Before my last few blogs on the section of the Torah dealing with the reunion of Jacob and Esau and a review of the Coen brothers’ new movie, The Ballad of Buster Scragg, I summarized the political debates in America in a chart depicting a four-way fight. The populists took over the Republican Party. We know because the president, as the leader of the party, routinely denigrates the core institutions of a democracy – an independent non-politicized judiciary, a free and responsible press, a representative legislature fairly chosen by the people, a non-politicized office of an attorney general, a military that is subject to civilian control but not to be used by those same civilians either to promote a domestic political agenda or to be used against a country’s own citizens. He uses harangues, mass rallies and the grossest of lies to promote “me” in the name of making the country supposedly “great” again. Populism of the right depends on the part of the nation that feels lost to the forces of history – namely and mainly white rural males. The insidious enemy consists of immigrants, both within the country and those wanting to come.

In contrast, left liberals retain control of the Democratic Party, though a more radical left, democratic socialists in America who would be characterized as the liberal left in Europe, have increased both their presence in Congress and their public support representing a rise of populism on the left as well as on the right. Throughout Europe, there are populists on the left within governments, but the populists mainly come from the right. In fact, the equivalent of the left liberal perspective in America, the social democrats, have been the greatest losers to populism on the right and left, but overwhelmingly on the right. The SPD in Germany is down to 14% support in the polls; the French socialists scored only 7.4% in last year’s parliamentary elections, the Dutch Labour Party won only 5.7% of the vote, the Czech Social Democrats have dropped to 7.3% in the polls.

After I describe the conflict within the Democratic Party in the USA in this blog and detail my interpretation with evidence from the political ground on the tensions within the Democratic Party, I will shift to Britain where the populist left have already taken control. Then I will move to the continent.

Why have populist parties, or factions within parties, arisen in America and Europe? The rise of social media? The effect of globalism and automation on workers? Fears of an economic turndown as economies begin to stall? Migration, that may be seen as a threat on the right but may be viewed as an opportunity as well as positive value for the left? I believe that none of these are key indicators. A fundamental culture clash is. The white rural male fear of “coloureds” and migrants may be central to the politics of the far right; the opposition to Israel as a Zionist state characterizes the populism on the left, much more clearly in Britain than in America. But I claim that the same forces exist in the U.S. Why Israel? This will be the suspense question hanging over this blog but only answered in a future blog.

To recall, the overall battle, with modifications and clarifications, can be represented in terms of basic and core political values (as well as personality traits not represented here) by the following chart:

Notice three similarities, marked with an asterisk, between the populists of the right and left. The core fight is cultural, not economic, focused on identity politics. Second, incumbents were challenged from both ends of the spectrum. Third, both the far left (relative to American politics) and the far right engage in the politics of resentment, but with different identities in play in defence of the “oppressed.” The oppressed on the right are the hard core of a traditional demography left behind by the culture and the economy of globalism. On the left they are not only oppressed domestic minorities (Hispanics and Blacks in America), but oppressed nations abroad.

Note also that socio-economic and structural factors in the difference between right and left – class, religion, income and education – though clearly still present, have taken a back seat to cultural conflicts and identity issues. This may be because of secularization as well as widespread access to satisfying basic needs. Certainly, the liberalization of social mores has influenced debates over abortion, gender preferences and preferred modes of dying – euthanasia. Thus, though socio-economic factors both influence and colour the identity wars, the core conflict is over the mode in which the full expression of the persona is expressed. That may also be why the idiosyncratic personalities of leaders on both the left and the right have gained in prominence.

In fact, the conflict within both the left and right may be characterized as one between the importance of socio-economic versus socio-cultural factors. The conservative right favours deregulation, free trade, a restricted role for trade unions and an emphasis on entrepreneurship. The populist quasi-authoritarian right uses the state for protecting “the nation” against imagined threats. On the left, the liberal left favours a state in which the state plays a protective economic role, but on the far left plays a protective “national” role, though the nation protected is very different than the one on the right.

It may be that the Industrial Revolution resulted in class warfare, but the Information Revolution brought a different war, not so much between the rich and the poor, but nevertheless betwixt two “nations” between which there is neither intercourse nor sympathy but rather ignorance of one another’s habits, thoughts and feelings. The two nations might as well inhabit different planets.

In this war, radically different uses of the new media play as critical a role as the printing press played in the Industrial Revolution, though, in the background, there have been very important economic and structural shifts.

Blue collar workers have lost their jobs rather than being drawn into an industrial work force at the lowest pay levels. Menial work shifted back to service rather than manufacturing as in the pre-industrial period; since 2000, five million factory jobs have disappeared in the U.S. At the same time, in the Information Era, there has been the rise of a new gross economic inequality where productive gains have gone almost exclusively to the top .1%. The populist and liberal left recognize that automation and computers have led to the demise while the right populists blame international bankers and/or trade partners. But the left populists also blame the latter, not for exploitation but for a failure to offer protection and ensure a just distribution. Further, the failure is global and the worst victims are those forced to migrate and/or become refugees. The latter numbers have doubled in the last two decades.

As my chart indicates, the divisions within the Democratic Party and on the Left are not marked over whether to support trade unionism or the prudence of pushing single payer health insurance, but primarily over cultural issues in the name of Third World solidarity and global anti-racism.

Our focus here is the USA and left populism versus liberalism. There are similarities between left and right populism, namely: attacks on the rule of law; on the bureaucracy; against the mainstream media; a portrait of a battle between the virtuous ‘ordinary’ masses and a nefarious or corrupt establishment or elite; an emphasis on the general will versus responsible representative democracy, and an opposition to capitalist globalism. But the differences between left and right populism are starker. They can be summarized as follows:

Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post (13 September 2018) recently wrote a piece entitled, “The Threat to democracy – from the left” and pointed to attacks by the left against speakers on campus ranging from Stephen K. Bannon to Condoleezza Rice.  For Zakaria, as much as he disagrees with him, Bannon “is an intelligent and influential ideologist, a man who built the largest media platform for the new right, ran Trump’s successful campaign before serving in the White House, and continues to articulate and energize the populism that’s been on the rise throughout the Western world.” As a liberal, Zakaria defends not only his right to speak, but the duty to offer him a platform. The populist left regards him as a present and certain danger and some would even deny him the right to speak. Civil liberties remain crucial for liberals but are expendable for left populists in the name of solidarity with and respect for the oppressed.

The populist left goes beyond the resistance and debates of liberals to demand direct and active opposition to defeat the toxic marriage of white nationalism and an entrenched plutocracy.  Unlike the right, left populists are not machos. Unlike Donald Trump, they would never praise Montana Republican representative Greg Gianforte for body slamming a reporter (DT – “any guy who can do a body slam…he’s my guy”). Instead, they focus on building networks rather than frontier virtues.

With the help of Alex Zisman

On the Competition for Recognition

[This is an absolutely must see film. A spoiler alert – though I do not detail the plot, I sometimes mention the outcome in order to define the theme and the satire of mythological right populism.]

Cowboy movies in their original form were truly and literally horse operas. The myths underpinning right-wing populism, and the rapscallions that populate that mob in imitation of their mythological fantasies, are satirized in the brilliant movie anthology by Joel and Ethan Coen (Raising Arizona, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?), the 2018 digitally shot (an intended pun), The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the American Frontier. The movie won the Golden Osella Award for best screenplay at the Venice International Film Festival.

In contrast, the populist left celebrates mutual security rather than a gun culture of individual liberty, a government that protects rather than allegedly tramples on our freedoms. This is a brutal, but at times deliberately gentle movie about the fantasy frontier of mythological America. And death! In contrast, the populist left celebrates life and a utopian future rather than a mythological past that is both dead and a paean to heroic dying. [In addition to titles, I will italicize all references to the American liberal and populist left to set off the contrast as well as to adumbrate my forthcoming analysis of those positions.]

Distances for left populist protesters are close and varied rather than “great and monotonous,” as the troubadour hero of the first vignette of the Coen film tells the audience in his sweet rather than rough voice, though he is speedier with a gun than any gunslinger I ever saw. Yet he looks like a rube if you ever saw one. Tim Blake Nelson (who played Delmar O’Donnell beside George Clooney and John Turturro in O Brother, Where Art Thou? a real rube who believed that sirens turned his chain-gang buddy into a toad) plays this ironic version of Gene Autry, but he can cuss as well as strum a guitar. As well as being extremely dexterous, he is a verbal gymnast with weighty words like Archimedean and sonorous sibilants – “the San Saba songbird is my sobriquet [nickname] of preference.” The latter skill matches his quick trigger fingers. And he deserves to wear white for he condemns the violation of the rules of this establishment and behaviour against local norms.

Opportunities are infinite in the wide-open spaces of the west, especially the opportunity to be killed arbitrarily. Considering the repeated extolling of taking fate in one’s own hand, fate seems all to frequently to deliver a bad hand. Instead of the tall tales of a dusty leather-bound and worn volume full of colour plates, the populist left offers visions of an egalitarian and caring future.

In the Coen film, the first tall tale is located in New Mexico, as much for its name as for its perfect setting. The most unlikely hero, played by Nelson, is a short and thin and mousy gunslinger, nothing like the roughest and toughest and tallest rugged cowboy type. He is more of a dandy than a tumbling tumbleweed, though he wears white, rides a white horse, sings cowboy songs and shoots anyone who challenges him – but always in a fair fight for he is not a “proper outlaw.” He joins a poker game in a stand-in for the Goodnews Saloon and is dealt a “dead man’s hand.” After all, he is a true cowboy, a ramblin’ gamblin’ man. He survives to sing and entertain after his kill, the cowboy song, “Shirley [or Surly] Joe,” a play on the original “Curly Joe from Idaho.”

This becomes a dance number. Everyone, except the dead poker player and his outraged brother, join in. After all, Nelson denies he is a misanthrope as his wanted poster suggests. But that is his tragic flaw. Nelson dies at the hands of another gunslinger, not as a bow to brotherly love but to arbitrary death. He is killed, not by stealth or skill, but by the other cheating. In total shock and surprise, Nelson looks bewildered as he examines the bullet that has travelled through his skull and pierced his Stetson before he flies aloft on his angel wings to the heavens above. Nelson had been shot before he was ready. The good-natured Nelson meets a bad end in an anarchic culture that rhetorically celebrates fair play while, in practice, ignoring the rules of a duel.

In contrast, fairness is the bottom line of the populist left, not the fairness of the rules of fighting to the finish, but the fairness of rules to enable a fruitful life.

In the second story of the anthology, “Near Algodones.” [Algodones is a Mexican border town famous for its medical tourism], also set in New Mexico, we do encounter a tall and handsome but truly dim-witted cowboy played by James Franco. Instead of a sharp shooter, he is a fumbling idiot defeated by a banker dressed in the protective gear of cooking pots and a washboard. He meets his end by being accused and convicted of cattle rustling when he cannot even rustle up enough to survive. Instead of linking with others to save himself and thrive, he relies on himself to doom that self in the face of much more powerful natural forces of a polity that uses and abuses the rule of law.

Liam Neeson plays Harry Melling in the third tale, the “Meal Ticket.” It is perhaps the most repulsive story in the whole anthology and is shot in the evening hours as if to hide the beauty of Colorado and show off only its dark and scruffy American roots. If Buster Scruggs was always smiling and upbeat, Liam Neeson is the very opposite; his role is a grumpy, heartless and mean-spirited huckster playing to smaller and smaller crowds until his audience has dwindled to five disinterested stragglers who keep their coins in their pockets. Meanness is matched with meanness.

