Judaism and the Hellenistic Experience: A Classical Model for Living in Two Cultures
Ever since the emancipation of the Jews from their medieval disabilities and restraints, individual Jews, and Judaism as a whole,…
Moses Hadas 1956-08-01If, in looking back on the long Jewish past, the Hellenistic era appears to be more directly relevant to contemporary Jewish problems than any other period, it is because it was during that period that Jews first had to come to terms with the challenge of Europeanism. The responses they formulated at that time are classic: that is, they can serve as a gauge by which to assess later responses to the same challenge, and perhaps to correct deviations which have proven too extreme. This function of the classic—as a standard by which to understand and measure the present, and as a means of self-criticism—is universally acknowledged in the realms of philosophy and morality, literature and politics; the classical paradigm for the Jewish response to the world of Western humanism may be equally serviceable.
Hellenism became a problem to the Jews, and to all other non-Greek peoples, when Alexander the Great appeared on the scene and conquered the empire built by the Persians in the Near East. The cultural revolution set off thereby was as momentous for the life and thought of the ancient world as the discovery of America or the new Ptolemaic cosmology was for modern times. Prior to Alexander the world had been made up of disparate and isolated polities, each absorbing the total energies and loyalties of its members. Alexander’s conquests made it impossible for the individual to rest in the belief that his polis was the center of the universe. With his cozy shelter stripped away, he was compelled to re-examine his loyalties and find his place in an enormously expanded world. It is for this reason that Hellenistic art, literature, and philosophy accord a new importance to the individual. And the essence of Alexander’s policy as well as of Stoic doctrine—an ecumenical ideal, in which distinctions of race and geography would vanish and all men become members one of another—reflected the revolutionary changes.
It has been customary among scholars to consider these changes mainly in their Greek manifestations, which are indeed easy to read. But the “barbarian” peoples on the periphery of the Greek world underwent a revolution at least as drastic. The new civilization they encountered through the agency of Alexander’s armies was not only more attractive in many ways than their own, but (a more exigent argument) it had proved more successful in terms of political power. Consequently, they were faced with a need to adjust to the Greek spirit and with a temptation to assimilate to it, both of which impulses were encouraged by the program of Hellenization that Alexander and some of his successors promoted.
The main feature of this program was the establishment of cities on the Greek pattern, either in new foundations (as at Alexandria) or superimposed on old cities (Jerusalem itself was for a time officially called “Antioch”). Now, since the central institution of the Greek city was the gymnasium (which embraced literature as well as athletics), and “graduation” from the gymnasium was an indirect prerequisite for citizenship, many “barbarians” in Alexander’s empire—including Jews—as citizens of the Hellenistic cities, must have been subjected to at least a minimum of Greek learning. (Needless to say, there were no Egyptian or Syrian gymnasia in Greece.)
The traditional picture of free cultural give and take between the Greeks and the conquered peoples is therefore wrong. In this respect the position of the “barbarian” world was analogous to that of the Far East in our own day. China and India, proud and tenacious of their own traditions as they may be, have had to adopt not only Western technology but with it a degree of superficial Westernization in dress and habits of thought, at the peril of complete mummification. But how deeply have Confucius or the Bhagavad-Gita penetrated Western thought? Even later Hellenistic borrowings of religious elements which we tend to regard as most typically Near Eastern are likely to be originally Greek ideas naturalized in the East and then returned to the West with different or heightened emphasis.
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Yet communication between Greeks and Hebrews was much easier than the traditional notion has it. It has frequently been argued that the difference in spirit between the two peoples was so radical as to make the one utterly unintelligible to the other. The common contrast of “Hellenism” and “Hebraism,” made famous by Matthew Arnold, assumes that all Greeks were rationalist worldlings and the Hebrews all unworldly pietists. Both pictures are certainly wrong. Though the most valuable part of the Greek legacy may indeed be the rationalism of a few of their thinkers, the truth is that the mass of Greeks—as books like E. R. Dodd’s The Greeks and the Irrational and Walter Otto’s The Homeric Gods make clear—were as continuously mindful of the supernatural as any people, and ritual observance entered into every aspect of their life. Nor, on their side, were the Hebrews wholly and exclusively preoccupied with their religion: if they had been, why should the prophets have found it constantly necessary to chide backsliders, or how could the Maccabees have won a war? There were of course fundamental differences between Greek and Hebrew religious beliefs, but they were not so profound as to make communication impossible. The real difference was not between the godly and the ungodly, but between two mixtures of godly and ungodly.
The spread of Hellenism among the Jews of the pre-modern Diaspora has always been acknowledged, but, again, the very recognition of this had led to another misconception—that the Diaspora Jews, by virtue of their contact with Hellenism, were a “Reform” minority, while those in Palestine, by virtue of their “purity,” were the Orthodox. But the truth is that even before the Roman conquest, Diaspora Jewry was more numerous than Palestinian, and, furthermore, it never regarded itself as in any sense deviationist or under lesser obligation to religious tradition. It is not even certain that the Diaspora Jews participated more fully in non-Jewish life than their co-religionists in Palestine. But in any case, they never denied the validity of the religious law authoritative in their day, and they certainly never entertained the notion that their participation in “Hellenism” made them inferior as Jews.
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Conversely, the traditional image of the Palestinian Jew as an unworldly devotee utterly untouched by anything outside the confines of Judaism is no less distorted. Jewish life in Palestine appears to have been far more deeply penetrated by Hellenism than has been suspected. Professor Erwin Goodenough’s Jewish Symbols in the Graeco-Roman Period presents a mass of archaeological evidence to show that this was so—even in connection with synagogue buildings and burials, where pagan intrusions would have been thought impossible. And, as Dupont-Sommer has shown, the recently discovered “Manual of Discipline” among the Cave Scrolls, which was the code of the Essene-like brotherhood at Qumran, reveals details of organization and practice markedly like those of Pythagoreanism.
Indeed, all the non-rabbinic Jewish literature of the intertestamentary period reveals similar influence. Because rabbinic literature, which disparages or more often disregards the Greek influence, is looked upon as the main stream of Jewish teaching, scholars have dismissed that influence as insignificant. But we know that strong Hellenistic influences were felt in Palestine, and the very slighting of these in rabbinic literature may well represent a purposeful closing of the ranks after the fall of Jerusalem (70 c.e.), to combat a latitudinarian tendency in religion that was growing more and more dangerous. Philo, who made the first attempt in Jewish history to reconcile the Bible with Greek philosophy, cannot have been unique; he must have had peers and a considerable audience, even in Palestine itself. Rabbinic literature betrays no hint that such interests existed. It is hard to believe that this silence is accidental.
The most explicit testimony to the spread of Hellenism among the Jews is in just those books which narrate (in Greek!) what has been regarded as Judaism’s war to the death against Greek domination. From I and II Maccabees it is clear that Hellenism had made great inroads, at least among the urban aristocracy, before the Maccabean insurrection against Antiochus (the revolt commemorated in the festival of Chanukah). That insurrection seems to have been as much motivated by nationalist (if the distinction is not too anachronistic) as by religious considerations. Religion, however, was used by Judah Maccabee as the battle-cry to rally the conservative rural and artisan classes to his standard and to consolidate the resistance against Antiochus. Antiochus’s anti-religious decrees were promulgated after the insurrection broke out.
When the Maccabees had won and Judea was liberated from alien domination, the tie that had held such disparate groups together relaxed, and each went its own way. And when religious tolerance was secured, the pietist group, apparently a minority, withdrew from the struggle and the nationalist group alone proceeded to the next step of attaining political sovereignty. The chief concern of the Maccabean rulers from that point on was to win for Judea a respectable position as a Hellenistic kingdom among other Hellenistic kingdoms; religion seems to have been taken into account only as it identified the separateness of the Jewish nationality. That is why the Maccabean kings and priests are so cavalierly dealt with by the rabbis; Judah himself is nowhere mentioned in their literature. Vis-à-vis the Greeks, the Jews—both under the Maccabees and in the Diaspora—were a “barbarian” people like any other, and they reacted to the impact of Hellenism in the same way as the other “barbarian” peoples of the Near East did: with the desire to participate as fully as possible in Hellenism, while at the same time salvaging the largest possible amount of native tradition. The motivation for the first impulse is obvious: to deny Hellenism was to shut oneself off from the main stream of civilization. But non-Hellenes would still be despised (and might despise themselves) as barbarians, and therefore to bolster their own self-esteem and perhaps convince authentic Hellenes of their antiquity and high civilization, all the ancient peoples that had lost their sovereignty—Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and Jews—wrote books to glorify their past.
These books regularly set forth the ancient military prowess and wise laws of the people in question, frequently claiming (and this shows which way the wind blew) that the Greeks themselves, through Orpheus or Plato, had learned from them. Except for a few of the Jewish works of this nature (preserved not by Jews but by the Church), these apologetic writings are known to us only from fragments, but it is clear that the tenor of all of them was cultural survival within Hellenism. Though none of the peoples concerned translated Greek literature or presented Greek culture in their own language, all gave their native traditions a Greek dress and sought to make them acceptable to Greek audiences. (The significant exception was burgeoning Rome, which, though it too was a cultural province of Hellenism, translated Greek into Latin.)
A clear illustration of this tendency is Aristeas to Philocrates, a Jewish work written probably in Alexandria about the middle of the 2nd century b.c.e. Its ostensible, and probably principal, object was to describe the genesis of the Septuagint translation of the Pentateuch, but surely a collateral purpose was to set forth a desirable mode of relationship to the Gentile world. When King Ptolemy writes the Jewish High Priest asking for a panel of translators, he addresses him as a full equal, and the translators are received at his court with the highest courtesy. At the dinner parties given in their honor their dietary usages are respected—the King’s steward has learned to respect the preferences of various guests—and their competence in philosophy arouses the admiration of the pagan philosophers present.
The object of all this is clearly to demonstrate to Jews, and to any pagans who might read Aristeas, that the most highly regarded of all Hellenistic kings valued the Jews and treated them as equals; but it also served, surely, to show the Jews that it was possible to share in the intellectual and even social life of their Hellenistic environment without compromising their religion.
A similar object will explain a puzzling pair of letters preserved in the twelfth chapter of I Maccabees. In about 144 b.c.e. (that is, just about the time of the composition of Aristeas) the Maccabee ruler Jonathan wrote, on behalf of the Jews, to “their brethren the Spartans . . . to renew the friendship and brotherhood” which had subsisted between the two peoples a century before. In witness of their old relations, Jonathan subjoined a copy of the letter which a Spartan king of the early 3rd century b.c.e. had supposedly addressed to a High Priest. The letter began as follows: “Arius king of the Spartans to Onias the chief priest, greetings: It hath been found in writing concerning the Spartans and Jews that they are brethren and that they are of the stock of Abraham; and now since this has come to our knowledge ye shall do well to write to us of your prosperity.”
