“Curiosity has always been a very important factor in my life, about all subjects. It’s a thirst for knowledge. I have a standard motto and it’s very short: ‘A good education and a kind heart will serve you well throughout your entire life’. The more you know, the more knowledge you acquire, the better off you are in dealing with other people; the more you develop an understanding for other people. If you know geography for instance, you learn why a civilization settled in one location as opposed to another location 20 miles away…”
“As I tell studio audiences, you’re never too old to learn. There’s a thrill connected to curiosity; curiosity leads to discovery and there’s a thrill that comes with discovery… Even if you are learning facts that you are not going to be able to use in your daily life, it enriches you. The fact itself just enriches you as a human being and broadens your outlook on life and makes you a more understanding and better person.”
I love this because obviously I live by it too. I am interested in just about everything, from science and nature to astrophysics and stars. I’m assuming that everything I learn is helping me somehow.
“There’s a natural order to the way the world has been populated. That natural order unfortunately has been overtaken by man’s interference in setting up all kinds of international boundaries. We’ve drawn boundaries that make it difficult to achieve peace and that’s unfortunate. It’s man’s hubris. It’s man’s arrogance… Little by little we make mistakes and we keep compounding those mistakes and expanding on them to the point where you can’t get people to agree anymore…“
Simplistic, yet 100% true. How humans have managed to destroy our earth in such a relatively short time astounds.
“I believe we are all part of the great soul, what some call God. We are God and God is us. We are one with our maker. How do I know this? It’s not that I know it; it’s that I feel it. The same way that when I go to Africa I feel that is where I came from. The same way I feel that Jean is my soulmate. I feel it in my gut.”
I know that everything and everyone is interconnected. We are each born unique and with a purpose in the world. The rest is not up to us.
“My life has been a quest for knowledge and understanding and I’m nowhere near having achieved that… and it doesn’t bother me in the least. I will die without having come up with the answer to many things in life…”
Yes, our to-do list will never be completely accomplished. Our wants never fulfilled. We will never achieve perfection. But the journey… the journey is the entire point.
I admit I was wrong. I thought that January was going to be the biggest reading month of the year, but it ended up tying with February. From here though, I’m in for a huge change. I’m beginning two new courses and I probably won’t have much time for “fun” reading until this summer.
It’s currently cold here, though it switches from hot to cold fairly often. I like the days when I can turn on the fireplace and dunk shortbread cookies in to hot tea.
I pre-ordered this book in October and started reading it but set it aside, so I was excited that the audiobook came out this month. Brené is so funny… she imbues every part with her casual yet honest personality. It’s as if she pulled up a chair at the kitchen table and says, “Ya’ll, who the hell let us watch this stuff as kids???” She reads definitions twice for emphasis, adds examples from her personal life, and tells it like it is.
I learned important distinctions between related emotions. For example: shame, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment.
Shame: “I am bad.”
Guilt: “I’m a good person but I did something bad.”
Humiliation: “I’ve been put down and didn’t deserve it.”
Embarrassment: “I’ve done something uncomfortable but I know other people have too.”
My favorite section talked about the difference between pity, compassion, empathy, and sympathy. Do you think you are self-compassionate? You can take a test here.
“Shame is not the cure [of unethical behavior]; it’s the cause. Don’t let what looks like a bloated ego and narcissism fool you into thinking there’s a lack of shame. Shame and fear are almost always driving unethical behavior. We’re now seeing that shame often fuels narcissistic behavior. In fact, I define narcissism as the shame-based fear of being ordinary. Grandiosity and bluster are easy to assign to an over-inflated ego. It’s tough to get a glimpse of the fear and lack of self-worth that are actually behind the posturing and selfishness, because posturing leads to weaponizing hurt and turning it on people. The last thing that shame-driven people need is more shame. What they need is more accountability for their behavior and their lack of empathy. Yes. More shame just makes them more dangerous — gives them the opportunity to redirect attention to the shaming behavior and weirdly, it can drum up support from others who are also looking for a way to discharge their own pain and are looking for an enemy to blame.
“Shame is not a compass for moral behavior. It’s much more likely to drive destructive, hurtful, and self-aggrandizing behavior than it is to heal it. Why? Because where shame exists, empathy is almost always absent. That’s what makes shame dangerous. The opposite of experiencing shame is experiencing empathy. The behavior that many of us find so egregious today is more about people being empathyless, not shameless.” (From this book, but quoted from Dare to Lead.)
There is a strong connection between humiliation and aggression/violence. Hmm.