Instead of protecting the weak and the handicapped, Neeson’s character uses an armless and legless orator to earn his way in the Wild West, portrayed as cold and indifferent and increasingly bored, by reciting the words of the tale of Cain and Abel and of The Gettysburg Address. The contrast between the words he mouths and the local governing social norms could not be in greater stark contrast. The limbless orator cannot use body language to communicate, so the expression all comes through his mellifluous tone and his loquacious mastery of speech. Neeson then presumably (it is not shown) discards the progeny who has helped him earn his living, echoing the words from The Merchant of Venice that adumbrate the orator’s death falling “as the gentle rain from heaven.” Why does Neeson do it? In favour of a more profitable clever chicken. So goes the way of survival of the fittest, the precise trope opposed by the mantra of the mutually caring, merciful and protective left.

In the fourth and most beautifully photographed and aptly named tale, “All Gold Canyon,” where Colorado is revealed in all its golden beauty under the sun above, Tom Waits, a grizzled prospector, digs up one hole after another, each deeper and wider and longer than the previous one, until he digs a hole that seems to be his own grave as a stranger suddenly appears to threaten his great find, “Mister Pocket.”  The pursuit of gold at the cost of despoiling nature is a central if not the main target of the populist left.

The fifth story, “The Gal Who Got Rattled” starring Joe Kazan as Alice Longabaugh, is most akin to a long short story rather than a short anecdote. Shot in Nebraska, it opens with a crazy conversation at a boarding house as she and her hapless but domineering brother set out finally to move forward towards their fortune at the end of The Oregon Trail. The long wagon trail evokes memories of hundreds of westerns that I have seen, including perhaps the most memorable and oldest one about wagon trains headed to Oregon, The Long Trail. Or perhaps there is a reference back to the 1959 western, The Oregon Trail. After all, there is a strong similarity between Prudence Cooper in that film and Alice Longabaugh. The realism and physical beauty of “The Gal Who Got Rattled” are at odds with the allegorical references of the plot.

James Polk, a protégé of Andrew Jackson and the 11^th president of the USA, acquired Texas and then the whole of the southwest in the war with Mexico. He delivered another diplomatic coup to the future of Canada by acquiring the Oregon Territory in negotiations with Britain, pioneering the rough and tough diplomatic style of no-holds barred political negotiations while seeding the region with American guerilla forces in preparation for war against Britain.

In contrast to the actual history, the dialogue of “The Gal Who Got Rattled” has the tone and rhetorical pace of the Bible. However, Alice’s “romance” with Bill Heck (William Knapp) is pure, but purely transactional. The tough, rough cowboy, Heck, is tender-hearted and considerate. This time a dog, President Pierce, is the inadvertent source of fate. The dog was named after Franklin Pierce, the 14^th U.S. president who beat the Democratic incumbent, Millard Fillmore, but failed to reconcile the north and south over allowing slavery in Kansas.

The dog survives, but not the female hero. Macho America was revived, but this time Pierce made a botch of it, alienating the abolitionists on the one hand by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act in Kansas and Nebraska without preventing the strong propensity of the South to secede from the union. In spite of the high-mindedness of Bill Heck, the low-minded dogs again win. In contrast, the populist left and its feminine revolution are determined to let “all dogs go to heaven,” especially mousy female ones. [No insult intended, just an interpretation of satire.]

The last tale, “The Mortal Remains,” obviously unlike the other vignettes, was shot on a sound stage and is perhaps the most subtle of the satirical pieces. It is helpful if you saw and can recall John Ford’s archetypal movie, Stagecoach with John Wayne. which also follows a mismatched group of strangers from a variety of backgrounds riding west in a stagecoach, each equally uncomfortable sitting beside the others.

From the claustrophobic inside of a stagecoach, in such great contrast to the wide-open spaces of the rest of the movie, we listen to the mellifluous orations respectively of, and initially totally surprisingly, a trapper (Chelcie Ross). He describes his relationship with a native woman, neither knowing the language of the other. But it did not matter since all humans are the same. All are equal in the eyes of God. However, in contrast to the populist left, the trapper insists that all are ferrets.  This is the animism of the populist right as distinct from the humanism of the populist left.

A proper and religious lady (Tyne Daly as Mrs. Betjeman) retorts that humans are not the same; they are divided into sinners and those who follow the word of God. Moral values divide humans. The cynical Frenchman (the Canadian actor, Saul Rubinek as René) sitting on her other side, extolls subtlety and nuance, complexity and diversity, while slyly making suggestions that Mr. Betjeman‘s love for Mrs. Purity was indeed (wink, wink) “based on moral and spiritual hygiene.” With the raising of pluralism and diversity when the dominant theme is equality, the suggestion is that we get cynicism rather than just the scepticism esteemed by the populist left.

Thigpen, the Englishman (Jonjo O’Neill), turns out to be the head “reaper” or bounty hunter, with the suggestion that perhaps all humans are just grist for death in exchange for money. The populist left, on the other hand, appears to disdain transactional exchanges. Thigpen is an English snot and can be contrasted with his down-to-earth Irish partner, Clarence Brendon Gleeson, who sings the final ditty in the movie. The two partners carry the corpse into a mansion in the middle of nowhere with plenty of room for everyone. With some hesitation, the three others follow. René pauses, shrugs as if to say “What the Hell,” and enters.

The movie may be smart and snappy, wickedly wicked and equally cruel, but it is also a dark, hilarious and loquacious satire full of sardonic wit that parodies the underpinnings of the American myth of the West that is at the root of the fantasies of the American populist right.

With the help of Alex Zisman

Jacob [J] fled from his home to Aram, not because he felt guilty about stealing the blessing intended for his older brother, Esau [E], but because his mother told him that she overheard E say that he would kill J. (Genesis 27:41-42) There are a number of possible interpretations for the flight; many are not mutually exclusive:

1. Rebekah [R] heard the threat and thought it was real and dangerous, but since E was a man who lived in the immediate, a man of impulse, she presumed the resentment and anger of her older twin son would subside, so J was urged to flee temporarily for his own safety;
2. In context, the threat was an expression of understandable anger – I’m going to kill him – rather than of intent, but R wanted to err on the side of caution;
3. R wanted J to flee even though she knew E would not kill J; after all, E was a hunter only for food and not for sport. E was not a killer. E had shown no inclination to kill his brother when J stole his birthright;

We could go on. The various interpretations suggest different motives and different human characteristics for each of the protagonists when they separate and when they get together again. J and Laban had not parted on good terms for his return trip either. In fact, Laban drew a line in the sand – in actuality, he built a pillar as a territorial marker. If J ever returned and crossed that line with any hostile intent, God would have to render judgement between them.

On route from Aran, J then entered Jordan and encountered God’s angels at a place he named Mahanaim, God’s camp. Why Mahanaim (מַחֲנָיִם)? Mahanaim means “two camps.” There will be two places to pass through, Mahanaim and Peniel. But neither will be the end point of the trip. Jacob will also divide his entourage into two camps in preparation for his meeting with E. There are also two brothers, each with his own camp. The divisions between all the sets are significant. The division between the two place names is one between a place of God versus a place for building an altar to God, though it is somewhat strange that J would not build an altar where he had met and been accompanied by angels.

What were the real feelings between the two brothers and what do they say about the character of each when J is just about to meet up with his brother two decades later. Again, there are several possible interpretations about the motives impelling the return. It could be a moment of reconciliation initiated by one of the twins. In the excellent movie directed by Peter Farrelly, Green Book, which we saw last evening, the issue of the reconciliation of estranged brothers is mentioned. Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a renowned black classical pianist on a concert tour through the Midwest and the South of the USA, is sitting in the back seat. He finally reveals a bit about himself to Tony Lip (played by Viggo Mortensen), a working-class Italian-American who had agreed to be Dr. Shirley’s driver and bodyguard on the tour. Shirley tells Tony that he has one relative, an estranged brother. Tony advises Shirley that he should seek a reconciliation and that will only happen if someone takes the initiative to have a meeting. You have to start somewhere.

In the movie, nothing comes of the advice. It is simply a moment to help reveal Dr. Shirley’s profound loneliness. In Genesis, there is estrangement, but when Jacob initiates a meeting after over twenty years, it becomes clear that J does not want a reconciliation; he just wants to live without threat in his homeland.

Certainly, J is portrayed as fearing the return. On the one hand, he had to flee Aram and the clutches of Laban if he wanted to establish his own dynasty. However, the prospect of return did not seem promising either. Would E still hold a grudge? Would E still want to kill him? J, ever the innovator and dissembler, becomes as proactive in meeting up with E as he was in leaving Laban. He sent a message ahead to E about his return with the instruction for the servant to say where he had been – with his uncle Laban – and to send “oxen, and asses and flocks, and men-servants and maid-servants” and to tell E, whom he addressed as his Lord, that these gifts were intended so that J “may find favour in thy sight.”

No queries about their parents. No asking about whether E was married and had children. No request about how his health was. Nothing is said that J missed E. They were twins after all. And certainly no mention of affection or even apology for what J had done. Just an echo of Genesis 6:8 when Noah “found favour with the Lord” after God despaired about his decision to create humans and about the wicked consequence of that decision. In deep and profound regret, God vowed to destroy the world. Except Noah. J effectively sent his brother material goods and asked that he would himself find favour with E just as Noah had with God.

Recall that J’s mother told him that she would let him know when he could come back safely. She never did. Was this because E’s anger never subsided? Or was it because J had become so busy and so ambitious (and so in love) that his memory of his family had faded? The messenger returns and tells J that E is coming out to meet him with 400 men. The messenger does not say they were armed. Isn’t it reasonable to assume E was out to get him? If E just wanted to welcome J back, E could have come alone or with a servant or two. He did not have to bring 400 men.

Perhaps there was another motive for bringing the 400. E may have wanted to show that, contrary to the blessing that J received, E was more than blessed himself. He could command an army of 400. “I have grown very strong,” E wanted to convey to J.

J, a transactional diplomat to the end, does not send forth his men, either armed or unarmed. He sends forth his womenfolk and servants in two waves with gifts from his flocks, while he, cautious as ever, adopts a backup plan and takes up a defensive position so he can escape if needed.

But if he wanted to escape, why did J not just send sufficient animals and servants to show how prosperous he had become? Why divide his forces in two equal parts? It seems that he really feared E and may have wanted to send enough of too much to prove his prosperity without risking everything. At the same time, he wanted to hold back sufficient so that he could remain rich.

At Mahanaim, God was named אֵל אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל (El-god-of-Israel), or possibly El (is) my God. Not YHWH. Not Adonai. But El. God becomes Jacob’s ruler. God becomes his God. Not a family god let alone a god for all of humanity.

The famous section now makes its appearance. J had sent all his family, all his servants, all his children across the river Jabbok and remained alone. J wrestles with the man or with an angel or with God or with his own inner demons or with E in his imagination immediately before their reunion.

In the above verses, Jacob becomes Israel. He is renamed after wrestling all night with a “man” who was unable to pin J down. That “man” wrenched J’s hip. It was dislocated. The “man” asked to stop the match. It was daybreak. They had been wrestling all night. Jacob agreed, but only if the “man” blessed him. The man asked after his name. “Jacob,” he said. No longer. The man renamed him Israel, but refused to disclose his own name when asked by J. J named the place, Peniel for J declared that he had come face-to-face with the divine. We recall that upon meeting E, J said that it was like coming face-to-face with God.

The hip is where the thorax and abdomen connect with the legs that allow humans to move forward. The hip is key to locomotion. With a dislocated hip, J was forced to slow down, to stop calculating and pushing towards the future and to stop and think and consider before he went on. Look what happens at Peniel. J arrives there limping from the injury he suffered during his wrestling match. J builds his altar. At Peniel, God gives J instructions. The point of this trip, God tells J, is not to build altars to me, whether at Mahanaim or Peniel, but that J must return to Beth-El where J saw the ladder to heaven. That is where the altar should be built. Why Beth-El versus Mahanaim or Peniel?

