The Big Question

From: Gideon Aronoff
To: John Derbyshire
Subject: The Exodus Impulse and the Sinai Impulse

John,

Allow me to correct your misconception (shared by several commenters) that I support illegal immigration in any way. I do not. I am in favor of a system that includes security measures to keep dangerous people out while offering opportunities to become part of our country to those who came here to work and support their families, but entered or stayed illegally.

They need to be made to do the right thing – and that includes paying fines, getting to the back of the line, learning English, and so on – but we have to create a realistic “line” rather than this mishmash of a system that we currently have. Let’s make it work and end illegal immigration. I’m still optimistic enough to believe that we as a country can do just that.

Now, as I wrap up this exchange about where Jews should stand on immigration, I'll focus on the key points that have divided us:

I believe that Jews are and should be parochial and universal at the same time. This understanding is well articulated by Rabbi Sidney Schwartz in his book Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World when he writes:

“The Jewish tradition’s universal teachings about responsibility toward all human beings and to the entire world continue to bring us back to the needed equilibrium between self-interest – the Exodus impulse – and the interests of humanity – the Sinai impulse. Even when, or perhaps especially when, the Jewish world tends toward the parochial, there are voices in our midst that call us back to our prophetic legacy to be agents for the repair of the entire world.”

My awareness of this interplay between Judaism’s Exodus and Sinai impulses frames my reading of Kevin MacDonald—even if it isn’t the framework from which MacDonald writes. I don’t think Jews need to be ashamed of watching out for our own parochial interests—the Exodus impulse.

I am proud of Jewish contributions to fighting the immigration restrictions that MacDonald describes. And I am particularly proud that in taking steps to benefit our community, we also were able to express the universal value of human dignity—our Sinai imperative—through our opposition to nationality-based quotas that were harmful to so many people and to our country as well. Pascal aside, I think that from a Jewish perspective we can and must be fully particularist and fully universal at the same time.

Though it is true that one can find any number of polls on the Internet to support any claim, I put most stock in established organizations such as Zogby, CBS-New York Times, and USA-Today. Their results show that the country is overwhelmingly supportive of a comprehensive approach to immigration reform.

Just a few weeks ago ABC News published a poll saying that 58 percent of Americans are in favor of allowing undocumented immigrants to stay if they paid fines and met other requirements. This summer a CNN-Opinion Research Corporation poll also found that most people did indeed favor comprehensive immigration reform. More than half of the people polled by NBC News-Wall Street Journal said they’d be disappointed if Congress did not pass immigration reform legislation. I could go on. I stick with my assertion that the majority are on our side. So it is naturally frustrating to have the issue taken off the table in Congress because the opposition minority was more successful at emailing, calling and faxing.

As for the economic arguments, of course there are economic pluses and minuses to immigration. But I believe the minuses can be mitigated by biting the bullet and creating a new system where legality and control are achieved through a federal comprehensive plan that includes legalization, enforcement, future legal flows, and integration.

Additionally, what I take away from Rabbi Sacks is not that the economy is irrelevant —it is crucial and he has written eloquently about both the challenges of a global economy and the virtues of the market. But we shouldn’t fetishize economic or other forms of power over individual freedom and dignity. My initial statement of Jewish immigration needs in my first e-mail was, in my mind, an example of the combined Sinai and Exodus imperatives, and placed economics in the full context of security, culture, practical necessity, and so on.

Next, let me correct the point on diversity. I wasn’t disagreeing that diversity is a worthy goal, only that immigration and integration are different areas of public policy and both deserve attention. Moreover, I was arguing that policies to promote diversity in immigration are, in my view, much better served by my proposals and that a renewed focus on integration—or assimilation—of newcomers will allow us to get the benefits from diversity while incorporating this diverse population into our common national objectives.

Regarding the comments about deportation—there has to be a better way forward for our country than to deport mothers, fathers, husbands and wives of families who are not here legally, and force the U.S. citizen and legal immigrant members of the families—often children—to make the inhumane and heartbreaking choice to separate from their loved ones or their country (the U.S.A). Separating families with mixed status, or making them choose to leave behind everything they’ve built for themselves over the years, is certainly legally permissible, but is not the way we should be treating millions of people.

I agree that we should always be seeking ways to improve our refugee system—we should work to improve all aspects of our government and our society. But to essentially shut down refugee protection is an extreme and callous response, particularly when based on misapplying the European example. U.S. and European immigration and integration policies are markedly different.

Bruce Bawer, who strives in his 2006 book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within to sound the alarm about the impact of failed policies in Europe still concludes:

“America views its immigrants as potential assets, Americans in the making, the next wave of bearers of the American dream; Europe views them as needy cases, wards of the state. America treats them as individuals, who, though welcome to retain aspects of their cultures of origin, are expected to think of themselves as free, self-determining Americans; Europe treats them as members of an ethnic and religious group and is less interested in their self-realization as individuals than in the preservation, in Europe, of their group’s customs.”

Finally, on the Senate bill: I don’t have contempt for the American people. I recognize the stresses that immigration can cause, and believe that the restrictionist camp includes people motivated by these real concerns as well as others who are motivated by racial and ethnic prejudice. When we in the immigrant rights camp paint our opponents with broad strokes and fail to make distinctions, we are guilty of the same sins of which we often, accurately, accuse our opponents.

However, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which monitors and reports on the activities of far-right extremists, has issued a valuable report in Extremists Declare ‘Open Season’ on Immigrants that notes that extremists continue to focus their energies on Hispanic hate-mongering through racist rhetoric, crude stereotypes, and threats of using violence to intimidate illegal immigrants.