There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of Jonathan’s own letter, but it does seem unlikely that a Spartan king would claim descent from Abraham. Yet Jonathan’s chancellery need not have forged Arius’s letter; it is altogether probable that the letter, spurious as it is, was already in existence, possibly as a part of a larger pseudepigraphon. The motive for the pseudepigraphon, as for Jonathan’s own letter, is easy to explain; new and weak polities in the eastern Mediterranean regularly claimed kinship with older or stronger peoples, as the people of the Troad, for example, claimed Roman protection somewhat later on the ground that Aeneas came from Troy. The intended audience of the pseudepigraphon would be mainly Jewish, and, as in the case of Aristeas, its aim may well have been not only to persuade Greeks that Jews were respectable, but to persuade Jews that Greeks were too: for if Spartans were likewise descended from Abraham, the Jews might legitimately adopt some of their usages. Professor Elias Bickerman has shown that the Maccabees did in fact adopt certain Greek administrative procedures, and the claim of kinship may have helped make them acceptable.
(This same wish to present one’s own traditions in the most favorable light and to assimilate them to the dominant culture appears in the writings of other non-Hellenic peoples. In the Ethiopian Romance of Heliodorus [circa 2nd century c.e.] we read of an Ethiopian maiden Whose surpassing beauty and virtue made her a suitable bride for no less a Hellene than one who traced his descent through a line including Achilles and a Gymnosophist priest who was so wise and saintly that he was received with high respect at Delphi itself. So skillfully written is the novel that the casual reader never suspects a propagandistic motive, but there can be no doubt that at least a subsidiary objective of the book was to win credit for a despised people and an obscure cult, and perhaps show the minority group that the Greeks were not always unappreciative.)
Administrative innovations were not the only Greek things that Jews found acceptable. In the Jewish spiritual life of the last pre-Christian century, two distinct movements took shape: the legalism which developed into what is called normative Judaism; and the apocalyptic speculations of Messianic triumph out of which Christianity arose. Both have been regularly deduced from Scriptural sources; legalism ultimately from the Mosaic legislation, and apocalyptic from isolated passages in the later prophets, with touches derived from the Babylonian captivity. But the differences between the developed legalist and apocalyptic tendencies and their presumed sources can be quite easily explained by the influence of Plato, who was the one Greek thinker familiar to all the Middle East.
The great monument of legalism is of course the Talmud, but whereas the prophets had regularly communicated truth by exhortation and pleading, with the cachet “Thus saith the Lord,” the rabbis arrived at truth by what can only be described as a process of dialectic. If we seek for an external cause to explain the change from one mode to the other, none is so plausible as the dialectic of Plato. In apocalyptic visions of “the end of days,” Platonic influence would seem even more tangible. There are adumbrations of the genre, to be sure, in the prophets, but the Platonic “myths,” and especially the vision of Er at the end of the Republic (which may itself have been influenced by Eastern sources), are actually complete apocalypses, very like the Jewish examples in conception and imaginative elaboration.
The Platonic touch may be perceptible in the constitution of the Maccabean monarchy itself. The Maccabees were not in the High Priestly line, and certainly not in the Davidic succession, and their sovereignty had to be legitimized. There were other new dynasties which required justification, and representatives of the various philosophical schools busily wrote treatises Peri Basileias (“On Kingship”) to provide them with a rationale. A favorite solution was to make the king nomos empsychos, “law incarnate,” which is an echo of the Platonic authoritarianism set forth in the Republic and the Laws. On this point archaeology provides an interesting commentary. Our earliest pictorial representations of the Ark in which the Scrolls of the Torah are kept show a gabled structure upon a platform mounted on wheels; Hellenistic kings carried their statutes, which were the symbols of their authority, in just such structures when they traveled to hold court. Innovations like these cannot have been imposed by an external authority but must have been adopted voluntarily to meet new situations; and works like Aristeas, or the pseudepigraphon of which the correspondence in I Maccabees was probably a part, would offer a justification for them.
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The rapprochement with Hellenism which Aristeas advocated for Egyptian Jews, and which was certainly practiced in Antioch and doubtless reflected in Palestine itself, was halted by the Romans and by special measures taken by the Jews. Whether, and to what extent, the second factor was connected with the first is debatable. Egypt became a Roman province after the battle of Actium (31 b.c.e.), and at once the Jews of Egypt, who had enjoyed de facto if not de jure equality, were placed under certain disabilities. From this period we have another Greek-Jewish book written in Alexandria, the so-called Third Book of the Maccabees, Which seems to be an intentional refutation of Aristeas. The story told here is that a Ptolemy had ordered all the Jews in his realm to embrace paganism on pain of death, and that his attempts to destroy them, when they proved intransigent, were miraculously baffled. The position now, in other words, is that no compromise whatever can be made with pagans or paganism.
But in neither Aristeas nor in III Maccabees is the Egyptian Jewish community envisaged as other than a permanent “orthodox” group. Widely as the two works may differ as to the range of permissible assimilation, the guiding objective of each still remains constant: participate in the life of the general community as fully as possible and retain the fullest possible loyalty to native tradition.
During the last century b.c.e., Judean kings were as ruthless and unprincipled in implementing their secular ambitions as kings anywhere have been. Independence ended in 63 b.c.e., when Pompey entered the Holy of Holies and reorganized the internal administration. Opposition to domestic tyranny and alien domination centered in pietist groups, and the Pharisees, who had been subversives (their title signifies “separatists”) under Jannaeus and Herod, moved, in effect, from the left to the center of the political spectrum. When Titus (with Philo’s nephew as his chief of staff) destroyed Jerusalem in 70 c.e. and even the illusion of sovereignty was extinguished, the Pharisees created a new thing in the world, a para-governmental polity based on religion—in effect a church. It exercised authority over a large area of the lives of its communicants, sent official representatives to carry its mandates and collect its tribute in a far-flung Diaspora, and could use excommunication to enforce conformity.
So long as there had been a secular Jewish government, however feeble, loyalty to Judaism need not have been exclusively religious; a man who lived by humanist ideals was none the less loyal. But when the religious became the sole authority, humanism became treasonable. This explains why synagogues and sepulchers could no longer bear pagan decorative motifs or Greek inscriptions, why Greek “wisdom” became anathema and Philo descended into oblivion, why the day the Septuagint was made was called accursed. The elements out of which normative Judaism was built had long been in existence, and had been shaped into similar structures under King Josiah in 621 b.c.e., and under Ezra in the 5th century; but it was the structure of normative Judaism erected in the 1st century that endured without essential change to modern times. Perhaps with less heroic measures Judaism would not have survived, but the heavy cost was the sacrifice of humanism.
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Whether because like challenges evoke like responses, or simply by imitation, the Catholic Church developed an ecclesiastical polity that was equally hostile to humanism. In the Senate house at Rome there stood a statue of Victory which was in fact little more than a symbol of Rome. The statue was removed by Constantine in 357, restored by Julian called the Apostate, and again removed by Gratian in 382. The humanist sympathizers, with Symmachus as their spokesman, pleaded that the statue need offend no man’s religion, for it was a nomen (name, symbol) rather than a numen (divinity), and as such all men could acknowledge its worth; it symbolized the cultural values which mankind had accumulated over the centuries and of which Rome was the guardian. The powerful St. Ambrose intervened, the humanists’ plea went unheeded, and Europe entered the Dark Ages.
An objective spectator finds the emergence of a powerful and authoritarian church out of the simple and gentle teachings of the Gospels paradoxical. Perhaps the transformation in Judaism which took place at the same time is no less so.
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Judaism and the Hellenistic Experience: A Classical Model for Living in Two Cultures
Must-Reads from Magazine
The Disappearance of Desire
The transgender movement’s missing element
Sohrab Ahmari 2018-03-14
But these things take time. It took a bloody civil war to abolish slavery, but de jure racial apartheid persisted for another century after Appomattox. Forty-six years separated the Stonewall Riots in 1969 from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision, which asserted a right to gay marriage in the Constitution.
Compared with those examples, acceptance of the transgender movement is proceeding at meteoric speed. Transgenderism has moved swiftly from the margins of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to the forefront of public consciousness. In just a few short years, mainstream institutions have come to accept, in toto, the transgender movement’s claims. States and the federal government under President Obama harmonized public-accommodations rules with the goals of the movement. Many Americans are celebrating this as the latest civil-rights cause, while others have found themselves going along, not least because any challenge to those claims is all but certain to invite the fury of an energetic activist class.
Hang on a minute.
The trans movement is asking Americans to accept and indeed to make their lives and their perceptions of reality conform to a set of extraordinary ideas based on very little debate. These claims are often put forth in the language of psychiatry and psychology, and they implicate the lives of real people, many of whom suffer genuine, sometimes unbearable anguish. Which good American can say no to the cries of a suffering minority, especially when they are amplified by scientific authority?
The science isn’t there yet, in point of fact. The case for accepting and advancing the cause of transgenderism is, at root, a radical philosophical argument—one that goes to the heart of what it means to be human. Accepting the trans movement’s argument requires us to lend credence to an extreme form of mind-matter dualism, and involves severing the links between bodily sex, gender identity, and erotic desire.
But first: What do the activists claim? If there is one unshakeable tenet, it is that gender identity and expression—a person’s self-concept as a gendered being and how that person outwardly manifests it—are different from the sex organs that have distinguished male from female since the emergence of the species. They argue that while a physician might “assign” a sex to a newborn, that label may well be at odds with the baby’s true gender. As the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) puts it in a guide for journalists, a transgender person is one “whose sex assigned at birth is different from who they know they are on the inside.” The term applies to those who are assigned the male sex at birth but whose innate sense tells them they are women, and vice versa. It also includes those “who do not fit in the distinct and opposite binary of male and female.”
The possession of sex organs has thus been deemed factually irrelevant. Instead, gender identity is based in the innate sense of the person himself or herself. A transgender woman is a woman, and a transgender man is a man—period, the activists say. Here is the HRC: “Contrasting transgender people with ‘real’ or ‘biological’ men and women is a false comparison. They are real men and women, and doing so contributes to the inaccurate perception that transgender people are being deceptive when, in fact, they are being authentic and courageous.”1 Thus, according to the activists, transitioning—whether by medical or social means or both—isn’t a process of becoming but of living out who transgender people really are.
This view of subjective gender identity as the unimpeachable guide to whether someone is male or female (or both or neither) has gained currency among some clinicians. In his book When Harry Became Sally, the Heritage Foundation scholar Ryan T. Anderson quotes the Duke University pediatrician Deanna Adkins to the effect that “it is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for the purposes of classifying someone as male or female.” I will return to these assertions shortly. For now, it suffices to note that the activists aren’t entirely wrong when they boast that their claims enjoy broad support among psychiatrists and psychologists.
At the same time, the activists hold—and this is their second major tenet—that gender itself is largely a social construct, since it is society that labels various traits or characteristics “masculine” or “feminine.” In a pamphlet addressed to loved ones of transgender people, the advocacy group Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, or PFLAG, defines gender as “a set of social, psychological, or emotional traits, often influenced by societal expectations, that classify an individual as male, female, a mixture of both, or neither.” Gender identity and expression, therefore, are infinitely fluid and plastic, subject to change over time, and existing on a spectrum that encompasses “a whole range of identities,” per PFLAG.
The third tenet is that gender identity and sexual desire have nothing to do with each other. According to a model school-district transgender policy drawn up by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, sexual orientation is “a person’s romantic and/or physical attraction to people of the same or opposite gender or other genders. Transgender and gender nonconforming people may have any sexual orientation.” PFLAG likewise bifurcates gender identity and sexual preference: “It is important to note that gender identity neither relates to, nor determines, sexual orientation….People who are transgender can also identify as gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, or queer.” The “focus” of transgender people’s decision to transition isn’t sexual orientation but gender identity. “Their internal sense of gender does not correspond with their biological sex, regardless of their attraction to other people.”