Because J and God had a deal. God promised to bring J back to the land; J promised to make God his El, his leader. That was a promise made at Beth-El and it is to Beth-El that J must return to ensure the fulfillment of the promise. Eternal return here has a different meaning. To the place where you had your real beginning, where your destiny was clearly set forth for you, to that place shall you return. And though there are places where God is present and places where one thanks and worships God, the key place is where promises are made and promises are kept to ensure the future of a nation.

J then finally meets up with his estranged twin, E. embraces J. My former colleague, Marty Lockshin, in his commentary, “Esau Hates Jacob: But is Antisemitism a Halakha?” notes that, “Esau kisses Jacob upon the latter’s return from Haran.” There is no conflict. Esau is overwhelmed at the sight of his younger brother. He hugs him. While he wept and raged when J stole his blessing, he is now just as emotional with happiness with the reunion. Famously, in the Torah scroll, the word kiss is dotted (puncta extraordinaria), implying not that “a kiss is but a kiss,” but that this kiss was something more.

What are we to make of the reunion? Rashbam, against the general consensus, argues that E had only friendly and not hostile intentions. Jacob projected Laban onto E who, unlike Laban, was simply overjoyed to see his brother. J misunderstood E’s friendly intentions. E had always been direct with his emotions. He neither strategized nor lived for the long haul. J, in contrast with E, had remained as suspicious and devious as ever. However, when he saw how E had responded to their reunion, J insisted that E accept his gifts for “to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” (Genesis 33:10) Was this just fake flattery for Jacob insisted on returning separately and without accepting E’s offer of men to guard his entourage?

Let me now try to put the various pieces together to sort out the meaning of the narrative and specifically of the two names of Jacob. As I indicated above, in the geographical underpinnings, there are borders – between Jacob and Laban, between potentially hostile forces. Good fences make good neighbours. There is the place where God promises to protect you and the place where you thank God for the protection offered and build an altar. But the key place is neither, but Beth-El, the place where there is to be found a ladder or stairway to heaven, the place where promises on both sides are fulfilled. The ladder to heaven is the stairway – not roadway – of the future of a people.

The story is about the future, about destiny, about what it will take to make a nation. As good hearted, as strong, as close to his feelings as E was, in spite of his being the older brother, he did not have the “stuff” to build a nation. As an older brother, he was a fighter pilot but not the calculating strategist needed for long term survival. The text reads more like Machiavelli’s Prince than as a moral tale or, alternatively, a tale of hard realism. Jacob becomes Israel, not because he is a moral character or because he is able to fight for his life, but because he knows when to stay and craft a victory over time but flee when necessary to survive. He is neither a feelie nor a wheelie, but steely, with a two-sided character that is at once focused on the self, on the nation he would found, while keeping his eye on the long range future.

You may disagree with this as an interpretation. You may also reject the message. These are two different decisions to make.

This is perhaps the most common question in commentaries on this section. Whether the commentary is entitled, “From Yaakov to Yisrael,” “Introspective Identity,” “The Name of Yisrael and Yeshurun,” “Your name is Israel,” “The Battle with Esav and the name Yisrael,” “Is It Yaakov or Yisrael,” “Yaakov and Yisrael: What’s in a Name?” “Yaakov Becomes Yisrael,” “Bolt of Inspiration 44 – Both names Are True,” “Yaakov’s Change of Name,” and on, and on, and on…, the question is discussed over and over again.

It is not as if there is a shortage of topics in this section. Some overlap, such as Jacob’s relationship to his brother, Esau. There is the tale of the rape of Dinah, which seems at first glance to have little if anything to do with naming and its meaning. Reuben slept with his father’s concubine. The Parashat is full of sex and betrayal. Yet, the story of Jacob wresting with the angel who blesses Jacob by changing his name is understandably a preoccupation.

However, there is another story about a change of name that ends the section. Rachel dies in childbirth and gives her son one name that is soon displaced when his father gives him another name. I will start there and then return to the story of Jacob’s name change.

But first a preamble. In Romeo and Juliet (Act II, Scene 2) set in Capulet’s orchard, on one of the most famous scenes in the Shakespearian repertoire, and one of the most romantic passages of all of literature, Romeo appears ruminating and talking to himself.

The theme is simple and direct. Two lovers are separated because their families, the Capulets and the Montagues, are feuding. Each of the lovers would surrender their names for the sake of their love. They hate their names. Their names separate rather than unite them. Names are tribal. Names are divisive. Names are identified with conflict. For what’s in a name. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

However, the human story in the Torah begins by giving things names. An apple is an apple. A banana is a banana. A rose is indeed a rose and would be something else by another name. Names have meanings. Names have significance. But not in the world of romantic love.

The story of Jacob in relationship to Rachel is one of the few stories of romance in the biblical text. After all, Jacob was smitten with Rachel and worked seven years to win her hand in marriage. And when tricked by Laban, Rachel’s father, who substituted his older and plain daughter in place of Rachel in the bridal bed, Jacob worked another seven years to finally gain her hand in marriage. Compared to such dedication and sacrifice, Romeo’s self-torment as Juliet stands on her balcony seems like infatuation rather than deep love, perhaps the same infatuation Jaccob and Rachel felt for one another when they first met.

But that is not how the love affair ends. Near the end of the Parashat, in chapter 35, verses 13-20 read as follows:

Jacob set up a pillar to commemorate where he spoke with God which he named, Beth-el, “House of God.” He also set up a pillar upon Rachel’s grave known, not just until the time when the Torah was written, but until the present as Rachel’s Tomb. Between those two bookends, Rachel gave birth to her second son whom she named Ben-oni, son of my pain, son of my suffering, before she died in childbirth. Jacob, after the love of his life died, renamed the boy, Binyomin (בנימים), Benjamin, perhaps son of my right hand. This does not seem very respectful to the love of his life, usurping the name she gave their son with his own.

One explanation is that Jacob did not want his youngest son, who became his favourite, to live under the shadow of possible guilt that his being born was responsible for his mother’s death. His father wanted to give him a positive message, a very positive one, by designating Benjamin as his favourite son, son of his right hand. Or it could have been, not about favouritism, but about a son whom he wanted to carry forth with his strength of his right hand. Or perhaps a third meaning; he wanted Benjamin to be straight and not deceitful, a characteristic associated with left-handedness; he did not want his son to be sinister. In any of these interpretations, the renaming was a romantic gesture, not one of disrespect or supplanting, but of heightening the prospects for his youngest son.

But Benjamin has another meaning, son of my old age. In this sense, there is a rivalry between his son remembering his mother’s pain or, alternatively, remembering that he, his father lived long enough so that he, Benjamin could be born. Do you want a name associated with your mother’s death and pain or with your father’s perseverance and determination unto old age?

But Rachel’s death on giving birth is not simply a matter of pain, but of greater perseverance, of seeing the birth through in spite of the pain she experienced. In this, there is an implied remonstration to Jacob – he remained someone who never knew himself and wanted to hide himself and, therefore, as a projection, also wanted to hide and bury the memory of the pain that Rachel went through. For the stories tend to focus on what Jacob sacrificed to win the hand of Rachel.

But what about Rachel? She was beautiful. She could have had the pick of anyone. But she not only waited 14 years, but was willing to share the marriage bed with her older sister. That is real sacrifice! Rachel knew that Jacob was by nature a dissembler and supplanter, not only of his brother Esau, but even of his wife whom he sincerely loved. Perhaps he even knew that the name she gave her son would be replaced, but at least her youngest son would know that it had been replaced. It was her gift to the truth of her existence and the truth of his birth rather than fake news built on fantasies that perhaps characterized his father. For his father, though extremely hard working, was not only timid, not only a mother’s boy, but a dissembler, even when his brother wanted to forgive and forget for love of his younger twin.

In the future, the tribe of Benjamin almost became extinct in the period of the civil war at the time of the rule of the judges and, in the war between the northern and the southern tribes, the remnant of the tribe of Benjamin was absorbed by the tribe of Judah. The name of Benjamin as a distinct line in history was eventually extinguished. As his mother suffered in pain and died, so would his progeny.

Whatever the name, whatever the meaning of the name, it cannot simply be tossed away on the ash heap of history as both Romeo and Juliet were willing to do for the sake of love. For the sake of real rather than romantic love, we want our children to remember us and to know what we want, what we expect of them, what we hope for them.

But what about Jacob being renamed Israel?

To be continued

With the help of Alex Zisman

That is an interpretation for another day. Sudfice to say, Israel survived. Israel lives on until this day even though eleven of the twelve tribes disappeared in history. For Jacob earned his knew name when he not only prevailed over man but over the divine.

 My plan when I woke this morning had been to write on the divisions of the political left in the United States as part of my series on the Competition for Recognition. A number of responses from readers that have been lurking in my mind have induced me to diverge. I will focus on a few responses, though some of the other more significant comments I received will inevitably creep into the blog.

The first was very brief.

“What is to give light must endure burning.”  Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning.

This was a response more to the tale of my nightmare than of my analysis of the political right. But the two are related as I will try to show. Frankl, whom I have not read for years, was a Holocaust survivor and psychologist who came to the conclusion that the key to survival in the Nazi concentration camps was the maintenance of hope. He did not call his quest for meaning a quest for recognition, but the two certainly have a great deal of overlap. The signature of humanity was not desire (the need to satisfy the id in Freudian terms), otherwise defined as the quest for pleasure. Nor was it life per se defined as the quest for survival and, therefore, a key condition of survival, achieving power – again, in Freudian terms, to enable one’s self to become a superego in determining values for oneself and others. The key was neither the id nor the superego, but the development of the ego in interaction with others, in the search for meaning or, what I have called, the quest for recognition.

The stress was not narcissistic nor engaged in a search for power over others in the interest of preserving and enhancing your own power, but in assuming responsibility for yourself in relationship to others. We are responsible for choosing how we respond to and deal with another’s search for recognition.

That always involves pain. If one is a soldier or first responder, this involves the risk of pain which in its chronic mental form becomes PTSD. If one has lived a life significantly without pain and if one uses part of that beneficence to help those who experienced PTSD, in addition to the satisfaction in helping another, there will be some cost – the experience of vicarious pain. But both sufferers and carers or care-givers can also endure the worst of suffering and die or burn out. It is possible that nothing but a wasteland can emerge from the process. The best way to avoid the third option is for the two to interact, the direct and the vicarious sufferer, but not so much that the care giver – the first and second responders as you will – themselves get caught up in the conflagration. Holding onto hope is not a mantra but a very difficult challenge.

This is pithy analysis of a pithy quote with all the necessarily attendant miscues and distortions. But it gets at a truth that is very different than the one Plato suggested in his allegory of the cave.  In The Republic, Plato envisioned prisoners chained to a log and looking at the cave wall. They could not see the fire behind them for they were tied up so that they could not turn their heads. All they could see were the shadows cast by puppeteers standing between the backs of these totally confined figures and the fire behind. Since they knew no better, these people who lacked even the freedom of mobility, even the mobility of their heads and their senses, these humans chained to a log by mental dogmas and blinders, took these shadows on the cave walls to be reality.

Note two things. For Plato, fire is a source of light but not of warmth or heat or even burning. It offers no pain and is merely a purely cognitive experience. Secondly, if those prisoners on the log are unchained and turn around to discover the source of light and the puppeteers, they suddenly recognize the cause of what they see. They suddenly recognize that the images they see are only appearances and two-dimensional reflections of a concrete reality. They would see the cover of a book reflected on the cave wall and take the cover to be the book.  To comprehend, we have to go beyond appearances to perceive real objects and name them rather than objects as they appear reflected on a cave wall. We have to move from sensibility to perception.