“As we have gotten deeper into the discussion on immigration, the white supremacist movement has reinvigorated itself and closed ranks around the cause of fighting immigration and turning America into a nation for ‘Whites only,’” says Abraham H. Foxman, ADL national director. “The immigration debate has provided the perfect storm for America’s white supremacist fringe to recruit, organize and sow the seeds of racial discord and hate.” Not all restrictionists hold these views, but it is a warning that we need to take seriously.

I share your opinion that the Senate bill was flawed. That's why it was opposed not just by immigration restrictionists but also by many hard-core advocates of immigrant rights. Ultimately it was killed by too much opposition from immigration restrictionist forces and too little support from the immigrant rights community. As a pragmatist, I concluded that it was better to work from this flawed model than to destroy it. I still believe that it could have been improved and that it was better than what we now have.

Unfortunately, what we now have is continued illegality and the exploitation of workers who are in this vulnerable status; more deaths of migrants in the desert; an ever coarsening political debate; an abdication of federal leadership on a major national issue; raids that are separating families and disrupting communities; and a hodgepodge of local responses that can cause trauma for immigrant families but cannot solve our immigration problems, or take the place of the wise and just legal immigration system that our country desperately needs.

We—and here I speak with my Jewish, American and American Jewish identities— can definitely do better. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get back to work.

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John,

Numbers do indeed matter. That’s why I posed questions about criteria and numbers and indicated that we need a rational debate to serve our varied interests and values. But numbers can’t be the whole story if we Jews are to truly address America’s dysfunctional immigration system in a Jewish manner.

Those of us in the Jewish community insist that our public policy prescriptions must defend the core dignity of each human being. The Talmud famously teaches us, “To save one life is as if you have saved the world.” Again to quote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi, “Judaism sees society as the arena in which specific ideals are realized: justice, compassion, the rule of law combined with respect for the sanctity of life and the dignity of the individual. The Torah is a unique attempt to create a nation governed not by the pursuit of power or the accumulation of wealth but by recognition of the worth of each person as the image of God.” We Jews take this very seriously, whether or not you do. And this exchange is, after all, about the Jewish take on immigration – and not on whether Kevin MacDonald thinks Jews are misusing immigration policy for nefarious ends.

To focus for the moment on the numbers issues, you use a trusty old technique of diverting attention from the point at hand by using outlandish, even reckless, exaggerations, as in “billions” of people pouring into America. When I say America needs a liberal immigration policy, “liberal” does not equal “open.” No one is arguing that America should admit billions of newcomers. Again I will say that the exact numbers and criteria should be developed through a rational debate in Congress and in American society.

As an American, I find it very distressing to see how a small group of pontificators, who lather up their base with false specters of uncontrolled migration of terrorists, have thus far succeeded in derailing any attempt at a considered, rational approach to the immigration problem. Polls continue to show that a majority of Americans actually want comprehensive immigration reform that includes a realistic path to citizenship for those already here, as well as smart, effective security measures to keep those who want to do us harm out – in short, a system that works for the benefit of America and in keeping with what we as a country purport to be our values.

Staying with the numbers side of the equation, it is crucial to understand that America needs more people to keep our economy running smoothly. This is not mere conjecture – Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says we will need to raise immigration levels to 3.5 million people annually to overcome the effects of an aging population. His predecessor, Alan Greenspan, made the same point repeatedly during his tenure.

The role of immigrants in our economy is now, as it has always been, a well-established plus. Not only in the entrepreneurial world, as I mentioned in the first piece, citing Intel, Google and other companies started by immigrants – but also in the everyday labor force. For the complete picture, we have to look also at the role of immigrants in agriculture, the service sector, technology, the arts and science, where examples of the contributions to America’s success abound.

Ultimately, what matters to the number-crunchers is that the U.S. continues to see real economic benefits from immigration, and that can be documented in a variety of ways. A recent study by the University of California, for example, showed that between 1990 and 2004, native-born wages increased an average of 1.8% as a consequence of immigration. In addition, the study also said that overall annual growth in Gross Domestic Product is approximately 0.1 percentage point higher as a result of immigration, which represents billions of dollars in economic output and, when compounded across a generation, represents a significant improvement in the standard of living of our children and grandchildren. Dan Siciliano, executive director of Stanford Law School’s Program in Law, Economics and Business, says “the evidence continues to mount in favor of the conclusion that immigration is good for economy, good for jobs, and a critical part of our nation’s future prosperity.”

I would like to now return to a point addressed in my previous response that elicited great disdain and scorn in your reply. While you are skeptical about the value of Torah and Talmud to this debate, we Jews see wrestling with the meaning of Torah as core to what it is to be Jewish. Specifically, on the question of who constitutes a “stranger among us,” you completely ignore the opinion of the identified inspiration for my stance: Orthodox Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who was quoted at some length. Presumably Rabbi Sacks knows something about the meaning of Torah.

I am happy to admit that there is not absolute unanimity in the Jewish world on the meaning of the injunction to welcome the stranger. To be frank, there isn’t this level of unanimity in the Jewish world on anything. However, Rabbi Sacks’ belief of what “a stranger among us” means, is the overwhelming perspective amongst our rabbinate, with fundamental agreement from across the Jewish spectrum. To name just a few, see Rabbi Joshua Maroof (Sephardic); Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal (Conservative); Rabbi Michael Feshbach (Reform); Rabbi Adam Chalom (Humanism); Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb (Reconstructionist); Rabbi Stephen B. Silvern (Renewal); and Rabbi Gershon Winkler (Independent).

As far as calling the notion of a “chosen people” exclusivist – that seems to come from a misinformed gentile understanding of the term – I wouldn’t use the moniker “goyish”. Under our Jewish religion there is a set of obligations that fall upon Jews, who are thus “chosen” to fulfill these obligations. This does not mean that we arrogantly consider ourselves God’s favorites.