Now we have the necessary elements to put together the vision of the human person offered by the trans movement. Each person has a strong innate sense of gender that, according to the activists, may or may not align with his or her physical sex. When the two don’t align, we are dealing, in essence, with brains or minds that are trapped in bodies with the wrong sex organs.2 It is incumbent on the rest of us, then, to recognize the “true” self that is so trapped and help it break free from the prison of the body.
This is a profoundly metaphysical, even spiritual, vision.
As the Princeton philosopher Robert George has written, today’s trans activists hold “an understanding of the human being—an anthropology—that sharply divides the material or bodily, on the one hand, and the spiritual or mental, on the other.” And more than that, they posit that the mind is superior to the body—a radical but logical extension of Rene Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” For their part, both George and Anderson characterize the trans anthropology as a contemporary version of Gnosticism, the ancient Christian heresy. But it is also a postmodern anthropology, in that it is on a warpath against traditional sexual categories as well as objectively knowable truth. The trapped mind, the activists say, trumps the Book of Genesis and modern biology. Can it?
Let us focus on the latter. Biological science tells us that sexual differentiation among human beings starts at the chromosomal level—X and Y. It is present at the moment of conception. The sex binary, in other words, is literally written into our code. A minuscule number of unfortunates are born with disorders of sexual development (intersex people and the like). But as Anderson argues, these cases are no more an argument against the essential nature and function of human sexuality—reproduction—than congenital heart disease is an argument against the essential function of the cardiovascular system.
How can a mind or a brain defy these iron laws? Or how can a mind know intimately a state of being of which it has never had bodily experience? How can a male be a female from birth, or know he is female from birth, when he has no knowledge at birth of what a female is? This is the metaphysical leap transgender theory asks us to make—that we can know something that is entirely external to our bodies, our experience, and our knowledge.
Trans activists and their medical allies point to some cross-gender features in the brains of transgender people to suggest that being transgender has neurobiological roots. Yet there is scant empirical evidence for this. Surveying the literature, Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins University noted in a 2016 study published in the New Atlantis that there is, at best, “inconclusive evidence and mixed findings regarding the brains of transgender adults.” They add that “there are no serial, longitudinal, or prospective studies looking at the brains of cross-gender identifying children who develop to later identify as transgender adults.”
The studies that do identify a brain connection tend to suffer from small sample sizes, the absence of control groups, and other methodological defects, according to Mayer and McHugh.3 Then, too, they rarely take into account neuroplasticity—the possibility that transgender people’s brains differ from those of people of their own biological sex precisely because they have spent years thinking and acting in cross-gender ways, not the other way around. In the absence of rigorously designed, long-term studies, Mayer and McHugh concluded, it is difficult to posit “causal relationships between brain morphology, or functional activity, and the later development of gender identity different from biological sex.”
That leaves the door open to psychological or psychosocial theories of the transgender condition. Only, the activist movement hounds anyone who questions the trapped-in-the-wrong-body theory or who puts forward alternative explanations for why some people change their gender.
T hat is what happened to J. Michael Bailey. Once an academic superstar, the uber-liberal researcher lost his psychology-department chair at Northwestern University and was turned into a professional pariah after activists raised a firestorm over claims he made in his 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen. The book’s thesis was that, at least in some cases, transgender identity and sexual preference are intimately linked. “One cannot understand transsexualism without studying transsexuals’ sexuality,” began the paragraph that landed Bailey in hot water. “Transsexuals lead remarkable sex lives. Those who love men become women to attract them. Those who love women become the women they love.”4Bailey’s book drew on the work of Ray Blanchard, a Canadian-American sexuality researcher after whom Blanchard’s transsexualism typology is named. Blanchardians hold that there are, in fact, two groups of male-to-female transgender people, distinguished by their objects of desire. One set consists of the “extremely feminine gay men” (Bailey), who struggle to succeed as men in a sexual market that prizes masculinity. They transition because they believe, not without reason, that they are more likely to attract sexual partners as “women.”
The others, known as autogynephiles, are less concerned with attracting partners, because their “attraction is to the women that they would become,” according to Bailey. As boys, autogynephiles exhibit sex-typical male behaviors. When they grow up, they take on masculine careers, marry, and have children. But around puberty, they begin secretly cross-dressing and masturbating, an encounter with the “woman” in the mirror that redirects their heterosexuality—away from real women and toward themselves. Some take their obsession no further than cross-dressing. Others transition and take on new personas, such as “Caitlyn Jenner.”
You can see why this theory would enrage transgender activists. It implies that a subset of trans people is motivated by sexually opportunistic, if rational, reasons to alter their bodies. And it characterizes others as victims of disordered heterosexuality. Though it may appear bizarre at first glance, the Blanchardian approach is far more intuitive than the trans orthodoxy, which has little to say about the sex lives of transgender people. Blanchard’s typology, moreover, continues to be subjected to the rigors of empirical testing, and it holds up.
A study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2009 compared “lifetime transvestic fetishism”—cross-dressing accompanied by arousal—among transgender people who identified as homosexual versus those who identified as heterosexual. It found that 81.7 percent of the heterosexuals reported lifetime transvestic fetishism, compared with only 23 percent of homosexuals.5 The same journal in 2011 reported that two MRI studies have confirmed Blanchard’s hypothesis that there would be cross-sex features at the level of brain anatomy among homosexual transsexuals “but not among heterosexual male-to-female transsexuals.”6
The Blanchardians have less to say about female-to-male transgender people. There is probably no female equivalent of autogynephilia. They have argued, however, that most female-to-male transsexuals are homosexual women, who, for various reasons, not all of them having to do with attracting partners, conclude that they would function better as “men.” But one needn’t accept everything that the Blanchardians say to agree that sexuality has something to do with why trans people transition.
Yet sexual desire is the factor that is missing from all mainstream-media accounts of the trans experience. This is what struck me most forcefully when I interviewed trans people and immersed myself in the online chat rooms where they socialize, commiserate, argue, boast, and try to find love.
S ubscribed to by more than 16,000 users, the chat room “Girls Like Us” is one of several such salons catering to male-to-female transgender people. Judging by the active users, the vast majority are African-American and male-to-female. Blanchard and Bailey would say that these are mainly homosexual transsexuals. On any given day, the participants post flattering selfies of themselves, solicit potential clients, share beauty advice, and poke fun—sometimes gently, often maliciously—at themselves and others.The main motif is the elusive dream of straight male partners and the living nightmare of “chasers.” Chasers are men who obsessively seek out male-to-females, especially those who retain their male apparatus. Most chasers identify as straight, and many offer to “top,” meaning to assume the dominant position in intercourse. But the male-to-females of “Girls Like Us” think they deceive themselves. “Every single admirer or tranny chaser I have met wanted c—k,” says Rachel,7
no exception. Even the ones who claimed to be ‘strictly top,’ sooner or later, wanted d—k. When I confronted them, they told me ‘if it wasn’t for the d—k, why would I be attracted to a t-girl?’ I tell them, if I wanted to f—k a chaser in the ass or if I wanted to use my d—k, I would have stayed gay.
Rachel’s complaint encapsulates the link between being transgender and sexual desire. She has made a rational choice not to “stay” a gay man, but she has yet to secure the obscure object of desire: a man who wants her as a woman. Ronda comments: “I agree, it’s been hard to find a guy to take serious for me, cause they all seem to want”—here she inserts a graphic “emoji” of an eggplant.
Those comments obviously come from male-to-females who have chosen to delay sex-reassignment surgery (SRS) or to not undergo it altogether. Yet those who have still confront the same problem. Says Rayna: “I had SRS…. That being said, if you get SRS, tranny chasers will still want you for your c—k, if you are not 100% passable.” Nicole responds: “It’s true. I’m post. It’s no easier dating with a vagina.” The users of “Girls Like Us” have an itch they can never scratch: They wish desperately to leave the homosexual world behind, but homosexuality clings to them in the form of biological men, gay or straight, who lust after them for their male aspects.
Many female-to-male trans people face a similar problem. They gripe about it daily on “Female-to-Male Some Rules,” an online salon with nearly 20,000 subscribers. The difference is that, like other lesbians, female-to-males are much more likely to be involved in monogamous, long-term relationships or to be seeking them (sexual promiscuity being much more common among men of whatever sexual orientation). Writes Isaac:
What do you do if your partner is only attracted to the things about your body that make you dysphoric? My girlfriend is really into about every part of me that captures my body’s femininity, and kind of ignores/avoids/never compliments my more masculine features. Examples: my large breasts, wide hips, chubby cheeks, drastic curves, but not my thicker body hair, my muscles, my broad shoulders, etc.
Most of the users on “FTM Some Rules” have undergone testosterone treatment and completed “top surgery”—usually, a mastectomy and male-chest contouring. But many of them forgo phalloplasty, since medical science has yet to perfect the construction of artificial penises. Writes Norman: “Why the f—k is it so difficult to get a date? I’m legitimately not a crazy person. I am pretty normal. I am funny, caring, romantic. Yet because I don’t have a penis no one will give me a chance.” Norman’s selfie shows him with broad shoulders and a full if wispy goatee. Outwardly, he is as passable as female-to-males come. But alas, those features, without more, don’t suffice to attract women.
The agonizing truth rears its head once more: A subset of transgender people consists of homosexuals struggling to leave homosexuality behind. Again, one needn’t agree with Bailey that Eros—whether homosexual desire or inwardly directed heterosexuality—is the only factor that drives people to cross the gender binary. But it is clearly a factor, as logic, common sense, and observation testify. The fact that the trans movement so vehemently denies this idea and targets its proponents for personal destruction suggests that we should press the “pause” button before adopting its agenda in its entirety. At the very least, we could use more scientific research in this area, free from bullying and intimidation.
I f the trans movement is right that transgender people are trapped in the wrong bodies, then transitioning socially and surgically should bring them clarity and confidence. The work being done to break down the male–female binary and the effort to introduce dozens of new “genders” into our understanding should allow Americans of whatever gender identity and sexual orientation to live more authentic lives, free from old stereotypes and the need to constantly define and redefine themselves against masculine and feminine ideals. But neither is the case today.For transgender people, the human body remains the ultimate barrier. The obstinate husk, with its intricately connected organs and systems, refuses to give in. A vagina-like opening and canal carved out of a penis is not a vagina, because it is not integrated into a reproductive system. Ditto for mastectomies and chest-contouring for female-to-males. Even with rigorous hormone therapy and the most skillfull surgeries, the perfect simulacrum falls short of the original, with all its imperfections.
Trans people themselves are more acutely aware of all this than any social conservative. On “Girls Like Us,” Kerry writes: “Don’t forget to humble yourself today, because you still fell out your mother’s p—y with a twig and two berries, no matter how fishy you ho’s think you are.” “Fish” is the term male-to-females use to refer to biological women. To look “fishy” is the highest compliment among them. Sophia says: “Having a fake p—y will not make it better. . . . Can’t give your so-called man real kids.”
