Eucatastrophe Reader

The Friend of Peace

The Friends of Peace: The Origins of Debate on Pacifism in Early 19^th Century New England

By Philip Crossman

Noah Worcester and Sylvanus Haynes had a good deal in common. They were both self-educated ministers of the early 19^th Century who eventually received honorary degrees from what are now Ivy League colleges. Both of them found ways to incorporate their spiritual interests with their political passions. And both liked to write, argue, and try to persuade. But there the similarities begin to recede into the background.

Noah was born in 1758. Sylvanus was born a decade later. In 1776 as the Revolutionary War was breaking out, Sylvanus would have been eight years old. Noah was a lanky teenager, already taller than most men who signed up to fight the British army and navy in and around Boston harbor. He was present at the battle of Bunker Hill and came close to being captured. Two years later, he found himself in the thick of the fighting outside Bennington, defending the American cause from Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne’s invasion down Lake Champlain. The carnage at Bennington was all that Noah needed to nudge him down the road towards a full blown passivist theology.

By 1791, as Sylvanus was just entering the ministry as a Baptist Pastor, Noah Worcester was receiving an honorary degree from Dartmouth (Sylvanus would receive his from Middlebury in 1817). By 1801, Sylvanus was leading revivals from the Baptist Church in Middletown, Vermont. Noah had converted to the Unitarian faith, no longer believing in the Trinity. Worcester would soon become one of the leaders of the move away from Congregational orthodoxy that led to the theological split between Harvard and Andover seminary in the first decade of the 19^th Century. Sylvanus too would level his rhetorical ire at the Congregationalists but for him, the matter had to do with tax support for select churches and infant baptism. He would die a Trinitarian Baptist in 1828.

By 1807, Sylvanus was seen as the theological mouthpiece of the Jeffersonian Republicans in Vermont and was even recommended to James Madison as a political force to be reckoned with. Noah Worcester’s talents, on the other hand, were being put to good use by the Federalists who, by 1814, were vociferously opposed to the Madison Administration’s war against Great Britain. In December of 1814, at the height of the war, Noah Worcester published a pamphlet entitled A Solemn Review of the Custom of War. It was a frontal assault on the whole idea of war as a mechanism for resolving human conflicts. The work was widely read in America and Europe (just recovering from the Napoleonic Wars) and was translated into many languages.  The following year, Worcester began editing a periodical known as The Friend of Peace in which he continued to further the argument.

Sylvanus Haynes was serving as a crucial counterfoil to the Federalists in Vermont during that same period. In 1814, he preached and published a sermon to the military department of Middletown that articulated in spiritual and political logic the justice of Madison’s war and the righteousness of the soldiers work in it. And thus it was that two ministers, two autodidacts with high-caliber rhetorical gifts, standing as representatives of two political parties, two denominations, and two opposing sets of convictions about the place that military preparedness plays in the real and spiritual worlds that they barely shared, would have found themselves on the battlefield of public opinion, both appealing to experience and to their readings of their shared sacred texts.  

By 1824, Noah Worcester had been hard at making his pacifist case for almost a decade. Some friend of Sylvanus’, perhaps political or perhaps spiritual, nominated him to be the person to write the “authorized” rebuttal to everything the “Friend of Peace” stood for, and Sylvanus accepted the challenge, publishing his thirty-six-page treatise, A Brief Reply to the Friend of Peace in Auburn, NY.

In his introduction, Sylvanus lays out his motives:

“Much is said, and much is written against defensive war, and against capital punishment in all cases: but scarcely anything has been published on the other side, at least, I have seen nothing of the kind from any other hand, for a number of years. And it has long appeared to me to be the duty of some men to take up the subject, and do it justice. Whether I have succeeded in this attempt, the public will judge. The matter is so interesting, that I could devoutly wish the task had fallen into abler hands, and hands more at leisure than mine.

I can truly say that, if I know my own heart, a sense of duty to God, and my country, has been my leading motive in undertaking this work . . .”

Haynes tries to be friendly. But his opposition roils below the surface, and the further one reads into the tract, the more one begins to sense the emergence of old unhealed political scars from the cauldron of contention that the War of 1812 was in New England. Haynes takes exception to the way that Worcester refers to Haynes’ party’s leaders as “tyrants, murderers, and butchers.” “Such abusive language neither charms the ear, nor attracts the heart,” he says. “On reading such blazing things, we are induced to fear that the ‘war spirit’ has unhappily caught the sons of peace.”

To Sylvanus, pacifism is theologically unsupported, experientially indefensible, politically corrosive, logically inconsistent, and pragmatically unworkable.  To Sylvanus, the work of Noah Worcester and the Massachusetts Peace Society is not a minor misdemeanor of shoddy logic. It is bordering on outright treachery. “If a man designed to stir up sedition and rebellion, and to break down, and revolutionize the government,” he writes, “what measure could he take more directly adapted to his purpose, than thus to slander the rulers? Thus, did wicked Absalom, and for a time he succeeded; but his race was short: vengeance overtook him.”

[For those not familiar with the story of Absalom, he was one of David’s rebellious sons who led an insurrection against his father’s government and providentially wound up being hung in a tree by his own long hair and executed by one of David’s generals. In short, Sylvanus is not kidding around here.]

It might be interesting to make our way through the thirty-six pages of Hayne’s argument but the flow of it leads inexorably to the conclusion that people like Noah Worcester have allowed their idealism to cloud their rationality. Haynes will often cite Worcester’s work, note Worcester’s objections to Haynes’ “just war theories” and then answer them. Sylvanus’ response to the objection below harkens back to the arguments of Machiavelli who also marketed himself as a “realist.” Clearly, these two men do not share the same estimate of human potential in a “fallen world” [Worcester would no doubt argue that we live in a fallen world because we won’t get up.]

“Objection. – But if all men would be peaceable and honest, then there would be no need of war, or of coercion in any form.

Answer. – As well may we say if there should be no cold weather, there would be no winter. The fact is too plain to be denied, and too public to be concealed that men are depraved, and that thousands of them have been, and still are disposed rather to steal, rob, murder, &c. than to live honestly. And it is totally useless, and perfectly chimerical to make any calculations upon general virtue in mankind, in the present state of things, without legal restraint, and coercion. There can be nothing more futile than to imagine that if governments would forbear to punish, the people would cease to transgress. Therefore the solemn truth must remain, that we must deal with mankind as they are and not as they should be.”

Here is another example of Sylvanus Haynes’ rhetorical style:

“Objection. – but the scriptures foretell a general peace through the world, and it will come to pass. It is to be brought about by means and it must begin sometime, and why not now? To renounce war wholly, would be to introduce this glorious period.

Answer. – As God has predicted it, so he will accomplish it in his own time, by diffusing a morally good and peaceful disposition through the great body of mankind; and he alone can do it. But that morally benign and quiet spirit is not now generally imparted, is too notorious to be questioned. And until that spirit is shed abroad, the blessed result will not appear. We admit the duty of doing what we can to tame, and soften the ferocious, and warlike spirit of the world, and to pave the way for the glorious reign of the Prince of Peace; but as the situation of the world is now, for us to reject the means of defense, and to say we will not use them in any case, appears to be presumption, approaching to madness. With the same propriety might we in February say the Lord has ordained that seed time shall come when the pastures will sustain our flocks and herds – when our heavy garments will be laid aside – when but little fuel will suffice – when teams will be employed in plowing the ground, and when, instead of the warm room, the cooling shade will be sought, &c. Therefore, to hasten on this blessed time, we must cease foddering our flocks and herds, and turn them out to pasture – keep but small fires – lay aside our thick wool and garments – take up our teams, and instead of drawing fuel for fires, to provoke the storms, and cold weather, we must go to plowing and sewing, and then rest in the shade, and have faith, and then spring will come: for it must come sometime and why not bring it on now? A man who should say and labor thus, would be justly charged with insanity. But the poor man would not be further from sound reasoning, then he who declares against defensive war in all cases, as the way to amend the wicked, dishonest and murderous dispositions of the disturbers and destroyers of mankind. Such a course would indeed be to impose the fruitless task of laboring at the effect in order to remove the cause.”

For Sylvanus, the crucial “mistake” in thinking that Noah Worcester and the Peace Society crowd that follows him makes, is to think that the rules of the spiritual kingdom Jesus established in the church are to be applied to the worldly kingdom of unconverted men. For Sylvanus, there are clear boundaries between these two worlds and thus clear rule-sets that apply to them. The rules for the “born again” cannot be the same rules for the “lost and still depraved” and it is always a mistake to apply one set of rules in the other realm.

In the community of faith, he insists,

“No civil, or military officer as such, is to be employed in his official duties. The rule that should govern, is the law of love. If the members offend, the brethren are to labor with them. All the satisfaction that is required, is, that they repent, confess their faults, and reform their lives. If they have injured anyone, they must make them good. If this be done, their standing is restored. If they cannot be reclaimed, they are to be excluded, as improper members to be retained; and then we have nothing more to inflict upon them.”    

Haynes’ conclusion drives home the importance of maintaining the distinction between the world of saints and the world of sinners:

“From these things it is evident that these two kingdoms are so different in their materials, manner of building, laws and government, as described in the word of God, but there is no arguing from one to the other. In one case, justice with stern aspect points his sword, and with awful frowns demands satisfaction of the offender; in the other, smiling mercy waves the olive branch, in an accent sweet as the melody of heaven, invites the sinner to repentance, and then to pardon and peace through the blood of the cross. Some having mistaken the point, and having blended these two kingdoms, have drawn the sword in the house of God, and have shed the blood of the saints and martyrs of Jesus Christ. Others equally erroneous, would extend to the hardened and flagrant transgressor in Caesar’s realm, the mild scepter of Emanuel‘s kingdom. But the better way seems to be to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that are Gods.”

I suspect that Noah Worcester tended to see the world as full of “saint-sinners” and drew his arguments from that foundation.

It appears that Noah Worcester, if he ever read Sylvanus Haynes’ critique of his life’s mission, remained unconvinced. He continued to publish his regular installments of Friend of Peace for another four years. Soon, the Massachusetts Peace Society merged into a national organization (The American Peace Society) which lived on in outreach and influence until it was drowned in the calamity that was World War I a hundred years after Worcester began his crusade (that was the wrong word, wasn’t it?)

It is fair to say that Noah Worcester’s arguments live on today and Sylvanus Haynes’ argument live on today. Meanwhile, human beings have not stopped going to war and regretting it even as they celebrate it.

Thanks to Dennis Davidson of the Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Society for some of the background material on Noah Worcester.

Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Society. (2001, July 7). Noah Worcester. Retrieved June 27, 2022, from https://uudb.org/articles/noahworcester.html 

Question for Comment: Do you find yourself more on "team Sylvanus" or "team Noah" when it comes to this issue of War? Why? 

"voters must be free to obtain information from diverse sources "

Dark Money REVIEW

Dark Money attempts to bring to the surface the negative consequences of allowing corporate money to infest elections. It does not make any effort to show us how corporate money might be also used to enlighten them. One might argue that the sierra club and the United Way can use the power of money to influence an election for good just as some other corporate rascal can try to tip the scales of election for bad. I thought the film was good mind you but it needed a counterpart. And it needed to address the assertion that while there are negative consequences, the consequence of government controlling who can say what might be worse.

Typically, a State grants a corporation status that is on par with that of citizens. A corporation is seen as a person in our legal system and can therefore access services and protections just like people can. Governments have the right to government protections, they have a right to use the courts to sue people or other corporations, and they have the right to express their policy preferences just like people do. 

The recent Supreme Court decision Citizens United grants corporations the same rights to freedom of speech that American citizens have. They are allowed to donate money to organizations that use the money to speak out for or against certain policies they like or dislike. The Citizens United decisions simply insists that corporations not collaborate with campaigns directly when spending the money. If they want to spend the money on a campaign directly, they must report the contributions for the public to see. .

 The following argument about the right of corporations to spend as much money as they want in their exercise of free speech comes from Justice Kennedy's majority decision in Citizens United v. FEC. 

"Speech is an essential mechanism of democracy, for it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people. See Buckley, supra, at 14–15 (“In a republic where the people are sovereign, the ability of the citizenry to make informed choices among candidates for office is essential”). The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it. The First Amendment “ ‘has its fullest and most urgent application’ to speech uttered during a campaign for political office.” 

". . .  Quite apart from the purpose or effect of regulating content, moreover, the Government may commit a constitutional wrong when by law it identifies certain preferred speakers. By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice. The Government may not by these means deprive the public of the right and privilege to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration. The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each. . . .  it is inherent in the nature of the political process that voters must be free to obtain information from diverse sources in order to determine how to cast their votes." 

". . .  The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations."

". . .  This protection has been extended by explicit holdings to the context of political speech."

" . . . Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas’ that the First Amendment seeks to foster  . . .   The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not 'natural persons.'"

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Links to an external site.), 558 U.S. 310 (2010)

In Dark Money, the viewer gets a first hand look at corporations using the loophole that Citizens United left open. We see the rule being violated and we see the culprit fined. All well and good. But we are left knowing that it will be rare that corporations who use their free speech rights in the same manipulative way will get caught as they were in this film. What then? Is the solution to eliminate the right of Corporations and non-Profits to speak out about issues they are passionate about? For me, the problem is not the granting of freedom so much as the unwillingness to use that freedom responsibly. I realize that many believe that corporations, lacking conscience, were not designed to act as though they felt guilt. And that may be the central reason why I am not sure they deserve to be regarded as people until they evolve. They are not people yet. Many of them are adolescents.

Personally, I think people need to be educated to think critically about all sorts of propaganda, particularly those that try to influence with some sensational story at the last minute of a campaign. 

Question for Comment: What do you think about this argument? Are corporations people? Do they have rights? Is the right to free speech (to spend as much money as they want in their advocacy of policy) one of those rights? Why or why not? 

"But Yehya was not convinced, and he did not stop bleeding."

The Queue REVIEW

Basma Abdel Aziz’ novel is dystopian fiction, political satire, and a statement of vigorous religious and social dissent.  It can at times remind the reader of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (there are multiple characters telling their stories). At times it reminds one of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (in that it provides political critique with a biting sarcasm). It reminds one of the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s  Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Gulag Archipelago (lone author single handedly taking on a totalitarian regime). There are moments when the reader may find themselves referencing the play, Waiting for Godot as people in the queue wait for something that never comes (a responsive government instead of God). I also found myself thinking of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary essay Common Sense (a clear voice demanding that an oppressed people wake up and “do something” to free themselves from tyranny). Lastly, we are reminded of Hanna Arendt’s work on the “banality of evil” as illustrated by the trial of Adolf Eichmann (evil by bureaucratic paper cuts).

In The Queue, A man (Yeya) is shot in the abdomen by security forces during a political protest event called “the shameful event.” His wound requires medical treatment and there is a doctor (Tarek) who understands that the treatment is required but who will not risk his own life and career to perform the surgery until the state has given its blessing to do so. To get permission for his surgery, Yeya joins an ever lengthening queue of people who need something from the government (called “The Gate”). Yeya’s  need just happens to be vital to his own survival. He is slowly bleeding to death while he waits. The story introduces us to the various stories of the people in the queue who share his fate or who are not in the queue but are aware of it. The line continues to grow. The door to “The Gate” never opens.  And all the while a citizen slowly bleeds to death. Of this government, Basma Aziz writes:

“If it weren’t for the people who’d once entered it and told of all the rooms and offices inside, anyone gazing up at it would have imagined it to be a massive block, solid and impenetrable.”

The line reminded me of a line in Stephen Crane’s short story, the Open Boat.

“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers. Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: ‘Yes, but I love myself.’ A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.”