We could travel further and not just turn our heads. We could get up, walk past the fire to the opening of the cave and see the light of day as the true reality rather than either just creating a taxonomy of objects or a taxonomy of shadows. We could move from sensibility through perception to understanding and comprehend the laws of causation that link and connect the interaction of objects.

However, there are two observations about Plato’s allegory, one that refers to what we cannot do and the other to that which we do not do. We cannot look directly at the sun, the source of all categories and scientific laws. If we do, we will burn our retinas. The second, what we do not do as we relate objects and their interaction to one another, as we relate agents to one another. There is no empathy in Plato’s allegory. There is no exposure of one’s own pain or exposure to the pain of others.

With regard to the first, as one psychoanalyst reader of mine from California noted with respect to my nightmare about the forest fires and my missing wife and children and my futile search for them, the dream did convey a sense of vulnerability – my physical chassis has grown old and in need of replacement parts. But so is the larger landscape. The California fires are not just fires in which we roast marshmallows and gather around to sing camp songs. Nor are they simply fires which burn through one forest or destroy a home or two. They are fires from hell. They leave a wasteland. And I feel the impotency not only to put out those fires, but the impotency to protect my children who are dedicated to combatting climate change, but do so in spite of their loss of hope that humans will get their act together to reverse the terrible course on which we are on.

Therefore, I feel frozen as well as empathetic, impotent not only about my personal demise, but I pick up the stress and strain on my children and grandchildren as they realistically contemplate that all their personal hopes will be dashed. It is shocking to think that the possibility of hope in a Nazi concentration camp may have been greater than the ability of young people to feel hope in the contemporary political climate and inadequate response to – and even denial of – climate change.

Kate Julian in her excellent article, “Why are young people having so little sex?” in the current Atlantic, explores in depth a myriad of possible explanations from the following list:

“Over the course of many conversations with sex researchers, psychologists, economists, sociologists, therapists, sex educators, and young adults, I heard many other theories about what I have come to think of as the sex recession. I was told it might be a consequence of the hookup culture, of crushing economic pressures, of surging anxiety rates, of psychological frailty, of widespread antidepressant use, of streaming television, of environmental estrogens leaked by plastics, of dropping testosterone levels, of digital porn, of the vibrator’s golden age, of dating apps, of option paralysis, of helicopter parents, of careerism, of smartphones, of the news cycle, of information overload generally, of sleep deprivation, of obesity. Name a modern blight, and someone, somewhere, is ready to blame it for messing with the modern libido.”

Julian does not explore the possibility that the search for meaning, the search for recognition of others and by others, the exercise of hope, may have been seriously stunted. This may have contributed to the increasing impotence and disinterest in humans, men especially, connecting with others and developing a relationship. If the fires of passion are increasingly becoming dying embers, is there a link with the ideology of the right and Trump’s response to the forest fires in California?

One responder to my blog from Rhode Island thought I had been too soft on the Right and given the conservative as opposed to populist right a pass when he argued that the intellectual right and their political partners have been driven by a very negative agenda with the intent of burning through organized labour as they passed on tax cuts to the wealthiest underpinned by a barely hidden racism. The economic conservatives merely offered an intellectual cover, were merely shadow boxers on Plato’s cave wall. They exhibited a total absence of empathy, an absence of compassion, for the working poor and black and Hispanic minorities.

I’ve been hearing Republican intellectuals go on for years about a “conservative” approach to the rule of law.  And yet, such conservative values pale in comparison to the display of naked power when it comes to the denial of voting rights (Bush v Gore), or the denial of giving Merrick Garland a hearing.  Their so-called “values” have been a con game for 50 years, although now – in the age of Trump and Fox News – they no longer need to pretend or even be ashamed of what they have wrought.  The idea that there is an actual argument on the right is a lovely fiction that liberals enjoy telling themselves because, after all, the left has genuine debates, the right must have them as well.  I’m sorry, but the emperor has no clothes (and hasn’t had them for half a century).

On the other hand, another reader thought that I had been, and have been, too hard on Donald Trump. The “tree huggers’ of the left opposed clear cutting and replanting old growth forests with seedlings, when, he argued, “cleared areas create a natural barrier to end fires destroying the whole forest.” If vast areas are left uncut and untouched, “Nature will burn its own ‘clear cut.’

“Trump is therefore right. Current policy, where massive human housing is placed in the midst of an old growth forest floor, particularly in dry areas of California, is a recipe for certain disaster. One cannot discuss California without pointing out their precarious fresh water capacity. After all Howard, California has a population equal to CANADA, but compared to our verdant, massive, fresh water paradise, Californians need to clean-out their forest floors or clear out people from their tinder box hinterlands. Their problem is different from ours. They have a severe water shortage and a very thin soil base.”

he last sentence is certainly true. But is the rest? Does Trump deserve a pass on this one at least? Is the problem one of forest management, too few forest fire suppression workers, obsolete and inadequate equipment and a lack of an overall strategy? I myself think the latter is to some extent true. But why? And does this get Donald Trump off the hook? Those forced to breathe the most poisonous air in the world at this time should not be left on the hook and hung out to dry. They have been living under darkened skies with clouds of smoke blocking the sunlight as flames whipped up literally around them.

Over a thousand people may be dead. What did DT have to say when he finally visited the destroyed city of Paradise with a population of 27,000 and burned through 230 square miles? 10,000 homes were destroyed in surrounding communities. “This is very sad to see.”  For someone prone to hyperbole, this was an understatement to say the least in response to the Camp Fire II that had engulfed Paradise, known as a retirement community though it had 15 schools at different levels, including Butte College. What is left is only charred chassis of cars and the remains of incinerated homes and buildings. “Right now, we want to take care of the people who have been so badly hurt.” Not a very strong expression of compassion. Methinks Trumps does not suffer from compassion fatigue so much as he conveys someone challenged by an absence of empathy. He no sooner dipped his finger into the stream of compassion than he withdrew it and reverted back to his immediate response – blaming others.

Bad forest management was the problem for DT.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

At least there were no more words during Trump’s visit about withholding emergency aid for the victims. Then he referred to the President of Finland, but that president denied that he had ever said that Finland controlled wildfires by sweeping the forest floor.  It is also not true, contrary to what Trump said, that Finland has no problem with fires. Ironically, it lacked sufficient fires while Sweden suffered from massive blazes this past year under the same extreme heat this past summer. As did Russia to the east of Finland.

But the reason was not raking the forest floor. The President of Finland had not mentioned raking to Trump. He did discuss controlled burns. But California uses controlled burns. The difference is that Finland has much greater precipitation, much lower average temperatures and lacks the hot dry winds of California where the risk was too great for a so-called controlled burn to rage out of control.

The difference between Finland and Sweden has been attributed to different forest management practices in both countries with similar geographies and weather patterns. In recent years, conservative governments in Sweden have cut back on monies for forest management and opened the forests to broader clear cutting while the Finnish government has increased the allocations to forest management. The recent social democratic government was unable to reverse this trend.

Finland, as my reader defending Trump implied as practicing good forest management, under a conservative president, Sauli Niinsto was able to continue and even expand the forest management practices of previous social democratic governments. Finland divided its forests into small containable compartments. Sweden has not. In Sweden in September, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, a social democrat, lost a vote of confidence. The far-right in the elections had made significant gains at the expense of both the social democrats and their traditional conservative opponents who had been in power prior to Lotven. The tale of responsibility for improved practices is not simply attributable to right and left, though the far right has certainly made governance in Sweden much more difficult.

Both Scandinavian countries view climate change as the major challenge of our era. However, Trump insisted that the fires had not made him change his denial of the effects of climate change. Yet he would conclude after his visit to Paradise that, “I think everybody’s seen the light and I don’t think we’ll have this again to this extent.” Climate scientists overwhelmingly profess the opposite to be true.

But has Trump seen the light? The surprise for me is that some of the victims still professed hope in an area that Trump won by four percentage points in 2016. “I hope he helps us. I hope he sees what we’re all going through,” said Casey Belcher, 33. “I hope he sees what we’re all going through and he feels our emotional pain.” Amy Velazquez, whose husband worked day and night as a firefighter, said, “Threatening to not send resources was the biggest blow. They’re thinking is hope alive? It was pretty devastating.”

People, especially leaders, chained to dogmatic positions and fixated on the shadows on a cave wall, are least likely to either discern causal connections and connect with those who suffer. As Bryan Belcher said, “The fact that we are not the ones to blame in this — why should we have to be the ones stuck with the hardship of it?” Others were more accusatory as Trump’s motorcade passed holding banners that read, “Climate change” and “Apocalypse!”

Of course, this is what Trump does, first focusing on blame and directing the blame onto others and away from himself. Then, in his almost complete ignorance and total distortions of sources of authority, he pronounces the problem solved as if he were god who says and there is. Trump says what is and then there is not. Of course, the causes of the fire are many. Building homes in a wilderness as in Paradise is itself problematic. Further, there had been previous warnings. Ten years earlier, the Humboldt Fire swept through 22,800 acres in that area. The next month, Camp Fire I – 2018 was the year of Camp Fire II – forced the evacuation of parts of Paradise but the fire never crossed the Feather River.

Residents thought that the Feather River to the east and Butte Creek to the west would continue to protect the homes spread out and built on a wide ridge between the two canyons. But this time the fires were so intense and the winds so strong that the canyons acted like a large chimney and residents fled with few belongings in cars surrounded by walls of flames and blocked by cars already charred. The major cause, as everyone but DT seems to know, is not forest management, but drought and non-seasonal high winds that whipped up from the high pressure areas of Nevada and Utah towards the cooler coast. On 8 November, humidity had plummeted as hot, dry winds swept over the parched vegetation. It was already a month or more after seasonal rains were expected, but again had not arrived. The vegetation on the ground was even more parched than usual.

Was poor forest management also a problem? Did tree huggers prevent wood from being cut? The Forest Practice Division, in fact, permits tree harvesting on a private as well as commercial scale, but also regulates it to protect forests, fish, wildlife and streams. However, the Forest Practice Division does not even have the power to reject a Timber Harvesting Plan of the major commercial operators as long as the plans are prepared by registered foresters. From 500 to 1,500 THPs are approved each year.

Thus, though regulated by rules and best practices, harvesting is not overseen by government. Further, given the resistance to taxes characteristic of the United States, especially of regions that are politically red, the firefighters are a volunteer force. If there is a problem with forest management on the northern part of the state, it is not with too much regulation or misguided regulation, but with too little government involvement in management, control and firefighting when necessary under the California Forest Practices Act.

The southern fires were not even forest fires. Fiery tumbleweed missiles flew through the air like cannonballs. The Woolsey Fire burned through 146 square miles in Los Angeles County and parts of Ventura County as well as parts of Malibu where many wealthy homeowners were able to hire their own private firefighting force to save their homes. The causes of the fires in an area of brush rather than forests were again dry vegetation and the hot and dry Santa Ana winds. This was also true of The Hill Fire in Santa Rosa Valley east of the Woolsey fire, but it was stopped, not by clear cutting, but by a large patch of land destroyed by fire five years earlier.

Management of forests and scrub lands, the planning of houses in the midst of all this, some management problems, are all contributing factors. But the main causes have been drought and high dry winds seen by most scientists to be a by-product of climate change.

DT does not deserve a pass. As one survivor described the maelstrom, “the gates of hell had opened up. Black and red was all you could see.” In the case of the environment, the light demands that we NOT endure burning while we burn with compassion on an interpersonal level.

Is Donald Trump a by-product of the failure of liberalism which sold out to identity politics and the politics of resentment in accordance with the views of Jordan Peterson? Is Donald Trump, as Dummitt declares, the most triumphant exponent of “Be true to oneself” and representative of those who feel unrecognized and who are willing to defy social convention from the right? Dummitt declared that the moral compass in the modern world on the left as well as on the right, was rooted in the authentic self – “to thine own self be true” – rather than, say, custom or religious edicts. Is this accurate?