Allison posts a picture of a brick wall, with fish carved into each brick, writing: “A lot of hoes that think you are ‘fish’”—meaning that, in her view, many male-to-females imagine they are real women, or close to real women, when, in fact, they are unpassable “bricks.” Phoenix comments: “At the end of the day you still are and always will be a man, sista.”
The users at “FTM Some Rules” aren’t nearly as vicious as the “Girls Like Us” crowd can be, but they, too, disclose their doubts about who counts as a “real” man. Many post selfies to the group, demanding affirmation, or voicing frustration with the slow pace of physical change on testosterone. Chris shares his interior dialogue with testosterone, the hormone he has started to inject weekly, to register his anger at the failure to grow a beard where he most wants one:
ME: I really wish I could grow a beard sooner.
T: Throws a bunch of hair on my neck.
ME: Yeah, that’s totally what I meant.
Steven has been taking testosterone much longer—10 years—yet he, too, has beard troubles: “Was secretly hoping I’d wake up with a full beard from the power of a decade, but it just didn’t happen. Still have a sasquatch ballzac [sic] on my chin.” His selfie doesn’t lie.
Eli says: “I hate that my voice makes everyone immediately think female. Seriously considering going mute until voice changes. Shoot me.” Then there is the shortcoming “down there,” which many female-to-males address by “packing” their underwear with pouches that resemble male organs. Many users at FTM Some Rules report that these products, no matter how well made or expensive, don’t relieve their dysphoria or the sense that an organ is missing.
Try as they might, the trans men are haunted by the femininity of their bodies, and the women by the masculinity of theirs. Mind cannot overcome matter—at least, not in these cases.
A s for the rest of us, the collapse, or near collapse, of the gender binary has wrought confusion and repression. Mayer and McHugh, the Johns Hopkins researchers, describe the state of affairs well. As gender is unmoored from its natural roots, they warn, it “could come to refer to any distinctions in behavior, biological attributes, or psychological traits, and each person could have a gender defined by the unique combination of characteristics the person possesses.” Just so.Spend a little time surfing the social-media platform Tumblr, and you might learn that you are “pyroshift gender,” defined as a “gender that acts as a flame. It can flicker to feeling varying degrees of masculine or feminine for short periods of time, yet it generally settles right back down into a neutral, burning, and calm state.” Or you might decide that you are “visigender,” which means that your gender “is best described using images, visual aids, etc., as you are unable to put it into words due to neurodivergence.” Or you might be “mascuflux”—“your masculinity shifts during days/weeks/hours. On one day you could feel like a boy. Another day you could feel agender, and another somewhere in between.” There are hundreds more of the kind, each more hair-splittingly particular than the next.
Even many trans people roll their eyes at these newfangled categories. They have a nickname for those who adopt them—“gender trenders.” These are mostly upscale, college-age women who have latched on to transgender identity as it has gathered social prestige. As Donald, a 25-year-old who has fully transitioned from female to male, told me, “There is an issue with people glamorizing being trans. As being gay or bi has become more accepted, you have these people who aren’t really dysphoric, but they really just want to dress the part and have this aesthetic.”
One irony is that, by elevating gender identity to a sacred status, the trans movement has made it harder for young people to set themselves apart. For many high-school and college students, “gender” is now the primary source of symbols and ideas. It is also, along with race, the only available idiom for expressing the angst and alienation that have accompanied young people since time immemorial.
Then, too, the trans movement has breathed new life into the gender stereotypes it supposedly set out to dismantle. Today’s activists delight in quoting Judith Butler and other radical feminists, who teach that gender is a “performative” charade. Yet the trans movement has ended up restaging that charade and imbued it with existential and even ontological significance. The feminine mystique has returned among the male-to-females in the form of platform heels, coiffured ’dos, French-manicured nails, hourglass curves, and exaggerated affect. Old-school masculinity has returned among the female-to-males in the form of lumberjack beards and burly bodies (albeit, sans penis). Though they now appear as simulacra, “man” and “woman” retain all their magic power.
Divorcing gender and sexuality also breeds confusion. As we have seen, modern psychology has produced a body of evidence showing that the male-to-female trans world is composed of two sets of people. There are those who are attracted to men, transition relatively early in their lives, and successfully present as female. And there are those who are attracted to the image or idea of themselves as women but tend to make the transition later and often present less successfully as women. The dividing line between these two groups is sexual orientation. The first group wants to attract men. The second group is concerned with reaffirming their feeling that there is a woman within—and it is that woman within to whom they are primarily attracted. This is the key insight of the Blanchardians, and their findings can’t easily be dismissed, not least because empirical studies continue to affirm various elements of the basic typology.
Sexuality is a bodily experience. It stretches credulity to suggest that a trans person’s decision to alter his or her sexed body has nothing to do with what he or she wishes to do with that body—and whom he or she wishes to attract. Yet, as with gender itself, the trans activists treat sexual desire as an abstract and disembodied thing. They therefore struggle to explain, for example, why it is that a majority of autogynephilic male-to-female transsexuals—those who, according to Blanchard and his followers, are attracted to the “women inside”—experiences arousal from cross-dressing, while most homosexual transsexuals do not.
The activists and their academic allies throw up a host of often tendentious objections to the Blanchardians. They argue, for example, that correlation—between sexual orientation and trans type—is not causation. That is true enough. But rather than seek to achieve a fuller understanding of the correlation through additional research, they try to shut down debate by claiming that concepts such as autogynephilia and transvestic fetishism are stigmatizing and disrespectful. Once more, we are asked to believe that the subjective reports of trans people about their identities and desires trump all. We don’t treat any other psychological condition this way.
Now, even if desire is the primary cause of transgenderism, it may still be the case that transitioning is the best medical treatment for some people who suffer acute emotional distress from the feeling of being trapped in the wrong body, though the jury is still out on this question. Blanchard, Bailey, and like-minded psychologists and clinicians actually favor transitioning in appropriate cases. Indeed, Blanchard himself worked for years as a gatekeeper—the term for a medical professional who approves sex-reassignment surgeries. We shouldn’t, however, make the vast logical, scientific, and metaphysical leaps demanded by the activists and remake our whole gender world when so many profound and complex questions remain unanswered.
O urs is an age racked by anxiety about truth and post-truth. The trans movement’s insistence on the anti-desire orthodoxy is yet another example of the postmodern effort to hinder our ability to perceive and speak the truth. We are told that we must resist the rise of a new class of politician, exemplified by Donald Trump, who has little regard for the facts and, when it serves his needs, doesn’t hesitate to inject falsehoods and conspiracy theories into the public square. Yet many of the same people insist that castration is a gender affirmation and that Caitlyn Jenner was never a man. What is more post-truth than this? Americans owe it to transgender people to treat them with compassion. But compassion must be anchored in truth.
2 How the mind came to this innate gender identity when, according to the activists, gender is a malleable social construct, is a contradiction that the trans movement has yet to resolve.
3 Mayer’s and McHugh’s concerns about inadequate medical research into the transgender phenomenon can’t be overstated. All absolute claims about transgender people, such as the ones put forth by the activists, should be taken with a large chunk of salt, simply because the available scientific research is new and tentative.
4 Note Bailey’s use of the term “transsexual,” which is now quasi-verboten, since it doesn’t capture those transgender people who don’t permanently change their bodies with hormones and/or surgery. I use it when discussing Bailey’s and Blanchard’s theories.
5 Blanchard and Bailey would likely argue, however, that even the 81.7-percent figure underestimates the rate of fetishistic transvestitism among the autogynephiles, since these patients have a tendency toward “memory distortion” after they transition. As Bailey told an interviewer in 2015, “they begin to assert that their gender dysphoria began in early childhood and was far more overt than they had alleged before. They also deemphasize the erotic component, even if they admitted it before. I think they do this for at least two reasons: shame (because: sex is involved) and the desire to believe they really have the brains of women.” The media’s preference for the brain-trapped-in-the-wrong-body narrative may impel the autogynephiles to adopt it.
6 Bear in mind, however, that the same caveat about neuroplasticity would apply here. It could well be that the brains of homosexual transsexuals show cross-sex (female) features because they, unlike autogynephiles, have thought and acted in feminine ways from a very young age. The cross-sex features in brain anatomy, in other words, could be an effect, not a cause, of homosexual transsexuality.
7 Although “Girls Like Us” is a public group, meaning that anyone can join, I have changed names in every instance and carefully scrubbed all other identifying information to protect the users’ privacy.
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The Guns of Navarro
Washington Commentary
Andrew Ferguson 2018-03-14
Their coming-and-going polka—now you see ’im, now you don’t—consumed the first 10 days of March. One week Cohn was in the driver’s seat of U.S. economic policy, steering his boss into a comprehensive overhaul of the tax code and preparing him for a huge disgorgement of taxpayer money to repair some nebulous entity called “our crumbling infrastructure.” The next week Cohn had disappeared and in his place at the president’s side Navarro suddenly materialized. With Navarro’s encouragement, the president unexpectedly announced hefty, world-wobbling tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. At first the financial markets tumbled, and nobody in Washington, including the president’s friends, seemed happy. Nobody, that is, except Navarro, whose Cheshire-cat grin quickly became unavoidable on the alphabet-soup channels of cable news. It’s the perfect place for him, front and center, trying to disentangle the conflicting strands of the president’s economic policy. Far more than Cohn, the president’s newest and most powerful economic adviser is a suitable poster boy for Trumpism, whatever that might be.
So where, the capital wondered, did this Navarro fellow come from? (The question So where did this Cohn guy go? barely lasted a news cycle.) Insiders and political obsessives dimly remembered Navarro from Trump’s presidential campaign. With Wilbur Ross, now the secretary of commerce, Navarro wrote the most articulate brief for the Trump economic plan in the months before the election, which by my reckoning occurred roughly 277 years ago. (Ross is also Navarro’s co-conspirator in pushing the steel tariffs. They’re an Odd Couple indeed: Navarro is well-coiffed and tidy and as smooth as a California anchorman, while Ross is what Barney Fife might have looked like if he’d given up his job as Mayberry’s deputy sheriff and gotten a degree in mortuary science.) The Navarro-Ross paper drew predictable skepticism from mainstream economists and their proxies in the press, particularly its eye-popping claim that Trump’s “trade policy reforms” would generate an additional $1.7 trillion in government revenue over the next 10 years.
Navarro is nominally a professor at University of California, Irvine. His ideological pedigree, like the president’s, is that of a mongrel. After a decade securing tenure by writing academic papers (“A Critical Comparison of Utility-type Ratemaking Methodologies in Oil Pipeline Regulation”), he set his attention on politics. In the 1990s, he earned the distinction of losing four political races in six years, all in San Diego or its surrounding suburbs—one for mayor, another for county supervisor, another for city council. He was a Democrat in those days, as Trump was; he campaigned against sprawl and for heavy environmental regulation. In 1996, he ran for Congress as “The Democrat Newt Gingrich Fears Most.” The TV actor Ed Asner filmed a commercial for him. This proved less helpful than hoped when his Republican opponent reminded voters that a few years earlier, Asner had been a chief fundraiser for the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador.