As the story progresses, the source of the people’s frustration and loss of freedom is progressively unveiled. Granting the State control of the military, the press, communication systems, religion, the economy, the courts, and essential social and health services has rendered the people incapable of resistance to their government’s indifference to them. Demanding what they deserve and are paying for is likely to wind up depriving them of the little they have.

To get services from “The Gate,” citizens need a “certificate of true citizenship” and this is a reward for constant compliance, not a right. Jefferson notes in the Declaration of Independence’s list of grievances that human beings will typically put up with abuses rather than do something about them, until those abuses reach a point of phase transition.  This appears to be what Basma Abdel Aziz is trying to inspire. Interestingly, the Bill of Rights may have been added to the Constitution to keep the government from gaining precisely the control of the levers of despotism that we see here (Control of religion, control of the press, control of free speech, control of weapons, control of private information, control of the judicial system, control of assembly, etc.)

As the plot progresses and we learn more about the people caught up in Yeya’s unfolding tragedy, the author continually reminds us of the growing size of the queue. Here are some passages I culled from the entire novel that indicate this swelling population of the neglected.

“The queue grew longer and longer every day, and the space it took up grew ever wider. He noticed that while only a few people left and didn’t return, new waves arrived every day, stretching the queue ever farther.”

“From afar, it [the door to the government office building] looked like a solid wall, and he wondered in despair whether it would ever open.”

“It took a year or two or even more for the Gate of Maladies to begin the paperwork needed to take action, and there were crumbling papers in its old chambers that had been waiting for decades to be finalized. Some, the descendants of the plaintiffs followed up on, while others were kept in trust, never to be discarded, even if no one ever asked about them again.”

“Yehya received an endless stream of news from his new position in the queue, which was no longer at the end, as it had been when he first got there, because dozens more people had since arrived behind him.”

“There was no shortage of reports on when the Gate would open, and this was the greatest source of chaos and contention. People at the end of the queue swapped stories that the Gate had already opened, while those stuck in the middle said they had a week ahead of them at most. Other stubborn rumors, whose provenance no one knew, said that the people standing at the front had heard voices coming from behind the Gate: whole conversations, the rustling of papers, the clatter of cups and spoons. But when these rumors finally reached the people at the front, they said they’d only seen shadows, arriving and departing, but that the gate hadn’t opened and no one had ever actually appeared.”

“People kept arriving at the queue, and the numbers continued to rise, so much so that they would soon block out the sun. But despite how crowded it was, the people in the queue lived their lives and solved their own problems without help from anyone.”

“The queue forked around here and extended ever farther, and no one cared to speculate how long or vast it was anymore.”

“People passed hearsay, a growing number of leaflets, and newspaper articles along the queue; they feverishly searched for fresh information anywhere and any way they could, while time passed and no one moved an inch forward.”

Aziz has described an almost pathological sense of resignation and subservience in the populace of her fictional (but real) society. There are certainly characters who are moving towards resistance (Dr. Tarek) and there are characters who began as rebels but are bullied into compliance (Amani) but as a general rule, the mass of people in the queue are just as stuck in their “queue-ocratic state of mind” as they are stuck in the queue itself.

I thought it might be interesting to examine the citizens of The Queue and their relationship to their government by using the lens of the American Bill of Rights. Citizens of Egypt, in Aziz’s view, have none of these protections. In the society she describes, state sponsored religion participates in the repression of the people.

• In the society she describes, the press and speech is whole subservient to the interests of “the Gate.”

• In the society she describes, assembly in protest is regarded as a national crime.

• In the society she describes all military capability is reserved to the state and its authorized delegates.

• In the society that she describes, citizens have no protection from intrusions into their privacy (either their phone conversations or their medical records).

• In the society she describes, there is no due process. You can be accused, tried, and convicted without any representation. It can happen without you even knowing that you were accused. There is no need for a speedy trial, a trial of your peers, or any trial at all.

• And finally, there is no obstacle to the state’s use of coercive force and even torture.

At the center of the story however, it becomes clear that control has gone beyond what the framers of our own Constitution thought to protect against: the weaponization of the social and health services system that it had not yet even imagined in the 1790’s. Aziz’s Egypt, in her view, has accepted the power of the state to leverage  its own healthcare system such that a man bleeding to death from a gunshot wound cannot get treatment without a “certificate of true citizenship.” Tarek, the doctor, is informed  that he will “need a special permit if he intended to extract the bullet.”

Note how Aziz describes the pervasiveness of government control over essential services.

“Yehya shook his head in silence. Since the Gate had materialized and insinuated itself into everything, people didn’t know where its affairs ended and their own began.”

“As the ruler faded from the public eye, it was the Gate that increasingly began to regulate procedures, imposing rules and regulations necessary to set various affairs in motion. Then one day the Gate issued an official statement detailing its jurisdiction, which extended over just about everything anyone could think of. Before long, it controlled absolutely everything, and made all procedures, paperwork, authorizations, and permits—even those for eating and drinking—subject to its control.”

Consumer behavior is controlled.

“It imposed costly fees on everything; even window-shopping was now subject to a charge, to be paid for by people out doing errands as well as those simply strolling down the sidewalk. To pay for the cost of printing all the documents it needed, the Gate deducted a portion of everyone’s salary. This way it could ensure a system of the utmost efficiency, capable of implementing its philosophy in full.”

The ability to conduct business is controlled.

“The Gate’s influence had begun to seep into businesses and organizations, onto the streets and into people’s homes.”

Education is controlled.

“He informed the principal that Ines was missing certain forms and that she needed to go to the Gate to obtain a Certificate of True Citizenship.”

Access to essential medication is controlled.

“People who take it say it’s available in public clinics, but you know how it is—they need permission from the Gate to fill your prescription.”

Access to religious services is controlled.

“She visited the High Sheikh, before that too was forbidden—forbidden, at least, without a permit from the Gate—and he told her bad luck followed her because she’d neglected her prayers.”

Access to a telephone is controlled.

“She remembered the notice she’d received from the Gate a year earlier, stating that she wasn’t entitled to a phone line due to misconduct.”

Access to employment is controlled.

“Sabah didn’t have much choice; the discussion was over in seconds. She was just a junior nurse there, young and insignificant, while the man on the other end was extremely senior, in age and position. Senior enough, perhaps, to fire her from this job and any other she might find, senior enough to shut down the entire hospital.”

Access to political representation is controlled.

“Silence gathered around him, as he raised his palms to the sky and called out: “Only those who have gone astray picked pyramid candidates!”

The press is controlled.

“Let’s talk on the way. You’re going to the queue, too, right? Listen, my boss doesn’t want to publish any more reports about the queue. He refused the article I wrote a week ago, and today he turned down another one, and before these two he took everything important out of an article I’d written about my trip to Zephyr Hospital with Amani. Can you believe it, he cut three whole paragraphs down to two and a half lines; it looked like a greeting card when he was done with it! And he even rejected my piece on the Violet Telecom boycott. He threw it down on his desk when he saw the headline, and then refused to give it back to me when I asked him for it.”

Free speech is controlled.

“Meanwhile, rumors spread that some people whose conversations had been recorded had disappeared; they’d been summoned to the basement and never returned.

Access to health care is controlled.

“Permits authorizing the removal of bullets shall not be granted, except to those who prove beyond doubt, and with irrefutable evidence, their full commitment to sound morals and comportment, and to those who are issued an official certificate confirming that they are a righteous citizen, or, at least, a true citizen. Certificates of True Citizenship that do not bear a signature from the Booth and the seal of the Gate shall not be recognized under any circumstances.”

“There was now yet another document to add to the growing stack of papers he needed to qualify for a permit; the road ahead grew longer, more difficult, and ever more complicated.”

“The official had photocopied it twice and told him there was just one more step: a personal interview at the Gate. If he passed this and was granted a Certificate of True Citizenship, it would automatically be added to his file there, along with the rest of his papers and documents. Then, when the Gate opened, they would consider his application for the permit to extract the bullet.”

During the course of the story, Yeya’s friend Amani determines to walk into the hospital and get Yeya’s medical records and x-rays so that he can be treated privately. She is detained and subjected to such reprisals that she finally leaves the building in a traumatized state. It is no wonder that people who are thus marinated in a state of permanent anxiety begin to lose their sense of autonomy. One of Aziz’s characters, Ines, we are told “never imagined she would fall victim to fear like this, having long considered herself one of the most resolute and resilient of people.”

Basma Abdel Aziz’s criticism of Egyptian government has only just begun however. “The most potent weapon in the mind of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” South African dissident, Steven Biko once said. And it is that oppression of the mind and not just the body that Aziz saves some of her most scathing criticism for. Note the way that “The Gate” controls the public’s own internal narrative even when the State’s narrative contradicts the individual citizen’s personal experience.

According to the State, Yeya was never shot.

“Furthermore, the report emphasized that no bullets had been visible on the man’s X-ray.”

He could not have been shot according to the State’s account of the events because no bullets were fired.

“She also told him that the Gate had released a statement claiming that no bullets had been fired at the place and time at which he had been injured. Several prominent journalists published full-page articles concurring that no bullets had been found, neither in the bodies of the dead nor of the injured. Eyewitnesses they quoted insisted that the people who caused the Disgraceful Events were just rioters who had suddenly ‘lost all moral inhibitions’ and flown into a frenzy: first they insulted one another, then they threw stones, and finally they seized iron bars from an old, vacant building belonging to the Gate. Any injuries they sustained were simply puncture wounds they suffered while struggling over the bars they’d wrenched off.”

Had people gone to the hospital? Maybe.

“On the phone, Amani read him a statement in The Truth newspaper made by an anonymous doctor supervising the treatment of the wounded at Zephyr Hospital. The doctor asserted that the high mortality rate was due to the fact that these rioters were simply too sensitive.”

Had anyone been killed in the uprising? No. All who died must have killed themselves.

“Some journalists went even further and published unconfirmed reports that the people who died were not in fact killed but had committed suicide when they saw what had happened. They even claimed that one of them had stabbed several others with an iron stake before turning it upon himself, Japanese seppuku-style.”

What if someone saw it otherwise? Best not to say so.

“He whispered in her ear that to obtain a Treatment Permit, she had to fill out a new application, praising the care her dearly departed daughter had received before her time was up.”

Aziz portrays a society where the people’s narrative of anything has lost all relevance. No one cares what they think happened.

“The results [of the poll] had finally been released, and were precisely the same as the results of the previous poll. Citizens had unanimously endorsed its governance, laws, and court rulings—wholeheartedly and dutifully supporting the just decrees that had recently been issued. Those conducting the poll had therefore decided not to conduct one again. To simplify matters, they would announce the previous poll’s results on a set yearly date.”

Ultimately, any source of information not read from the State-sanctioned script becomes unmentionable and even unthinkable.

“A long time passed, and the Events had nearly faded into memory, when one morning the Gate broadcast a public message, declaring that the square was secure again and open to pedestrians. The Disgraceful Events were over, it said, never to return again, and it urged citizens not to be misled by what they had seen, no matter how confident they were in the accuracy of their vision.”

“After that, the special channel began to broadcast new laws and decrees as the Gate issued them, one after the next, and forbade other channels from showing them. Then it decided to list the names of people whose applications and permits would be approved when the Gate opened, listing them on-screen at the end of every week. This attracted a huge viewership; people delighted in discovering who among them had been lucky and who had been rejected. Later, the Gate issued a decree that forbade other channels from screening any announcements other than its own and forced them to air its broadcasts instead. Its messages had become increasingly aggressive and intense, particularly after the Disgraceful Events, and it made the other channels replay them all. Some networks complied, but others refused and instead shut down their channels and offices. The Gate didn’t regulate radio stations the same way, though. It simply made sure it held sway over employees at the stations, and recruited loyal citizens, men and women alike, to call in to the programs while posing as unbiased listeners.”

In the face of Yeya’s pitiful attempts to save his life, the State remains inflexible. He cannot have a bullet removed if the State’s account of the events say that there were no bullets, right?

“No one was injured by any bullet that day or the day after or on any other day, do you understand? . . . The Disgraceful Events were simply a conspiracy hatched by some cowardly foreigners and a few measly traitors who had orchestrated the Events by planting seeds of discord among people, intentionally trying to divide them.”

Not even video footage could be allowed to complicate the State’s narrative. The Gate explains that such video was the result of a staged foreign movie made to look authentic.

“The countries involved in this joint production wanted it to look as natural as possible, so they kept the cameras and filming equipment hidden from view. The announcement added that it was one of the biggest action films in world history, explaining that this was why a few citizens had believed that there were bullets, tear gas, and smoke, even though there clearly hadn’t been anything like that, nothing except for standard special effects. The Gate called on everyone to remain calm, and avoid being misled by rumors that had been invented and spread by deranged lunatics.”

Clearly, any assertion that Yeya makes to a need for surgery amounts to an insurrection against “The Gate” and the tranquility it has brought to the country. And yet …

“Yehya knew where the bullet moving around in his pelvis came from, he’d seen who shot him, and nothing could deny or change that, not as long as he was still alive.”

Abdel Aziz is not done yet however. It is not simply the body of citizens and the mind of citizens that “The Gate” has fixed to control. It has a plan to subjugate the spirit as well. At numerous points in the novel, the author notes the ways that religious entities and personalities are employed in the service of the wider repression.

Any individual freedoms that citizens may have been left to enjoy can come under attack by religious persecution.

“Someone else quoted a passage from the Greater Book, and although she couldn’t make out what he said, she sensed from his tone that it was directed at her.”

Religion could be used to excommunicate citizens from public commerce and public community.

“The fatwa declared that if anyone insulted religion in any way, boycotting and ignoring them would be not only permissible but also a religious duty.”

“If this woman had any honor, she would know that to obey your Commander was to obey God, and that insubordination was a sin greater than any mortal could bear and would lead to her own demise. But she was probably corrupt, morally and otherwise—no scruples, no religion, not even wearing a respectable headscarf; he could see a strand of hair hanging down beneath that pitiful scrap of fabric on her head. Yes, she was definitely one of the people the Commander had warned him about, just talking to her was dangerous, she might mess with his mind, try to brainwash him.”

Religion could be used to deny people a right to assembly and protest.

“Gathering for any purpose other than to pray and understand religion was hateful, he repeatedly announced; it caused people to lose God’s favor, brought His wrath upon them, and was tantamount to apostasy.”

Religion could be used to instill passivity and docility into citizens and to dissuade them from protesting their own emasculation.

“He had singled her out in group prayers, claiming that the path she’d chosen led to an abyss of corruption, and that she was planting seeds of evil among people by urging them to think, and ask questions, and engage in other such undesirable activities.”

“The High Sheikh invoked a few passages from the Greater Book, explaining that if a believer were to be struck by a bullet (despite his prayers and supplication), his faith would guide him to the understanding that it was God himself who’d struck him down. A wounded believer should not despair or oppose God’s will. Nor should he question the unquestionable—such an act could lead him down a perilous path toward doubt. Instead, the believer must accept the will of God. He must acknowledge how lucky he was to be struck by a bullet, and exalted to a place in heaven ordinarily reserved only for the most dutiful.”

“The remedy to poverty was to bow down and pray and to stop her grousing and complaining.”

Religion could be used to get people to self-censor themselves.

“He added that to question them or gossip about matters of religion—as some fools were doing—was religiously impermissible.”

Religion could be used as a tool of social control over half the population.

“He arose from his seat to distribute an array of small booklets to the women, with titles like The Nature of Women, Torment and Blessing in the Grave, Suffering the Temptation of Women, and Conjugal Rights. He gave Ines the whole collection, saying it was a small gift to welcome her into a sisterhood of repentance and to celebrate her return to the path of guidance and truth.”