Unfortunately, you totally missed my point about the parallelism between waves of Jewish and other immigration. As someone who values people as well as numbers, what I was talking about here was a parallel of motivation, not demographics. I also wanted to point out that prior to the immigration laws of the 1920s, there were essentially no restrictions on immigration (except on the Chinese), so Jews who might today agree with your restrictionist approach should remember that their forebears didn’t necessarily have to break any laws to stay in this country.

But where are the Latin American success stories, you ask. Here’s a recent one, featured by NBC television’s Washington affiliate last week: Alfred Quinones now says he's living proof that not all undocumented workers are laborers, maids and bus boys. He entered this country illegally by climbing a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border, found work picking tomatoes in California, learned English, and later got into U.C. Berkeley, then Harvard Medical School. His U.S. citizenship followed and – 12 years after scaling that fence – he became one of the nation's top neurosurgeons at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, where he is today working to find a cure for brain cancer. He has been called “one of the most accomplished neurosurgeons in the world.”

You can’t predict who’s going to make the greatest contributions, so while the statistics have some value, the patients whose lives are being saved by this illegal immigrant from Latin America don’t give a hoot about some study showing that more European and Asian-born people have started companies here.

You ask why, even with the success stories, we should accept so many people from Latin America – you want diversity. Respectfully, this point makes no sense based on either geography or public policy. The fact that the U.S. has more immigrants from Latin America is a matter of proximity – by and large, people migrate to neighboring places. The fact that Mexicans and Central Americans are such a dominant group is understandable, but not a profound point. We who support comprehensive immigration reform would like to see programs to tie future flows of legal, rather than undocumented, migration, to economic needs – accompanied by effective enforcement measures. This new realistic legal system would promote diversity and fairness because immigrant workers from any part of the world would be able to apply for visas. The advantage of geography would be mitigated.

As far as your answer to how generous we should be to people fleeing persecution – “Not very,” you say. I find this callous response to be contrary to the core Jewish and American traditions. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, in his The Book of Jewish Values, writes eloquently about the Torah’s injunction that “You shall not turn over to his master a slave who seeks refuge with you from his master.” [Deuteronomy 23:16-17]. I have to say that I am astounded that you would have America turn its back on persecuted victims from Iran, Darfur, Burma, and other vicious regimes and lecture them that they should “reform” their countries. One can certainly oppose fraud – I do – without losing our humanity and our compassion for the oppressed.

You also say that my premise that we can’t practically deport 12 million people is false – again you twist the meaning, and answer a different question – I used the word “practically” deliberately, and stand by the assertion that it would not be practical – regardless of whether or not this has been “costed.” Is “between $41 billion and $46 billion annually over five years” indeed practical to you? More impractical is the notion of trying to remove 12 million people – visions of the trains to Auschwitz come to mind – by the U.S. government. That would be a horror only a truly heartless person would relish. Would it be practical to you to see families of mixed status (again the trains to Poland come to mind) ripped apart? Surely, there’s a better way.

John, since we haven’t had the opportunity to meet in person, I checked out your bio on the web and have to say that I am impressed by your accomplishments since immigrating to the United States. I would count as one of your most important achievements the lesson that you teach (paralleling that of Alfred Quinones) that undocumented migrants – or illegal aliens as you would likely describe yourself – can make valuable contributions to our now common homeland if given a second chance at citizenship. I hope we all learn this lesson well.

Ultimately, I conclude that numbers are part of the essence of the immigration issue, but the essence also has to take in the totality of the interest of all Americans – immigrant and non-immigrant, business and labor, religious, non-religious, conservative, liberal and in-between. I believe we can get there, but only if we work together to make it happen. Our side has from the start been ready for this. Sadly, your side has repeatedly shown quite plainly that it has no such interest. One need only think back to June in the U.S. Congress, when the best opportunity at what would have been at least a start was shot down by your vocal minority. This is tragic for Jewish Americans and all Americans, immigrant and native-born alike.

NEXT: Good for America? Good for Jews? Good for the Whole World??

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From: Gideon Aronoff
To: John Derbyshire
Subject: Old Chestnuts

John,

Immigration restrictionists frequently trot out the old chestnut that American Jews’ attitudes about immigration are mired in a sepia-toned time warp where babushka’d bubbes and wide-eyed zaydes are still hobbling off boats from the old country. This is not, however, a valid description of twenty-first century American Jews’ views on immigration and our complex identities that meld parochial interests, universal Jewish values and our national interests as Americans.

Today, we are witnessing a striking parallel to our own Jewish American history, as Latin Americans, Asians and others clamber to get into America like we did – but this time, because we were ultimately embraced by America, we are mostly part of the established “native” population. We remember that when the massive waves of Jewish immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s – if you weren't Chinese – there were essentially no visa requirements, so it was easyStriking Parallels: This is how somebody else's Bubbe got to America to arrive legally. By the early 1920s however, severe restrictions were put in place and Jews began resorting to illegal entry, or were denied access, with tragic consequences during the Holocaust. Today there are only 5,000 visas for low skilled workers – it is therefore not surprising that desperately poor people take life-threatening measures to support their families, even if this runs counter to our immigration laws.

As a Jewish community activist engaged in the struggle to protect refugees and to ensure that immigrants and newcomers are offered welcome and assimilated into our country, I constantly seek to understand the diverse array of goals, hopes, needs and expectations our community has for America’s immigration system.