After that defeat, Navarro got the message and retired from politics. He returned to teaching, became an off-and-on-again Republican, and set about writing financial potboilers, mostly on investment strategies for a world increasingly unreceptive to American leadership. One of them, Death by China (2011), purported to describe the slow but inexorable sapping of American wealth and spirit through Chinese devilry. As it happened, this was Donald Trump’s favorite theme as well. From the beginning of his 40-year public career, Trump has stuck to his insistence that someone, in geo-economic terms, is bullying this great country of his. The identity of the bully has varied over time: In the 1980s, it was the Soviets who, following their cataclysmic implosion, gave way to Japan, which was replaced, after its own economic collapse, by America’s neighbors to the north and south, who have been joined, since the end of the last decade, by China. In Death by China, the man, the moment, and the message came together with perfect timing. Trump loved it.
It’s not clear that he read it, however. Trump is a visual learner, as the educational theorists used to say. He will retain more from Fox and Friends as he constructs his hair in the morning than from a half day buried in a stack of white papers from the Department of Labor. When Navarro decided to make a movie of the book, directed by himself, Trump attended a screening and lustily endorsed it. You can see why. Navarro’s use of animation is spare but compelling; the most vivid image shows a dagger of Asiatic design plunging (up to the hilt and beyond!) into the heart of a two-dimensional map of the U.S., causing the country’s blood to spray wildly across the screen, then seep in rivulets around the world. It’s Wes Cravenomics.
Most of the movie, however, is taken up by talking heads. Nearly everyone of these heads is attached to a left-wing Democrat, a socialist, or, in a couple of instances, an anarchist from the Occupy movement. Watched today, Death by China is a reminder of how lonely—how marginal—the anti-China obsession has been. This is not to its discredit; yesterday’s fringe often becomes today’s mainstream, just as today’s consensus is often disproved by the events of tomorrow. Not so long ago, for instance, the establishment catechism declared that economic liberalization and the prosperity it created led inexorably to political liberalization; from free markets, we were told, came free societies. In the last generation, China has put this fantasy to rest. Only the willfully ignorant would deny that the behavior of the Chinese government, at home and abroad, is the work of swine. Even so, the past three presidents have seen China only as a subject for scolding, never retaliation.
And this brings us to another mystery of Trumpism, as Navarro embodies it. Retaliation against China and its bullying trade practices is exactly what Trump has promised as both candidate and president. More than a year into his presidency, with his tariffs on steel and aluminum, he has struck against the bullies at last, just as he vowed to do. And the bullies, we discover, are mostly our friends—Germans, Brazilians, South Koreans, and other partners who sell us their aluminum and steel for less than we can make it ourselves. Accounting for 2 percent of U.S. steel imports, the Chinese are barely scratched in the president’s first great foray in protectionism.
In announcing the tariffs, Trump cited Chinese “dumping,” as if out of habit. Yet Navarro himself seems at a loss to explain why he and his boss have chosen to go after our friends instead of our preeminent adversary in world trade. “China is in many ways the root of the problem for all countries of the world in aluminum and steel,” he told CNN the day after the tariffs were announced. Really? How’s that? “The bigger picture is, China has tremendous overcapacity in both aluminum and steel. So what they do is, they flood the world market, and this trickles down to our shores, and to other countries.”
If that wasn’t confusing enough, we had only to wait three days. By then Navarro was telling other interviewers, “This has nothing to do with China, directly or indirectly.”
This is not the first time Trumpism has shown signs of incoherence. With Peter Navarro at the president’s side, and with Gary Cohn a fading memory, it is unlikely to be the last.
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The Tribe Has Woken
Review of 'Political Tribes' By Amy Chua
Abe Greenwald 2018-03-15
Amy Chua has an explanation for what ails us at home and abroad: Elites keep ignoring the primacy of tribalism both in the United States and elsewhere and so are blindsided every time people act in accordance with their group instinct. In Political Tribes, she offers a survey of tribal dynamics around the globe and renders judgments about the ways in which the United States has serially misread us-and-them conflicts. In the book’s final chapters, Chua, a Yale University law professor best known for her parenting polemic Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, focuses on the clashing group instincts that now threaten to sunder the American body politic.
As Chua sees it, “our blindness to political tribalism abroad reflects America at both its best and worst.” Because the United States is a nation made up of diverse immigrant populations—a “supergroup”—Americans can sometimes underestimate how hard it is for people in other countries to set aside their religious or ethnic ties and find common national purpose. That’s American ignorance in its most optimistic and benevolent form. But then there’s the more noxious variety: “In some cases, like Vietnam,” she writes, “ethnically blind racism has been part of our obliviousness.”
During the Vietnam War, Chua notes, the United States failed to distinguish between the ethnically homogeneous Vietnamese majority and the Chinese minority who were targets of mass resentment. In Vietnam, national identity was built largely on historical accounts of the courageous heroes who had been repelling Chinese invaders since 111 b.c.e., when China first conquered its neighbor to the south. This defining antipathy toward the Chinese was exacerbated by the fact that Vietnam’s Chinese minority was on average far wealthier and more politically powerful than the ethnic Vietnamese masses. “Yet astonishingly,” writes Chua, “U.S. foreign policy makers during the Cold War were so oblivious to Vietnamese history that they thought Vietnam was China’s pawn—merely ‘a stalking horse for Beijing in Southeast Asia.’”
Throughout the book, Chua captures tribal conflicts in clear and engrossing prose. But as a guide to foreign policy, one gets the sense that her emphasis on tribal ties might not be able to do all the work she expects of it. The first hint comes in her Vietnam analysis. If American ignorance of Chinese–Vietnam tensions is to blame for our having fought and lost the war, what would a better understanding of such things have yielded? She gets to that, sort of. “Could we have supported Ho [Chi Minh] against the French, capitalizing on Vietnam’s historical hostility toward China to keep the Vietnamese within our sphere of influence?” Chua asks. “We’ll never know. Somehow we never saw or took seriously the enmity between Vietnam and China.” It’s hard to see the U.S.’s backing a mass-murdering Communist against a putatively democratic ally as anything but a surreal thought experiment, let alone a lost opportunity.
On Afghanistan, Chua is correct about a number of things. There are indeed long-simmering tensions between Pashtuns, Punjabs, and other tribes in the region. The U.S. did pay insufficient attention to Afghanistan in the decade leading up to 9/11. The Taliban did play on Pashtun aspirations to fuel their rise. But how, exactly, are we to understand our failures in Afghanistan as resulting from ignorance of tribal relations? The Taliban went on to forge a protective agreement with al-Qaeda that had little if anything to do with tribal ties. And it was that relationship that had tragic consequences for the United States.
Not only was Osama bin Laden not Pashtun; he was an Arab millionaire, and his terrorist organization was made up of jihadists from all around the world. If anything, it was Bin Laden’s trans-tribal movement that the U.S. should have been focused on. The Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance was based on pooling resources against perceived common threats, compatible (but not identical) religious notions, and large cash payments from Bin Laden. No American understanding of tribal relations could have interfered with that.
And while an ambitious tribe-savvy counterinsurgency strategy might have gone a long way in helping the U.S.’s war effort, there has never been broad public support for such a commitment. Ultimately, our problems in Afghanistan have less to do with neglecting tribal politics and more to do with general neglect.
In Chua’s chapter on the Iraq War, however, her paradigm aligns more closely with the facts. “Could we have done better if we hadn’t been so blind to tribal politics in Iraq?” she asks. “There’s very good evidence that the answer is yes.” Here Chua offers a concise account of the U.S.’s successful 2007 troop surge. “While the additional U.S. soldiers—sent primarily to Baghdad and Al Anbar Province—were of course a critical factor,” she writes, “the surge succeeded only because it was accompanied by a 180-degree shift in our approach to the local population.”
Chua goes into colorful detail about then colonel H.R. McMaster’s efforts to educate American troops in local Iraqi customs and his decision to position them among the local population in Tal Afar. This won the trust of Iraqis who were forthcoming with critical intelligence. She also covers the work of Col. Sean MacFarland who forged relationships with Sunni sheikhs. Those sheikhs, in turn, convinced their tribespeople to work with U.S. forces and function as a local police force. Finally, Chua explains how Gen. David Petraeus combined the work of McMaster and MacFarland and achieved the miraculous in pacifying Baghdad. In spite of U.S. gains—and the successful navigation of tribes—there was little American popular will to keep Iraq on course and, over the next few years, the country inevitably unraveled.
I n writing about life in the United States, Chua is on firmer ground altogether, and her diagnostic powers are impressive. “It turns out that in America, there’s a chasm between the tribal identities of the country’s haves and have-nots,” she writes, “a chasm of the same kind wreaking political havoc in many developing and non-Western countries.” In the U.S., however, there’s a crucial difference to this dynamic, and Chua puts her finger right on it: “In America, it’s the progressive elites who have taken it upon themselves to expose the American Dream as false. This is their form of tribalism.”She backs up this contention with statistics. Some of the most interesting revelations have to do with the Occupy movement. In actual fact, those who gathered in cities across the country to protest systemic inequality in 2012 were “disproportionately affluent.” In fact, “more than half had incomes of $75,000 or more.” Occupy faded away, as she notes, because it “attracted so few members from the many disadvantaged groups it purported to be fighting for.” Chua puts things in perspective: “Imagine if the suffragette movement hadn’t included large numbers of women, or if the civil-rights movement included very few African Americans, or if the gay-rights movement included very few gays.” America’s poorer classes, for their part, are “deeply patriotic, even if they feel they’re losing the country to distant elites who know nothing about them.”
Chua is perceptive on both the inhabitants of Trump Country and the elites who disdain them. She takes American attitudes toward professional wrestling as emblematic of the split between those who support Donald Trump and those who detest him. Trump is a bona fide hero in the world of pro wrestling; he has participated in “bouts” and was actually inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013. What WWE fans get from watching wrestling they also get from watching Trump—“showmanship and symbols,” a world held together by enticing false storylines, and, ultimately, “something playfully spectacular.” Those on the academic left, on the other hand, “are fascinated, even obsessed in a horrified way, with the ‘phenomenology’ of watching professional wrestling.” In the book’s most arresting line, Chua writes that “there is now so little interaction, commonality, and intermarriage between rural/heartland/working-class whites and urban/coastal whites that the difference between them is practically what social scientists would consider an ‘ethnic difference.’”
Of course, there’s much today dividing America along racial lines as well. While Americans of color still contend with the legacy of institutional intolerance, “it is simply a fact that ‘diversity’ policies at the most select American universities and in some sectors of the economy have had a disparate adverse impact on whites.” So, both blacks and whites (and most everyone else) feel threatened to some degree. This has sharpened the edge of identity politics on the left and right. In Chua’s reading, these tribal differences will not actually break the country apart. But, she believes, they could fundamentally and irreversibly change “who we are.”
Political Tribes, however, is no doomsday prediction. Despite our clannish resentments, Chua sees, in her daily interactions, people’s willingness to form bonds beyond those of their in-group and a relaxing of tribal ties. What’s needed is for haves and have-nots, whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives to enjoy more meaningful exposure to one another. This pat prescription would come across as criminally sappy if not for the genuinely loving and patriotic way in which Chua writes about our responsibilities as a “supergroup.” “It’s not enough that we view one another as fellow human beings,” she says, “we need to view one another as fellow Americans.” Americans as a higher ontological category than human beings—there’s poetry in that. And a healthy bit of tribalism, too.