“I was too white for Black people, and too Black for white people. I had a boy’s name and bad acne.” Given a “white” name to help her gain an entry to job interviews later in life, Brown shares her life experiences about what it’s like to exist in a Black body surrounded by white people. I honestly try to surround myself with a variety of opinions from people of all races and religions, but lately I’ve noticed how difficult that is to do sometimes. I appreciate personal stories like this one to open my eyes to bias. Highly recommend.
“My story is not about condemning white people but about rejecting the assumption—sometimes spoken, sometimes not—that white is right: closer to God, holy, chosen, the epitome of being. My story is about choosing to love my Black femaleness, even when it shocks folks who expected someone quite different. It’s about standing before roomfuls of Christians and challenging them to see Blackness without the baggage of racist bias. It’s about surviving in a world not made for me.“
I have to admit, I had not once considered this perspective: “Her eyes flashed. She knew she had them. ‘Of course not. I’m just saying that segregation didn’t have to be followed with integration. Surely relegating us to the back of the bus could have stopped without us having to give up all the businesses that died because we started going to white folks. Think about all that we lost—the doctors’ and dentists’ offices, the grocery store owners and auto mechanics. I mean, could we have kept a great number of Black teachers if we had demanded equal funding for our schools rather than busing ourselves to theirs?’”
“It’s work to be the only person of color in an organization, bearing the weight of all your white co-workers’ questions about Blackness. It’s work to always be hypervisible because of your skin—easily identified as being present or absent—but for your needs to be completely invisible to those around you. It’s work to do the emotional labor of pointing out problematic racist thinking, policies, actions, and statements while desperately trying to avoid bitterness and cynicism. It’s work to stay open to an organization to learn new skills without drinking in the cultural expectations of body size, personality, interests, and talents most valued according to whiteness.”
unlikely friendship turned true love between Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis. Patti Callahan breathes life into this fascinating woman whose hunger for knowledge leads her to buck tradition at every turn. In a beautifully crafted account, Patti unveils Joy as a passionate and courageous—yet very human—seeker of answers to the meaning of life and the depths of faith.
“Much of our friendship and our lives found its way into that novel: my Fairyland and his North, his Island. Our views on longing and need and joy. Our accusations and questions for the gods. Our shared history of mythology and its ability to offer meaning. And for me, the problem of obsessive love. There was a tangled twine ball of us in that myth, unraveling day by day with our discussions and our readings, our bantering and our debate. There were moments in the writing of that novel that we merged into one without ever touching.”
Here is how Davis describes her inspiration for this novel: “On a cold winter’s day in late 2019, after taking a marvelous tour of the Frick Collection, I stared up at the front entrance and wondered what might have happened if the woman who posed for the figure in the pediment above the door—considered the “supermodel” of the 1910s—encountered Helen Clay Frick, the headstrong adult daughter of Henry Clay Frick. The storyline for this book bloomed from there, although there is no evidence the two women ever crossed paths.”
I enjoyed the two stories that Davis tells here and especially loved how they come together in the end, which usually does not happen in her novels. The main characters are strong, likable women. This is based on a true story.
“Maybe, with Mr. Frick gone, Miss Helen would be free to figure out where she stood in the world without a parent scrutinizing her at every turn, comparing her unfairly to a long-dead sibling. It might be exciting, thrilling, to watch Miss Helen come into her own. She had every advantage—intelligence, social standing, a passion for her library, money—and maybe that would be enough to eradicate her pettiness and quell her temper so that she would become a softer version of herself. A kinder version.”
The title story here was so fun to read and had a shocking ending. Just the idea that there’d be a government service going throughout the public correcting historical inaccuracies and misinformation… such a good idea!
“This was one of the Free Americans’ rallying cries: ‘We are the future!’ A cheerful way of saying the shame of the U.S. past wasn’t genocide or terror, but the fact that it hadn’t completely worked yet. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but it was rattling. It was the ubiquity, or it was the persistence. It was the way the Free Americans, and their claims on being the only Americans, transcended facts and time and progress. The way they always seemed to be around the corner. The way, however lacking in general insight they might be, they could somehow hear the ticking clock of the question, the ‘Do they know I’m human yet?’ The way they took delight in saying ‘No.’ The way they took for granted that it would always be their question to answer.”
This next quote is from my favorite story of the collection, “Anything Could Disappear,” about a young girl asked to watch a baby on a bus and the mother does not return. The girl raises the baby as her own for about a year, and they had a wonderful life and she cared for him very well, until she realizes that he has a father who is missing him desperately.“She liked the pattern of her life now. The domestic monotony coupled with the rush of feeling always close to the edge something; the sensation of having the thing she loved and valuing it all the more because she knew it could all go wrong at any minute. And then, everything did.”