First, and from the most parochial perspective, Jews have a need for a system that facilitates Jewish immigration, protects Jewish refugees and recognizes that long- and short-term visitors from abroad are important parts of our global Jewish community. (Ten percent of all Jews in America today are foreign born – they are still coming from places where they’re not welcome; they still come to teach in our schools, work in our camps, etc.) That said, to serve this goal, it’s neither moral nor practical to think we can carve out a system that admits Jews but restricts others, slamming the door to America behind us.

Secondly, we have a need for a vibrant economy, now and in the future. While I fully recognize that the economic analysis of the pros and cons of immigration is complex, I come down on the side of the argument that our country needs significant immigration to continue its prosperity.

Since 1990, immigrants have started one out every four U.S. venture-backed public companies. The Kaufman Foundation reports that in 2005, 350 out of 100,000 immigrants started businesses each month; compared to 280 started by native born Americans. In technology the phenomenon is more apparent than in any other sector of the economy. American immigrants founded or co-founded some of the world’s most prominent tech companies, among them Intel, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Yahoo! and Google. Forty percent of companies operating in high-technology manufacturing today were started by immigrants and more than half of the employment generated by these manufacturers has come from immigrant-founded companies.

This pronounced, positive impact of immigration on America’s success is not just apparent in the entrepreneurial statAn Important Part of the Mix: Immigration is good for the economyistics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projected in 2004 that the total employment in service occupations would increase by 19 percent by 2014, second only to professional and related occupations. Half of the 20 occupations anticipating the greatest job growth will require only short-term on-the-job training. During this same period America will need to fill about 25 million job openings (or 45 percent of all vacancies) with workers with a high-school diploma or less.

Third, the Jewish community requires federal policies that enhance community and national security. Jews need real security – not “press release” security. Real security will come from careful analysis, careful policy making and a focus on individuals where evidence shows they may be a threat – and not stereotyping groups such as Latinos, Africans, Middle Easterners or others. It will not come from speeches made in Congress, publicity stunts like the recent campaign to send bricks to elected officials, or partial, “feel-good,” enforcement measures that won’t actually stop undocumented immigration.

Fundamentally, an enforcement-only approach to immigration would be folly – and I find myself in good company when I say that. The Coalition for Immigration Security, a group of former Bush administration security officials, encourages Congress and the administration to enact legislation that provides strong immigration law enforcement coupled with “realistic policies related or our labor markets and economic needs.” The coalition also said in a report last year that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to pay a fine, undergo strict security checks, and “make amends for their mistake without crippling our economy and social structures by being part of a mass deportation. Each day that we fail to bring these people out of the shadows is another day of amnesty by default.”

A fourth core need of American Jews is for immigration policies that promote the integration of newcomers into American culture -- thereby enhancing both our security and our identity. It is essential to remember that integration into American culture is an historic phenomenon that makes the American experience markedly different from that of European countries, where integration is not fostered and where Jews are under siege. Moreover, it’s not inconsistent to call for policies that promote integration of newcomers and, at the same time value the benefits of true American diversity in allowing us to be fully Jewish and fully American.

The fears generated about people from other cultures bringing their antisemitism with them is yet another thinly-veiled example of bigotry trumping sound policy making. While it is true that some immigrants bring the prejudices of their home countries, including antisemitism, second- and third-generation immigrants tend to leave these negative views behind. Why? Because they are becoming fully-integrated Americans.

This alarmist prejudice against recent arrivals is not new to today’s America, it is part of a cycle of nativism that periodically afflicts our country. Our revered Ben Franklin’s own inherent bigotry was evident in 1751 in his “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind”:

“Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of us Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”

We Americans – all of us – should focus our debate about immigration based on rational analysis rather than irrational judgments about outsiders. We have been shown plenty of examples beyond Franklin’s that, when allowed to truly integrate, all groups do indeed become true Americans – while keeping alive their individual heritages. You can still get a pretty good bratwurst in Pennsylvania today but it’s safe to also say that English is still the predominant language throughout the state.

Finally, while all of these tangible interests are crucial, we must not lose sight of the fact that Jews are a religious and ethical people and the bearers of an ancient tradition. We are taught to internalize the lesson that is repeated throughout the Torah and the Talmud that we must “welcome the stranger,” “not oppress the stranger,” “protect the stranger,” “have one law for the stranger and the citizen among you,” all because “you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

This lesson is most clearly articulated by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi, who has written:

“Why should you not hate the stranger? – asks the Torah. Because you once stood where he stands now. You know the heart of the stranger because you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt…I [G-d] made you into the world’s archetypal strangers so that you would fight for the rights of strangers – for your own and those others, wherever they are, whatever the colour of their skin or the nature of their culture, because, though they are not in your image – says G-d – they are nonetheless in Mine. There is only one reply strong enough to answer the question: Why should I not hate the stranger? Because the stranger is me.”

That’s why, even in 2007 as most of the world’s most serious hostilities are happening to other groups – refugees fleeing persecution in Iran, innocents enduring chaos and violence in Burma, destitute masses of undocumented migrants risking death to seek opportunity, millions suffering extreme poverty – we Jews still must focus on helping to protect them.

I close with a few questions to ponder: How generous should we be to people who are fleeing persecution? If we practically can’t deport 12 million people, is it better to leave them in the shadows, or create a package of enhanced enforcement, new immigration opportunities, legalization and integration programs? What policies best serve to promote the integration of newcomers? Since we can’t accept everyone in the world, what are the criteria for a controlled, liberal immigration system?

Without doubt there is plenty of room for analysis and debate on the details of these policy questions. But, based on the full range of American Jewish interests and values, I conclude that we Jews must remain deeply engaged with the challenges posed by American immigration and continue to fight the forces of immigration restriction as we seek to create a 21^st century American Jewish movement for immigrants and refugees.

NEXT: But why such favoritism to Mexicans, Gideon?