Is there anywhere in such a society where a person might take refuge from this pervasive State control? Might one carve out a place where some measure of personal control could be asserted, at least in privacy? Aziz is unsparing on this point. The Gate asserts that it has a “father’s right” to know everything about the citizen’s lives.

“He said it was the right of a father—and those of a father’s rank and position—to watch over his children, using all available means. This could not be considered an infringement of their privacy, he added, and ended his speech by saying that honest citizens had nothing to hide from their guardians.”

No information about a citizen can be declared off limits to the State. Yeya the patient has no privacy that the state needs to consider. Indeed, while the State has full access to his medical records, Yeya does not.

“This document examines the patient’s status after he left the hospital and was no longer under close medical supervision. It aims to create a comprehensive picture of the environment and conditions in which the patient lives and operates, to monitor possible developments (both medical and non-medical), and observe his close friends and acquaintances. Only doctors attending to this case and those with designated official IDs are permitted to examine this file, regardless of their professional specialization.”

Where does all this lead? Basma Abdel Aziz describes a population psychologically beaten down and almost incapable of mounting resistance. “Politics had eaten away at people’s heads until they in turn had begun to devour one another,” she says. Everyone is immobilized by the belief that the Gate is about to open – is about to begin serving people. “Everyone expected the queue to move at any minute, and they wanted to be ready” She says.

“Many people had chosen to abandon their work completely and camp out at the Gate, hoping they might be able to take care of their paperwork that had been delayed there. The new decrees and regulations spared no one.”

No one speaks out.

“How honorable they were not to leave the house when the Disgraceful Events broke out!”

“What laudable principles they had, which had kept them from being swept up in lies or spreading false rumors themselves.”

No one contradicts.

“He [Tarek] knew full well that the visit had something to do with the Gate of the Northern Building. Tarek would have been a fool to think there wouldn’t be consequences if he crossed a man like that, especially in such difficult and uncertain times.”

“It’s impossible to act against the official instructions we receive from the Gate. You both know how it is.”

No one notices what a dystopia they are living in.

“The queue was like a magnet. It drew people toward it, then held them captive as individuals and in their little groups, and it stripped them of everything, even the sense that their previous lives had been stolen from them.”

No one even imagines that things as they are are the result of “The Gate’s” policy.

“Amani would laugh, too—she could never be convinced that the independence she believed she possessed was in truth no more than an accepted illusion, part of a web of relations and contradictions. The Gate itself was an integral part of the system, too, even if from the outside it appeared to pull all the strings.”

Everything as it is, is inevitable. Resistance, where it exists, peeks above the surface of society like a single blade of grass in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

“Standing there in the queue, he toyed with the possibility of freedom; he wanted, even if only in the smallest way, to cast off what he was used to doing so mechanically and to break the tedium of these countless weeks of waiting. He marked his place on the ground, told people nearby that he was leaving, as was customary in the queue, and then decided that for the rest of the day he would no longer do what was expected of him.”

In the midst of all this dystopian gloom, there are two characters who are in transition. The doctor, Tarek and Yeya’s friend Amani. At the beginning of the story, Tarek is cowed by the pressures that have been brought to bear on him not to treat Yeya. “Tarek was a man who didn’t overstep boundaries,” Aziz writes, “a man who’d never been to the Gate, not once in his life.”

“Tarek had never questioned the Gate’s definitive and crushing triumph. But he wasn’t altogether enthusiastic about it, either, particularly given the sorts of injuries he’d attended to in the emergency room.”

Conversely, at the beginning of the story, Amani is unflinchingly devoted to getting Yeya the treatment that he needs come hell or high water. Over the course of the novel, Tarek begins to resist – his good heart overcoming his “good sense.” In the same time frame, Amani is traumatized into subservience. 

“Things had happened to her that no one else knew, things she couldn’t speak of, things she still hadn’t admitted even to herself.”

After her incarceration and experience in solitary confinement, Aziz tells us that “she surrendered to the conclusions that she began to weave around the Gate’s message.” She becomes an agent of the tyranny.

“Then she tried to convince Yehya that the bullet that had pierced his side and lodged itself in his pelvis was a fake bullet, that it wasn’t important to remove it, and that he no longer needed to trouble himself with the matter of who had shot him.”

Tarek becomes unable to “pretend as if nothing had happened.” And thus, suddenly, “in a moment of wild rage, he decided to go to the queue in search of Yehya.”

As for Amani, the novel concludes by telling us the following:

“Amani relaxed. She’d found what she’d long hoped for in the Gate’s message—stability and tranquillity—while Yehya kept slowly bleeding.

… But Yehya was not convinced, and he did not stop bleeding.

“Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed spent one hundred and forty nights of his life in the queue.”

Question for Comment: How does a story like this influence your disposition to grant your government power. Clearly, if it is too weak to abuse you, it may be too weak to serve you. But the converse may also be true. If it is powerful enough to help you, it may be powerful enough to hurt you. This story revolves around the government’s power to grant a medical treatment or deny it. Would you want your government to have that power? Why or why not?

"This land is my land. This land is your land."

Little Pink House REVIEW

This movie illustrates to me the power of a movie to get a story into people’s consciousness and the limitations of a movie to get the *whole* story in there. The story focuses on the experience of a woman who owns a home along the river in New London, Connecticut. The state of Connecticut and the city of New London would like to entice a large pharmaceutical company to come build a complex there and they need Susette Kelo’s house torn down to accommodate their plans. At the heart of the legal question is whether or not the public is entitled to take someone’s property (with compensation) for a public purpose (like economic development) and not just for a public project (like a bridge). More specifically, can it take property from one person or corporation and give it to a second because the second would raise substantially more tax revenue for the public?

The movie makes it clear that Susette Kelo was a likable woman and was attached to her house and believed strongly that it was a violation of her rights to property to take her house and demolish it – for any amount of money.

While a few minutes of the movie brings us into the Supreme Court debate, much is left out.

What is particularly interesting to me is the ironic make-up of the majority and minority decision. The movie leaves you with the impression that powerful moneyed interests (i.e. Republicans) got their way again at the expense of the little guy. What is interesting is that the Supreme Court was not aligned as you might suspect in this case (Republican appointees on the side of Pfiezer and Democratic appointees on the side of Susette Kelo).

Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Bader Ginsburg, and Breyer all voted in favor of the City of New London and Pfiezer here (we suspect that they saw the economic benefit that the redevelopment would have on a struggling impoverished community). The dissenting justices (O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas) were all Republican appointees. “Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's interpretation of the Constitution,” Thomas wrote, “Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not.” Thomas continued his argument by saying that the Fifth Amendment allows government to take property only if the government intends to own the property or to let the public to use it. This was an originalist position.

In short, if the conservative leaning justices had another federalist society “originalist” on their side instead of an activist judge on the other, Susette Kelo would have gotten to keep her home and Pfeizer would have had to build around it. As the case was won by New London’s lawyers, that did not happen, But ironies did not end with the decision’s outcome. The City of New London offered to move Susette Kelo’s house to another location in the city. It spent some 75 million dollars to get Pfeizer to move in but Pfeizer merged with Wyeth (how my brother wound up working for Pfeizer) and the company decided that they did not need the facilities any more.

The movie ends with a shot of Suzette Kelo standing in front of the empty lot where her house used to be (the film neglects to tell you that it was moved for her not destroyed) giving you the impression that Pfeizer and a corrupt republican governor (who is shown reading about the decision from his jail cell) had destroyed her house for the sheer fun of it.

It is a movie that makes me wonder if movies about 5-4 court case decisions are a good idea. Maybe a documentary would have been the better way to go.

Question for Comment: which side of this case would you have voted on?  

“In the near future, after economic catastrophe and climate change came famine, the great migration and the civil war.”

Humanity Bureau REVIEW

“In the near future, after economic catastrophe and climate change came famine, the great migration and the civil war.” 

This is a movie starring (is that the right word for this actor these days?) Nicolas Cage that is marinated in anti-Trumpism. It is clear that the movie was put together as a low-budget protest piece against a variety of Trump’s more distasteful policies (or imagined policies) or character traits (or imagined character traits). Its supposed to be a futurist look into the end results of a Trump presidency (nuclear war, irreversible climate change, border fences that are designed to kill asylum seekers, and an aggressive attempt to eliminate anyone who is deemed more “taker” than “maker”). It is a fugitives fleeing oppression story that winds up looking something like The Sound of Music without music and without a happy ending.

The characters all come off as somewhat contrived but maybe the producers were afraid that too much subtlety would obscure the message. The main protagonist (Noah Kross) has a name that only barely disguises itself as a reference to “the person who saves humanity from impending disaster.” Like Noah and Jesus, he becomes aware of the coming disaster just in time to tell the world about it so that they can save themselves (if they will listen). The antagonist is a man by the name of Adam Westinghouse. I find this particularly delicious. His last name is an obvious reference to an American corporation founded in 1886. The first name, Adam, would suggest that this evil villain is a powerful corporation with all the powers of a person (the great evil of the Progressive left). How appropriate in the movie that he wears an eye patch, looks like a pirate, seeks to repress the truth (even if it means killing struggling mothers of orphaned children), and maintains his own swimming pool for himself in a world where the poor can get no water. If only they had thought to name his superior “Monsanto” or “Walmart.”

Given that the premise of the film is an American government that promises to take its struggling masses to “New Eden” when in reality, they simply take them to be cremated, it is particularly interesting that there is a character in the film who has a German accent, is named Adolph, and who helps the fugitive family to escape to safety in Canada (I cannot help but assume that the director intends for us to see in the film’s main characters a personification of Joseph helping Mary and Jesus escape from Herod). I suspect that the point is that not even Germans named Adolph would act like this American government is acting.

There is a moment in the film where Noah and Rachel (the boy’s foster mother) are talking about what they should tell the boy about who he is and who his actual father is. Cage’s character wonders if he is ready to hear the truth. One suspects that the screenwriter and producer see their message as a prophetic one. “Here is where the Trump administration is taking us,” they seem to say. “Best get over the border to Canada while you still can.”

There is a scene where the evil Adam Westinghouse is swimming in his pool and he invites one of his lieutenants to dive in and join him. The man fears he might drown, having never seen so much water before we imagine. “The trick is to hold your breath before you go under” Westinhouse says. Ironically, this may be the message of the movie to those in American that it assumes are about to suffer under an organized Trumpian attempt to eliminate those who have need of welfare (Rachel Weller is, after all the name of the single mother who has been determined unworthy of continued citizenship – Rachel, if you did not know this, is Hebrew for a female sheep). The final credits roll to a song entitled Done the Math by the band, The Headstones. The lead singer is none other than the actor who plays Westinghouse in the movie. The final words of the song are “I won’t just try to hold my breath and make it through.”

Well, every day
I feel consumed
From one day
to the next
The best I can do
And every day
I feel unglued
Well, I won't just
hold my breath
And try to
make it through
I've done the math
I've done the math

The call to action is clear: “Revolt now while you still have a chance or prepare to be sent to Buchenwald or Auschwitz’s.” The final scenes of the film portray a society in the flames of rebellion stirred up by the secrets that Noah Kross has exposed. A protestor aims his gun at a Humanity Bureau agent. Fade to black. “When I was a boy, I couldn’t wait for summer vacation” and then an image of a boy under water holding his breath about to resurface.

Question for Comment: In the history of revolution, it has always been a fear of what a tyrant was about to do rather than the knowledge of what they had done that has sparked violent opposition. Take the American Revolution for example. Patrick Henry does not drum up the resistance movement by citing the Tea Act. He asserts that the Tea Act is only a precursor to what is coming. “The King and Parliament,” he insists, have as their ultimate goal the enslavement of the colonies in view. It is not about a nickel here and a dime there to pay for the French Indian war. It is about human enslavement.” In a similar way, this film attempts to draw a picture of just where the trump Administration is heading as a means of inspiring resistance to what is actually doing. How is this strategy likely to be effective or counter-productive to an opposition movement?

“Everyone was greedy. I just went along."

The Wizard of Lies REVIEW

First of all, the resemblance between Robert De Niro and Bernie Madoff is a bit spooky.

https://nyppagesix.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/madoff.jpg?quality=90&strip=all

It is impossible for me to say how well De Niro pulls off Bernie Madoff’s personality though. I suspect that Bernie Madoff is one of those people who cannot be imitated by anyone else precisely. For 40 years, Madoff built a reputation of honesty and integrity that was accentuated with a profound understanding of his chosen field (finance). Bernie Madoff had the capacity to make up a complicated lie and carry on a long conversation about it, for years, with people who knew him. Someone has described him as an idiot savant with respect to image projection (like Shakespeare’s Iago). His thoughts about his scam are revealing for what they say about the human capacity of rationalization. Madoff seems to walk fluidly back and forth between taking responsibility and projecting it.

Here, he seems to take responsibility: “[My wife] is angry at me. I mean, you know, I destroyed our family.”

Here he casts some doubt upon whether his actions were entirely his own: “How could I have done this? I was making a lot of money. I didn’t need the money. [Am I] a flawed character?”

Here he deflects criticisms of hi essential nature by distancing himself from the decisions he made from the sort of person he is: “I’m not the kind of person I’m being portrayed as.”

Here, he reframes his scam in a way that makes him seem like an altruist: “I made a lot of money for my clients”

Here he insulates his fraud from the realm of decision making. Somehow, he seems to want to present himself as someone else’s puppet. His actions are not entirely autonomous:  “We made a very nice living. I didn’t need the investment-advisory business. I took it on and got myself involved in it, but if you think I woke up one morning and said, ‘Well, listen, I need to be able to buy a boat and a plane, and this is what I’m going to do,’ that’s wrong.”

Here, he makes it sound as though the original idea for his fraud was not concocted by him (but if not him, then who?) He makes it seem as though he was trying to be good. He was trying to end the scam. He was a “hostage” of sorts: “I had more than enough money to support my lifestyle and my family’s lifestyle. I allowed myself to be talked into something, and that’s my fault. I thought I could extricate myself after a short period of time. But I just couldn’t.”

Here, he complains of unfairness in the way that he is presented in the media. He suggests that what he is, is what he was when he was at his best. Not what he was when he was at his worst: “Does anybody want to hear that I had a successful business and did all these wonderful things for the industry? And got all these awards? And so did my family? I did all of this during the legitimate years. No. You don’t read any of that.”

Here, he deflects blame onto the wider system, the context: “I realized from a very early stage that the [financial & investment] market is a whole rigged job. There’s no chance that investors have in this market.”

Here, he portrays himself as a victim, asking to be seen as a fellow victim and not the perpetrator: “[The fraud] was a nightmare for me. It was only a nightmare for me. It’s horrible. When I say nightmare, imagine carrying this secret. Look, imagine going home every night not being able to tell your wife, living with this ax over your head, not telling your sons, my brother, seeing them every day in the business and not being able to confide in them.”

Here, he asserts the pain of not being understood. Not being able to explain (as though there is an explanation for defrauding people of 65 billion dollars: “My wife doesn’t forgive me, but at least she understood. With my sons I could never explain what happened.”

Here, he insists that he tried to warn people. He put warnings on the cigarette boxes as it were and notified people that they should not invest money with him if they could not afford to lose it all:  “[Prospective investors] were all told by me, ‘Don’t invest any more money than you could afford to lose. This is the stock market. There’s always stuff that can happen. Brokerage firms can fail. I could go crazy and do something stupid. If you want a [safe thing], put your money in government bonds. So everybody understood this.”

Here, he infers that he was just one more leaf in the stream, responding to peer pressures that he was not alone in responding to: “Everyone was greedy. I just went along. It’s not an excuse.” Look, there was complicity, in my view.”