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Xi Who Must Be Obeyed
Media Commentary
Matthew Continetti 2018-03-15
Then again, you know what happens when you assume.
“Here is my prediction,” Kristof wrote. “The new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, will spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well. Mao’s body will be hauled out of Tiananmen Square on his watch, and Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning writer, will be released from prison.”
True, Kristof conceded, “I may be wrong entirely.” But, he went on, “my hunch on this return to China, my old home, is that change is coming.”
Bad hunch.
Five years later, the Chinese economy, while large, is saddled with debt. Analysts and government officials are worried about its real-estate bubble. Despite harsh controls, capital continues to flee China. Nor has there been “some political easing.” On the contrary, repression has worsened. The Great Firewall blocks freedom of speech and inquiry, human-rights advocates are jailed, and the provinces resemble surveillance states out of a Philip K. Dick novel. Mao rests comfortably in his mausoleum. Not only did Liu Xiaobo remain a prisoner, he was also denied medical treatment when he contracted cancer, and he died in captivity in 2017.
As for Xi Jinping, he turned out not to be a reformer but a dictator. Steadily, under the guise of anti-corruption campaigns, Xi decimated alternative centers of power within the Communist Party. He built up a cult of personality around “Xi Jinping thought” and his “Chinese dream” of economic, cultural, and military strength. His preeminence was highlighted in October 2017 when the Politburo declined to name his successor. Then, in March of this year, the Chinese abolished the term limits that have guaranteed rotation in office since the death of Mao. Xi reigns supreme.
Bizarrely, this latest development seems to have come as a surprise to the American press. The headline of Emily Rauhala’s Washington Post article read: “China proposes removal of two-term limit, potentially paving way for President Xi Jinping to stay on.” Potentially? Xi’s accession to emperor-like status, wrote Julie Bogen of Vox, “could destabilize decades of progress toward democracy and instead move China even further toward authoritarianism.” Could? Bogen did not specify which “decades of progress toward democracy” she was talking about, but that is probably because, since 1989, there haven’t been any.
Xi’s assumption of dictatorial powers should not have shocked anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention to recent Chinese history. The Chinese government, until last month a collective dictatorship, has exercised despotic control over its people since the very founding of the state in 1949. And yet the insatiable desire among media to incorporate news events into a preestablished storyline led reporters to cover the party announcement as a sudden reversal. Why? Because only then would the latest decision of an increasingly embattled and belligerent Chinese leadership fit into the prefabricated narrative that says we are living in an authoritarian moment.
For example, one article in the February 26, 2018, New York Times was headlined, “With Xi’s Power Grab, China Joins New Era of Strongmen.” CNN’s James Griffiths wrote, “While Chinese politics is not remotely democratic in the traditional sense, there are certain checks and balances within the Party system itself, with reformers and conservatives seeing their power and influence waxing and waning over time.” Checks and balances, reformers and conservatives—why, they are just like us, only within the context of a one-party state that ruthlessly brooks no dissent.
Now, we do happen to live in an era when democracy and autocracy are at odds. But China is not joining the “authoritarian trend.” It helped create and promote the trend. Next year, China’s “era of strongmen” will enter its seventh decade. The fundamental nature of the Communist regime in Beijing has not changed during this time.
My suspicion is that journalists were taken aback by Xi’s revelation of his true nature because they, like most Western elites, have bought into the myth of China’s “peaceful rise.” For decades, Americans have been told that China’s economic development and participation in international organizations and markets would lead inevitably to its political liberalization. What James Mann calls “the China fantasy” manifested itself in the leadership of both major political parties and in the pronouncements of the chattering class across the ideological spectrum.
Indeed, not only was the soothing scenario of China as a “responsible stakeholder” on the glide path to democracy widespread, but media figures also admonished Americans for not living up to Chinese standards. “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” Tom Friedman conceded in an infamous 2009 column. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.” For instance, Friedman went on, “it is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power, and wind power.” The following year, during an episode of Meet the Press, Friedman admitted, “I have fantasized—don’t get me wrong—but what if we could just be China for a day?” Just think of all the electric cars the government could force us to buy.
This attitude toward Chinese Communism as a public-policy exemplar became still more pronounced after Donald Trump was elected president on an “America First” agenda. China’s theft of intellectual property, industrial espionage, harassment and exploitation of Western companies, currency manipulation, mercantilist subsidies and tariffs, chronic pollution, military buildup, and interference in democratic politics and university life did not prevent it from proclaiming itself the defender of globalization and environmentalism.
When Xi visited the Davos World Economic Forum last year, the Economist noted the “fawning reception” that greeted him. The speech he delivered, pledging to uphold the international order that had facilitated his nation’s rise as well as his own, received excellent reviews. On January 15, 2017, Fareed Zakaria said, “In an America-first world, China is filling the vacuum.” A few days later, Charlie Rose told his CBS audience, “It’s almost like China is saying, ‘we are the champions of globalization, not the United States.’” And on January 30, 2017, the New York Times quoted a “Berlin-based private equity fund manager,” who said, “We heard a Chinese president becoming leader of the free world.”
The chorus of praise for China grew louder last spring when Trump announced American withdrawal from an international climate accord. In April 2017, Rick Stengel said on cable television that China is becoming “the global leader on the environment.” On June 8, a CBS reporter said that Xi is “now viewed as the world’s leader on climate change.” On June 19, 2017, on Bloomberg news, Dana Hull said, “China is the leader on climate change, especially when it comes to autos.” Also that month, one NBC anchor asked Senator Mike Lee of Utah, “Are you concerned at all that China may be seen as sort of the global leader when it comes to bringing countries together, more so than the United States?”
Last I checked, Xi Jinping’s China has not excelled at “bringing countries together,” unless—like Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam—those countries are allying with the United States to balance against China. What instead should concern Senator Lee, and all of us, is an American media filled with people suckered by foreign propaganda that happens to coincide with their political preferences, and who are unable to make elementary distinctions between tyrannical governments and consensual ones.
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Karl Marx’s Jew-Hating Conspiracy Theory
Marx didn’t supplant old ideas about money and commerce; he intensified them
Jonah Goldberg 2018-03-14
rom the time of antiquity until the Enlightenment, trade and the pursuit of wealth were considered sinful. “In the city that is most finely governed,” Aristotle wrote, “the citizens should not live a vulgar or a merchant’s way of life, for this sort of way of life is ignoble and contrary to virtue.”1 In Plato’s vision of an ideal society (the Republic) the ruling “guardians” would own no property to avoid tearing “the city in pieces by differing about ‘mine’ and ‘not mine.’” He added that “all that relates to retail trade, and merchandise, and the keeping of taverns, is denounced and numbered among dishonourable things.” Only noncitizens would be allowed to indulge in commerce. A citizen who defies the natural order and becomes a merchant should be thrown in jail for “shaming his family.”
At his website humanprogress.org, Marian L. Tupy quotes D.C. Earl of the University of Leeds, who wrote that in Ancient Rome, “all trade was stigmatized as undignified … the word mercator [merchant] appears as almost a term of abuse.” Cicero noted in the first century b.c.e. that retail commerce is sordidus (vile) because merchants “would not make any profit unless they lied constantly.”
Early Christianity expanded this point of view. Jesus himself was clearly hostile to the pursuit of riches. “For where your treasure is,” he proclaimed in his Sermon on the Mount, “there will your heart be also.” And of course he insisted that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
The Catholic Church incorporated this view into its teachings for centuries, holding that economics was zero-sum. “The Fathers of the Church adhered to the classical assumption that since the material wealth of humanity was more or less fixed, the gain of some could only come at a loss to others,” the economic historian Jerry Muller explains in his book The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. As St. Augustine put it, “Si unus non perdit, alter non acquirit”—“If one does not lose, the other does not gain.”
The most evil form of wealth accumulation was the use of money to make money—usury. Lending money at interest was unnatural, in this view, and therefore invidious. “While expertise in exchange is justly blamed since it is not according to nature but involves taking from others,” Aristotle insisted, “usury is most reasonably hated because one’s possessions derive from money itself and not from that for which it was supplied.” In the Christian tradition, the only noble labor was physical labor, and so earning wealth from the manipulation of money was seen as inherently ignoble.
In the somewhat more prosperous and market-driven medieval period, Thomas Aquinas helped make private property and commerce more acceptable, but he did not fundamentally break with the Aristotelian view that trade was suspect and the pursuit of wealth was sinful. The merchant’s life was in conflict with the teachings of Christianity if it led to pride or avarice. “Echoing Aristotle,” Muller writes, “Aquinas reasserted that justice in the distribution of material goods was fulfilled when someone received in proportion to his status, office, and function within the institutions of an existing, structured community. Hence Aquinas decried as covetousness the accumulation of wealth to improve one’s place in the social order.”
In the medieval mind, Jews were seen as a kind of stand-in for mercantile and usurious sinfulness. Living outside the Christian community, but within the borders of Christendom, they were allowed to commit the sin of usury on the grounds that their souls were already forfeit. Pope Nicholas V insisted that it is much better that “this people should perpetrate usury than that Christians should engage in it with one another.”2 The Jews were used as a commercial caste the way the untouchables of India were used as a sanitation caste. As Montesquieu would later observe in the 16th century, “whenever one prohibits a thing that is naturally permitted or necessary, the people who engage in it are regarded as dishonest.” Thus, as Muller has argued, anti-Semitism has its roots in a kind of primitive anti-capitalism.
Early Protestantism did not reject these views. It amplified them.3 Martin Luther despised commerce. “There is on earth no greater enemy of man, after the Devil, than a gripe-money and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men…. Usury is a great, huge monster, like a werewolf …. And since we break on the wheel and behead highwaymen, murderers, and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break on the wheel and kill … hunt down, curse, and behead all usurers!”4
It should therefore come as no surprise that Luther’s views of Jews, the living manifestation of usury in the medieval mind, were just as immodest. In his 1543 treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, he offers a seven-point plan on how to deal with them:
- “First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools .…This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians …”
- “Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed.”
- “Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.”
- “Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb… ”
- “Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside … ”
- “Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them … ”
- “Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow.… But if we are afraid that they might harm us or our wives, children, servants, cattle, etc., … then let us emulate the common sense of other nations such as France, Spain, Bohemia, etc., … then eject them forever from the country … ”
Luther agitated against the Jews throughout Europe, condemning local officials for insufficient anti-Semitism (a word that did not exist at the time and a sentiment that was not necessarily linked to more modern biological racism). His demonization of the Jews was derived from more than anti-capitalism. But his belief that the Jewish spirit of commerce was corrupting of Christianity was nonetheless central to his indictment. He sermonized again and again that it must be cleansed from Christendom, either through conversion, annihilation, or expulsion.
Three centuries later, Karl Marx would blend these ideas together in a noxious stew.
II
The idea at the center of virtually all of Marx’s economic writing is the labor theory of value. It holds that all of the value of any product can be determined by the number of hours it took for a laborer or laborers to produce it. From the viewpoint of conventional economics—and elementary logic—this is ludicrous. For example, ingenuity, which may not be time-consuming, is nonetheless a major source of value. Surely it cannot be true that someone who works intelligently, and therefore efficiently, provides less value than someone who works stupidly and slowly. (Marx anticipates some of these kinds of critiques with a lot of verbiage about the costs of training and skills.) But the more relevant point is simply this: The determinant of value in an economic sense is not the labor that went into a product but the price the consumer is willing to pay for it. Whether it took an hour or a week to build a mousetrap, the value of the two products is the same to the consumer if the quality is the same.