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From: Jack Wertheimer
To: Joey Kurtzman
Subject: Different Pasts, Different Futures

Well, Joey, I never saw it coming. All your talk about the new age in which we live, the easy movement of people and ideas, the collapse of boundaries between people and the joys of intermarriage. And now when all is said and done, where do we end up? We’re back to the stale arguments between socialists and Zionists about universalism versus particularism that took the Jewish world by storm 100 years ago!

After the horrors of the Gulag, Castro’s hell in Cuba, countless “Great Leaps Forward,” and the defeat ofCold Enough for Ya'?: After the Gulag, socialism still titillates young Jews Communism in most parts of the world by triumphant liberation movements, you want to take us back to the glory days of socialism. After all the oppression and slaughter that Jews—and hundreds of millions of others—have suffered in the socialist paradises, you want to return to the delusions of your grandparents, if not great-grand-parents. They, at least, could claim ignorance about the outcome of the wonderful socialist experiments. You have no such excuse, but harbor the wish that somehow the current century will differ from the last one.

Leaving aside your willful historical amnesia, your retreat into the past is sinful because you are blind to the opportunities presented to you and your generation of Jews today. Instead of working to further the greatest Jewish experiment of the past two millennia, the extraordinary, maddening, exhilarating, confusing, and ultimately heroic Jewish State, you want to experiment with the biggest non-starter of all—“universalized Judaism.” Instead of building a vibrant Jewish community in this country to demonstrate that Jewish life is so vital it can renew itself after the horrors of the Shoah, you want to expend all your energy to return to the nightmare from which people behind the iron curtain awoke barely 15 years ago. The socialism that “once swept Jewish Europe” was a catastrophe for Jews and non-Jews alike, but you want to give it another crack because you imagine the 21^st century is ripe, even if the 20^th was not.

As I see it, you’ve been suckered, repeatedly. First, you’ve taken to heart the socialist pretensions of your own forebears. Immigrant Jews and their children talked the socialist talk, but did not walk the walk. They did everything in their power to make it in capitalist America. And they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Aside from engaging in sometimes bizarre political behavior, so that as Milton Himmelfarb famously put it, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans,” the heirs of the socialist Jews are very nicely ensconced in upper middle class America and more than happy to enjoy their comforts.

You were also ripped off by your Jewish school. Instead of offering far more complicated messages about how Jewish observance repairs us and makes us better human beings, your schooling apparently succumbed to the Judaism lite of “Tikkun Olam.” All we have to do is invest in saving the whales or any other cause du jour and presto—we have a sufficient expression of our Judaism. I applaud Jews who want to save whales and do good in the world, but only if they also want to do good for Jewish life too and to live as Jews. Helping others is no substitute for helping one’s own.

And now you are taken in once again by a “prominent philosopher” who wants the middle class to give away a quarter of its income. This proposal is worthy of a debate?! And if most middle class Americans find this unrealistic scheme as absurd as I do, what do you want to do, Joey? Redistribute their income against their will? I sure hope this is not one of those shiny new ideas that, in your view, are “humiliating” Judaism “in the marketplace of ideas.”

Nice to Pigs, Mean to People: Would Peter Singer expropriate our wealth in the name of progress?Rather than dwell on the past, let me suggest where we differ regarding a way forward. You trace the collapse of Jewish engagement to the allure of new ideas. Unfortunately, you don’t let on what those ideas are. As I see it, Jews are drifting away because they are seduced by rampant individualism, which persuades them to do their own thing. Consumerism, bowling alone, finding your bliss are not exactly powerful ideas, even if they are attractive candy. You and I at least share a common belief that Jews ought to care about something beyond themselves. You favor universal concerns; I favor Jewish needs first, followed by some engagement with larger causes. From where I sit, growing numbers of American Jews invest themselves in no causes, neither Jewish nor universal. The marketplace of ideas offers a mighty thin gruel in our time

We also differ on strategy. You are intent on pursuing the disaffected who may or may not want to be Jewish, and while you’re at it, you counsel the abandonment of Orthodox Jews and others who care about Jewish peoplehood. It’s a remarkable approach to building a market, Joey: Sever your ties to your most faithful customers in favor of those who show the least commitment to anything Jewish. I favor the reverse: build from the core outward—and the core is committed to Jewish peoplehood.

As you consider what is novel about our times, I wonder whether you recognize that for the first time since Emancipation, Orthodoxy is ascendant, rather than on the defensive. While the heirs of the socialists and other universalists are disappearing as Jews and while liberal versions of Judaism are finding it ever harder to retain the allegiance of their youth, Orthodox Jews are building strong communities, reproducing at high rates, and are so self-assured that they are engaged in outreach efforts to win back Jewish souls. I’ve met a fair number of Jews who have been touched by these efforts. Their existence ought to teach us something about the hunger many Jews feel for real Jewish meaning.

You and I also differ on how Jews can best survive and thrive as a small minority in America. You seem to favor ever more accommodation to current mores and values. I contend that Judaism can only thrive if it is countercultural, and the culture it must reject is precisely what you find most appealing. Of course, as Jacob Neusner observes, Judaism must make sense of the world in which we live. But that explanation must be rooted in Judaic thinking and categories. Its explanations must transcend the ephemeral to address deeper human needs. Any Judaism offering such meaning must be rooted in authentic Jewish teachings.

And what you propose, Joey, is inauthentic: How can you claim that a Jew is “anyone who makes an effort to enrich his life with the wisdom of the Jewish tradition and Jewish scripture”—a definition, by the way, that would include millions of Bible reading Christians—even as you reject the assumptions about Jewishness embedded in every book of the Torah and subsequent Jewish texts? Already in the Book of Exodus, the people of Israel are commanded to serve as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Countless Jewish texts explicitly stress the special obligations Jews have toward one another. Jewish literature is replete with distinctions between Jews and gentiles. Your jettisoning of Jewish peoplehood is a repudiation of the very wisdom that suffuses the texts you claim are at the core of your Jewishness.