I got an email from BookBub specifically recommending only this book that came out this month. As I put it on my “Want to Read” list in Goodreads, I noticed a couple friends were already reading it, so I figured I would as well. It was a gripping story and I liked the main character immediately. So much of her pain and regret came through in the writing that I cried a few times just feeling it all. Ruth is happily married and about to begin a family when memories of her past come up. Forced to give up her baby at 17, she goes home to finally find out what happened to her son. Her family members each carry their own remarkable stories of struggle through race issues and class distinctions. It was a short read but very memorable. I am thinking about the characters still.
“Midnight stopped talking, but not even Daddy could control his thoughts. What went on in his mind belonged to him. No guardrails, no judgment from the grownups, no rules to break. Just a private space in a cluttered world that was his and his alone.”
“Midnight barely had one parent, and he wasn’t sure that one loved him sometimes. A bubble of happy that had been growing in Midnight’s heart popped. How had he been so stupid? He hadn’t even had time to decide exactly how he felt, whether he wished Ms. Ruth were his mom or his girlfriend. The only thing he did know was that when Ms. Ruth looked at him, only him, and asked him questions, he felt special… to her, if to nobody else. Nobody except mom had treated him like that before. When she died, he had given up on hoping for much of anything. If Ms. Ruth thought he mattered, maybe he really did.”
I wouldn’t call this an introduction to mysticism, since it assumes knowledge that I don’t yet have, but it was still full of depth and richness.
“Eternal life is only awareness. Understanding that everything participates in circles of return. That everyone will be transfigured and reborn. Even a stone will become earth in which a tree will bear fruit to be eaten by a child which will become the twinkle of an eye. Everything will change. And the Holy One will meet everything backstage, in between performances. He will answer all our questions and show us all of eternity from one end to the other.”
I’d not heard of this author until it came up on Amazon as recommended. (Where do those algorithms come from?) (Does anyone remember when Amazon had actual humans sitting at desks writing book reviews? And you could follow them and write to them?)
Ian Frazier wrote the introduction to this collection, talking about “Ms. Malcolm’s quick and precise sketching of interiors and related domestic details.” My favorite piece was a profile of the portraitist who photographed Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip for an exhibition celebrating her sixty years as queen.
Otherwise, she seems to write about people who are slightly crazy… fiction writers, painters, other photographers. The title story confused me thoroughly until I understood what she was doing!
“Autobiography is an exercise in self-forgiveness. The observing “I” of autobiography tells the story of the observed “I” not as a journalist tells the story of his subject, but as a mother might. The older narrator looks back at his younger self with tenderness and pity, empathizing with its sorrows and allowing for its sins. I see that my journalist’s habits have inhibited my self-love. Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. In what follows I will try to see myself less coldly, be less fearful of writing a puff piece. But it may be too late to change my spots.”
I couldn’t begin to classify this book. It’s fantasy, magic, and romance and unlike anything I’d ever read before. There’s a deadly curse, a disappearance, and two main characters who fall in love. I’d say the R-rated scenes should have kept me away, but by the time I realized it, I was already hooked by the story.
“When he began to understand that what he was seeing at home (when his parents gathered well-dressed people into sparkling rooms and made pretty speeches about charity) was the adult version of the same game, only half of which was played to the victim’s face. The other half was the whispers, the casual venom, the two-facedness. The brutal construction of one’s reputation on the shreds of those you flattered with one hand and tore down with the other.”
Orlean writes with humor and humility about her love of animals of all kinds. Her story about how she came to keep backyard chickens was so funny to me, and I loved learning about how the modern supermarket came to be. She writes knowingly and humorously of pandas, deer, donkeys (“The donkey I’ll never forget was coming around a corner in the walled city of Fez, Morocco, with six color televisions strapped on his back.”), lions, dogs, animal actor rights, Oxen pairs, and rabbits.
“Although we may think of the animal world as something separate from us, like a moon orbiting around the earth, it’s more of a weave, with some animals farther away from the cross-threads of the human world and others closer. But we are certainly cohabitants of one place, and the separation is shrinking rather than expanding.”
“I had reveled in the animals’ friendship and their strangeness; the way they are so obvious and still so mysterious; their colors and textures, their fur and feathers; the sounds and smells of their presence. I liked the way their needs set the rhythm of every day, and how caring for them felt elemental and essential. Living among them, as I had on the farm, was just as satisfying as I imagined it would be.”