Marx had philosophical, metaphysical, and tactical reasons for holding fast to the labor theory of value. It was essential to his argument that capitalism—or what we would now call “commerce” plain and simple—was exploitative by its very nature. In Marx, the term “exploitation” takes a number of forms. It is not merely evocative of child laborers working in horrid conditions; it covers virtually all profits. If all value is captured by labor, any “surplus value” collected by the owners of capital is by definition exploitative. The businessman who risks his own money to build and staff an innovative factory is not adding value; rather, he is subtracting value from the workers. Indeed, the money he used to buy the land and the materials is really just “dead labor.” For Marx, there was an essentially fixed amount of “labor-power” in society, and extracting profit from it was akin to strip-mining a natural resource. Slavery and wage-labor were different forms of the same exploitation because both involved extracting the common resource. In fact, while Marx despised slavery, he thought wage-labor was only a tiny improvement because wage-labor reduced costs for capitalists in that they were not required to feed or clothe wage laborers.
Because Marx preached revolution, we are inclined to consider him a revolutionary. He was not. None of this was a radical step forward in economic or political thinking. It was, rather, a reaffirmation of the disdain of commerce that starts with Plato and Aristotle and found new footing in Christianity. As Jerry Muller (to whom I am obviously very indebted) writes:
To a degree rarely appreciated, [Marx] merely recast the traditional Christian stigmatization of moneymaking into a new vocabulary and reiterated the ancient suspicion against those who used money to make money. In his concept of capitalism as “exploitation” Marx returned to the very old idea that money is fundamentally unproductive, that only those who live by the sweat of their brow truly produce, and that therefore not only interest, but profit itself, is always ill-gotten.
In his book Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, Jonathan Sperber suggests that “Marx is more usefully understood as a backward-looking figure, who took the circumstances of the first half of the nineteenth century and projected them into the future, than as a surefooted and foresighted interpreter of historical trends.”5
Marx was a classic bohemian who resented the fact that he spent his whole life living off the generosity of, first, his parents and then his collaborator Friedrich Engels. He loathed the way “the system” required selling out to the demands of the market and a career. The frustrated poet turned to the embryonic language of social science to express his angry barbaric yawp at The Man. “His critique of the stultifying effects of labor in a capitalist society,” Muller writes, “is a direct continuation of the Romantic conception of the self and its place in society.”
In other words, Marx was a romantic, not a scientist. Romanticism emerged as a rebellion against the Enlightenment, taking many forms—from romantic poetry to romantic nationalism. But central to all its forms was the belief that modern, commercial, rational life is inauthentic and alienating, and cuts us off from our true natures.
As Rousseau, widely seen as the first romantic, explained in his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, modernity—specifically the culture of commerce and science—was oppressive. The baubles of the Enlightenment were mere “garlands of flowers” that concealed “the chains which weigh [men] down” and led people to “love their own slavery.”
This is a better context for understanding Marx’s and Engels’s hatred of the division of labor and the division of rights and duties. Their baseline assumption, like Rousseau’s, is that primitive man lived a freer and more authentic life before the rise of private property and capitalism. “Within the tribe there is as yet no difference between rights and duties,” Engels writes in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. “The question whether participation in public affairs, in blood revenge or atonement, is a right or a duty, does not exist for the Indian; it would seem to him just as absurd as the question whether it was a right or a duty to sleep, eat, or hunt. A division of the tribe or of the gens into different classes was equally impossible.”
For Marx, then, the Jew might as well be the real culprit who told Eve to bite the apple. For the triumph of the Jew and the triumph of money led to the alienation of man. And in truth, the term “alienation” is little more than modern-sounding shorthand for exile from Eden. The division of labor encourages individuality, alienates us from the collective, fosters specialization and egoism, and dethrones the sanctity of the tribe. “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist,” Marx writes. “Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world—both the world of men and nature—of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.”
Marx’s muse was not analytical reason, but resentment. That is what fueled his false consciousness. To understand this fully, we should look at how that most ancient and eternal resentment—Jew-hatred—informed his worldview.
III
The atheist son of a Jewish convert to Lutheranism and the grandson of a rabbi, Karl Marx hated capitalism in no small part because he hated Jews. According to Marx and Engels, Jewish values placed the acquisition of money above everything else. Marx writes in his infamous essay “On the Jewish Question”:
Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew—not the Sabbath Jew … but the everyday Jew.
Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money [Emphasis in original]
The spread of capitalism, therefore, represented a kind of conquest for Jewish values. The Jew—at least the one who set up shop in Marx’s head—makes his money from money. He adds no value. Worse, the Jews considered themselves to be outside the organic social order, Marx complained, but then again that is what capitalism encourages—individual independence from the body politic and the selfish (in Marx’s mind) pursuit of individual success or happiness. For Marx, individualism was a kind of heresy because it meant violating the sacred bond of the community. Private property empowered individuals to live as individuals “without regard to other men,” as Marx put it.
This is the essence of Marx’s view of alienation. Marx believed that people were free, creative beings but were chained to their role as laborers in the industrial machine. The division of labor inherent to capitalist society was alienating and inauthentic, pulling us out of the communitarian natural General Will. The Jew was both an emblem of this alienation and a primary author of it:
The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews. [Emphasis in original]
He adds, “The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.” And he concludes: “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” [Emphasis in original]
In The Holy Family, written with Engels, he argues that the most pressing imperative is to transcend “the Jewishness of bourgeois society, the inhumanity of present existence, which finds its highest embodiment in the system of money.” [Emphasis in original]
In his “Theories of Surplus Value,” he praises Luther’s indictment of usury. Luther “has really caught the character of old-fashioned usury, and that of capital as a whole.” Marx and Engels insist that the capitalist ruling classes, whether or not they claim to be Jewish, are nonetheless Jewish in spirit. “In their description of the confrontation of capital and labor, Marx and Engels resurrected the traditional critique of usury,” Muller observes. Or, as Deirdre McCloskey notes, “the history that Marx thought he perceived went with his erroneous logic that capitalism—drawing on an anticommercial theme as old as commerce—just is the same thing as greed.”6 Paul Johnson is pithier: Marx’s “explanation of what was wrong with the world was a combination of student-café anti-Semitism and Rousseau.”7
For Marx, capital and the Jew are different faces of the same monster: “The capitalist knows that all commodities—however shabby they may look or bad they may smell—are in faith and in fact money, internally circumcised Jews, and in addition magical means by which to make more money out of money.”
Marx’s writing, particularly on surplus value, is drenched with references to capital as parasitic and vampiric: “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has bought from him.” The constant allusions to the eternal wickedness of the Jew combined with his constant references to blood make it hard to avoid concluding that Marx had simply updated the blood libel and applied it to his own atheistic doctrine. His writing is replete with references to the “bloodsucking” nature of capitalism. He likens both Jews and capitalists (the same thing in his mind) to life-draining exploiters of the proletariat.
Marx writes how the extension of the workday into the night “only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor,” resulting in the fact that “the vampire will not let go ‘while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited.’” As Mark Neocleous of Brunel University documents in his brilliant essay, “The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx’s Vampires,” the images of blood and bloodsucking capital in Das Kapital are even more prominent motifs: “Capital ‘sucks up the worker’s value-creating power’ and is dripping with blood. Lacemaking institutions exploiting children are described as ‘blood-sucking,’ while U.S. capital is said to be financed by the ‘capitalized blood of children.’ The appropriation of labor is described as the ‘life-blood of capitalism,’ while the state is said to have here and there interposed itself ‘as a barrier to the transformation of children’s blood into capital.’”
Marx’s vision of exploitative, Jewish, bloodsucking capital was an expression of romantic superstition and tribal hatred. Borrowing from the medieval tradition of both Catholics as well as Luther himself, not to mention a certain folkloric poetic tradition, Marx invented a modern-sounding “scientific” theory that was in fact reactionary in every sense of the word. “If Marx’s vision was forward-looking, its premises were curiously archaic,” Muller writes. “As in the civic republican and Christian traditions, self-interest is the enemy of social cohesion and of morality. In that sense, Marx’s thought is a reversion to the time before Hegel, Smith, or Voltaire.”
In fairness to Marx, he does not claim that he wants to return to a feudal society marked by inherited social status and aristocracy. He is more reactionary than that. The Marxist final fantasy holds that at the end of history, when the state “withers away,” man is liberated from all exploitation and returns to the tribal state in which there is no division of labor, no dichotomy of rights and duties.
Marx’s “social science” was swept into history’s dustbin long ago. What endured was the romantic appeal of Marxism, because that appeal speaks to our tribal minds in ways we struggle to recognize, even though it never stops whispering in our ears.
IV
It is an old conservative habit—one I’ve been guilty of myself—of looking around society and politics, finding things we don’t like or disagree with, and then running through an old trunk of Marxist bric-a-brac to spruce up our objections. It is undeniably true that the influence of Marx, particularly in the academy, remains staggering. Moreover, his indirect influence is as hard to measure as it is extensive. How many novels, plays, and movies have been shaped by Marx or informed by people shaped by Marx? It’s unknowable.
And yet, this is overdone. The truth is that Marx’s ideas were sticky for several reasons. First, they conformed to older, traditional ways of seeing the world—far more than Marxist zealots have ever realized. The idea that there are malevolent forces above and around us, manipulating our lives and exploiting the fruits of our labors, was hardly invented by him. In a sense, it wasn’t invented by anybody. Conspiracy theories are as old as mankind, stretching back to prehistory.
There’s ample reason—with ample research to back it up—to believe that there is a natural and universal human appetite for conspiracy theories. It is a by-product of our adapted ability to detect patterns, particularly patterns that may help us anticipate a threat—and, as Mark van Vugt has written, “the biggest threat facing humans throughout history has been other people, particularly when they teamed up against you.”8
To a very large extent, this is what Marxism is —an extravagant conspiracy theory in which the ruling classes, the industrialists, and/or the Jews arrange affairs for their own benefit and against the interests of the masses. Marx himself was an avid conspiracy theorist, as so many brilliant bohemian misfits tend to be, believing that the English deliberately orchestrated the Irish potato famine to “carry out the agricultural revolution and to thin the population of Ireland down to the proportion satisfactory to the landlords.” He even argued that the Crimean War was a kind of false-flag operation to hide the true nature of Russian-English collusion.
Contemporary political figures on the left and the right routinely employ the language of exploitation and conspiracy. They do so not because they’ve internalized Marx, but because of their own internal psychological architecture. In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi, the talented left-wing writer, describes Goldman Sachs (the subject of quite a few conspiracy theories) thus:
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
Marx would be jealous that he didn’t think of the phrase “the great vampire squid.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has occasionally traded in the same kind of language, even evoking some ancient anti-Semitic tropes. “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special-interest friends, and her donors,” Trump said in one campaign speech. “This election will determine if we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged.” He added: “Our corrupt political establishment, that is the greatest power behind the efforts at radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working people. Their financial resources are virtually unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched.”