Here, he decries that his actions were in no way more reprehensible than what the government itself does (perhaps he is referring to Social security?): “It’s unbelievable. Goldman … no one has any criminal convictions—the whole new regulatory reform is a joke. The whole government is a Ponzi scheme.”

Here, he both takes responsibility and dismisses it in the same paragraph: “Look, none of my clients, even if they lost every penny they put in there, can plead poverty. Look, it doesn’t mean I’m excusing what I did, doesn’t mean I don’t feel sorry for them. I’m embarrassed … It was the people that came in very late in the game that got hurt. All of my friends, most of my individual clients, are not net losers. Now if you listen to [them], they’re living out of Dumpsters and they don’t have any money, and I’m sure it’s a traumatic experience to some, but I made a lot of money for people. Does it justify it? No.”

Here he tries to extricate himself from guilt by saying that he tried to make things right for those he regarded as friends. “I was always able to rationalize [the fraud]… Look, I tried to give moneys back to my individual clients when I realized it was impossible to get myself out. I tried to return funds to my friends, moneys to the smaller clients. They wouldn’t take it back … Everybody said, ‘No, you can’t do that. You can’t send me my money back. I’ve been a friend of yours, or a client, for years’ … I couldn’t tell them I would have been doing them a favor. I couldn’t. I mean, could I have insisted? Yes.”

Here, we see him taking responsibility and not taking responsibility: “I did block [my fraud] out of my mind. I had no choice.”

Here, we see him placing his own suffering on the scale as a down payment for assuaging his responsibility for inflicting harm on others: “Let me tell you, I cried for well over two weeks [over the suicide death of my son Mark]. I cried and cried. I didn’t come out of my room. I didn’t speak to anybody, and so on. I have tears in my eyes when I’m talking to you, even. Not a day goes by that I don’t suffer. I may sound okay on the phone. Trust me, I’m not okay. And never will be.”

http://www.ibtimes.com/select-quotes-bernard-madoff-magazine-interview-271615 

Question for Comment: Are our actions ever entirely our responsibility? Are they ever entirely not our responsibility? The wizard of Lies raises all these questions and more.

Globalization - "There are only two choices"

Failure to Adjust REVIEW

“This issue on which the whole future of U.S. trade (and perhaps investment) policy may rest is how we decide, as a nation, to deal with the real dislocations to workers and firms caused by import competition. There are only two choices: to limit the imports themselves, or to help the dislocated workers and firms adjust to the new competition.” —C. Fred Bergsten, “The International Economy and American Business,” May 1973. 

This is one of those books that everyone should read. Because they probably won’t, it is a book that every American teacher should read. Because they won’t, I am writing a brief review.

Edward Alden (the author) graduated from high school a year before I did. For those of you (and there are not many of you reading my blog) who were not around then, that was just when Ronald Reagan was coming to power in America and things began shifting in favor of the business-owning and investor class. It was also when it began to make more and more sense for American businesses to take advantage of trade liberalization to move their manufacturing plants to “better pastures” overseas. Alden explains why this boon to owners was not a boon to workers. “Such mobility,” he says of the ability that companies acquired to move to the states where the lowest wages were,

“tended to level wages within the United States as well since industry was just as mobile as labor—though, very importantly, not more so. While people could move to take advantage of higher wages, companies could also move to take advantage of lower labor costs.” 

“By the time I went off to college in the fall of 1979, …. the conditions that had produced this self-sufficiency had largely disappeared. In the decade from 1970 to 1980, international trade as a share of the US economy had nearly doubled to more than 20 percent.”

This means that workers were losing their ability to simply move to the new state where the jobs had moved to. And because the new workers were not Americans, they could not put any political pressure on companies to improve wages or benefits. An underpaid and exploited American worker can vote in an American election. A similar person in Jamaica cannot.

“. . . For those who earned their livings making steel or stitching clothing or assembling TV sets, the nature of competition had changed profoundly. If one domestic car company gained market share at the expense of another, it had little impact on those who made cars; the employees let go by one company would likely be hired by another. But if the competitor was in another country, the impact was not so benign. Given the tight immigration restrictions in place in most countries, not to mention generally insurmountable cultural and linguistic barriers, laid-off auto workers could not simply pick up and move to another country where carmakers were hiring.” 

No one explained these things to me in any of my courses in high school or college. But the implications for me could have been more profound (had I been inclined to make my living in manufacturing or in serving those who did make their money in that sector). “The ease with which companies can move across international borders has given them enormous leverage over their workforces,” Alden explains,

“Capital is far freer to move in search of investment opportunities, but labor cannot follow. That has given business far more power than it had enjoyed in the more self-sufficient economy of a generation ago.”

And thus, he concludes, “America’s leading companies are thriving, but the prosperity they are producing is not being shared broadly among U.S. citizens.”

The title of the book, Failure to Adjust does not implicitly identify who failed to adjust but the gist of the book suggests that it was everyone. Companies did not adjust by sponsoring more programs to retrain workers. The government did not adjust by upgrading the education system to better meet the competitive challenges. Tax codes did not adjust to sufficiently obtain the rising profits made by companies overseas. Institutions of secondary and higher education did not adjust to make training affordable. And, ultimately, the workforce itself did not adjust by heading down to the local library of community college. Indeed, many of these workers simply took their lower wages and expressed their anger by voting for politicians who promised to do something to bring their old jobs back.

“Far too many Americans are simply unprepared for the competition they are now in,” Alden writes,

“They are like overmatched boxers who keep getting knocked down, only to be told by their corner that they just have to get back in the ring and keep taking the punches in the hope that eventually they will become better fighters. It would make more sense to pull them out of the ring for a year of training and conditioning before sending them back again.”

For the worker who has the same skill as some overseas worker willing to work for half the wages of an American, the prospects have been bleak. “Companies have enormous leverage to demand government subsidies, tax cuts, or a compliant, low wage workforce as a condition for investment,” Alden explains. And thus, not only are the take-home wages lower, the wages must be taxed at a higher percentage to cover the loss of the corporate taxes that are now insulated from local taxation policies by the fact that such taxes can only be levied if the company brings the money back into the United states to spend.    

Alden has more bad news. His chapter on trade agreements highlights why it is that the promise of global trade has not worked to the benefit of American workers. American politicians have often used trade deals for diplomatic purposes, handing over one commercial trade advantage after another to allies and potential allies as payment for their loyalty in our geopolitical games. Deals that make allies happy at the cost of American workers have been the order of the day for decades. Strategic goals continued to outweigh economic ones for US policymakers and this perception of political callousness on the part of those making those deals was at the heart of Donald Trump’s surprising electoral victory in 2016.  

Though politicians continued to genuflect to the working classes to get their votes, it appears that what they were doing involved the selling of a certain amount of snake oil. What they were doing was passing trade regulations without creating the mechanisms for enforcing them. Just as they were passing immigration quotas that they never intended to actually enforce, they made trade deals that ultimately never had any teeth in them. So long as investors and corporate donors did not really want them enforced, it seemed to work.   “We need a commitment to better results, not just better rules,” Alden insists.   

“US corporate profits hit record levels in 2013 and 2014, and as a share of national income, corporate profits were the highest recorded since I 929. A steadily larger share of those profits is now earned overseas. Nearly half the revenue for companies on the S&P 500 now comes from outside the United States, and some 60 percent of their cash is held outside the United States.” 

Cash made overseas is cash not taxed by the U.S. or its individual States. Take Apple for example, Alden writes,  

“While Apple paid more than 30 percent in federal tax on its US profits that year, the tax rate on its foreign earnings was just 2.5 percent. The difference matters enormously because Apple earns the majority of its revenue outside the United States –“ 

What does this mean? It means that the owners of companies like Apple get to enjoy the benefits of living in an American society that they are not being taxed proportionately to pay for. Whether I entirely agree with Bernie Sanders’ solutions to this reality is immaterial. He is correct to insist that it is a moral as well as political problem. Is it enough for us that Americans who have invested in Apple pay 15% of their earnings in taxes when Apple itself pays executives with dividends instead of salaries so that they can pay significantly less in U.S. taxes than they might otherwise?   

“In the past half century, American corporations have become increasingly adept at using profit shifting to low-tax or tax-haven countries to drive their tax bills lower and lower. Even as corporate profits have hit record levels, corporate taxes as a share of total federal tax payments have fallen to their lowest levels since the United States began taxing corporate income a century ago. This falling corporate share has contributed to the federal budget deficit, leaving less money for education, research, infrastructure, and other public investments that could help the United States in responding to international economic competition.” 

“In recent years, several high-profile companies have undertaken what are known as ‘inversions,’ in which a US-headquartered company merges with a foreign partner and then relocates the headquarters outside the United States to take advantage of lower corporate tax rates in countries like Ireland or even Canada. The companies include drug giant Pfizer, auto parts and HVAC maker Johnson Controls, and fast-food giant Burger King.” 

“With further clever tax planning of the sort that Apple, Starbucks, and other companies employ, the bulk of those profits can be ‘earned’ in low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland or no-tax jurisdictions like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. In Apple’s case, according to the Senate investigation, 64 percent of the company’s global pretax income (i.e., income earned outside the United States) was recorded in Ireland, even though only 4 percent of Apple’s employees and 1 percent of its customers are in Ireland.”  

Obviously, some companies cannot simply move elsewhere. If they mine things out of the ground or sell things to consumers who are not going to drive to China to buy them, they must stay where they are and pay their corporate taxes. And thus, “The highest tax rates are paid by relatively immobile companies …” Thus, Ironically, Walmart pays way more U.S. taxes than Apple.   

In Failure to Adjust, Edward Alden argues that the solution is not to put obstacles in the way of U.S. companies who wish to compete in international marketplaces. If one simply brought jobs back to American where these companies would have to pay double wages, they would lose the ability to compete in international markets. They would not sell the same number of iphones and solar panels around the globe. Because of the way international competition works, they would simply go out of business.  

“If GM were not building those cars in China, some other competitor—Volkswagen, BMW, Toyota, Honda—would probably do so instead and capture most of the Chinese market growth.” 

Alden’s argument is thus not for protectionism and tariffs or for forcing companies to relocate manufacturing plants back in the U.S. . His argument is that as a country, we have failed to recognize the nature of new realities and when we have recognized that reality, we have failed to educate people to adjust to it. We have failed to go into negotiations with a view to the interests of all citizens.     

“The failure to help American workers adjust to the new scale and intensity of global competition,” he concludes,  “is one of the bigger mistakes of US government economic policy in the last half century, one that has resulted in an enormous waste of human capacity and in eroding popular support for international trade and U.S. Engagement with the world.”  

Question for Comment: The question that is left on the table for me is not, “should people re-invent themselves with the help of teachers who can help them meet these new challenges? That question to me is a slam dunk, “yes.” The difficult question is, “Who should pay for that training?” Should companies themselves pay for it? Should State governments (who generally are in control of education budgets) pay for it? Should the Federal government whose trade deals and tax policies are causing the problem, have to pay to retrain people whose lives are impacted? Or should the responsibility of educational costs rest on the shoulders of workers themselves?  

Eggheads v. Fatheads PART I

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life REVIEW Part I

“Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding.” – Proverbs 23:23

Psychologists tell us that there is a part of the brain that has an incredible ability to work to understand truth. They also tell us that this part of the brain will grow lazy if it is not made to develop a work ethic. And, as with the individual brain, so also with an entire culture, for they too can value or devalue the work of truth-seeking. Most people go through life solving problems that they have to solve. This makes sense. Why wouldn’t they? If in the process of solving their problems, they learn something true, they are okay with that. There other people who go through life trying to discover the truth; and if those people (I will call them “intellectuals”) happen to solve an actual problem in the process, they are okay with that. Make no mistake, “intellectual” is not a term that describes “smart people” in contrast to everyone else who we might call “dumb.” The intellectual is merely someone whose intelligence finds itself less motivated by pragmatism and practicality than most intelligent people. An intellectual might, for example, spend hours and hours reading a fifty year old book about anti-intellectualism just because he finds the subject interesting – because he wants to know the back story to something that he notices in his present culture. The reward may hold no fiscal advantage to him or her whatsoever. Intellectuals are thus often driven and motivated by questions regardless of whether or not they are actual problems.

An intellectual may not make a dime from what he learns. The problems of his life will be there when he is done. She will have solved none of her real world problems by means of her intellectual effort. She will simply have learned something she finds interesting and that will help her to think better and more accurately about other interesting things. Perhaps the word “intellectual” is another word for “fool” for, being so good at knowing things, he or she may not know what is actually worth knowing. I can’t help but think of the young college philosophy graduate who cannot find a job and takes work at his father’s hardware store. On the first day, his father gives him a broom and a mop and tells him to clean the basement of the hardware store. “Dad?!” whines the graduate. “I have a college degree!”

“Oh … right,” says his father, “Let me show you how to use that.”

Hofstadter explains why many people find the intellectual to be a superfluous use of a community’s food supplies when he says:

“Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of the life of the mind supremely well when he said that the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions.” Incidentally, this book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Perhaps the Russian launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 had made Americans realize that the study of space and physics and higher math was not as flighty an endeavor as they had supposed.[i]  

This book takes about forty hours to read so it is not likely that many people will ever read it but nevertheless, it tells the story of anti-intellectualism in American life from its origins to 1962, the year I was born. If you were to read it, you would see clearly that just as America has had its economic boom and bust cycles, it has had its intellectual booms and busts as well. There have been times when the question asker has been greatly valued (and paid) and there have been extended times when the same individual has been mocked and derided for being so utterly “useless” to the masses. Hofstadter writes,

“Anti-intellectualism was not manifested in this country for the first time during the 1950’s [referring to McCarthyism]. Our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity, and has a long historical background. An examination of this background suggests that regard for intellectuals has not moved steadily downward and has not gone into a sudden, recent decline, but is subject to cyclical fluctuations.” 

Hofstadter divides the book into chapters that concern different sources of anti-intellectualism in American history.  

Among these, you will come across the following

• Threatened religious leaders who believe that study is a distraction when there is direct revelation and inspiration to be had whenever we wish to have it.
• Populist politicians who pander to masses comfortable in the belief that truths one cannot acquire while working in a factory or on a farm serve only to inflate the egos of those rich and lazy enough to care about them.
• Successful businessmen who think that using intellectual energy on subjects that make no profit is ludicrous and take away talent and energy from more necessary things.
• Educational leaders who are given the task of teaching masses of students who do not themselves see any reason to be concerned with any matter that does not fall into the category of “what matters to my life today or my career tomorrow?”

It is worth noting that Hofstadter is not incapable of seeing some criticisms of intellectualism as legitimate. Where intellectuals use their book knowledge to snobbishly assert their “betterness,” he notes it. Where they seek to create a vetting mechanism for tagging and excluding those less educated, he notes it. “I can only say that I do not suffer from the delusion that the complexities of American history can be satisfactorily reduced to a running battle between the eggheads and the fatheads,” he says.

“This book is a critical inquiry, not a legal brief for the intellectuals against the American community. I have no desire to encourage the self-pity to which intellectuals are sometimes prone by suggesting that they have been vessels of pure virtue set down in Babylon. One does not need to assert this, or to assert that intellectuals should get sweeping indulgence or exercise great power, in order to insist that respect for intellect and its functions is important to the culture and the health of any society, and that in ours this respect has often been notably lacking.” 

I found his sources fascinating. I have 27 pages of notes. I will spare you by supplying a representative sample.  

Religious Anti-Intellectualism:

Hofstadter notes that democratization impacted all aspects of American life between the colonial era and the rise of Jacksonian democracy. Perhaps nowhere was it more pronounced in its influence than in religion where masses of people converted to denominations lead and taught by no few ministers who saw study as a potential hindrance to good preaching. “The various denominations responded in different ways to this necessity’” Hofstadter says of the geographical dispersal of millions of people across the West, all needing to be brought into the fold, “but in general it might be said that the congregations were raised and the preachers -were lowered.” 