Whether or not the above is true, will the winner in this competition be the side which invokes the morally superior identity? If conservatives favour market and individual freedoms versus excessive bureaucracy and taxes, while the left liberals attack social and religious conventions that impose restrictions on sexuality, gender and race, is the present polarization simply a fundamentalist evangelical conflict between two definitions of moral purity and the claim that each is the real outsider, the real excluded, while each should provide the moral compass for the modern world?

If this depiction of the core of current polarization is accurate, can that polarization be overcome by avoiding the dichotomy of left and right and giving priority to traditional liberal and/or conservative references, say citizenship or to an overarching social order, that is, making a strong shared identity more basic than the identity quests that divide us? Such a solution would once again prioritize our customs and shared values that emphasize the rule of law, free speech, the right of self-expression and public civility. Or do we have to reach back further in our history, into the biblical narrative, a narrative of constant tension between ethical imperatives and historical propensities?

As I see the American political battleground, a four-way fight is underway. On the right, for now, the populists have won. On the left, the Left Liberals remain in charge, but the democratic socialists are in the process of mounting stronger and stronger challenges.

The overall battle can be represented by the following chart:

Tomorrow, I will focus on the battle on the left. Today, attention is focused on the victory of right-wing populism over traditional conservatism in the internecine war on the right.

I begin with modernity and the moral purity of the economic right as best expressed by Friedrich A. Hayek. (See Individualism and Economic Order.) One type of individualism [economic] leads to freedom and spontaneous order. The other type of individualism [cultural] leads to a controlled economy and imposed order rooted in collectivism according to Hayek. For many, this implies that the only collectivist challenge comes from the left. However, there is a collectivist, a nationalist, challenge that comes from the right.

The Trump presidency is a case of deliberate inauthenticity, a case of wearing the mantle of market freedom, but organizing a takeover by collectivists who are nationalists, that is, by a group identified by their common loyalties. Order is imposed by a singular leader claimed to embody the nationalist spirit even if the actual spirit consists of lies, degradation of customs, racism, degenerate language and de facto narcissism. The playbook and the philosophy of fascism has not fundamentally changed since Giovanni Gentile, the Italian philosopher, set down the tenets of fascism in the book, The Doctrine of Fascism that he ghostwrote for Benito Mussolini.

Gentile misinterpreted Hegel and put forth what he called a neo-Hegelian view that extolled collectivism and denigrated individualism. There was no objective reality or reference points external to the self. Hence, this variation of the proposition, “To thine own self be true.” The true subject was not an abstract “I,” an individual postulated as an abstraction in an ideal world where that “I” enjoyed a full panoply of protections. The true subject was embodied, was an actual individual, a concrete rather than abstract individual. There was no true manifold objective world and no true abstract individuality. Truth was to be located in the subject, the heroic subject that asserted agency on behalf and in the name of the national collectivity. The objective world was only a projection of that individuality. Experience is only a product of what is projected; objectivity does not provide boundaries for this narcissism in the name of the collective.

There are no lies since the only truth that exists is that projected by the mind of the “wise” leader as the divine is conceived of as immanent in such projections. The leader is the “truest” believer in himself. The objective world must conform to this form of subjective Being.

Let me make these abstractions concrete. Ryan Costello lost his seat (the 6^th Congressional District in Pennsylvania) in the House of Representatives in the midterm elections (see The New Yorker, 12 November 2018). He is an example of a traditional or moderate Republican, a conservative centrist. He was willing, even eager, to have government catch up with technical advances in renewable energy. He was willing to work with the Democratic opposition across the aisle to improve health-care delivery and introduce reasonable immigration controls.

“And then Trump gets elected. And the norms of politics all just blow up and you’re trying to figure out how to orient yourself when the rules don’t apply anymore, and you’re allowed to say and do things which used to be disqualifying.” Trump lied. Repeatedly! Often! Daily! Without due process, Trump banned entry to persons from seven Muslim countries. Without due process, Trump took away the White House press pass of CNN’s Jim Acosta. Costello wanted the Mueller investigation into election collusion with the Russians to go forward without any political interference. But the leader of his party, the president, denounced the FBI as corrupt, denounced the press for spreading fake news, insulted black female reporters while insisting on decorum at White House press briefings.

Costello faced a choice. Complicity with Trump or disloyalty to the Republican Party that had been taken over by Trump and his followers. He chose to walk a tightrope, generally ignoring the depths of degradation of his party’s leader, occasionally publishing on Facebook his own dissent towards Trump’s latest malfeasance when it became too extreme, but expressing no interest in condemning or censoring the president in the House. He chose not to accompany Jeff Flake of Arizona into the political wilderness. He allowed fear to determine his choices.

However, he faced chaos from the left as well as the right and barely escaped being shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter who critically wounded the Majority Whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, at a Republican charity baseball game. However, the bulk of artillery aimed his way came from the right even as he tried to sidestep Trump’s racism and Trump’s ignoring and ignorance of the Constitution and the rule of law. Costello faced either the ire of the voters in Pennsylvania or the ire of the President who would back an alternative Republican candidate in the primaries in Pennsylvania’s sixth district. He avoided the latter only to see his political career destroyed (at least for now) by the former. His principles of balanced budgets, free trade, upholding the Constitution, the rule of law and the separation of powers had all crashed and burned much earlier as prudential silence morphed into the “habitual muteness of the acquiescent.”

The politics of total war against party dissidents and politicians with backbone and character meant that reasonable compromise was no longer the language of politics. Extremism, zealotry and populism were. Conspiracy theories were floated in the air like hundreds of sky lanterns, even though everyone knew they were fire hazards. Republicans moved from being the upholders of institutions and their values to participating in the destruction of norms and institutions and engaging in voter suppression and gerrymandering. Shock value and publicity seekers usurped the role of thoughtful and reflective independent minded politicians.

But the roots lay in those same institutions. For the core issue of getting a foothold on the race to power depended most on the commitment of a core group of party members in a district and/or actually recruiting those members for the nomination. In a far less democratic Canada, constituency nominations depended, in most suburban ridings, on getting one ethnic group, or an alliance of two ethnic groups, who could deliver the signatures to party membership and their votes on nomination day. 1-2% of eligible voters could choose the candidate for their party, and, depending on the national race, could coast to victory.

In the USA, the nomination depended less on getting the support of a core of party members in a constituency party meeting (as in Canada) than on winning a popularity contest in a political primary, that is, in electioneering that never stopped and depended on the energizer batteries of politics – money and human time. The kind of publicity adopted depended on the intellectual, policy and publicity silos of your side. Decency, rationality, objectivity and a primary concern with truth had largely been shovelled into the ashbin of history, though to different degrees and with respect to different key issues. Core support came from two sometimes overlapping sources: evangelical Christians who had already subscribed to surrendering the individual self to a higher “divine” self, who appeared immanently in history; and resentful white Americans who felt they had lost their place in history.

Totally contrary to Christopher Dummitt, the core reference point has been neither authenticity nor moral purity, but expediency, opportunism and ambition. People’s rule had replaced party rule and the people were no longer an aggregate of individual voters, but an ideological tribe in which the members demonstrating the greatest zealotry won over the mob. Rallies, not debates, became the central focus of an election campaign by both the socialist left and the populist right.

However, on the right the collectivists, the nationalists, emerged victorious. Each day that passed witnessed the defeat of another compromiser, of another compromise, of another part of objective reality. Climate change impelled by human activity, according to Trump, was not a major contributing cause to the tremendously destructive fires that so recently laid waste to enormous tracts of land and even a whole city in California. The fact that these were not forest fires but largely shrub lands, the fact that, in any case, forests were not managed primarily by the State of California but by the federal government that owned the majority of forest tracts, the fact that “sweeping forests” was not an idea passed on by the Finnish Prime Minister as a forest management tool or that it was even a useful one, did not matter. Trump, as usual, mouthed off in ignorance and pronounced that there would be no more such fires. More than that, he pronounced his own personal view of nature as simply an extension of his own wishes rather than an independent reality.

“I have a strong opinion. I want great climate, and we’re going to have a forest that is very safe.”

The problem with old age is that we spend far too much time seeing doctors and trying to keep an old and decrepit chassis working. Ignoring times spent in labs for various blood and urine tests, for x-rays and Dopplers, echograms and neurological tests, this week alone I saw my general practitioner, my heart doctor and my sleep doctor. And today I head to the Toronto Western Hospital to have my eye measured to prepare for surgery and the removal of cataracts.

Not only do these visits take time, but when I meet old friends, we spend too much time reciting and comparing our ills. But it is not only with friends. Yesterday, I was on the phone talking with my youngest son for about two hours – he lives in Vancouver – and he was upset that I had not kept him up to date on my health and my treatments. And then there are the visits – to friends who have really serious health issues. I miss them. I want to see them. I want them to keep going even as I tire of the effort to keep going myself. Illness consumes time.

Why then bore you with such issues? Because I could use some help. I visited my sleep doctor yesterday – or perhaps it was the day before. I, to my surprise, had not seen her for quite awhile. I went to check whether my CPAP breathing mechanism that I use at night was set at the correct pressure. I made the appointment before I found out that taking a diuretic pill once a day got rid of the excess water in my legs and lungs that evidently accounted for why I had been feeling so tired. Hence, the breathlessness I had been experiencing. Perhaps that is why I was even more cheerful when seeing her than I perhaps usually am.

She told me that she likes to see me and missed me. How often does a doctor tell you that? Patients with sleeping problems are normally grumpy and melancholic. They feel sleep deprived and wish they could sleep more. In contrast, she said, I seem to be the rare – very rare evidently – a patient who comes to see her who is upbeat, tries to tell funny stories and cheers her up. I do not complain about lack of sleep for the fact that I need much less sleep pleases me enormously as it allows me normally to get my blog written before breakfast.

However, this time I had a real problem. I had a horrible nightmare early in the week. I had watched the news and the frightening fires in California where flames skipped over three football fields in minutes. I watched on television as families in cars escaped through walls of flames when they could barely make out whether they were fleeing the fire or getting into it. The children in the car were panicky as a father tried to reassure them that they should calm down. They would escape, he insisted. They evidently did so; that is why we could watch their car video that they had made.  Unfortunately, perhaps 200-300 did not escape.

I had gone to sleep about 10:30 p.m. and instead of waking up around 3:30 a.m., I woke at 11:45 p.m. I woke shaking. I could not get back to sleep. I also could not write. This is very unusual for me when I can be sitting at my desk writing within 60 seconds of waking up. I also do not usually remember my dreams. My sleep rhythm is unusual since I enter a deep sleep almost as soon as I put my head on my pillow – perhaps it can take as much as 30 seconds. And when I wake up, I am not drowsy but fully awake. But this past week, I could not write for two mornings in the aftermath of that nightmare. I missed writing two blogs.

However, this dream – or, rather, nightmare – was vivid in my memory. I was shaking when I awoke. In that dream, I had been in Africa working when I received a phone call that there was an enormous fire in the region where we lived back home – and home seemed to be California rather than Toronto. The caller told me that they had not been able to locate my wife and my two youngest children. In the dream, they were 6 and 9 years old at the time – so the dream was set almost 25 years ago.

I immediately flew home and began looking for them. The dream consisted almost entirely of that search – a futile search for I never found them. I passed houses with flames 30-40’ in the air. I passed cars engulfed in flames and tried to peer into them to see if my missing wife and two youngest children were in those cars. The dream went on and on, searching and searching but finding nothing. But the most peculiar part of the dream is that when I walked endlessly among these flames, I was freezing cold. I felt like an iceberg – assuming an iceberg can feel. I was frozen and never warmed up.