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard – Simard grew up in a logging family, but began noticing that today’s practices of wiping clean an entire area differed from how things used to be done, where new growth was fostered amidst old growth. Now a scientist, she looks into how trees make social and cooperative networks to communicate and protect each other. This was a loooong read for me, but still fun to read about the tools and methods used by researchers.
“Wood wide web:” competition or cooperation? Simard spent her career fighting against clear-cut policies in Canada forests, arguing that trees form networks of mycorrhizal fungi underground, communicating with each other and providing essential nutrients to each other. Some of her stories were hilarious… a pig that fell into the outhouse that led her to discover a world in the soil. Some were heartbreaking, like the break up of her marriage. Simard shares her excitement and struggles in being a woman researcher, with many tales of dismissal and intimidation by the policy-makers and foresters. It is ultimately her life as a mother and her struggle through cancer that makes the book personal.
“I was over the moon, ecstatic. The grin on my face irrepressible. I threw my arms up to the wind and I shouted, ‘YES!’ Deep down in our own ways, we both knew that we’d picked up something miraculous happening between the two tree species, something other-worldly, like intercepting a coded conversation over the airwaves that could change the course of history.”
“The inland rainforest my family had logged seemed indestructible; the big old trees the keepers of the communities. What mattered was that loggers once stopped and carefully gauged and evaluated the character of the individual trees to be cut. Transportation by rivers kept cutting small and slow, whereas trucks and roads exploded the scale of operations.”
This novel reads like you’re sitting down with a friend and she’s reminiscing about various times in her life. She is feeling reflective, generous, and nostalgic. The book explores the ongoing connection she has with her ex-husband, father of their 2 girls. How well can you truly understand another person? A very quick read.
“I have always thought that if there was a big cork board and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me. I feel invisible is what I mean, but I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain and I cannot explain it… truly it is as if do not exist… I mean, I do not exist in the world. It could be as simple as the fact that we had no mirrors in our house when I was growing up, except for a very small one high above the bathroom sink. I really do not know what I mean, except to say that on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.”
Windmueller contacted these writers two years ago to represent voices across the political spectrum to write 11 essays about the relationship between the Trump presidency and American Jews. The contributors include academics, journalists, lobbyists, activists, and pollsters who write about the uniqueness of Donald Trump’s presidency and its impact on the American political story and the US-Israel relationship. Saba Soomekh wrote in her essay that “there are many shades of gray when it comes to Trump, antisemitism, his relationship with American Jewry, and Israel.” I think this collection proves that there are at least differences of opinion.
While it was difficult for me to read from the Trump defenders, I thought they were a little more interesting than the critics, who generally spoke of Trump’s uprooting of many established norms, his undermining of pluralist democracy, his weakening of civility in American national discourse, and his attempts to destroy its moral compass… all things I’ve heard about ad nauseum. True, but not very interesting!
Mark Mellman: “Donald Trump’s pro-gun, anti-choice, anti-immigration, anti-environment, anti-LGBTQ, racist agenda was guaranteed to elicit antipathy from American Jews.” and “To quote a Republican operative describing a campaign from which Trump drew inspiration, “We created a hate campaign. We put all the hate groups into one big pot and let it boil.” (Anthony Lewis, 1978, writing about Ed King, who beat Governor Dukakis in the Democratic primary) “Trump took it a step further. He did not just allow it to boil, he applied the heat required to make it boil. Exploitation of grievance and the mobilization of resentment, or in the words of one-time GOP strategist Kevin Phillips, ‘knowing who hates who,’ was the lodestar of the Trump campaign and his Presidency.“
Michael Berenbaum: “As the President left office unwillingly at 12:00 noon on January 20, 2021—the day I first drafted this piece—the nation he led was living through at least seven simultaneous crises. A health crisis An economic crisis A social justice crisis A climate crisis A leadership crisis A democracy crisis A crisis of truth And we were failing, pulling apart rather than together, muddling through without direction, with indecision and misdirection.” (The United States has 4% of the world’s population and 20% of the infections.)
Gilbert N. Kahn wrote his piece to explain why Orthodox Jews supported Trump. Morton A. Klein and Elizabeth A. Berney, Esq. wrote: “We believe that history will ultimately recognize Donald Trump as one of the greatest presidents ever for the Jewish people, Israel and America.” Ehud Eiran explained the gap between Trump’s support in Israel and lack of support from Jews at home.
Matthew Brooks and Shari Hillman somehow write of the “remarkable successes of the Trump administration in those policy areas of particular concern to the American Jewish community: President Trump’s Middle East policy, his support of religious liberty, and his efforts to combat anti-Semitism in the US.” I can acknowledge the Abraham Accords (although I don’t grant these milestones to Trump’s work).