"’Without study too!’ Here we are close to one of the central issues of the Great Awakening. An error of ‘former times’ was now being revived, [Charles] Chauncy [a 17^th Century clergiman and President of Harvard College] asserted, the error of the heretics and popular preachers who said that ‘they needed no Books but the Bible.’ ‘They pleaded there was no need of learning in preaching, and that one of them could by the SPIRIT do better than the Minister by his learning; as if the SPIRIT and Learning were opposites.’ This, Chauncy thought, was the fundamental error of the revivalists: Their depending on the Help of the SPIRIT as to despise Learning.”

Following are examples from sources that Hofstadter quotes: 

Here is the Methodist circuit-rider, Peter Cartwright (1856): 

“Suppose, now, Mr. Wesley had been obliged to wait for a literary and theologically trained band of preachers before he moved in the glorious work  his day, what would Methodism have been in the Wesleyan connection today? ... If Bishop Asbury had waited for this choice literary band of preachers, infidelity -would have swept these United States from one end to the other. . . .  

The Presbyterians, and other Calvinistic branches of the Protestant Church, used to contend for an educated ministry, for pews, for instrumental music, for a congregational or stated salaried ministry. The Methodists universally opposed these ideas; and the illiterate Methodist preachers actually set the world on fire (the American world at least) while they were lighting their matches! . . .  I do not wish to undervalue education, but really I have seen so many of these educated preachers who forcibly reminded me of lettuce growing under the shade of a peach-tree, or like a gosling that had got the straddles by wading in the dew, that I turn away sick and faint. Now this educated ministry and theological training are no longer an experiment. Other denominations have tried them, and they have proved a perfect failure. . . .  

I awfully fear for our beloved Methodism. Multiply colleges, universities, seminaries, and academies; multiply our agencies, and editorships, and fill them with all our best and most efficient preachers, and you localize the ministry and secularize them too; then farewell to itinerancy; and when this fails we plunge right into Congregationalism, and stop precisely where all other denominations started. . . .  Is it not manifest that the employing of so many of our preachers in these agencies and professorships is one of the great causes why we have such a scarcity of preachers to fill the regular work? Moreover, these presidents, professors, agents, and editors get a greater amount of pay, and get it more certainly too, than a traveling preacher, who has to breast every storm, and often falls very far short of his disciplinary allowance. Here is a great temptation to those who are qualified to fill those high offices to seek them, and give up the regular work of preaching and trying to save souls. . . .  

Perhaps, among the thousands of traveling and local preachers employed and engaged in this glorious work of saving souls, and building up the Methodist Church, there were not fifty men that had anything more than a common English education, and scores of them not that; and not one of them was ever trained in a theological school or Biblical institute, and yet hundreds of them preached the Gospel with more success and had more seals to their ministry than all the sapient, downy D.D’s [Doctor of Divinity] in modern times, who, instead of entering the great and wide-spread harvest-field of souls, sickle in hand, are seeking presidencies or professorships in colleges, editorships, or any agencies that have a fat salary, and are trying to create newfangled institutions where good livings can be monopolized, while millions of poor, dying sinners are thronging the way to hell without God, without Gospel. . . .  

What has a learned ministry done for the world, that have studied divinity as a science? Look, and examine ministerial history. It is an easy thing to engender pride in the human heart, and this educational pride has been the downfall and ruin of many preeminently educated ministers of the Gospel. But I will not render evil for evil, or railing for railing, but will thank God for education, and educated Gospel ministers who are of the right stamp, and of the right spirit. But how do these advocates for an educated ministry think the hundreds of commonly educated preachers must feel under the lectures we have from time to time on this subject? It is true, many of these advocates for an improved and educated ministry among us, speak in rapturous and exalted strains concerning the old, illiterate pioneers that planted Methodism and Churches in early and frontier times; but I take no flattering unction to my soul from these extorted concessions from these velvet-mouthed and downy D.D’s; for their real sentiments, if they clearly express them, are, that we were indebted to the ignorance of the people for our success.”  

Here is a manifesto from a group of revivalist ministers from the early 19^th Century 

“That every brother that is qualified by God for the same has a right to preach according to the measure of faith, and that the essential qualification for preaching is wrought by the Spirit of God; and that the knowledge of the tongues and liberal sciences are not absolutely necessary; yet they are convenient, and -will doubtless be profitable if rightly used, but if brought in to supply the want of the Spirit of God, they prove a snare to those that use them and all that follow them.” 

Here is the great Second Great Awakening revivalist preacher, Charles Finney: 

“I had read nothing on the subject except my Bible; and what I had there found upon the subject, I had interpreted as I would have understood the same or like passages in a law book. Again; I found myself utterly unable to accept doctrine on the ground of authority. ... I had no where to go but directly to the Bible, and to the philosophy or workings of my own mind. . .”  As to literature: "I cannot believe that a person who has ever known the love of God can relish a secular novel.”  "Let me visit your chamber, your parlor, or wherever you keep your books. What is here? Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, and a host of triflers and blasphemers of God."  

“Even the classical languages, so commonly thought necessary to a minister, were of dubious benefit,” according to Finney. Students at Eastern colleges would spend,  

"four years ... at classical studies and no God in them."  

And upon graduation, 

"such learned students may under stand their hie, Juiec, hoc, [Latin] very well and may laugh at the humble Christian and call him ignorant, although he may know how to win more souls than five hundred of them. . . . The race is an intellectual one. The excitement, the zeal, are all for the intellect. The young man . . . loses the firm tone of spirituality. . . . His intellect improves, and his heart lies waste." 

These opinions are all from Finney s Memoirs, chapter 7, "Remarks Upon Ministerial Education," pp. 8597; cf. Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion, pp. 176-8. 

Here is the famous Protestant evangelist, D.L. Moody 

"It makes no difference how you get a man to God, provided you get him there."

Hofstadter writes:  

“Although he had no desire to undermine the established ministry or its training, he cordially approved of laymen in religious work and felt that seminary-educated ministers ‘are often educated away from the people.’ [Moody] denigrated all education that did not serve the purposes of religion for secular education, he said, instead of telling men what a bad lot they are, flatters them and tells them ‘how angelic they are because they have some education. An educated rascal is the meanest kind of rascal.’ Aside from the Bible, he read almost nothing. ‘I have one rule about books. I do not read any book, unless it will help me to understand the book.’ Novels? They were ‘flashy. ... I have no taste for them, no desire to read them; but if I did I would not do it.’ The theater? ‘You say it is part of one’s education to see good plays. Let that kind of education go to the four winds.’ Culture? It is ‘all right in its place,’ but to speak of it before a man is born of God is ‘the height of madness.’ Learning? An encumbrance to the man of spirit: ‘I would rather have zeal without knowledge; and there is a good deal of knowledge without zeal.’”  Bradford: Moody, pp. 24, 25-6, 30, 35, 37, 64,  

“I have heard of reform, reform,” wrote Moody, 

“until I am tired and sick of the whole thing. It is regeneration by the power of the Holy Ghost that we need.”

 As a consequence, says Hofstadter, ”Moody showed no patience for any kind of sociological discussion. Man was, and always had been, a failure in all his works. The true task was to get as many souls as possible off the sinking ship of this world.” 

Here is the nationally known evangelist, Billy Sunday from the 1920’s. 

“What do I care if some puff-eyed little dibbly-dibbly preacher goes tibbly-tibbling around because I use plain Anglo-Saxon words? I want people to know what I mean and that’s why I try to get down where they live.”  

Literary preachers, he said, tried "to please the highbrows and in pleasing them miss the masses.” According to Hofstadter,  

“The language used by Moody, simple though it was, lacked savor enough for Sunday. Moody had said: ‘The standard of the Church is so low that it does not mean much.’ Sunday asserted: ‘The bars of the Church are so low that any old hog with two or three suits of clothes and a bank roll can crawl through.’ Moody had been content with: ‘We don’t want intellect and money-power, but the power of God’s word.’ Sunday elaborated: ‘The church in America would die of dry rot and sink forty-nine fathoms in hell if all members were multimillionaires and college graduates.’” McLoughlin: Billy Sunday, pp. 164, 169. 

“With Sunday it was quite another matter. He brooked no suggestion that fundamentalism was not thoroughgoing, impregnable, and tough. He turned his gift for invective as unsparingly on the higher criticism and on evolution as on everything else that displeased him. ‘There is a hell and when the Bible says so, don’t you be so black-hearted, low-down, and degenerate as to say you don t believe it, you big fool!’ Again: "Thousands of college graduates are going as fast as they can straight to hell. If I had a million dollars I’d give $999,999 to the church and $1 to education.’ ‘When the word of God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell!’ 

Here is William Jennings Bryan "If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education." 

Here is Billy Graham 

“You can stick a public school and a university in the middle of every block of every city in America and you will never keep America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education. During the past few years the intellectual props have been knocked out from under the theories of men. Even the average university professor is willing to listen to the voice of the preacher.  [In place of the Bible] we substituted reason, rationalism, mind culture, science worship, the working power of government, Freudianism, naturalism, humanism, behaviorism, positivism, materialism, and idealism. [This is the work of] so-called intellectuals. Thousands of these ‘intellectuals’ have publicly stated that morality is relative that there is no norm or absolute standard.”  Billy Graham William G. McLcmghlin, Jr.; Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age (New York, 1960)]

Political Anti-Intellectualism:

Democratization also stimulated a metastasizing of anti-intellectualism in political life as well as religious life.  

A good deal of the Federalist attack on Jefferson, for example, was directed at his bookish intellectualism.  

“The Federalist writer, Joseph Dennie, saw in [Jefferson] a favorite pupil of the ‘dangerous, Deistical, and Utopian’ school of French philosophy. ‘The man has talents,’ Dennie conceded,  “but they are of a dangerous and delusive kind. He has read much and can write plausibly. He is a man of letters, and should be a retired one. His closet, and not the cabinet, is his place. In the first, he might harmlessly examine the teeth of a non-descript monster, the secretions of an African, or the almanac of Banneker. . . . At the seat of government his abstract, inapplicable, metaphysico-politics are either nugatory or noxious. Besides, his principles relish so strongly of Paris and are seasoned with such a profusion of French garlic, that he offends the whole nation. Better for Americans that on their extended plains ‘thistles should grow, instead of wheat, and cockle, instead of barley,’ than that a philosopher should influence the councils of the country, and that his admiration of the works of Voltaire and Helvetius should induce him to wish a closer connexion with Frenchmen.” 

With the defeat of John Quincy Adams by the populist, Andrew Jackson, college educations went out of style in political life entirely. No longer did Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison own the regard of the public like the tobacco farming, Indian-killing, pistol dueling, self-made military “Gaston” who now found himself President of the country. “The first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism in American politics,” says Hofstadter,  

“was, in fact, given by the Jacksonian movement. Its distrust of expertise, its dislike for centralization, its desire to uproot the entrenched classes, and its doctrine that important functions were simple enough to be performed by anyone, amounted to a repudiation not only of the system of government by gentlemen which the nation had inherited from the eighteenth century, but also of the special value of the educated classes in civic life.” 

“Adams was the last nineteenth-century occupant of the White House who had a knowledgeable sympathy with the aims and aspirations of science or who believed that fostering the arts might properly be a function of the federal government.” 

“Jackson, it was said, had been lucky enough to have escaped the formal training that impaired the ‘Vigor and originality of the understanding.’ Here was a man of action, ‘educated in Nature’s school’ who was ‘artificial in nothing’; who had fortunately ‘escaped the training and dialectics of the schools’; who had a ‘judgement unclouded by the visionary speculations of the academician’; who had, ‘in an extraordinary degree, that native strength of mind, that practical common sense, that power and discrimination of judgement which, for all useful purposes, are more valuable than all the acquired learning of a sage’; whose mind did not have to move along ‘the tardy avenues of syllogism, nor over the beaten track of analysis, or the hackneyed walk of logical induction,’ because it had natural intuitive power and could go ‘with the lightning’s flash and illuminate its own pathway.’ 

“George Bancroft, who must have believed that his own career as a schoolmaster had been useless, rhapsodized over Jackson s unschooled mind: 

‘Behold, then, the unlettered man of the West, the nursling of the wilds, the farmer of the Hermitage, little versed in books, unconnected by science with the tradition of the past, raised by the will of the people to the highest pinnacle of honour, to the central post in the civilization of republican freedom. . . . What policy will he pursue? What wisdom will he bring with him from the forest? What rules of duty will he evolve from the oracles of his own mind?’  

Against a primitivist hero of this sort, who brought wisdom straight out of the forest, Adams, with his experience at foreign courts and his elaborate education, seemed artificial. “A group of Jackson s supporters declared that the nation would not be much better off for Adams’ intellectual accomplishments: 

“That he is learned we are willing to admit;” Jackson’s followers offered about Quincy Adams, “but his wisdom we take leave to question. . . , We confess our attachment to the homely doctrine: thus happily expressed by the great English poet:  

‘That not to know of things remote
From use, obscure and subtle,
but to know- That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime wisdom.’  ‘

That wisdom we believe Gen. Jackson possesses in an eminent degree.’ 

“Most of the Brahmin world found itself unable to embrace Jackson as President,” Hofstadter writes,  

“Harvard did award him an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at its 1833 commencement, but Adams refused to attend. ‘I -would not be present’ he wrote, "to see my darling Harvard disgrace herself by conferring a Doctor’s degree upon a barbarian and a savage who can scarcely spell his own name."

Bemis: op. cit., p. 250; see also Adams s Memoirs, Vol. VIII (Philadelphia, 1876), pp. 546-7.

If Jackson’s Presidency unleashed a wave of anti-intelectualism in American life, the famous frontiersman, Davy Crocket rode it all the way to Congress.

“It was Crockett s pride to represent the native style and natural intuition. In his autobiography, published in 1834, Crockett boasted of the decisions he handed down from the Tennessee bench at a time when he ‘could just barely write my own name.’ ‘My judgments were never appealed from, and if they had been they would have stuck like wax, as I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life.’ This ingenuous confidence in the sufficiency of common sense may have been justified by Crockett’s legal decisions, but he was not content to stop here: he had a considered disdain for the learned world. At one point in his Congressional career, Crockett reported: ‘  ‘There were some gentlemen that invited me to go to Cambridge, where the big college or university is; where they keep ready-made titles or nicknames to give people. I would not go, for I did not know but they might stick an LL.D. on me before they let me go; and I had no idea of changing ‘Member of the House of Representatives of the United States’ for what stands for ‘lazy lounging dunce,’ which I am sure my constituents would have translated my new title to be, knowing that I had never taken any degree, and did not own to any, except a small degree of good sense not to pass for what I was not. . . .” 

Anti-Intellectualism in American political life may have reached maturity under the guiding hand of Tammany Hall in New York City where the famous George Washington Plunket asserted that an education was a handicap for all young men wishing to enter politics.  

“If Tammany leaders were "all book worms and college professors,” Plunkitt declared,   

“Tammany might win an election once in four thousand years. Most of the leaders are plain American citizens, of the people and near to the people, and they have all the education they need to whip the dudes who part their name in the middle. ... As for the common people of the district, I am at home with them at all times. When I go among them, I don t try to show off my grammar, or talk about the Constitution, or how many volts there is in electricity or make it appear in any way that I am better educated than they are. They wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing.”  “Some young men think they can learn how to be successful in politics from books, and they cram their heads with all sorts of college rot. They couldn’t make a bigger mistake. Now, understand me, I ain’t sayin nothin against colleges. I guess they have to exist as long as there’s bookworms, and I suppose they do some good in certain ways, but they don’t count in politics. In fact, a young man who has gone through the college course is handicapped at the outset. He may succeed in politics, but the chances are 100 to 1 against him.”  William L. Riordon: PLunkitt of Tammany Hall (1905; ed. New York, 1948), pp. 601.  