I told my sleep doctor that the dream had stayed with me all week, not only because it had been so horrific and because it had shaken me up so much, but because I could not figure out what it might mean. I usually find I can find an interpretation that seems to make sense. However, in this dream, the only thing that seems to have been clear was that the videos of the flames and the children in the escaping cars had probably set off the dream. Nothing else.

Of course, my sleep doctor was not a dream doctor. Her expertise was in the mechanics of sleep and not its imaginary content. I did not expect her to help me interpret the dream. I merely wanted to explain my physical tiredness succeeded by relief via a diuretic and then my mental tiredness brought on by a dream. I welcome any efforts at interpretation. In this there remains hope. For my readership offers me the opportunity and the audience to try to understand that dream.

But it is not my dream that I want to write about, but Jacob’s.

Jacob had his dream while lying on the ground with his head on a rock. I was in bed with my head on a pillow. In Jacob’s dream, there is a ladder connecting heaven and earth. In my dream, earth has become a fiery hell. In Jacob’s dream, angels skip up and down the ladder; it is a sulam with the same numerical value as Sinai that adumbrates Moses’ encounter with God at Sinai. Jacob wakes from his dream in amazement. I woke from mine in anguish, despondent, dejected and wretched.

In my dream, I plod along horizontally. There is no skipping, just despair. If God stood over Jacob in his dream revealing himself to Jacob and promising that the land on which he rested his head will be given to him and his progeny, there was no God in my dream. No angels and not even Satan. I was alone in my dream, very much alone. And I walked in a landscape that no one would want to inherit.

Jacob flees his life of cheating his brother and wrestling away Esau’s birthright and blessing. Finally, between his home and that of his uncle, he is able to lie down and have a dream. But in my dream, I can only wander endlessly and aimlessly. I cannot even look forward to wrestling with God at the ford of the Jabbok River.

When Jacob awoke from his dream, he entered into a covenant with God, namely that, as long as God was with him and protected him and guided him, as long as he gave Jacob food to eat and a garment to wear, Jacob would remain His loyal servant. There was no one in my dream protecting my wife and children. There was no one guiding me as I trudged along amongst the flames and through the smoke without direction. And I felt only cold. Where Jacob had seen the house of God and the gate of heaven, I wandered the streets of hell.

The next morning after the dream, I went to synagogue and recited the kaddish. It was my mother’s Yahrzeit, the anniversary of her death eighteen years ago. It was morning and I recited the Shaharit prayer, the morning prayer that Abraham had supposedly established. Though I went through the motions and had amiable conversations with my friends, my heart was not in it. And it was a prayer for my mother. I felt more like Isaac, but in a paved over field with burning houses and cars on all sides. But in my dream, there was neither any prayer that poured out of me, nor conversation either. I saw no one. I asked no one. I searched, but the streets were deserted. It was certainly not Jacob’s evening prayer for there were no encounters at all.

In fact, the smoke was so thick, I could not tell whether it was morning, noon or night. It was true hell for the different times of the day had been obliterated. And I did not ask God to take me out of the darkness of that day into the light. Was this a world that God would inhabit, for it was truly a scorched earth unsuited to bring forth food, for sustaining animals and allowing beautiful yellow and purple flowers to grow. It was a world of gray on gray except for the brilliant red of the flames. It was a world that no one owned and no one would even want to own. The world was indeed illuminated, but not by the sun’s light, not by God’s light, but by the darkness and the flames that make up hell.

The celestial spheres, the sun and the moon, were blocked out by billowing black and grey smoke. And there was no one in charge of a world headed towards hell. God had abdicated. God had also fled the flames and abandoned His responsibilities. And I could not find my wife or my youngest children. Instead of the darkness providing an ambience for intimacy, there was nothing. There was nothingness. There was no God to embrace me in my fear, in my terror. There was no God with whom I could even make a deal, draw up a covenant, one in which we could exchange mutual promises and obligations. I did not feel, as I usually felt, when I awake in the very early hours of the morning and would write until I saw the light of day beginning to form outside of my picture windows in my study. I was not merely insecure, tired and wary as Isaac always seemed to be. I was petrified and identified with Jacob who loved bright colours and innocent jokes to cover up his profound terror. Deep down, he felt hopeless and was in despair, for a night of intimacy with his God had been lost. It was a night in which, except for the flames, all cows were both black and dead.

There was no progress in that dream, from hope to worry and trepidation. Instead of God turning on the lights, the flames were subsiding and left only burned out collapsed homes and frames of vehicles in a bleak landscape. Would the lights come on again? Would I see my wife and two youngest children again? I was so obsessed that I could not even thank an unknown God that my older children were safe and living elsewhere.

I pray every day that God renews His creation if there is a God and if God is still working at His job. I pray that each day will be a brand new day, a day full of creativity, a day of renewal when the world is always experienced anew. But the world had died. It had been torched.

I have never been concerned with whether God existed or not. The issue was never for me whether I believed or did not believe God existed. The issue had always been whether I believed that if God existed, that I was worthy of His faith in me. But in that bleak landscape, I feared that I had lost the faith in myself, the real faith that sustained me, that the world was and would be born anew every morning with a different pattern even though the elements were identical, that at night the angels ascended and descended the ladder in continuous motion, like elves, to renew the world for another day even though fascists and Nazis driven by the politics of resentment were in pursuit.

Will my family, will all families, be so blessed as I have been blessed? Will they even have a ladder to climb?

[To repeat my warning, this blog may be dangerous to your mental health.]

I begin with Jordan Peterson and the alleged failure of liberalism in order to comprehend his view of the forces underlying the conflict between the political right and left. How, in the pursuit of what each sees as the true order of the world, the true good, is the result not simply mutual incompatibility and exclusion, but the very opposite result of the one intended by each? Leftists, it is said, want to change the world; though he berates the extreme right, his more frequent target seems to be the left which he regards as the embodiment of postmodernism, relativism and, believe it or not, aggressiveness. Those on the right believe the priority should be on changing yourself, which is Peterson’s aim. But then how can the two positions be reconciled if this so-called traditional conservative right position merely regards the extreme right as a distraction more than a target?

I will not review Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which, though an international blockbuster and extolled by new media sensations on YouTube such as PewDiePie, has generally been greeted by respected reviewers as inconsistent, self-contradictory, sloppy, shoddy, glib, banal, obscure, boring, full of philosophical buzzwords with virtually no explication, lazy analogies and clichés. They often claim the book to be a tedious read full of arbitrary judgments, and assertions without any defence or argument and citations at odds with the actual references.

Peterson is the mercurial intellectual equivalent of the polarizing Trump, one who mixes polemical tirades with boy scout pep talks. When he offers an assertion without an argument – such as respect and project strength – he comes across as weak. As one commentator noted, he displaces a conservativism of substance, a conservatism of tradition, a conservativism of civility, with the moral equivalent of pop art that turns ads into objects of art as he puts forth a gospel of masculinity.

However, I have bracketed the book’s weaknesses. I am not concerned with Peterson’s own contradictory tales of the genesis of the book out of his “procrastination-induced reasoning” or his more careful and purportedly 1999 deeper volume, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. I also avoid any consideration of his role as a public intellectual and charismatic communicator using contemporary media, propelled by his singular acerbic stance against the Canadian Parliamentary Bill C-16 to include “gender identity or expression” to be protected under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Peterson’s gun slinging stance, reinforced by his quaint Alberta slang – “Sort yourself out, bucko” and “Toughen up, you weasel” – aims to slay the evils of male emasculation and gender protection akin to the gunfighters at the OK Corral. The position has been contemporaneous with the rise of Donald Trump. But I set that all aside.

Instead, I will focus on the philosophical underpinnings, the most important of which is Heidegger, more particularly, Peterson’s interpretation of Heidegger, and the latter’s notion of Being. In a separate blog sometime in the next few weeks, I will dig into Heidegger’s views in his own right. Today, I address the quotes and the queries posed to me by an academic colleague and one of the careful readers of my blogs.

According to Peterson’s interpretation of Heidegger (see Being and Time), Being is activity (contrasted with matter which is passive) and central to human existence; human existence is inherently tragic. The task of humans is to transform the negativity of Being, its inherent nihilism and conflictual character, into improvement and something positive, namely proper (184) or perfect Being (190) – rule 6. We find meaning, value (and, surprisingly, even joy) by finding our “rightful destiny” (28) in what Heidegger dubbed “Dasein,” that is, how individuals experienced Being in their own unique lives.

How? By developing our consciousness. There is, on the one hand, matter which is passive, and then two active competing forces, one tending towards chaos and ignorance and accompanied by despair and angst, betrayal and horror. The other inclines towards order, towards structure, towards authority. “Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country… It’s the flag of the nation.” (36) Consciousness is that which is non-material and which mediates between chaos and order and, therefore, suffers from the tension of such an existence, especially since, even as we enhance order, we are inherently hurtling towards death and suffering pain as we face a telos of destruction even as we try to give meaning (rule 7) to what is meaningless, to do good and not add to the evil, to the meaninglessness, of the world. Instead, our prototype is the good man (168-9), an overachiever aiming for the highest good as a father, a husband and a friend even if, in experience, pain, strife and the inevitably of suffering define the world. (172; 174) One of Peterson’s heroes, versus Aristotle, is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who insisted that humankind was not destined for happiness.

The biblical stories of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel, exemplify this portrait of experience. Adam, like God, seeks to give order to the world and to be recognized by God for his efforts. Eve allows herself to slip towards chaos, towards disorder and material existence. In interacting, the two come to know one another and thereby to know both good and evil.

Cain follows in the footsteps of his mother and Abel of his father. Abel, a shepherd, does not work towards increasing order, increasing institutional structures, towards cities and civilization. He is a nomad. Cain, in contrast, the proprietor of order and orderliness and imposing those on nature, in his quest for meaning, ends up killing Abel and, tragically, advancing the chaos he so assiduously tries to avoid and counteract. If Adam and Eve met their tragic end because of their complementarity, and became conscious of good and evil in the process, Cain and Abel do so through conflict between them and the polar tensions towards which each is drawn. That is why we end up with a Hobbesian world that is “nasty, brutish and short” and, in the effort to make the world good and more orderly, we compound that state by adding evil to the mix.

This is satanic. This emerges as conscious malevolence. For, if we are aware that we cannot bring order and meaning to the world, that ultimately we cannot achieve goodness, then we surrender to despair and we turn to destructiveness, to “pure hatred of man, God and Being,” to expediency and acceptance of life as catastrophic instead of accepting that life is a struggle to exemplify order and the good even though we recognize the effort is futile, that proper or perfect Being is out of reach. However, if we do not make the effort, then the self becomes the benefactor of evil who strides “about the stage of Being as Nazi and Stalinist alike; who produced Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the multiplicity of the Soviet gulags.”  (p. 194)

What then is the role of thought, of critical thought, of reason, which Descartes in the seventeenth century defined as the essence and central character of the modern individual and Karl Popper, in that same line and out of that inheritance in the twentieth century insisted that thinking as logical was primarily engaged in building order through a process of falsification of that which contributed to disorder, of taking apart fake news at the same time as the opponents of thought labelled all thought per se as fake. Descartes used doubt to try to defeat doubt and find a foundation for certainty in reason that would replace the dying faith of religion. However, over three centuries, the only result has been sewing distrust in reason itself and affirming the reality of pain and suffering rather than the contentment of logic as the essence of existence. Peterson, using the same doubt, comes to a different conclusion, not the certainty of the self but the certainty of suffering.

The tragedy – in deconstructing and labeling the fake, thought contributes to the notion that all thought is fake. Thought falls into the trap of thoughtlessness and, therefore, helps neo-fascists in their quest for power. That is the tragedy of thought. That is the tragedy of thinking. That is how the quest for the good helps produce the horror show of contemporary existence. Thought cannot avoid becoming an abettor of evil even as it acts in the name of the good, even as it acts in “good faith” to advance the realm of thought and reason. For if the essence of thought is scepticism, if the essence of thought is critique, if the essence of science is premised on falsification, then it is easy to see how that good faith is turned inside out, is inverted to translate all of experience into doubt where truth claims receive no more status than false ones.