In his concluding essay, Windmueller divides Jewish voters into five categories, and explained the pro-Trump/Israel-focused voters: “For these activists Israel is an extension of their American story. For this voting sector, Judaism frames their political identity and supports their civic behavior and beliefs. For others, Israel has specifically replaced their religious identity. The Jewish State serves to reinforce their political orientation and most certainly their specific and unique passion to view Israel’s political well-being as part of their Americanism.”
I also agree that, as Dan Schnur writes, “Trump has been as much a symptom of the populist and pugnacious rage that fueled his campaigns as a cause of those sentiments. Trump didn’t create the working-class uprising, the rural and exurban resentments, and the grassroots anger that reshaped the nation’s political landscape over the course of his presidency. But whether intentionally or intuitively, he tapped into those emotions and channeled them toward the political leaders of both parties effectively enough to propel himself to the White House.”
Windmueller concludes: “The very core of America’s social fabric appears to be coming apart. Civility has left the public square, partisanship has trumped patriotism, and communalism has given way to self-aggrandizement. Sadly, hate and distrust are the new protocols. When conspiracy and mythology replace reason and meaning, a society loses its credibility and credence. To be clear, these unsettling conditions were not singularly the product of the Trump Presidency but rather seems to have been embellished by this President and his allies.”
Please note that I wrote separate posts about these three books on hate and extremism:
This week, we have been discussing Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ 1995 book Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. Catch up on Monday-Thursday’s posts linked below and catch up on the entire Freedom under threat series starting here.
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
James Arthur Baldwin
Today the secular West has largely lost the values that used to be called the Judeo-Christian heritage. Instead, it has chosen to worship the idols of the self – the market, consumerism, individualism, autonomy, rights and ‘whatever works for you’ – while relinquishing the codes of loyalty, reverence and respect that once preserved marriages, communities and the subtle bonds that tie us to one another, moving us to work for the common good.
Losing its religious faith, the West is beginning to lose the ideals that once made it inspiring to the altruistic: reverence, loyalty, human dignity, the relief of poverty, public service, collective responsibility, national identity and respect for religious values while at the same time making space for liberty of conscience and the peaceable co-existence of more than one faith. Today Western politics often seem bereft of vision beyond the mantra of ‘freedom and democracy’ and cost-benefit calculations of maximum services for the minimum of tax.
Faced with a culture of individualism and hedonism, it is not surprising that young radicals, eager to change the world, turn elsewhere to express their altruism, even if it involves acts that are brutal and barbaric. Altruism misdirected can lead to evil: that has been the thesis of this book. That is why the West must recover its ideals.
Identity is based on narrative, the stories we tell about who we are, where we came from, and what is our relationship to others.
A large chunk of the book goes through some biblical texts very closely. Each narrative where there is an apparent “choice and rejection,” (Cain and Abel, Joseph and his brothers, etc.) Sacks gives a counter-narrative that subverts the surface story and provides a completely different viewpoint and understanding. It is so refreshing and brilliant!
At the core of the Bible’s value system is that cultures, like individuals, are judged by their willingness to extend care beyond the boundary of family, tribe, ethnicity and nation.
So what is a solution for hatred and violence?
Role reversal.
“To be cured of potential violence towards the Other, I must be able to imagine myself as the Other.“
A problem arises at times of change and disruption when people are anxious and afraid. We have to remember that we were once on the other side of the equation. We were once strangers: the oppressed, the victims. Remembering the Jewish past forces us to undergo role reversal.
A chosen people is the opposite of a master race, it is a servant community.
It is not a race but a covenant
It exists to serve God, not to master others
A master race worships itself; a chosen people worships something beyond itself.
A master race values power; a chosen people cares for the powerless.
A master race believes it has rights; a chosen people knows only that it has responsibilities.
The key virtues of a master race are pride, honor and fame. The key virtue of a chosen people is humility.