In his footnote to Plunkitt’s advice to budding NY politicians, Hofstadter writes:  

“One is reminded here of the techniques of the delightful Brooklyn Democratic leader Peter McGuiness. Challenged for the leadership of his district during the early 1920’s by a college graduate who maintained that the community should have a man of culture and refinement as its leader, McGuiness dealt with the new comer with a line that is a favorite of connoisseurs of political strategy. At the next meeting McGuiness addressed, he stood silent for a moment, glaring down at the crowd of shirtsleeved laborers and housewives in Hoover aprons until he had their attention. Then he bellowed, ‘A11 of yez that went to Yales or Cornells raise your right hands. . . . The Yales and Cornells can vote for him. The rest of yez vote for me.’  Richard Rovere: "The Big Hello in The American Establishment” (New York, 1962), p. 36. 

If Plunkit was the archbishop of anti-intellectualism, Hiram Evans, the imperial wizard of the Klu Klux Klan in 1926 may have been the Pope.  According to Hofstadter, Evens,

 “wrote a moving essay on the Klan s purposes, in which he portrayed the major issue of the time as a struggle between ‘the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock’ and the ‘intellectually mongrelized Liberals.’ All the moral and religious values of the ‘Nordic Americans,’ he complained, were being undermined by the ethnic groups that had invaded the country, and were being openly laughed at by the liberal intellectuals. ‘We are a movement,’ Evans wrote,  ‘of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock.

Our members and leaders are all of this class the opposition of the intellectuals and liberals who hold the leadership, betrayed Americanism, and from whom we expect to wrest control, is almost automatic.  This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being ‘hicks’ and ‘rubes’ and ‘drivers of second-hand Fords.’ We admit it. Far worse, it makes it hard for us to state our case and advocate our crusade in the most effective way, for most of us lack skill in language. . . .  

Every popular movement has suffered from just this handicap. . . .  

The Klan does not believe that the fact that it is emotional and instinctive, rather than coldly intellectual, is a weakness. All action comes from emotion, rather than from ratiocination. Our emotions and the instincts on which they are based have been bred into us for thousands of years; far longer than reason has had a place in the human brain. . . . They are the foundations of our American civilization, even more than our great historic documents; they can be trusted where the fine-haired reasoning of the denatured intellectuals cannot.’”  

"The Klan s Fight for Americanism," North American Review, Vol. CCXXIII ( March- April-May, 1926), pp. 38 ff. 

Evans’ screed may well be the “Bull Unum Sanctum moment” at the apex of anti-intellectualisms political power in America but there certainly have been no shortage of revivals since. In Progressive Wisconsin for example, the college and university friendly politician Robert Lafollette was eventually replaced by a backlash candidate that swore to “clean house” with respect to intellectual meddling in the State’s affairs. 

“The anti-intellectuals defeated La Follette’s Progressive successor,” says Hofstadter, “and returned to power with Emanuel L. Philipp, a railroad and lumber man. In his campaign Philipp featured anti-intellectualist denunciations of university experts, and called for a reduction in taxes, retrenchment in the university, and an end to its political ‘meddling.’ There must be, he said, a thorough house-cleaning at the university; socialism was gaining ground there, and ‘many graduates are leaving with ideas that are un-American.’

Still, Hofstadter reserves a space for his finest specimen of anti-intellectualism in political life by quoting Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois “who launched a long and ferocious diatribe against the expansion of governmental powers during the war, and particularly against ‘a government by professors and intellectuals.’” “This remarkable speech is replete with the clichés of anti-intellectualism, “says Hofstadter, “and though it can hardly be imagined to have had much influence at the time, it must be taken as a landmark in anti-intellectualist oratory.”

 "... a coterie of politicians gilded and plated by a group of theorizing, intolerant intellectuals as wildly impractical as ever beat high heaven with their phrase-making jargon. . . . They appeal to the iconoclast, the freak, the degenerate . . . essayists of incalculable horsepower who have essayed everything under the sun ... a fair sprinkle of socialists. . . . Everything will be discovered. . . . Psychologists with X-ray vision drop different colored handkerchiefs on a table, spill a half pint of navy beans, ask you in a sepulchral tone what disease Walter Raleigh died of, and demand the number of legumes without counting. Your memory, perceptive faculties, concentration, and other mental giblets are tagged and you are pigeonholed for future reference. I have seen those psychologists in my time and have dealt with them. If they were put out in a forest or in a potato patch, they have not sense enough to kill a rabbit or dig a potato to save themselves from the pangs of starvation. This is a government by professors and intellectuals. I repeat, intellectuals are good enough in their places, but a country run by professors is ultimately destined to Bolshevism and an explosion."

Congressional Record. 65th Congress, and session, pp. 9875, 9877 ( September 3, 1918).

No anthology of anti-intellectualism in American political life would be complete without a reference to Joseph McCarthy who never seems to have met an intellectual that he could not call a communist.

“Primarily it was McCarthyism which aroused the fear that the critical mind was at a ruinous discount in this country. Of course, intellectuals were not the only targets of McCarthy’s constant detonations. He was after bigger game. But intellectuals were in the line of fire, and it seemed to give special rejoicing to his followers when they were hit. His sorties against intellectuals and universities were emulated throughout the country by a host of less exalted inquisitors.” 

And yet there is more. Hofstadter moves on to a lengthy discussion of anti-intellectualism in the American business community. 

Commercial Anti-Intellectualism:

It is not difficult to hear echoes of things said today in the views of business leaders a hundred years ago, though on the whole, the makers of money have come to see the value in reaping benefits from the seekers of truth, particularly when it is technological in nature. But here is just one example of what commercial anti-intellectualism looks like from a hundred years ago.

"What we are opposed to, and what we appeal to you for protection against is a bill that will put our business in the hands of theorists, chemists, sociologists, etc., and the management and control taken away from the men who have devoted their lives to the upbuilding and perfecting of this great American industry” Chicago packer, Thomas E. Wilson, pleading before a Congressional committee in 1906 

I will provide more on commercial anti-intellectualism when covering anti-intellectualism in education as the two are so closely related.  

Educational Anti-Intellectualism: Perhaps one of the biggest ironies of the history of American anti-intellectualism is just how pervasive it is within the educational system itself. This part of the book was particularly fascinating. “What sort of educational reformer would be against the use of American schools for developing budding intellectuals?” I wondered.  

“Exhibit L. The following remarks have already been made famous by Arthur Bestor, but they will bear repetition. After delivering and publishing the address excerpted here, the author, a junior high-school principal in Illinois, did not lose caste in his trade but was engaged for a similar position in Great Neck, Long Island, a post which surely ranks high in desirability among the nation’s secondary schools, and was subsequently invited to be a visiting member of the faculty of the school of education of a Midwestern university.   

“Through the years we’ve built a sort of halo around reading, writing, and arithmetic. We’ve said they were for everybody . . . rich and poor, brilliant and not-so-mentally-endowed, ones who liked them and those who failed to go for them. The teacher has said that these were something ‘everyone should learn.’ The principal has remarked, ‘All educated people know how to -write, spell, and read.’ When some child declared a dislike for a sacred subject, he was warned that, if he failed to master it, he would grow up to be a so-and-so.  

The Three R s for All Children, and All Children for the Three R’s! That was it.  

We’ve made some progress in getting rid of that slogan. But every now and then some mother with a Phi Beta Kappa award or some employer who has hired a girl who can’t spell stirs up a fuss about the schools . . . and ground is lost. . . . When we come to the realization that not every child has to read, figure, write and spell . . . that many of them either cannot or will not master these chores . . . then we shall be on the road to improving the junior high curriculum.  

Between this day and that a lot of selling must take place. But it’s coming. We shall someday accept the thought that it is just as illogical to assume that every boy must be able to read as it is that each one must be able to perform on a violin, that it is no more reasonable to require that each girl shall spell well than it is that each one shall bake a good cherry pie.  

We cannot all do the same things. We do not like to do the same things. And we won’t. When adults finally realize that fact, everyone will be happier . . . and schools will be nicer places in which to live. . . .  

If and when we are able to convince a few folks that mastery of reading, writing, and arithmetic is not the one road leading to happy, successful living, the next step is to cut down the amount of time and attention devoted to these areas in general junior high-school courses. . . .   

One junior high in the East has, after long and careful study, accepted the fact that some twenty percent of their students will not be up to standard in reading and they are doing other things for these boys and girls. That’s straight thinking. Contrast that with the junior high which says, ‘Every student must know the multiplication tables before graduation.’

 A. H. Lauchner: "How Can the Junior High School Curriculum Be Improved?" Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary-School Principals, Vol. XXXV (March, 1951), pp. 299-301. Hofstadter has much more to say about anti-intellectualism in education but this post is long as it is and thus, I will simply devote a second blog post to the topic.

 

[i] “Suddenly the national distaste for intellect appeared to be not just a disgrace but a hazard to survival. After assuming for some years that its main concern with teachers was to examine them for disloyalty, the nation now began to worry about their low salaries. Scientists, who had been saying for years that the growing obsession with security was demoralizing to research, suddenly found receptive listeners. Cries of protest against the slackness of American education, hitherto raised only by a small number of educational critics, were now taken up by television, mass magazines, businessmen, scientists, politicians, admirals, and university presidents, and soon swelled into a national chorus of self-reproach.”

The eggheads v. the fatheads

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life REVIEW Part II – Business and Education Education

In a previous post, we looked at what Richard Hofstadter had to say about anti-intellectualism in American religion, politics, and business. In this post, we summarize his arguments about anti-intellectualism in American education. There is a certain irony here. How is it that the principle mechanism for socializing children into a love of truth-seeking can be commandeered and used to stifle the impulse altogether? I suspect that it is neither Hofdtadter’s nor my intent to make schools into academies of irrelevance that banish the curricula of the dollar-godded utilitarians entirely, but it is our intent to say that students should be encouraged and inspired to get interested in what interests them without having to justify the interest to their future potential employers.  

So, here are some examples from the history of anti-intellectualism in American education. Hoftadter starts with a gentleman by the name of Wiilliam Manning of North Billerica, Massachusetts, who published a 1798 pamphlet decrying the public expenditure of tax money on schools. For Manning, education was nothing more than an elitist weapon of class warfare. He saw no reason why a school teacher should be paid anything more than a low-cost day laborer. Hofstadert writes:

“Here, then, is the key to Manning’s educational strategy. Education was to be made cheap for the common man; and higher education, such as there was, would be organized simply to serve elementary education to provide inexpensive instructors for the common schools. "Larning . . . aught to be promoted in the cheepest and best manner possable" in such a way, that is, that "we should soone have a plenty of school masters & misstrisejs as cheep as we could hire other labour, & Labour & Larning would be connected together & lessen the number of those that live without work." 

“Advanced learning Manning considered to have no intrinsic value worth cultivating. Academies and classical studies that went beyond what was necessary "to teach our Children a b c" were "only to give imploy to gentlemens sons & make places for men to live without worke. For their is no more need for a mans haveing a knowledge of all the languages to teach a Child to read write & cifer than their is for a farmer to have the marinors art to hold plow.” 

Examples throughout American history abound.

 “The canons of the cult of experience required that the ambitious young man be exposed at the earliest possible moment to what one writer called ‘the discipline of daily life that comes with drudgery.’ Formal schooling, especially if prolonged, would only delay such exposure. The lumber magnate, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, concluded that the college man was ‘apt to think that because he is a college graduate he ought not be obliged to commence at the bottom of the ladder and work up, as the office boy does who enters the office when he is fourteen years of age.’” 

“On two matters there was almost no disagreement: education should be more "practical"; and higher education, as least as it -was conceived in the old-time American classical college, was useless as a back ground for business. Business waged a long, and on the whole successful, campaign for vocational and trade education at the high-school level and did much to undermine the high school as a center of liberal education. The position of the Massachusetts wool manufacturer who said that he preferred workers with only a common-school education, since he considered that the more learned were only preparing themselves for Congress, and who rejected educated workmen on the ground that he could not run his mill with algebra, was in no way unusual or extreme; nor was the argument of the industrial publicist Henry Carey Baird was the founder of the first publishing firm in America specializing in technical and industrial books. "Too much education of a certain sort," he protested in 1885, “such as Greek, Latin, French, German, and especially bookkeeping, to a person of humble antecedents, is utterly demoralizing in nine cases out of ten, and is productive of an army of mean-spirited "gentlemen" -who are above what is called a "trade" and who are only content to follow some such occupation as that of standing behind a counter, and selling silks, gloves, bobbins, or laces, or to "keep books. . . . Our system of education, as furnished by law, when it goes beyond what in Pennsylvania is called a grammar school, is vicious in the extreme, productive of more evil than good. Were the power lodged with me, no boy or girl should be educated at the public expense beyond what he or she could obtain at a grammar school, except for some useful occupation. ‘The high school’ of today must, as I believe, under an enlightened system, be supplanted by the technical school, with possibly ‘shops’ connected with it. ... We are manufacturing too many ‘gentlemen’ and ‘ladies,’ so called, and demoralization is the result. . . . ‘Whenever I find a rich man dying and leaving a large amount of money to found a college, I say to myself, ‘It is a pity he had not died while he was poor.’" 

Frederick Weyerhaeuser and Henry Carey Baird were not the only business interests that opposed an intellectual curriculum in the schools. The great industrialist, Andrew Carnegie also thought it was foolish to “leave no child behind” in schools. Though he donated money for libraries so that the meritorious could educate themselves, he apparently preferred his workers to have brains that obeyed more than they thought.  

“On the classical college curriculum he [Carnegie] was unsparing. It was a thing on which men ‘wasted their precious years trying to extract education from an ignorant past whose chief province is to teach us, not what to adopt, but what to avoid.’ Men had sent their sons to colleges ‘to waste their energies upon obtaining a knowledge of such languages as Greek and Latin, which are of no more practical use to them than Choctaw’ and where they were ‘crammed with the details of petty and insignificant skirmishes between savages.’ Their education only imbued them with false ideas and gave them ‘a distaste for practical life.’ ‘Had they gone into active work during the years spent at college they would have been better educated men in every true sense of that term.’ 

Even founders of prestigious schools like Stanford had dim views of the intellectual life of the intellectualized eastern colleges.  

“Leland Stanford was another educational philanthropist who had no faith in existing education. Of all the applicants for jobs who came to him from the East, the most helpless, he said, were college men. Asked what they could do, they would say ‘anything’ while in fact they had ‘no definite technical knowledge of anything,’ and no clear aim or purpose. He hoped that the university he endowed would overcome this by offering ‘a practical, not a theoretical education.’”  

Opposition to intellectual activity for its own sake in higher education also came from the American farmer. 

“As Ross points out, ‘the farmers themselves were the hardest to convince of the need and possibility of occupational training.’ When they did not resist the idea of such education, they resisted proposals that it have any university connections or any relation to experimental science. Separate farm colleges, severely utilitarian in purpose, would do. The Wisconsin Grange argued that each profession should be taught by its practitioners. ‘Ecclesiastics should teach ecclesiastics, lawyers teach lawyers, mechanics teach mechanics, and farmers teach farmers.’” 

Politicians, seeking approval and votes of such farmers mimic their attitudes towards the intellectual.  

“Some governors wanted to get as far away as possible from the tradition of liberal education represented by the classical colleges. The governor of Ohio wanted the instruction to be ‘plain and practical, not theoretically and artistically scientific in character’; the governor of Texas imagined that an agricultural college was ‘for the purpose of training and educating farm laborers’ The governor of Indiana thought that any kind of higher education would be a deterrent to honest labor.” 