A second reason Marxism is so successful at fixing itself to the human mind is that it offers—to some—a palatable substitute for the lost certainty of religious faith. Marxism helped to restore certainty and meaning for huge numbers of people who, having lost traditional religion, had not lost their religious instinct. One can see evidence of this in the rhetoric used by Marxist and other socialist revolutionaries who promised to deliver a “Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.”
The 20th-century philosopher Eric Voegelin argued that Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire had stripped the transcendent from its central place in human affairs. God had been dethroned and “We the People”—and our things—had taken His place. “When God is invisible behind the world,” Voegelin writes, “the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.”9
The religious views of the Romantic writers and artists Marx was raised on (and whom he had once hoped to emulate) ran the gamut from atheism to heartfelt devotion, but they shared an anger and frustration with the way the new order had banished the richness of faith from the land. “Now we have got the freedom of believing in public nothing but what can be rationally demonstrated,” the writer Johann Heinrich Merck complained. “They have deprived religion of all its sensuous elements, that is, of all its relish. They have carved it up into its parts and reduced it to a skeleton without color and light…. And now it’s put in a jar and nobody wants to taste it.”10
When God became sidelined as the source of ultimate meaning, “the people” became both the new deity and the new messianic force of the new order. In other words, instead of worshipping some unseen force residing in Heaven, people started worshipping themselves. This is what gave nationalism its spiritual power, as the volksgeist, people’s spirit, replaced the Holy Spirit. The tribal instinct to belong to a sacralized group took over. In this light, we can see how romantic nationalism and “globalist” Marxism are closely related. They are both “re-enchantment creeds,” as the philosopher-historian Ernest Gellner put it. They fill up the holes in our souls and give us a sense of belonging and meaning.
For Marx, the inevitable victory of Communism would arrive when the people, collectively, seized their rightful place on the Throne of History.11 The cult of unity found a new home in countless ideologies, each of which determined, in accord with their own dogma, to, in Voegelin’s words, “build the corpus mysticum of the collectivity and bind the members to form the oneness of the body.” Or, to borrow a phrase from Barack Obama, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
In practice, Marxist doctrine is more alienating and dehumanizing than capitalism will ever be. But in theory, it conforms to the way our minds wish to see the world. There’s a reason why so many populist movements have been so easily herded into Marxism. It’s not that the mobs in Venezuela or Cuba started reading The Eighteenth Brumaire and suddenly became Marxists. The peasants of North Vietnam did not need to read the Critique of the Gotha Program to become convinced that they were being exploited. The angry populace is always already convinced. The people have usually reached the conclusion long ago. They have the faith; what they need is the dogma. They need experts and authority figures—priests!—with ready-made theories about why the masses’ gut feelings were right all along. They don’t need Marx or anybody else to tell them they feel ripped off, disrespected, exploited. They know that already. The story Marxists tell doesn’t have to be true. It has to be affirming. And it has to have a villain. The villain, then and now, is the Jew.
1 Muller, Jerry Z.. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought (p. 5). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
2 Muller, Jerry Z. Capitalism and the Jews (pp. 23-24). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
3 Luther’s economic thought, reflected in his “Long Sermon on Usury of 1520” and his tract On Trade and Usury of 1524, was hostile to commerce in general and to international trade in particular, and stricter than the canonists in its condemnation of moneylending. Muller, Jerry Z.. Capitalism and the Jews (p. 26). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
4 Quoted approvingly in Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. “Capitalist Production.” Capital: Critical Analysis of Production, Volume II. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, trans. London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, & Co. 1887. p. 604
5 Sperber, Jonathan. “Introduction.” Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. New York: Liverwright Publishing Corporation. 2013. xiii.
6 McCloskey, Deirdre. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 142
7 Johnson, Paul. Intellectuals (Kindle Locations 1325-1326). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
8 See also: Sunstain, Cass R. and Vermeule, Adrian. “Syposium on Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures.” The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 17, Number 2, 2009, pp. 202-227. http://www.ask-force.org/web/Discourse/Sunstein-Conspiracy-Theories-2009.pdf
9 Think of the story of the Golden Calf. Moses departs for Mt. Sinai to talk with God and receive the Ten Commandments. No sooner had he left did the Israelites switch their allegiance to false idol, the Golden Calf, treating a worldly inanimate object as their deity. So it is with modern man. Hence, Voegelin’s quip that for the Marxist “Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come.”
10 Blanning, Tim. The Romantic Revolution: A History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 34) (Kindle Locations 445-450). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
11 Marx: “Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.”
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Ideas Have Consequences
Review of 'Realism and Democracy' By Elliott Abrams
Seth Mandel 2018-03-15
Then, in 1966, Syrian Baathists—believers in a different transnational unite-all-the-Arabs ideology—overthrew the government in Damascus and lent their support to Palestinian guerrillas in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank to attack Israel. Later that year, a Jordanian-linked counter-coup in Syria failed, and the key figures behind it fled to Jordan. Then, on the eve of the Six-Day War in May 1967, Jordan’s King Hussein signed a mutual-defense pact with Egypt, agreeing to deploy Iraqi troops on Jordanian soil and effectively giving Nasser command and control over Jordan’s own armed forces.
This is just a snapshot of the havoc wreaked on the Middle East by the conceit of pan-Arabism. This history is worth recalling when reading Elliott Abrams’s idealistic yet clearheaded Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring. One of the book’s key insights is the importance of legitimacy for regimes that rule “not nation-states” but rather “Sykes-Picot states”—the colonial heirlooms of Britain and France created in the wake of the two world wars. At times, these states barely seem to acknowledge, let alone respect, their own sovereignty.
When the spirit of revolution hit the Arab world in 2010, the states with external legitimacy—monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait—survived. Regimes that ruled merely by brute force—Egypt, Yemen, Libya—didn’t. The Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria has only held on thanks to the intervention of Iran and Russia, and it is difficult to argue that there is any such thing as “Syria” anymore. What this all proved was that the “stability” of Arab dictatorships, a central conceit of U.S. foreign policy, was in many cases an illusion.
That is the first hard lesson in pan-Arabism from Abrams, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The second is this: The extremists who filled the power vacuums in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other countries led Western analysts to believe that there was an “Islamic exceptionalism” at play that demonstrated Islam’s incompatibility with democracy. Abrams effectively debunks this by showing that the real culprit stymieing the spread of liberty in the Middle East was not Islam but pan-Arabism, which stems from secular roots. He notes one study showing that, in the 30 years between 1973 and 2003, “a non-Arab Muslim-majority country was almost 20 times more likely to be ‘electorally competitive’ than an Arab-majority Muslim country.”
Abrams is thus an optimist on the subject of Islam and democracy—which is heartening, considering his experience and expertise. He worked for legendary cold-warrior Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and served as an assistant secretary of state for human rights under Ronald Reagan and later as George W. Bush’s deputy national-security adviser for global democracy strategy. Realism and Democracy is about U.S. policy and the Arab world—but it is also about the nature of participatory politics itself. Its theme is: Ideas have consequences. And what sets Abrams’s book apart is its concrete policy recommendations to put flesh on the bones of those ideas, and bring them to life.
The dreary disintegration of the Arab Spring saw Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which after a year was displaced in a military coup. Syria’s civil war has seen about 400,000 killed and millions displaced. Into the vacuum stepped numerous Islamist terror groups. The fall of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya has resulted in total state collapse. Yemen’s civil war bleeds on.
Stability in authoritarian states with little or no legitimacy is a fiction. Communist police states were likely to fall, and the longer they took to do so, the longer the opposition sat in a balled-up rage. That, Abrams notes, is precisely what happened in Egypt. Mubarak’s repression gave the Muslim Brotherhood an advantage once the playing field opened up: The group had decades of organizing under its belt, a coherent raison d’être, and a track record of providing health and education services where the state lagged. No other parties or opposition groups had anything resembling this kind of coordination.
Abrams trenchantly concludes from this that “tyranny in the Arab world is dangerous and should itself be viewed as a form of political extremism that is likely to feed other forms.” Yet even this extremism can be tempered by power, he suggests. In a democracy, Islamist parties will have to compromise and moderate or be voted out. In Tunisia, electorally successful Islamists chose the former, and it stands as a rare success story.
Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood took a different path in Egypt, with parlous results. Its government began pulling up the ladder behind it, closing avenues of political resistance and civic participation. Hamas did the same after winning Palestinian elections in 2006. Abrams thinks that the odds of such a bait-and-switch can be reduced. He quotes the academic Stephen R. Grand, who calls for all political parties “to take an oath of allegiance to the state, to respect the outcome of democratic elections, to abide by the rules of the constitution, and to forswear violence.” If they keep their word, they will open up the political space for non-Islamist parties to get in the game. If they don’t—well, let the Egyptian coup stand as a warning.
Abrams, to his credit, does not avoid the Mesopotamian elephant in the room. The Iraq War has become Exhibit A in the dangers of democracy promotion. This is understandable, but it is misguided. The Bush administration made the decision to decapitate the regime of Saddam Hussein based on national-security calculations, mainly the fear of weapons of mass destruction. Once the decapitation had occurred, the administration could hardly have been expected to replace Saddam with another strongman whose depravities would this time be on America’s conscience. Critics of the war reverse the order here and paint a false portrait.
Here is where Abrams’s book stands out: He provides, in the last two chapters, an accounting of the weaknesses in U.S. policy, including mistakes made by the administration he served, and a series of concrete proposals to show that democracy promotion can be effective without the use of force.
One mistake, according to Abrams, is America’s favoring of civil-society groups over political parties. These groups do much good, generally have strong English-language skills, and are less likely to be tied to the government or ancien régime. But those are also strikes against them. Abrams relates a story told by former U.S. diplomat Princeton Lyman about Nelson Mandela. Nigerian activists asked the South African freedom fighter to support an oil embargo against their own government. Mandela declined because, Lyman says, there was as yet no serious, organized political opposition party: “What Mandela was saying to the Nigerian activists is that, in the absence of political movements dedicated not just to democracy but also to governing when the opportunity arises, social, civic, and economic pressures against tyranny will not suffice.” Without properly focused democracy promotion, other tools to punish repressive regimes will be off the table.
Egypt offers a good example of another principle: Backsliding must be punished. The Bush administration’s pressure on Mubarak over his treatment of opposition figures changed regime behavior in 2005. Yet by the end of Bush’s second term, the pressure had let up and Mubarak’s misbehavior continued, with no consequences from either Bush or his successor, Barack Obama, until it was too late.
That, in turn, leads to another of Abrams’s recommendations: “American diplomacy can be effective only when it is clear that the president and secretary of state are behind whatever diplomatic moves or statements an official in Washington or a U.S. ambassador is making.” This is good advice for the current Oval Office occupant and his advisers. President Trump’s supporters advise critics of his dismissive attitude toward human-rights violations to focus on what the president does, not what he says. But Trump’s refusal to take a hard line against Vladimir Putin and his recent praise of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s move to become president for life undermine lower-level officials’ attempts to encourage reform.
There won’t be democracy without democrats. Pro-democracy education, Abrams advises, can teach freedom-seekers to speak the ennobling language of liberty, which is the crucial first step toward building a culture that prizes it. And in the process, we might do some ennobling ourselves.
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