“The entire ethical-legal principle on which the Hebrew Bible is based is that we own nothing. Everything – the land, its produce, power, sovereignty, children, and life itself – belongs to God. We are mere trustees, guardians, on his behalf. We possess but we do not own. That is the basis of the infrastructure of social justice that made the Bible unique in its time and still transformative today.“
Monotheism and Dualism
“Different civilizations generate different character types. That is not because character is a matter of ethnicity: that is racism, and it is also untrue. Humans are culture-producing animals, and the way we act, even the way we feel, depends in no small measure on structures of the mind that we have internalized from our environment and habits of the heart we learned as children. Religions are culture-shaping institutions, and they include not just a theology, but also an anthropology. What we believe about God affects what we believe about ourselves. Monotheism internalizes conflict, whereas myth externalizes it.“
“Within religion, the most extreme, anti-modern or anti-Western movements will prevail.“
“That is the real difference between monotheism and dualism. When bad things happen to an individual or group, one can either ask, ‘Who did this to me?’ or, ‘Given that this has happened, what then shall I do?’ The first is the question a dualist asks, the second is the response of a consistent monotheist.
“So different are these questions that they generate two modes of being: respectively a blame culture and a penitential culture:”
DUALISM: Blame culture
MONOTHEISM: Penitential culture
“Who did this to me?”
“What should I do about my situation?”
External cause
Internal response
Looks to the past
Looks to the future
Passive
Active
Victim mentality
Logic of responsibility
“Defining yourself as a victim is ultimately a diminution of what makes us human. It teaches us to see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility. The victim, ascribing his condition to others, locates the cause of his situation outside himself, thus rendering himself incapable of breaking free from his self-created trap. Because he attributes a real phenomenon (pain, poverty, illiteracy, disease) to a fictitious cause, he discovers that murdering the cause does not remove the symptom. Hence efforts must be redoubled. Blame cultures perpetuate every condition against which they are a protest.“
A kind of pathological dualism dominates discourse in Iran and other Islamist countries today.
“The primary victims of Islamist violence are Muslims themselves, across the dividing lines of Sunni and Shia, modernist and neo-traditionalist, moderate against radical, and sometimes simply sect against rival sect. Violence is what happens when you try to resolve a religious dispute by means of power. It cannot be done.
“You cannot impose truth by force. That is why religion and power are two separate enterprises that must never be confused.“
Western liberal democracy does not strive to be pure good and righteousness. It’s job is to keep the peace between contending factions. That’s what makes it:
“…the best way of instantiating the values of Abrahamic monotheism. It does not invite citizens to worship the polis, nor does it see civic virtue as the only virtue. It recognizes that politics is not a religion nor a substitute for one.“
Religion deals with eternity; politics deals with the here-and-now.
“More important still is what liberal democratic politics achieves. It makes space for difference. It recognizes that within a complex society there are many divergent views, traditions and moral systems. It makes no claim to know which is true. All it seeks to do is ensure that those who have differing views are able to live peaceably and graciously together, recognizing that none of us has the right to impose our views on others.“
“Apocalypse is what happens to prophecy when it loses hope, and to politics when it loses patience. Apocalyptic politics is the strange phenomenon of a revolutionary movement whose gaze is firmly fixed on the past. It arises at times of destabilizing change and speaks to those who feel unjustly left behind.“
Religion is at its best when it resists the temptation of politics and opts instead for influence. It tells us is that:
“Civilizations are judged not by power but by their concern for the powerless; not by wealth but by how they treat the poor; not when they seek to become invulnerable but when they care for the vulnerable.
“Religion is not the voice of those who sit on earthly thrones but of those who, not seeking to wield power, are unafraid to criticize it when it corrupts those who hold it and diminishes those it is held against.“
This post consists simply of excerpts from the book. They are too good not to remember.
To get a better look at this, Sacks focuses on antisemitism,“not because it is the most important instance of religiously motivated hate, but because it is the one in which we can see these processes at work most clearly. Christian and Muslim victims of violence vastly outnumber Jews, whether in the age of the Crusades or today. It is, though, by putting antisemitism under the microscope that we can trace the sequence by which fear becomes hate and then murderous violence, defeating rationality and becoming both destructive and self-destructive.”
“Antisemitism is important because it illustrates more clearly than any other phenomenon the psychological and social dynamic of hate. It helps us understand what may be operative in human conflict over and above the normal clash of principalities and powers, nations and interests. Its return within living memory of the Holocaust signals more than a danger to Jews. It is, as it always has been, the first warning signal of a world order in danger of collapse.“
A social scientist and historian, René Girard had a thesis that “the most effective way by which two groups can end this cycle is by killing a third party, one who is neither a Montague nor a Capulet, who stands outside the feud, and whose death will not lead to another cycle of retaliation. The victim must be, in other words, an outsider, someone either not protected by a group, or the member of a group not in a position to inflict its own retaliatory violence.”
Pathological dualism occurs when you have the simultaneous presence of contradictory beliefs:“The particular combination of conspiracy theory and substitute victim involved in the creation of a scapegoat requires a difficult mental feat. You have to be able to believe at one and the same time that the scapegoat is both all-powerful and powerless.”