News papers often picked up the refrain.  

“One paper called the agricultural colleges ‘asylums for classical idiots and political professors’ and another suggested that the necessary task was ‘to clean out the smug DJD’s and the pimply-faced Professors’ and put in their places men who have a lively sense of the lacks in learning among men and women who have to grapple daily with the world’s work in this busy age."

It is no wonder, Hofstadter notes in his day, that a President of Oklahoma University stated his desire to preside over a college that the football team could be proud of. At this point in Hofstadter’s book, he turns to anti-intellectualism in the elementary and secondary schools where this battle between “eggheads” and “fatheads” is settled. The chapter is entitled, “The School and the Teacher” and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the back-story to what is taking place in their own childrens’ schools.  

The fight over whether or not tax payers wanted to fund intellectual activity began even while the fight to publically fund schools at all was just concluding. Horace Mann had to sell the idea of public education in Massachusetts by insisting that it would be good for business and the republic. In some respects, schools were to be thought advisable if they taught students not to think.   

“Francis Bowen, Harvard’s professor of moral philosophy, concurred with Mann’s views; the New England school system, he said, looking backward in 1857, "had degenerated into routine, it was starved by parsimony. Any hovel would answer for a school-house, any primer would do for a text-book, any farmer s apprentice was competent to *teach school" American Journal of Education, Vol. IV (September, 1857), p. 14. 

In 1870, when the country was on the eve of a great forward surge in secondary education, William Franklin Phelps, then head of a normal school in Winona, Minnesota, and later a president of the National Education Association, declared:  'They [the elementary schools] are mainly in the hands of ignorant, unskilled teachers. The children are fed upon the mere husks of knowledge. They leave school for the broad theater of life without discipline; without mental power or moral stamina. . . . Poor schools and poor teachers are in a majority throughout the country. Multitudes of the schools are so poor that it would be as well for the country if they were closed. . . . They afford the sad spectacle of ignorance engaged in the stupendous fraud of self-perpetuation at the public expense. . . . Hundreds of our American schools are little less than undisciplined juvenile mobs.” 

In 1892 Joseph M. Rice toured the country to examine its school systems and reported the same depressing picture in city after city, with only a few welcome exceptions: education was a creature of ward politics; ignorant politicians hired ignorant teachers; teaching was an uninspired thing of repetitive drill. Ten years later, when the Progressive movement was barely under way, the New York Sun had a different kind of complaint:

 ‘When we were boys, boys had to do a little work in school. They were not coaxed; they were hammered. Spelling, writing, and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn. In these more fortunate times, elementary education has become in many places a vaudeville show. The child must be kept amused, and learns what he pleases. Many sage teachers scorn the old-fashioned rudiments, and it seems to be regarded as between a misfortune and a crime for a child to learn to read.’” 

“The tradition seems to have persisted well on into the nineteenth century, when we find this sad confession: "The man who was disabled to such an extent that he could not engage in manual labor who was lame, too fat, too feeble, had the phthisic or had fits or was too lazy to work well, they usually made schoolmasters out of these, and thus got what work they could out of them." 

"If a young man be moral enough to keep out of State prison, he will find no difficulty in getting approbation for a schoolmaster.” 

Some years later President Joseph Caldwell of the University of North Carolina waxed indignant about the recruitment of the school teachers of his state: ‘Is a man constitutionally and habitually indolent, a burden upon all from whom he can extract support? Then there is one way of shaking him off, let us make him a schoolmaster. To teach school is, in the opinion of many, little else than sitting still and doing nothing. Has any man wasted all his property, or ended in debt by indiscretion and misconduct? The business of school-keeping stands -wide open for his reception, and here he sinks to the bottom, for want of capacity to support himself. Has any one ruined himself, and done all he could to corrupt others, by dissipation, drinking, seduction, and a course of irregularities? Nay, has he returned from prison after an ignominious atonement for some violation of the laws? He is destitute of character and can not be trusted, but presently he opens a school and the children are seen flocking into it, for if he is willing to act in that capacity, we shall all admit that as he can read and -write, and cypher to the square root, he will make an excellent schoolmaster.” 

A vicious circle had been drawn. American communities had found it hard to find, train, or pay for good teachers. They settled for what they could get, and what they got was a high proportion of misfits and incompetents. They tended to conclude that teaching was a trade which attracted rascals, and, having so concluded, they were reluctant to pay the rascals more than they were worth. To be sure, there is evidence that the competent schoolteacher of good character was eagerly welcomed when he could be found, and soon earned a status in the community higher than that of his colleagues elsewhere; but it was a long time before any considerable effort could be made to improve the caliber of teachers generally.” 

“Here no doubt the American educational creed itself needs further scrutiny. The belief in mass education was not founded primarily upon a passion for the development of mind, or upon pride in learning and culture for their own sakes, but rather upon the supposed political and economic benefits of education. No doubt leading scholars and educational reformers like Horace Mann did care for the intrinsic values of mind. But in trying to persuade influential men or the general public of the importance of education, they were careful in the main to point out the possible contributions of education to public order, political democracy, or economic improvement.” 

“There is also some evidence that the anti-intellectualism I have already characterized in religion, politics, and business found its way into school practice. There seems to have been a prevailing concern that children should not form too high an estimate of the uses of mind.” A fifth reader of 1884 quoted Emerson’s Goodbye:

I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophists’ schools, and the learned clan;
For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet.  

Educational reformers were no doubt pleased with the progress that was to be made when children were required to attend school. But if their vision was to give all of the sort of education that the wealthy had typically given to their sires in the private schools of New England, they were to be sadly disappointed. Putting a hockey team on a stage will not make them ballet dancers. “Now, in an increasing measure,” writes Hofstadter,  

“secondary-school pupils were not merely unselected but also unwilling; they were in high school not because they wanted further study but because the law forced them to go. The burden of obligation was shifted accordingly: whereas once the free high school offered a priceless opportunity to those who chose to take it, the high school now held a large captive audience that its administrators felt obliged to satisfy. As an educational committee of the American Youth Commission -wrote in 1940: "Even where a pupil is of low ability it is to be remembered that his attendance at secondary school is due to causes which are not of his making, and proper provision for him is a right which he is justified in claiming from society."  What the High Schools Ought to Teach (Washington, 1940), pp. II-IA.

Hofstadter traces the cascade of effects that resulted from requiring all children to attend more school for more years.  

“As the years went by, the schools filled with a growing proportion of doubtful, reluctant, or actually hostile pupils. It is a plausible conjecture that the average level of ability, as well as interest, declined. It became clear that the old academic curriculum could no longer be administered to a high-school population of millions in the same proportion as it had been to the 359,000 pupils of 1890. So long as public education had meant, largely, schooling in the primary grades, the American conviction that everyone can and should be educated was relatively easy to put into practice. But as soon as public education included secondary education, it began to be more doubtful that everyone could be educated, and quite certain that not everyone could be educated in the same way. Beyond a doubt, change was in order. 

Moreover, the schools were under pressure not merely to fulfill the laws, but to become attractive enough to hold the voluntary allegiance of as large a proportion of the young for as long as they could. Manfully settling down to their assignment, educators began to search for more and more courses which, however dubious their merits by traditional educational standards, might interest and attract the young. In time they became far less concerned with the type of mind the high school should produce or with the academic side of the curriculum. (Boys and girls who wanted to go to college would hang on in any case; it was the others they had to please.) Discussions of secondary education became more frequently inter-larded with references to a new, decisive criterion of performance ‘the holding power of the school.’  

The need to accept large numbers with varying goals and capacities and to exercise for many pupils a custodial function made it necessary for the schools to introduce variety into their curricula.” 

In time, a watered down intellectualist approach turned from a necessary evil to a positive good. Hoftadter explains:  

“Far from conceiving the mediocre., reluctant, or incapable student as an obstacle or a special problem in a school system devoted to educating the interested, the capable., and the gifted, American educators entered upon a crusade to exalt the academically uninterested or un-gifted child into a kind of culture-hero [Think Ferris Beuller]. They were not content to say that the realities of American social life had made it necessary to compromise with the ideal of education as the development of formal learning and intellectual capacity. Instead, they militantly proclaimed that such education was archaic and futile and that the noblest end of a truly democratic system of education was to meet the child’s immediate interests by offering him a series of immediate utilities. The history of this crusade, which culminated in the ill-fated life-adjustment movement of the 1940’s and 1950’s, demands our attention; for it illustrates in action certain widespread attitudes toward childhood and schooling, character and ambition, and the place of intellect in life.” 

“The balance was tipping,” Hoftadter informs,  

“The high schools were no longer to be expected to suit the colleges; instead, the colleges ought to try to resemble or accommodate the high schools.” 

“In 1911, a new committee of the N.E.A., the Committee of Nine on the Articulation of High School and College, submitted another report, which shows that a revolution in educational thought was well on its way. The change in personnel was itself revealing. Gone were the eminent college presidents and distinguished professors of the 1893 report; gone, too, were the headmasters of elite secondary schools. The chairman of the Committee of Nine was a teacher at the Manual Training High School of Brooklyn, and no authority on any basic academic subject matter was on his committee, which consisted of school super intendents, commissioners, and principals, together with one professor of education and one dean of college faculties. Whereas the Committee of Ten had been a group of university men attempting to design curricula for the secondary schools, the new Committee of Nine was a group of men from public secondary schools, putting pressure through the N.E.A. on the colleges: ‘The requirement of four years of work in any particular subject, as a condition of admission to a higher institution, unless that subject be one that may properly be required of all high-school students, is illogical and should, in the judgment of this committee, be immediately discontinued.’" 

“The task of the high school, the Committee of Nine argued,’was to lay the foundations of good citizenship and to help in the wise choice of a vocation,’ but it should also develop unique and special individual gifts, which was ‘quite as important as the development of the common elements of culture.’ The schools were urged to exploit the dominant interests ‘that each boy and girl has at the time.’ The committee questioned the notion that liberal education should precede the vocational: ‘An organic conception of education demands the early introduction of training for individual usefulness, thereby blending the liberal and the vocational. . . .’ It urged much greater attention to the role of mechanic arts, agriculture, and ‘household science’ as rational elements in the education of all boys and girls. Because of the traditional conception of college preparation, the public high schools were responsible for leading tens of thousands of boys and girls away from the pursuits for which they are adapted and in which they are needed, to other pursuits for which they are not adapted and in which they are not needed. By means of exclusively bookish curricula false ideals of culture are developed. A chasm is created between the producers of material wealth and the distributors and consumers thereof. By 1918 the ‘liberation’ of secondary education from college ideals and university control seems to have been consummated., at least on the level of theory, even if not yet in the nation’s high-school curricula.” 

“In that year the N.E.A/s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education formulated the goals of American schools in a document about which Professor Edgar B. Wesley has remarked that ‘probably no publication in the history of education ever surpassed this little five cent thirty-two page booklet in importance.’ A This statement, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, was given a kind of official endorsement by the United States Bureau of Education, which printed and distributed an edition of 130,000 copies.” 

Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education made an anti-intellectual approach to education official policy. It insisted that  

“the high school placed too much emphasis on intensive pursuit of most subjects. Studies should be reorganized so that a single year of work in a subject would be ‘of definite value to those who go no further.’ This would make the courses ‘better adapted to the needs both of those who continue and of those who drop out of school.’” 

Insult followed injury. The report called on colleges to stop bullying high schools to teach subjects at levels that were too difficult for the common student.  

“The commission further argued that the colleges and universities should follow the example of the secondary schools in considering themselves obliged to become mass institutions and to arrange their offerings accordingly. ‘The conception that higher education should be limited to the few is destined to disappear in the interests of democracy,’ it said prophetically. This meant, among other things, that high-school graduates should be able to go on to college not only with liberal but with vocational interests, and that, once in college, they should still be able to take whatever form of education they can which affords ‘profit to themselves and to society.’ In order to accommodate larger numbers, colleges and universities should supplant academic studies to some degree with advanced vocational education.” 

“The commission quite reasonably urged that the high-school curriculum should be differentiated to offer a wide range of alternatives” says Hofstadter,  

“but its way of expressing this objective was revealing:  “The basis of differentiation should be, in the broad sense of the term, vocational, thus justifying the names commonly given, such as agricultural, business, clerical, industrial, fine-arts, and house hold-arts curriculums. Provision should be made also for those having distinctively academic interests and needs.” 

“Increasingly, the mental world of the professional educationist became separated from that of the academic scholar,” the author explains.  

“It is hard for an amateur, and perhaps even a professional in education, to know how much of this was justified. But two things it does seem possible to assert: first, that curricular change after 1910 was little short of revolutionary; and second, that by the 1940’s and 1950’s, the demands of the life-adjustment educators for the destruction of the academic curriculum had become practically insatiable.” 

“The old academic curriculum, as endorsed by the Committee of Ten, reached its apogee around 1910. In that year more pupils were studying foreign languages or mathematics or science or English - any one of these than all non-academic subjects combined. During the following forty-year span the academic subjects offered in the high-school curricula fell from about three fourths to about one fifth. Latin, taken in 1910 by 49 per cent of public high-school pupils in grades 9 to 12, fell by 1949 to 7.8 per cent. All modern-language enrollments fell from 84.1 per cent to 22 per cent. Algebra fell from 56.9 per cent to 26.8 per cent, and geometry from 30.9 per cent to 12.8 per cent; total mathematics enrollments from 89.7 per cent to 55 per cent. Total science enrollments, if one omits a new catch-all course entitled ‘general science’ fell from 81.7 per cent to 33.3 per cent; or to 54.1 per cent if general science is included. English, though it almost held its own in purely quantitative terms, was much diluted in many school systems.” 

“When the Committee of Ten examined the high-school curricula in 1893, it found that forty subjects were taught, but six of these thirteen were offered in very few schools, the basic curriculum was founded on twenty-seven subjects. By 1941 no less than 274 subjects were offered, and only 59 of these could be classified as academic studies. What is perhaps most extraordinary is not this ten-fold multiplication of subjects, nor the fact that academic studies had fallen to about one fifth the number, but the response of educational theorists: they were convinced that academic studies were still cramping secondary education. In the life-adjustment movement, which flourished in the late 1940’s and the 1950’s with the encouragement of the United States Office of Education, there occurred an effort to mobilize the public secondary-school energies of the country to gear the educational system more closely to the needs of children who - were held to be in some sense uneducable.” 

“Accordingly, life-adjustment educators soon became convinced that their high educational ideals should be applied not merely to the neglected sixty per cent: what was good for them would be good for all American youth, however gifted. They were designing, as the authors of one life-adjustment pamphlet quite candidly admitted, nothing less than ‘a blueprint for a Utopian Secondary School’ a school which, they added, ‘could be operated only by teachers of rare genius.’ As I. L. Kandel has sardonically remarked, the conviction of life adjustment was ‘that what is good for sixty per cent of the pupils attending high schools, and, according to reports, deriving no benefit from this plan, is also good for all pupils.’ These crusaders had thus succeeded in standing on its head the assumption of universality once made by exponents of the classical curriculum. Formerly, it had been held that a liberal academic education was good for all pupils. Now it was argued that all pupils should in large measure get the kind of training originally conceived for the slow learner. American utility and American democracy ‘would now be realized in the education of all youth.’ The life-adjustment movement would establish once and for all the idea that the slow learner is ‘in no sense’ the inferior of the gifted, and the principle that all curricular subjects, like all children, are equal. ‘There is no aristocracy of subjects,’ said the Educational Policies Commission of the N.E.A. in 1952, describing the ideal rural school. ‘Mathematics and mechanics, art and agriculture, history and home-making are all peers.’” 