I’m not going to engage in the charade you apparently encountered while growing up, Joey. I’m not going to argue that the sum total of Jewishness is to repair the world. Rather, I believe engagement with Jewish texts and Jewish living will deepen you as a person, ground you in the life of a vibrant people undergoing one of the most exciting revivals in human history, and compel you to struggle with concepts both foreign to this age and timelessly profound. I hope your “impulse to Jewishness” will triumph sufficiently to give authentic Judaism a serious chance to heal your fractured, Frankenjewish identity. The Jewish people need you.

I’ll be happy to continue our conversation—online or off.

Jack

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From: Jack Wertheimer
To: Joey Kurtzman
Subject: No Torah, No People...What's the Future of Jewish Life?

Dear Joey,

You call yourself a reporter and in fact your last letter is a fascinating report from the field about the perceptions of a certain segment of your generation. At this point it is hard to know hFive More and We've Got a Minyan: a "polyglot, postmodern, American creole" minyan, anywayow many of your peers share your outlook and experiences, but I believe you when you argue that you have come of age in a very different world than earlier generations of Jews.

This is my understanding of what you report: 1) You live in a world of “cosmopolitan pluralism” where you interact with people of many backgrounds (e.g. your experience with Korean-American friends at a Baptist Bible school), and, more broadly, you are immersed in a “polyglot, postmodern American creole culture.” 2) You take it for granted that society is so open that there is no barrier between Jews and non-Jews and certainly no way to prevent intermarriage, even if you wanted to—which you do not.

I believe there is yet an additional factor shaping your generation, which has great bearing on our discussion of peoplehood: You live at a time when well-educated Americans marry late, if at all, and have few children, if any. The fact that the responsibilities of parenting are far down the road for most of your generation further disconnects you from what used to be conventional Jewish life.

By contrast, your Orthodox peers for the most part live in a different world. Since they tend to marry when they are 10-to-15 years younger than most non-Orthodox Jews and have children at younger ages, they assume a set of responsibilities that bring them into contact with organized Jewish life and have a greater and more immediate stake in the collective Jewish present and future.

I can understand why you would regard all these circumstances as a wonderful gift. You feel free and unbounded—no family, no children, no people, no limits, just the great wide world. Little wonder that you latch on to the great causes of our time: “Darfur and mass child death-by-malnutrition” give your life meaning. But do they? I don’t question your concern with these horrors. Which thinking person would not be shaken? But forgive my skepticism, Joey: If you cared deeply about these causes, you would pick yourself up and join the Peace Corps or volunteer for any of the myriad of service organizations sending Americans to do good in the world. Instead, you are content to invoke the mantra of Darfur and malnutrition, as if the brutalities of war and poverty are some new invention.

There is something profoundly adolescent about all this emoting, which is about right because your generation is living out a delayed adolescence, but you are convinced that it is all a terrific gift. Rabbinic Judaism, by contrast, understood long ago that unbounded freedom is a trap. No family, no children, no people, no limits amount to … very little. I doubt your immigrant forbearers would shep nachas.

There is a quality to your writing about Jewish ethnocentrism that is highly reminiscent of the not-too-distant past. Ninety years ago, Rosa Luxemburg declared she had “no room in my heart for Jewish suffering.” Because of the “screams … of the unheard,” she wrote, “I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” Three years after writing these words, she was murdered for her revolutionary activities by German nationalists.A Sanguine Disposition: Cosmopolitanism has been a mixed bag for idealistic young Jews like Rosa Luxemburg

After World War II in countries throughout Eastern Europe, other Jews also proclaimed their eternal fidelity to international socialism, only to be lined up in front of firing squads for being “rootless cosmopolitans.” Don’t be so quick to assume that the easy pluralism and globalism you take for granted is forever, any more than is the post-nationalist era proclaimed by the Tony Judt’s of the Jewish world. And don’t assume your non-Jewish peers are as indifferent to group allegiances as they might claim. Your Jewish spiritual ancestors with their flights of internationalist fancy learned this lesson too late.

You and I can’t seem to discuss the peoplehood issue without reference to intermarriage. Let me try to clarify where we differ: I never suggested that intermarriage is the cause of all that bedevils American Jewry. Of course, intermarriage is a symptom of profound social transformation and the collapse of social barriers.

The reason I labeled intermarriage a disaster in my opening letter is that it promotes further erosion in Jewish life. How? First, because intermarriage fuels more intermarriage: it depletes the market of eligible Jewish males (who intermarry at higher rates than Jewish females) and thus forces many Jewish women who seek to create a Jewish family but do not want to intermarry to choose between a life without children or single parenthood or marrying a non-Jew. Second, when only 30 percent of intermarried parents claim to be raising their children as Jews, we are losing a large majority of the next generation. And, third, many among those who are raised with some Jewish content, are exposed to such confused messages that they struggle to reconcile their incompatible heritages. All the happy talk so fashionable in today’s Jewish community about intermarriage merely obscures these underlying realities.

I reject your contention that we are obsessed with “bloodlines and marital practices.” The religious and communal leadership of the Jewish community has capitulated on this issue, avoiding serious discussion about what is really going on, and prattles endlessly about “outreach” as if there is a vast horde of intermarried families clamoring for engagement with Jewish life, but is somehow shut out by the “bloodline” police. Nonsense. Everyone from Chabad to Reform to birthright Israel is engaged in outreach. Their efforts cannot mitigate the reality that large majorities of intermarried families and their children are lost to the Jewish people.