“For a thousand years, the scapegoat of choice in Europe and the Middle East has been the Jews. They were the most conspicuous outsiders: non-Christians in a Christian Europe, non-Muslims in an Islamic Middle East… Antisemitism is only contingently about Jews. Jews are its victims, but they are not its cause. The cause is conflict within a culture. It is the potential internal violence that, if expressed, has the power to destroy a society.“
“The greater the threat from the outside, the stronger the sense of cohesion within.”
“Wherever you find obsessive, irrational, murderous antisemitism, there you will find a culture so internally split and fractured that if its members stopped killing Jews, they would start killing one another.“
“The trouble with the use of scapegoats is that it is a solution that compounds the problem. It makes internal tension bearable by turning the question ‘Why has this happened?’ into the question ‘Who did this to me?’ If it is someone else’s fault, not mine, I can preserve my self-respect intact.“
“Jews became the test-case of this truth. They were different: monotheists in a pagan age, then non-Christians in a Christian Europe. Today they are the most conspicuous non-Muslims in an Islamic Middle East. The fate of Jewry through the ages has been the clearest indicator of whether a culture, faith or empire has been willing to accord dignity or rights to the one-who-is-not-like-them.“
“A minority everywhere, they kept their identity intact, becoming the only significant minority in history to survive without assimilating to the dominant culture or convert to the majority faith.“
“This is not an argument for powerlessness. A thousand years of persecution culminating in the Holocaust are sufficient to refute the notion that Jews, or any other nation, can survive without the ability to defend themselves. But to reach, as they did, the spiritual heights without any of the conventional accoutrements of nationhood and political self-determination is enough to tell us that religion and power are two different things altogether, even if both in their distinct ways and different senses are political.“
“Freud and René Girard argued that it is not religion that leads to violence. It is violence that leads to religion.
“Girard cast his net wider. Violence is born in what he called mimetic desire (from mimesis, meaning ‘imitation’). Mimetic desire is wanting what someone else has because they have it. Mimetic desire is not just wanting to have what someone else has. Ultimately it is wanting to be what someone else is.“
“Antisemitism is the first warning sign of a culture in a state of cognitive collapse. It gives rise to that complex of psychological regressions that lead to evil on a monumental scale: splitting, projection, pathological dualism, dehumanization, demonization, a sense of victimhood, and the use of a scapegoat to evade moral responsibility. It allows a culture to blame others for its condition without ever coming to terms with it themselves. The antisemitism flooding through the Arab and Islamic world today is as widespread and virulent as it was in Europe between 1880 and 1945, and it is being disseminated worldwide through the Internet.“
“As the mysterious, omnipotent, all-embracing enemy, Jews united the group, silenced dissent, distracted the mind from painful truths and enabled otherwise utterly incompatible groups to become allies. Today, for example, Islamist groups find it hard to win Western support for the imposition of Sharia law, the beheading of captives, the forced conversion of Christians or the sentencing to death of blasphemers. But when they criticize Israel, they find they no longer stand alone. This brings within the fold such strange fellow travelers as the far right, the anti-globalization left, and some notoriously politicized human rights organizations, surely the oddest coalition ever assembled in support of people practicing terror to bring about theocracy.“
Altruistic evil is evil committed for a sacred cause:
in the name of high ideals
to avenge past wrongs
to correct perceived injustice
to institute a new social order
to restore a romanticized golden age
It is the greatest threat to freedom in the postmodern world.
The relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam has been historically a poisoned one, Rabbi Sacks explores why. He starts by exploring three phenomena: mindset, myth and sibling rivalry.
First, there is a specific mindset that makes altruistic evil possible: dualism. This is incompatible with monotheism, but it has nonetheless from time to time found a home there.
Second, there are myths that feed this mindset, and they are surprisingly durable and adaptable, moving from one religion to another and even to secular cultures.
Third, there is the unique relationship between the three Abrahamic faiths that has set them in tension with one another.
“The violence that leads to war and terror is between groups, and it is precisely this that leads to in-group solidarity and cohesion; and fear, suspicion, and aggression towards out-groups. It is neither secularism nor religious belief that makes us what we are, the curious mixture of good and bad that can lead us to the moral heights or the savage depths. It is our groupishness.
“Religion performed, and continues to perform, a task fundamental to large groups. It links people, emotionally, behaviorally, intellectually, and spiritually, into communion and thus community.“
If not religion, then what???