There are implications of Peterson’s views on issues such as “fake news.” CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, they all stand on the side of “facts” and discriminating between what is factually accurate and what is hyperbole, what is misleading and what is an absolute falsehood. But all these “news” organizations fail to convey that what they portray as “news,” what they deconstruct as false, only feeds the frenzy of deceit as they suborn themselves to the conviction that fake news, that false news, is the news, when that is the oldest satanic seduction of all. In defence of facts, they help shovel the dirt on the grave of facts. And when we become self-conscious of this, we are driven to despair and into the long night of the human soul.

How can Peterson emerge from this long passage on the road to hell by supporting a very non-Nietzschean moral quest for being humble in one’s exertions in order to resist the core of the satanic path of pride that necessarily leads to intolerance and oppression? He does it by turning away from the dictum “To thine own self be true” towards the humbler premise that one does not possess a self to which one can be true. Rather, he advises, become self-conscious of the deceit in your own heart, of the cowardice in your own gut, of how your own motives are driven by resentment and towards malevolence.

Peterson offers an updated version of a Christianity in which we are born sinners and, however much we strive, and ought to strive, to overcome a propensity to malevolence, we and the world all eventually succumb to their embrace. So generally, “it is best to do what others do, unless you have a very good reason not to.” Peterson found very good reasons in his own mind for rejecting correct thinking and the preference for neutral over gender pronouns. Conformity and critique are not opposites but complements. Be cautious but forceful seems to be his maxim.

By accepting pain and suffering as inevitable, we minimize our contribution to that tragedy and can work to alleviate unnecessary pain and suffering. By accepting the inherent irrationality, the inherent lack of logic to existence, we minimize the worst mistake of the Enlightenment, the belief that we can replace the tragic with a divine order of goodness through science and reason. By surrendering the utopian quest of modernity, we can best minimize though not evade its inevitable hell.

Peterson’s maxims are simple: Pursue meaning even as you accept that it will all be meaningless in the end. Seek unity and order even as disunity, disorder and chaos confronts us and spreads. Pursue the Kingdom of God on Earth, but only if you recognize that God’s kingdom can only be established in heaven. Only then can Being emerge out of Nothingness. Only then can God’s quest to order the world through logos, through words, be pursued though never realized. Pursue truth but surrender the vision of a singular objective truth in favour of your own truth. Resurrect the true meaning of, “To thine own self be true.”

What about the proposed rules? Rule 1 – “Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back.” The analogy is a lobster to put forth a Darwinian proposition defending dominance hierarchies which are “older than trees.” Posture expresses dominance – as do handshakes. You can understand why so many sophisticated critical readers found this writing banal.

Rule 2 – “Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible For Helping.”  The rule is not act towards others as you would have others treat you, but treat yourself as if you were another in need. Clever but not exactly profound.  It is as if the inversion in his writing served as a deliberate ploy as when, in narrative chaos, he esteems self-criticism prior to any worldly critique in rule 6 stated above with the imperative that you put order in your own house before criticizing others.

What about Rule 11 – “Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding?” Don’t impose order when children are discovering their own way to make order out of chaos.  Don’t be over-protective. The book may be badly written. The philosophy underlying it may appear obscure. But the advice is not bad. Rule 12 states, “Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street.” That alone leads me to understand why my youngest son, though professing some ambivalence towards Jordan Peterson, urged me strongly to read him.

I have done my duty.

[WARNING: this philosophical blog may endanger your mental health.]

In Part I, I referred to two tensions set up in Dummitt’s review article between globalism and nationalism and between an inner authentic and an outer socially imposed self. With respect to the latter, Dummitt argued that the political left and the right both favour the authentic self over a socially imposed one, but that the left’s definition of authenticity favoured globalism. The right defined authenticity in terms of national self-realization versus universal human rights.

To clarify the debate, we first have to go back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Dummitt, after stating that, “In all times, individuals have been at odds with their societies.” He then quoted Fukuyama as follows: “But only in modern societies has the view taken hold that the authentic inner self is intrinsically valuable, and the outer society systematically wrong and unfair in its valuation of the former.” Thus, “It is not the inner self that has to conform to society’s rules, but society itself that that needs to change.”

Note the following:

1. At all times, individuals have not been at odds with their societies. More accurately, individuals are much more often at odds with parts of a society as they defended other parts. Isaac was at odds with Philistine society, but certainly totally obeisant to his own tribal norms. Further, he was at odds with the Philistine civil society mobs but not substantively with King Abimelech.
2. The dichotomy between an inner self and social impositions does not begin in modernity but has earlier versions, ones that run quite contrary to Rousseau. Stoicism, for example, esteemed a self indifferent to, but not in tension with, socially prioritized values, such as wealth or status or social accolades. The esteemed self was not one that was “true to itself,” but only true to the degree it became virtuous in terms of the values of wisdom and courage, justice and self-control.
3. Before we deal with the tensions and incongruities between the self and society, it is crucial to understand the tensions and lack of congruity between the self and the physical world that surrounds us, including our own bodies.
4. For example, Dan Crenshaw, the rising non-Trumpite Republican star and ex-Navy SEAL who won a House of Representatives seat in Texas in the midterm elections, as a result of injuries suffered from an IUD or mine, is not only blind in one eye, but cannot judge how to coordinate a pitcher to pour water into a glass unless the two objects actually touch one another. He suffers from a visual form of agnosia, perceptive agnosia; he is unable to assess the size and shape and orientation of objects relative to one another separated in space and compensates by making the objects touch so that he can grasp one in one hand and the other in the other hand to pour water from one to the other.
5. There are many other forms of such incongruities between the self and our physical world. For example, I have a friend with a spinal injury whom I visited yesterday. As a paraplegic, he suffers from anosognosia, where he assumes he has pain and sometimes even movement in his legs when they are totally paralyzed. He “knows” they cannot move nor feel pain, but nevertheless feels that pain and sometimes even movement. To give one other example in myself, I was blind in one eye for decades. About twenty years ago, I regained vision in the blind eye, fuzzy at first but able to make out figures on large billboards. Currently, I can now read with that eye if the print is reasonably large. Nevertheless, I find I still read almost exclusively with my other eye. It is a mild form of hemineglect which could possibly, and probably, be overcome with visual exercises.
6. There is a much more general human incongruity between any human and the world that surrounds us. Owls, as I have written, primarily locate prey through very finely tuned hearing rather than their wide and large eyes. In a famous essay in the 1970s by the philosopher, Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” he tried to imagine how bats “see” the world when they rely on echolocation rather than sight. Nagel’s point is that we can only see and experience the world that we are equipped to see. Put another way, are the sounds owls and bats hear objects?
7. I have digressed and probed only slightly into these areas of epistemology and consciousness to make one point, that a self is what it experiences and a self, whether that of any human or that of an individual, can only experience that which it is equipped to experience Further, what the self experiences is dependent on the body and the state of the body may even determine if we can have experiences. A blind person or a paraplegic still has a self. But does a person suffering from severe dementia or from extreme Parkinson’s still have a self?
8. What we experience is not only limited by our bodies, but by the mental frameworks that we overwhelmingly inherit and use to understand the world, unless we are those rare geniuses that create new frameworks for grasping the world. The external world cannot be grasped independent of the instrument by which it is understood. (Hegel Introduction, Phenomenology of Spirit) Werner Heisenberg insisted that, “what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” or, as Albert Einstein put it, theory “determines what we can observe.”

I want to make one last point before I return to the issue of the authentic self versus socially imposed norms.

What is the “authentic” self to which Jean-Jacques Rousseau refers? Rousseau, I believe, would accept all I have written in points 1-5 above. However, as Fukuyama stated in his volume, The End of History and the Last Man, Rousseau agreed that human “nature” had developed, was rooted in both the body and the historical framing provided by the mind and largely inherited. His contention was that the frames we have inherited and the norms thrust upon us by society have deformed humans and made them unhappy. The security we demand is largely a product of what we now call paranoia, for humans are not “naturally” out to get one another. Material demands are not part of an inherent demand to acquire goods but are socially constructed to establish status. “The wants created by modern consumerism arise, in other words, from man’s vanity, or what Rousseau calls his amour-propre.”  (83)

All these demands – for security, for wealth for status – are infinite. They lack boundaries. Even more importantly, for Rousseau, they result in greater and greater unhappiness as the gap effectively grows between our basic needs for security, material goods and minimal recognition. Abandon the treadmill. Return to nature and recover the joys of the natural life. Move to Vancouver Island, better yet, Salt Spring or Pender Island.

Two points. Rousseau’s philosophy was not the first and most fundamental attack on the project of “conquering nature.” (84) Second, even his own reply, calling for a return to nature, had many variations, many of which did not presume the pre-existence of an essential authentic self.

I offer Baruch Spinoza as an example within the modern age and the Western tradition. Like the Stoics, he valued, not the authentic self, but the virtuous one in which control of the passions lead to happiness. Second, his view of God, the world, the self and knowledge required, not a command over nature, but a reconciliation with nature. For everything was but an aspect of nature. Happiness was not acquired by becoming a slave to needs, to the quest for security and wealth or status – all these are transitory – but to the life of reason that would lead us back to a unity with nature, the opposite direction of his Jewish upbringing and the Dutch bourgeois society that surrounded him and of which he was so much a part in running his family’s business.

However, his God, the God that he had come to believe in, was not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but the absolutely infinite, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent God of the unity of Greek philosophy and the Christian religion. His was not a God who unleashed a flood that drowned the world and then said He was mistaken, for that action did nothing to improve the commonwealth of humans. Spinoza’s God was not a god for all humanity, not a god who revealed himself in and through history and, in particular, the historical narrative of a specific people, Jews. As Spinoza wrote in Proposition11 of his Ethics, “God, or a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.” God’s essence as infinite entails God’s existence. The very conception of grasping the Infinite entails that God must exist.

Spinoza was not ex-communicated by his synagogue, the cherem imposed on him because he did not believe in God, and possibly for his ethical and political views, but because he proposed a God, not of experience and presence, but a product of abstract thought and reason. Further, everything – that which is given in nature and the artifacts made by man – are all aspects of God. God does not give form to pre-existing matter. Matter is an aspect of God. God and nature are not other; they are one and the same.

Rousseau could not agree that a reconciliation with nature could come about through reason, for reason was the source of the deformation of what was natural in man, what was universal in man. And what was natural was given, not created – by God or by humans. Rousseau, like Hobbes and Locke, tried to decipher the “state of nature” prior to human historical development.

Hume would reject such an effort and Hegel went further for he insisted that, like the ancient Israelites, the quest for status, the quest for recognition, was not an artifact of history, but a precondition of any history whatsoever. Adam wanted to be like God, to create things by giving form to the world he found through language. Cain and Abel each wanted exclusive recognition from God. Jacob and Esau each wanted their father’s recognition. The quest for recognition, not security or wealth, drove the development of humans as historically-rooted beings.

The more basic divide than the ones that separated those who defined the essence of humanity as security-seeking or wealth-seeking or getting back to one’s true nature stripped of its so-call historical and socially imposed accretions was between philosophers who insisted that humans had a universal nature and those who viewed humans as a product of their history, whether in the minor scale (Hume) or the grand one (Hegel). Rousseau, like Hobbes and Locke, and like Spinoza in his pantheism, was an essentialist.

Rousseau’s essentialism was not the given foundation of history but the way of escaping the disaster that history had wrought.

Is this the core bottom line of both the political right and the political left as claimed in the Dummitt essay? Were both sides variations of a common Rousseau theme?