Education for All American Youth, A "Further Look (Washington, 1952), p. 140. 

Consider the evidence Hofstadter was presenting in 1962:  

“Witness the case of the course in "Home and Family Living" required repetitively in one New York State community in all grades from seven to ten. Among the topics covered were: "Developing school spirit," "My duties as a baby sitter," "Clicking with the crowd," "How to be liked," "What can be done about acne?" "Learning to care for my bedroom," "Making my room more attractive." Eighth-grade pupils were given these questions on a true-false test: "Just girls need to use deodorants." "Cake soap can be used for shampooing." 

The end result is actually somewhat shocking.  

“In the name of utility, democracy, and science, many educators had come to embrace the supposedly uneducable or less educable child as the center of the secondary-school universe, relegating the talented child to the sidelines. One group of educationists, looking forward to the day when ‘the aristocratic, cultural tradition of education [will be] completely and finally abandoned’ had this to say of pupils who showed unusual intellectual curiosity: ‘Any help we can give them should be theirs, but such favored people learn directly from their surroundings. Our efforts to teach them are quite incidental in their development. It is therefore unnecessary and futile for the schools to, attempt to gear their programs to the needs of unusual people.’ In this atmosphere, as Jerome Bruner puts it, ‘the top quarter of public school students, from which we must draw intellectual leadership in the next generation, is perhaps the group most neglected by our schools in the recent past.’" 

“Possibly I exaggerate” says Hofstadter, “but otherwise it is hard to understand how an official of the Office of Education could have written this insensitive passage.”  

“A considerable number of children, estimated at about four million, deviate sufficiently from mental, physical, and behavioral norms to require special educational provision. Among them are the blind and the partially seeing, the deaf and the hard of hearing, the speech-defective, the crippled, the delicate, the epileptic, the mentally deficient, the socially maladjusted, and the extraordinarily gifted.” 

Hodstadter writes in the footnote to the above passage:  

"Lloyd E. Blanch, Assistant Commissioner for Higher Education, United States Office of Education, writing in Mary Irwin 9 ed.: American Universities and Colleges, published by the American Council on Education (Washington, 1956), p- 8; italics added. It has been pointed out that the author was, after all, proposing special programs for the gifted, among others, but this consideration does not seem to me to mitigate the implications of this bizarre list of categories.” 

In many respects it makes sense that a school needs to “fit” the children educated in it. But to assert that the child who wishes to pursue the development of a non-vocational intellect is a freak and a nuisance, is a painful irony for many. Imagine what it is like for an intellectually oriented child to attend school in a place where the principle proudly states: 

“For this world it is deemed important that the pupil learn, not chemistry, but the testing of detergents; not physics, but how to drive and service a car; not history, but the operation of the local gas works; not biology, but the way to the zoo; not Shakespeare or Dickens, but how to write a business letter.” 

Hofstadter concludes his book with a lengthy discussion of the philosophical approach of John Dewey. As interesting as it was to me, it tended to add words to an argument that I think was already finished and so I will leave it for some future post.

In conclusion, as I was reading, I began to wonder, “Why should there be an ‘anti-intellectual’ movement? Why should it bother someone practical that someone is out there spending their days learning “useless” impractical things? I suspect that it has something to do with the egalitarian values of a democracy that believes that no person should have more power or wealth than another. Maybe there is simply a notion that there is something pretentious and aristocratic about a small group of people looking down from the heights of their broader view of the world, thinking those below them as knowledge-peasants? As Hofstadter expresses it,

“Something was missing in the dialectic of American populistic democracy. Its exponents meant to diminish, if possible to get rid of, status differences in American life, to subordinate educated as well as propertied leadership.” 

Maybe just as there is building resentment for the “one-percenters” who control most of the money, there is something that is considered un-American about owning more than a fair share of understanding. Never-mind that the question that led to it was long-orphaned by the majority.  

Question for Comment: Do you think different kids need different schools? Or do we simply need schools that are better at meeting the needs of different kids?

"Our enemy has invited us to know more about it"

The Way of the Strangers REVIEW

“When someone says something too evil to believe,” writes Graeme Wood,

“one response is not to doubt their sincerity but to expand one’s capacity to imagine what otherwise decent people can desire. That, I have concluded, is the proper response to the Islamic State.”

Many of the Muslims that he interviews as background to his argument believe that it is permissible to murder him. In the Way of the Strangers is an intelligent and well-researched attempt to know who the theologians and propagandists behind ISIS recruitment efforts are. Who actually thinks it is a good idea to have a calif? And why? “The cognitive dissonance still jars me,” Wood writes,

“These are intelligent people with the most wicked beliefs. It’s tempting to try to resolve that tension by doubting their sincerity. Surely they don’t want genocide, surely they don’t want me dead. But I have looked for signs of a con, and if there is one, they are its victims and not its perpetrators.”

Letters between ISIS members, he says, “combine quiet dignity with complete moral insanity.” “The most monstrous squad of historical reenactors of all time” he calls them, referring to their desire to bring the seventh century back into style. And yet his book is based on years of thoughtful curiosity, making acquaintances and even friendships with those who support the idea of a Syrian Caliph.

This book did its work well as far as I am concerned. I came away from it feeling much more confident that I could teach about this small, but influential and destructive, pocket of the Islamic world. Perhaps it would help to simply list some of the questions that I was asking that it answers.

One: Why should we bother understanding the theology behind the Caliphate movement when these people are obviously just crazy psychopaths, right?

I gather that one of the reasons it is important to understand any enemy is to determine if enmity could be ended with conversation and diplomacy or, if, in reality, the animosity is based on something fundamental to what they believe. It is also important to be able to distinguish between Muslims who might be friends and Muslims who have no wish to be so we do not “snap-to-grid” with our judgements about all of them.  “This version of Islam bears only passing resemblance to the Islam practiced or espoused by most Muslims,” Graeme Wood explains.

“Mainstream Muslims resent that the Islamic State claims exclusive access to the truth about their religion, and in solidarity with their revulsion, many non-Muslims have averted their eyes and willfully ignored the particulars of the Islamic State’s religious claims. This studied ignorance has been a costly mistake. Our enemy has invited us to know more about it, and we have been so repulsed that we have declined the offer.”

Two: What do so many thousands of Muslims living in Europe find attractive about the establishment of a Caliphate in Syria?

The author explains that many Muslims find it difficult to live a Muslim life in secular Western societies. They fear the influence of western media and culture on their kids, much like the Pilgrims feared the influence of England and Holland on their kids. Muslims in England or France or Belgium or even secular Turkey or affluent Saudi Arabia are attracted to the idea of a place devoid of any non-Muslim influence. It is not altogether unlike the reasoning of some parents who take their kids out of public schools and put them in parochial schools (only to find that parochial schools are not perfect either). Wood calls it a “caliphate of the imagination.”

“In addition to the physical caliphate, with its territory and war and economy to run, there was a caliphate of the imagination to which all these people had already emigrated long before they slipped across the Turkish border. They believed the state that awaited them would purify their lives by forbidding vice and promoting virtue. Its leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, would unify the world’s Muslims, restore their honor, and allow them to reside in the only truly just society. Its Muslim citizens would enjoy perfect equality, free of the iniquities they had suffered due to differences of race, wealth, or nationality in the countries of their birth.”

Three: What theological differences create the division between pro-Caliphate Salafi’s and the wider Islamic community?

In some respects, the Salafis resemble some Protestant communities who reject all theological and cultural innovations that have attached themselves like barnacles to their vision of the “golden age” of the first century church as described in Acts. Their suspicion of “heresification” grows with every year subsequent to the prophet’s death. “Salafis take the Koran, the example of the Prophet, and the actions and beliefs of [the original Muslims of Mecca and Medina] as their primary sources of religious authority,” Wood writes, “and they reject the opinions of many Muslims who came later.” They “do not follow the prophet’s followers.”

Theologians of the Caliphate are “originalists.” When al-Baghdadi gave his “inaugural sermon” he took it almost word for word from the speech that his namesake, the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, gave after Muhammad died. This form of Islam wants to go back before there were any “denominations” in the Islamic world – before the Shiites, before the Sufis, before Ataturk, before the Wahabi’s or the brotherhood or the founding of Syria. They would prefer to have an Islamic world devoid of Muslim political or theological sub-units. “Among the special challenges for Salafi recruiters is the danger of accidentally recruiting someone for another form of Islam instead,” Graeme Wood explains,

“They need to welcome the recruit into the religion without exposing him to deviant traditions like Sufism, scholasticism [kalam] or Neoplatonism [falsafa] and much else that Salafis deride as reprehensible innovation. What most Muslims perceive as progress, Salafis consider disbelief. Hesham [one of Wood’s interviewees] had to usher me past these attractions like a parent trying to drag a kid past candy at a supermarket checkout. The siren song of Sufism, some Salafis say, is so seductive that Sufi shrines should be dynamited or bulldozed at the earliest opportunity. Tolerance is a danger to men’s souls.”

 Obviously, millions of Muslims around the world are attached to their historical interpretive schemas, just as many Christians today practice Christianity as Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians, or Pentecostals. They resent the claim of the jihadists that all innovations are heresies.

“Salafis offer three key replies. The first is contained in a hadith [tradition of the prophet not contained in the Qur’an] that Hesham quoted to me several times: ‘This community [ummah] will divide into seventy-three sects, all of which save one will go to Hell: the one that followed what I and my Companions are doing.’ Salafis take themselves to be the chosen sect [alfirqah al najiyyah], and they do not mind that their putative coreligionists detest their eccentricities.” Those who are fighting for the existence and expansion of the caliphate feel no embarrassment about condemning all but their strict construction of the pure faith.

“This practice of declaring self-described Muslims to be infidels is called takfïr [excommunication], and historically Muslims have refrained from it,” says Wood, “Those who leave Islam are theoretically subject to the death penalty. It is therefore a serious accusation.”  

I suspect that the reader can see where this is heading. ISIS is neither bashful about declaring other Muslims outside the fold nor squeamish about going to war with them. “The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,” one of Wood’s interviewees tells him, “said that not one in a thousand of his followers would join him in paradise.”  “Only the authority of the Koran and Sunna of the Prophet matter; precedent and prior interpretation count for little. An analogy to U.S. law will unavoidably fail in its particulars but may be useful as illustration: imagine if a bright man happened upon the U.S. Constitution as it existed in 1791 and tried to construct a legal system on that basis, without a jot of consideration for any of the Supreme Court opinions and pieces of legislation that followed in the two subsequent centuries. Bin’ali has undertaken a task of comparable boldness for Islam.”

“Every Muslim scholar to whom I have shown Bin’ali’s sermons has ended up exasperated—by his brashness, his violence, his rhetorical style. ‘Murakallaf,’ said one. (In plain English: “What a poseur.”) Some react with pained expressions. as if unexpectedly in the presence of loud bagpipe music, or a malodorous fellow passenger on public transit. How does an Islamic scholar argue with someone who denies that the last millennium of Islamic scholarship ever happened? At the same time, though, some will acknowledge his creativity and nerve. Bin’ali is citing scripture in a learned and brilliant way—just without obeisance to previous scholars.” 

Four: What makes Muslims in some countries so vulnerable to recruitment efforts?  

According to Wood, the problem is that defenders of the Caliphate are neither illiterate nor incoherent. Once they have won the argument that a thousand years of scholarship can and should be discarded, they are often on the rhetorical high ground. Imagine an argument in the Jewish community today that said that the work of centuries of rabbis can and should be ignored as they attempted to argue that Jews should deal with Palestinians like the Jews of the book of Joshua dealt with Canaanites. Imagine Christian theologians arguing that King David’s treatment of the men of Moab should define how a Christian leader deals out justice rather than appeals to the Sermon on the Mount (David lined Moabites on the ground and killed every third one).  What makes a modern Muslim vulnerable is his or her exposure to knowledge without understanding of it. “Still less capable of confronting Salafi counterarguments are secular-minded non-Salafi Muslim laymen,” Wood tells us,  

“The average lay Muslim is like the average layman of any faith: largely ignorant and prone to believe a sanitized version of it. The Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel has called this a ‘cotton-candy view of the religion,’ and notes that the view dissolves, with occasionally catastrophic psychological consequences, upon contact with the moral ambiguity of reality. Part of the task of Salafis who proselytize to fellow Muslims is to reach them at this stage of cognitive dissonance—torn between modern sensibilities and realization that slavery is part of the history and present of Islam—and convince them that the modem sensibilities must go. Some Salafis even go so far as to say they must cultivate love of slavery and other antique practices to remain Muslim.” 

What makes young people vulnerable is the traits of the internet itself. One does not need missionaries when they have youtube and it is entirely possible to speak to the idealism of youth through that medium, luring people into involvement in something that cannot be seen for what it is at a distance. “Mass illiteracy once protected religion from amateurism,” writes Wood,  “But now the gates to the nuclear facility have been breached, and hobbyists and high school students are playing with the fissile material. . . . They have youtube for a Sheikh.”  

Five: What makes ISIL a threat to be taken seriously?  

Back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Winston Churchill warned his government and country about the fundamental threat of Nazism. Many called him a warmonger. He insisted that the logical conclusion to be drawn from reading Mein Kompf was legitimate fear. I think something similar could be said of the theology of the Caliphate. It is not so much that al-Baghdadi wants to unify Islam. That is understandable. It is the type of Islam that he aspires to make the unifier. Bin-ali’s manifesto of the Islamic state, “This is Our Creed. This is Our Methodology” makes it an imperative to take the movement seriously. The Caliphate, says Wood, has “weaponized shame by declaring their jihad the only absolution.” They insist that the only way to be a Muslim of any kind, is to be their kind of Muslim. And that kind, is an incessantly militant one.   

“The Islamic State suggests backtracking to the fork in the path of history and taking the other route. It aspires to be a more religiously muscular Saudi Arabia, under less merciful management.”

“Accepting any fixed border—conceding that Islam's authority can be finite—is anathema. If the caliph consents to a longer-term peace or permanent border, he will be in error. Temporary peace treaties are renewable, but may not be applied to all enemies at once: the caliph must wage war to expand the domain of Islam, or remove obstacles to its practice at least once a year. He may not rest or he will fall into a state of sin.”

“Consider how Muslims (or, for that matter, Christians) believe that God deals with those who die without hearing about the one true religion. Their souls are neither obviously saved nor definitively condemned. Similarly, Musa said, the Muslim who acknowledges one omnipotent God and prays, but who dies without pledging himself to a caliph, has placed himself in a middle space between Islam and disbelief. He has failed to live a fully Islamic life and dies in a state of sin.”

 “On the topic of slavery, too, he conceded the facts—the Islamic State practices slavery, and slavery (including sex slavery) has a scriptural and historical basis in Islam—without conceding the interpretation. What the Islamic State was doing, he said, is slavery. ‘It's getting someone who was free and forcing him to not be free. But Musa viewed this as a mercy. He used an argument (associated in U.S. jurisprudence with Oliver Wendell Holmes) that "the greater includes the lesser.” If it's permissible to do something, then it's permissible to do lesser versions of the same thing. To the Islamic State, killing infidels is patently permissible. So what's wrong with keeping them alive to do chores around the house?”

It is not difficult to argue that ISIL is our present generation’s version of Fascism. It cannot be appeased into extinction. Some ideas may not be held by many people but they can have an influence far greater than the numbers of the original group of believers. Graeme Wood has done us all a service by spending so much time and effort talking to the people who can explain something difficult to understand. I highly recommend his book.

Question for Comment: If left alone, would a society that intentionally replicated 7^th century Mecca collapse under the unsustainable weight of its own ideas?