“In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries three substitutes for religion emerged as the basis for new identities. One was the nation state. A second was the ideological system. The third was race. The first led to two world wars, the second to Stalin’s Russia, the Gulag and the KGB, and the third to the Holocaust.
“The first two attempts were universalist: a universal religion or a universal culture. The third attempt, the one we have been living through for the past half-century, is the opposite. It is theeffort to eliminate identity by abolishing groups altogether and instead enthroning the individual.
“The contemporary West is the most individualistic era of all time. Its central values are in ethics, autonomy; in politics, individual rights; in culture, postmodernism; and in religion, ‘spirituality’. Its idol is the self, its icon the ‘selfie’, and its operating systems the free market and the post-ideological, managerial liberal democratic state. In place of national identities we have global cosmopolitanism. In place of communities we have flash-mobs. We are no longer pilgrims but tourists. We no longer know who we are or why.“
He is spot on, right? Sacks says that no civilization has ever had this type of order system.
“We are now living through the discontents of individualism and have been since the 1970s. Identity has returned. The tribes are back and fighting more fiercely than ever. The old sources of conflict, religion and ethnicity, are claiming new victims. The anti-modern radicals have learned that you can use the products of modernity without going through the process that produced them, namely Westernisation. Meanwhile the energy of the West has been sapped by the decay of the very things religion once energised: marriage, families, communities, a shared moral code, the ability to defer the gratification of instinct, the covenant that linked rich and poor in a bond of mutual responsibility, and a vision of the universe that gave rise to the social virtue of hope.“
Why do seemingly normal, well-educated and adjusted people with careers and families ahead of them become jihadists and suicide bombers?
People join radical movements to alleviate isolation and become part of a community engaged in the pursuit of something bigger than themselves. They have genuine ideals. They feel the suffering and humiliation of their fellow believers. They wish to dedicate their life to ending injustice.
“War is normal. Altruistic evil is not normal. Suicide bombings, the targeting of civilians and the murder of schoolchildren are not normal. Violence may be possible wherever there is an Us and a Them. But radical violence emerges only when we see the Us as all-good and the Them as all-evil, heralding a war between the children of light and the forces of darkness. That is when altruistic evil is born.“
Pathological dualism is a virus that attacks the moral sense.
It does three things.
It makes you dehumanize and demonize your enemies. (Dehumanization destroys empathy and sympathy. It shuts down the emotions that prevent us from doing harm.)
It leads you to see yourself as a victim. (Victimhood deflects moral responsibility. It leads people to say: It wasn’t our fault, it was theirs.)
Defining yourself as a victim is a denial of what makes us human. We see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility. The victim, ascribing his condition to others, locates the cause of his situation outside himself, thus rendering himself incapable of breaking free from his self-created trap.
3. And it allows you to commit altruistic evil, killing in the name of the God of life, hating in the name of the God of love and practicing cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. (Altruistic evil recruits good people to a bad cause. It turns ordinary human beings into murderers in the name of high ideals.)
“When dehumanization and demonization are combined with a sense of victimhood, the third stage becomes possible: the commission of evil in an altruistic cause. Nazism presented itself as a profoundly moral movement, designed to purify the nation from alien elements poisoning its bloodstream, restore the greatness of the Aryan race, rid the world of false doctrines like capitalism and communism, and rescue the Volk from degeneracy. From the beginning, Hitler defined his task in moral and aesthetic terms.“
Pathological dualism creates a self-contained world which becomes self-confirming.
“It divides humanity into absolute categories of good and evil, in which all the good is on one side and all the evil on the other, and you will see your own side as good, the other as evil. Evil seeks to destroy the good. Therefore your enemies are trying to destroy you. If there is no obvious evidence that they are, this is a sign that they are working in secret. If they deny it, this is proof that the accusation is true, else why would they bother to deny it? And since they are evil and we are good, they are the cause of our present misfortunes and we must eliminate them so that the good to which we are entitled, the honor we once had and the superiority that is our right can be ours again.“
* * *
You can read from the beginning of this “Freedom under threat” series here.
Welcome and thank you for visiting! I’m Naomi – a mother, writer, creative soul, and avid reader. I aim to share my thoughts and ideas to inspire positive change that will help you live an authentic and caring life.
Poetic Aperture is for me and for you. I often write just to process the swirling activity inside, but I also hope to inspire COMPASSION, COURAGE, and WONDER in you and support you on your journey of elevating the everyday.
I am a rabbinical student at the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York. I am fortunate to have an amazing 15-year-old daughter and a supportive husband of 22 years.
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“There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart. Pursue those.” ~ Michael Nolan