Why is this reality not spurring you and your friends at Jewcy to action? Why do you spend your time defending the status quo, rather than fighting for the revitalization of Jewish life? In 1969, a group of young Jewish activists forced their way into the General Assembly of the then Council of Jewish Federations to demand greater investment in Jewish education. This was during the era of the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war demonstrations. The Jewish students protesters were supporters of those causes too, but they invested their energy in challenging the Jewish establishment for being insufficiently Jewish in its priorities.

Today, by contrast, you and other young Jews are busy worrying about the ethnocentrism of the Jewish community. I am not a big fan of baby-boomer self-absorption, but in this case, a portion of my generation had it right. And you have it wrong: the problem of American Jewish life is an insufficiency of Jewish pride and connection, not a surfeit of ethnocentrism.

I wish your version of generational rebellion would focus on the unbearable lightness of Jewish life in American. I wish you would stop with the self-congratulatory routine about “the self-confidence of this generation of Jewish Americans” to look at the hollowness of Jewish life. Yes, you are confident that no barriers will impede you as you strive for socio-economic success. But the collapse of those barriers is hardly your achievement. Are your peers self-confident in their Judaic literacy and the ease with which they can negotiate their way around a synagogue religious service, a Jewish text, a neighborhood in Jerusalem?

Most of your generation attended mediocre if not worse Jewish educational programs; most are illiterate in the national language of the Jewish people; most have only a glancing familiarity with the riches of our Jewish heritage. Instead of being angry about the terrible waste and demanding of the establishment that itThey Call This a "Siddur": How many FrankenJews have any clue what to do with it? gets its priorities straight, you resort to motherhood and apple pie talk about Darfur and malnutrition, as if that requires a great sell.

Your concluding observations about the death of ethnocentrism, reminds me of a conversation I held last summer with a group of American Jewish college students. One of them declared: “I believe it is immoral for Jews to give priority to aiding fellow Jews when so many other people are in greater distress.” In reply, a different student shot back, “Don’t we have a greater responsibility to take care of our own family? Jews around the world are our family.”

As I read your impatient remarks about those who believe “ someone is a less appropriate object of our love and commitment because of the particulars of their genealogy,” I can only conclude that either you don’t accept that human beings have a special responsibility to give back to their own family or that you don’t regard the Jewish people as your family. Given the world in which I grew up, these are unthinkable options for me.

But if you truly accept no special responsibility for fellow Jews, if you cannot bring yourself to rank concern for fellow Jews uppermost in your priorities, then I am left to wonder what being Jewish means to you. Taking care of your own people does not cut it for you; assuming the yoke of Torah, which among other things issues a religious commandment to build a Jewish family in the time-honored fashion of marrying a Jew, does not seem to resonate. So, Joey, what do you believe ought to be the content of a Jewish life?

Jack

Next: The Coming Jewish Schism

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From: Jack Wertheimer
To: Joey Kurtzman
Subject: Pick One People, One Religion

Dear Joey,

Thank you for your illuminating and brutally honest opening letter. It ought to be required reading by all Jewish leaders, especially those who have worked so assiduously to silence anyone who dares utter the self-evident truth—vividly dramatized by your letter—that intermarriage is a disaster for the Jewish people.

If you are accurately representing the views of your colleagues at Jewcy, your letter is a heartbreaking reflection of what intermarriage has wrought. Not only do you forthrightly concede that “Judaism and Jewishness have never had so limited a claim on the identity of young Jews”—a reality denied by the advocates of outreach—you also urge the reinvention of Judaism so that it reflects the mixed “patrimony” of children raised in intermarried families. In other words, you seek religious syncretism.

I can sympathize with your predicament. Over the past decades, Jewish institutions have turned aThis Is A Religious Object: You can't spell Christmas tree without Christ blind eye to the cognitive dissonance developing in a great many intermarried families, which struggle to reconcile incompatible religions. The extended outreach industry based in synagogues, JCCs, and federations has downplayed the damage, pretending that everything will turn out all right. Christmas trees are really not religious symbols; Easter dinner is really not about Christ. It’s all just a way to be respectful of the Gentile side of the family. What your letter demonstrates is that “Jewish-American mongrels,” as you call them, took these celebrations seriously and are trying desperately to reconcile the irreconcilable components within their own identity.

For my part, I have a different message: Pick a single religion and a single people. It will save you much grief. I hope the religion you choose is Judaism and the people with a claim on you is the Jewish people. Your wish to create a Jewish identity mixing multiple religious traditions is a fantasy, and you know it because of the very ways you think about yourselves—“Frankenjews,” “mongrelized” are terms you employ to describe your fractured selves.

No authentic Judaism can be built on the religious syncretism you demand. And no concept of Jewish peoplehood ought to be capacious enough to approve of the premise that Jewishness has merely a vote but not a veto, a phrase, by the way, coined by Mordecai Kaplan and the Reconstructionists in reference to Halakha, but not accepted by the Conservative movement.

So to answer your two questions directly: “Has America annihilated Jewish peoplehood?” It has eroded the willingness of a significant sector of your generation to take responsibility for fellow Jews. But there are tens of thousands of young Jews who advocate for Israel on college campuses, eagerly sign up for Birthright trips (nearly 25,000 are going this summer alone!), join AIPAC, volunteer to address Jewish needs at home and abroad—and yes, take the time to go online to figure out how they want to connect to the Jewish collective. Many more will enlist when the Jewish community does a better job of teaching Jews that repairing the Jewish people (Tikkun Am Yisrael) is at least as important as repairing the world (Tikkun Olam).