Tomorrow: Part IV

The Foundation Stone of the Contemporary Political Right and Left

With the help of Alex Zisman

This blog will deal only with the first of the dozen questions I asked in my last blog:

Is the conflict between an inner authentic self and a socially imposed outer self the defining characteristic of individualism in the modern age so that what is required is social change, not an alteration to the personality and values of the individual?

Dummitt, echoing Fukuyama, claimed that the beginning of modernity was rooted in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of a conflict between an inner authentic self and a socially imposed outer self that defined individualism in the modern age or even just modernist thinkers and writers. That meant that social change, not an alteration to the personality and values of the individual, was prioritized.

I believe there are many tributaries that flow into the larger stream of individualism that marks modernity and not just or even primarily the Rousseau stream. Though I will later add a contribution from the ancient world, I offer three others associated with three other modern philosophers, all British:

Thomas Hobbes – individualism, survival and security

John Locke – possessive individualism

David Hume – individualism as a product of custom

Thomas Hobbes in the Leviathan argued that individuals by nature possessed liberty, and in such possession, individuals were all equal in the state of nature. However, unlike Rousseau, they did not possess an individualized authentic self, differentiated from others, but, rather, their own particular instinct for survival. They were unbounded and free to take any action needed to survive. The result – conflict with others and, thus, fear. Without an overarching sovereign authority, flight and fight would be the two dominant expressions of that fear. The historical task, therefore, was to create a sovereign authority that protected those included under its safety net. Thus, to survive, individuals had to surrender their liberties as necessary and as long as the surrender of that liberty contributed to self-preservation.

John Locke in the Second Treatise of Government put forth a different starting point rooted in economic rather than political man. In nature, the individual was driven not just by a need to survive, but by a need to express himself (excuse the gender bias, but it is inherent in the material) by expanding his somatic self in the world. Only there was no way to do this. All he could do was be a hunter/gatherer collecting food to survive. However, money was invented, that is, an abstract way to give permanent value to what was accrued to the individual. That money might be the number of sheep or camels in a herd or pieces of a standardized metal representing the value of such accretions. With such a system, men could accumulate material goods ad infinitum. The individual became a possessive individualist rather than a defensive individualist. It was the conflict over possessions that led to political and violent conflicts. Thus, to keep the peace, one merely had to arrange a transactional relationship between the individual and the state – the state protects me and my ability to engage in commerce through orderly laws and I pay taxes for that protection. And the state provides protection against other states, preferably by treaties, but, as a last resort, war.

David Hume disdained both ahistorical accounts of the origins of the body politick rooted in either a natural predisposition for survival or an inner predisposition to acquire possessions. Locke had offered a form of individualism that was economic. Hobbes, with his foundation in self-preservation, put forth an individualism that was incorporeal rather than somatic; it was rooted in a moral intellectualism or an intellectual moralism in which individual autonomy and self-sufficiency morphed into unique contributions to the intellectual wealth of the world. David Hume, though he generously hosted an unstable (and unappreciative) Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his home, held a very opposite view to that of Rousseau. Humans were not unique creatures who had to throw off the accoutrements of history and society to express their individual authenticity. Or, à la Hobbes, their intellectual rationalism or, à la Locke, their self-interested somatic calculations. Humans were often and customarily irrational and, versus Rousseau, very fallible creatures. Thus, their individualism was best expressed in a historical context which emphasized individual self-expression – in many forms – but in a historical and social context which valued such self-expression, but recognized the need for those expressions to be boundaried and limited by custom and law.

These are very different ways to emphasize the moral worth and primacy of the individual, the prevailing characteristic of modernity. They oppose the reductionism of Dummitt and Fukuyama. To make each of them clearer, it is helpful to place them within an ancient context that emphasized kinship genealogical and contractual ties where communitarian values seemingly trump individualism in its various expressions as having moral priority.

The reading of Toldot this past Shabbat offers a case in point. It is the story of Isaac and his relationship with his wife, Rebekah, and his twin sons, Esau and Jacob, though also of Rebekah’s relationship to Isaac, her favourite. Each is individualized both genetically and in terms of socialization. Isaac, according to most rabbinic commentators, is weak, a nebbish, a fearful, timid and passive individual who follows the patterns of the past and is easily manipulated by his more forceful wife who had a clearer understanding of the destiny of the Israelites. This timidity and passivity may have resulted from the fact that he was the second-born son of Abraham whose mother forcefully displaced the first-born and her son. It could have been exacerbated because of trauma, his father’s willingness to sacrifice him on an altar to give proof of his father’s loyalty to God.

Whatever the reasons or combination of factors, Isaac is a unique personality. He is the first figure portrayed in the Torah who actually loves another. He did not choose her; his father via his servants did, but, in the tale, it is Rebekah who chooses the smitten Isaac. It is ironic, but also rings true, that this same nebbish would favour the son who was an outdoorsman, a hunter who easily expressed his immediate urges and lived in the moment rather than being swamped by the heritage of the powerful personality of his father, Abraham. Esau seemed to be everything that Isaac was not.

Isaac followed God’s instructions to the letter (in contrast to his father, Abraham, who finds a way out of his conundrum). “Don’t go down to Egypt,” God instructs him. He obeys, even though it seems clear that the only friend he has in the land of the Philistines is the king, Abimelech.

No sooner is the matter settled than Isaac follows in the footsteps of his father, Abraham, and says that his wife is his sister so the Philistines will not try to seduce or rape her given that she has the protection of a man. If she were his wife, they might kill him to collect his beautiful bride as a concubine. Clearly, a Hobbesian form of survivalism is in play.

But a flawed one. For he allows himself to be seen by the king fondling Rebekah. Abimelech, the king, the sovereign authority, kicks in and reprimands him, reminding him that Isaac did not think of a third option, that someone might have tried to seduce or even rape Rebekah, especially given that Isaac was the furthest thing from a warrior that anyone could imagine. The consequences feared, would not be what Isaac would do in revenge, but what the gods might do and the guilt that would accrue from dishonouring their own Philistine mores.

We seem to be in Hobbesian territory, but with an overlay of historical and customary customs and norms, especially since Isaac’s safety is only ensured by the protection of the sovereign, King Abimelech. The tale then takes a Lockean turn. Isaac becomes rich with herds, flocks and servants. But the richer he got, the more envied he was by his Philistine neighbours. After all, this nebbish had a beautiful wife and lots of money to boot. What did his neighbours do? Out of a competitive zeal, they filled all the wells that he had inherited from his father with rubble. Isaac faced economic ruin.

Abimelech stepped in. “I can’t protect you from my own people. Their envy over your wealth is too strong. If I tried, they might go to war against me. But go into the countryside where there is a lot of land and dig new wells there for yourself and your family.” Isaac did not protest but followed Abimelech’s instructions. To no avail. He restored a well that his father had dug. The surrounding Philistines filled it with rubble claiming the water belonged to them. Isaac called the well Esek, a well of contention. Two different expressions of possessive individualism, but now clearly rooted in ethnicity, were in play, and the more powerful won.

The same thing happens to a second well he dug, but this time Isaac names the well Sitnah meaning enmity. Isaac clearly saw that the conflict over the well was not just driven by different self-interests in conflict, but by a deeper hatred that would later be labeled antisemitism. This was not just a battle for survival needing the protection of a sovereign, in this case a sovereign too afraid of an uprising by his own people to provide protection. Nor was it just a battle for competing Lockean self-interests. But neither was it merely a battle between different customs of the tribe of Abraham versus the Philistines, for Abimelech seemed to imply the two tribes shared the same customs.

If neither Hobbes nor Locke nor Hume were sufficiently in play, what was the source of this visceral jealousy and hatred? Justin E. H. Smith in The Stone wrote about the roots of the “race” problem in our contemporary world in an essay, “The Enlightenment’s ‘Race’ Problem, and Ours.”

In 1734, Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former chamber slave of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony, written in Latin and entitled “On the Impassivity of the Human Mind.” (T)he rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus praised “the natural genius” of Africa, its “appreciation for learning,” and its “inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs” and of “divine things.” Kraus placed Amo in a lineage that includes many North African Latin authors of antiquity, such as Terence, Tertullian and St. Augustine.

Yet, David Hume, ignorant of accomplishments such as that of Amo, and ignoring a number of his intellectual forbears, wrote, “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complection than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation.” Immanuel Kant would echo the same sentiment. Kant dismissed the citation of a black author because “this fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” Donald Trump remonstrating three female black and very professional reporters for asking “stupid” questions echoed these same sentiments.

This is not individualism where people are recognized for what they do and for what they achieved either as soldiers in defence of their country or intellectual inventors behind start-up nations, nor as capitalists engaged in personal wealth accumulation. This is racism, bold and simple.

A former student of mine, Cecil Foster, has a book coming out in the new year called, They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada. It is a book about how pullmen on the passenger trains of an expanding Canada not only influenced the development of trade unionism, a concept of a community of communities, as well as how travel enlightens and how trade is and should be conducted, but shaped race relations and human rights in this country as well as Canada’s dominant motif as a “multicultural” nation. These are some of the superlative preview reviews:

• unforgettable – Toronto Star
• equates the coming of age of his protagonists with the coming of age of the nation – National Post
• an evocative book about black men – Vancouver Sun

As U of T professor George Dei wrote, “Foster brings historical depth to his work and shows that the social and political recognition of blackness and multiculturalism is itself a contingent moment in history.”

The struggle in the Enlightenment was not just rooted in stark individualism of either the Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke or even Hume variety, but in an individualism rooted in black (and Jewish) communitarianism in a struggle which is cultural as well as somatic, intellectual or merely rooted in competing systems of customs.

Isaac opts for flight rather than fight, since he clearly is vastly outnumbered and digs his own well rather than digs up one of his father’s that was filled in. Out of necessity, he becomes his own person. He calls that third well Rehovot, where he finally had space and air to breathe free of the threat of persecution.

But then Isaac’s servants dug a fourth well, but only after he built an altar to the sovereign God, the one God of all nations. Only then was Isaac’s tribe accepted as a sovereign entity with which Abimelech could make a treaty, not one between states with defined borders, but between and among ethnic groups within a single kingdom, as happened in the constituency nomination meeting that I wrote about last week.

In my view, Dummitt and Fukuyama have a very truncated view of individualism and modernity, for modernity is both informed by and informs group identities.

Last evening, after going out to dinner with friends, we listened to a jazz band at Koerner Hall, Still Dreaming, with Josh Redman on sax, Ron Miles on cornet, Scott Colley on base and Brian Blade, the percussionist. Though the first two tunes were explicitly written by Josh and Ron respectively, the evening was a tribute to Josh’s father, Dewey Redman on tenor sax, and his exciting and innovative band of the 1970s and 1980s, “Old and New Dreams.” That music was lyrical but cerebral; it was neither visceral nor emotional. The energy and passion were translated into daring innovation and novel structures.

The sophisticated playing last night, however, went beyond that tribute. The band offered a structured architectonic of different tunes so that the whole program came off as if a drama was unfolding rather than just an assemblage of numbers. At the foundation was the rivalry between the sax and the cornet expressed in different form and expressions of beauty as they riffed on the same chord in the first two tunes. Then the music travelled through conflict, reconciliation, a semblance of unity and ultimately, in the call-back, a unique complementarity. The genius was not only in the quality of the players but in how they combined their talents and their instruments to provide a whole evening of both aesthetic and dramatic excitement. Throughout the evening, the base always returned to keep the different approaches to melody intact as the percussionist provided a steady but varied beat to keep the others on track.

Still Dreaming offered a suitable metaphor for my thinking yesterday and my blog this morning, of how different expressions and tributaries come together in the modern world to flow into a major stream that goes back to the past and even the ancient world. And all the time, contingency is in play.

With the help of Alex Zisman