As to your second question: How are you wrong? Your analogy of Yochanan Ben Zakkai gives it away. Yochanan Ben Zakkai retreated to Yavneh with a small band of followers in order to develop rabbinic Judaism. His was a minority movement that triumphed because it had a coherent, principled religious message. It was not a message of pluralism, “I’m ok, you’re ok,” or religious syncretism. It was not a “big tent” understanding of Judaism. RatheAre These FrankenJews?: Jewish peoplehood isn't dead yetr, it sought to move Jews to act on religious imperatives and obligations. Only over many centuries did rabbinic Judaism gradually win over the masses of Jews.

Jewish life in the United States will be renewed when we build from the core outward, when we support the most committed, then reach out to the moderately engaged, and keep doors open for those of your disengaged peers who want to confront an authentic Judaism, rather than recreate Judaism in their own image.

I hope that the leadership of the American Jewish community will have the wisdom to reject religious syncretism and affirm the centrality of Jewish peoplehood. I pray that Jewish leaders will have the courage to assert what they have danced around—namely, that Judaism is different. It is different from Christianity and from secular liberal culture. I’m betting that some of your peers will be so moved by principled Jewish positions that they will cease to be Frankenjews, and become un-conflicted members of the Jewish people.

Jack

Next: The Old Ethnocentric Cult is Finished

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From: Kevin Kelly
To: Andrew Keen
Subject: The Holy 1%

Andrew,

You ask: “Have we changed the original question? Now it’s not whether we can save the Internet, but rather whether the Internet can save us.”

Not me! You shifted the topic in this direction at the very beginning of our exchange when you wrote: “We are supposed to be discussing whether or not the Internet can be saved. But I’m not sure that this is a helpful way of thinking about the Internet. A better question is whether humankind can be saved.” Remember?

As you say, the Internet is a mirror, but like all technology it is a magic mirror, a fun-house mirror. Instead of merely reflecting back our portrait 100-percent intact, it adds something novel to the image, so that we emerge altered. First we shape our technology, and then our technology shapes us. We are in this together. The technium is not an inert surface, but an active force in our lives. Our inner lives are shaped by our language and alphabet, by our tools of seeing, by our notions of law and justice—all of which we have invented; and, once invented, they push back against us. The Internet and other tools are saving us by allowing us to remake ourselves.

Into what? Great question! It’s the mega-question of the next several centuries. What are we? What can we be? What should we be? Every new technology we create, such as the web, forces another iteration of this refrain: Who then shall we be? To answer it we will dive deep into our natures, our traditions, and, most of all, into new technologies.

I don’t know who we are, or who we will be, but I am pretty sure the answer is not “professionals.” Professionals, as you argue in your book, are the chief solution to the messiness and corruption of values brought about by the untidy technologies of the web. In other words, the rest of us are the problem. In your last post you said (emphasis mine):

“Good digital citizens need to be nurtured by the state, by schoolteachers and university professors, by authoritative journalists, by parents, by peers, by fellow citizens, by both new and old media companies.”

Just to ensure that I’m not taking this sentence out of context, here is one from your book:

“Before the Web 2.0, our collective intellectual history has been one driven by the careful aggregation of truth—through professionally edited books and reference materials”

But now?

“Say good-bye to today’s experts and cultural gatekeepers—our reporters, news-anchors, editors, music companies, and Hollywood movie studios. In today’s cult of the amateur, the monkeys are running the show.”

“With the advent of the cult of the amateur, it has become increasingly difficult to determine the difference between readers and writer, between artist and spin doctor, between art and the product, between amateur and expert. The result? The decline of the quality and reliability of the information we receive, thereby distorting, if not outrightly corrupting, our national civic conversation.”

Wait, there’s more:

“Many unwise ideas—slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears—have been extremely popular with the crowd. This is why the arbiters of truth should be the experts—those who speak from a place of knowledge and authority.”

There are many problems with this old-fashioned idea that the “arbiters of truth should be the experts.” Just because it is an old idea, of course, doesn’t mean it is wrong. But it doesn’t address today’s big questions: Who is an expert? What makes a professional? And why should they be arbiters of truth? Is truth even something that can be arbitrated?

You single out the authoritative professional journalist as a key arbiter of truth and a necessary cultural gatekeeper protecting civilization from the barbarian hordes of monkey bloggers and intellectual vandals. So I wonder, Andrew, are you a professional or amateur? Are you one of our trusted arbiters of truth, having “years of formal training” in the field, a person with proper credentials, a person making his living in journalism and thereby qualified to arbitrate truth for the masses, or are you one of the monkeys, just another “dabbler” with a blog, a mere passionate amateur with something to say, like the rest of us?

In your book, there is no room for anything in between, so I’d really like to know, who am I speaking to right now? Professional guardian, or amateur troublemaker? If you are only an amateur, why should we listen to anything you say? If professional, then by whose authority? And if you are professional, aren’t you uneasy in declaring that the solution to our society’s problems is in letting you be the gatekeeper?

You don’t need to answer these questions, because I can illustrate the same point by directing them at myself. Am I professional or amateur? Well, I have earned a salary in journalism in years past, but I was working for a magazine that I helped to start, so I hired myself! I probably couldn’t have gotten a job elsewhere. I have no college degree in anything, no formal training, and I’ve never taken a journalism class in my life. I run a “monkey” blog and make more money from it than I do from books, so I’d be hard-pressed to say I am a professional. In the past years I’ve self-published most of my books (an indication of amateurism in your accounting), and yet in the media I'm billed as an expert, and I am listed in Who’s Who in America (credentials at last!).

I honestly have no idea if I am a professional or amateur, and frankly it doesn’t matter to me or, and more importantly, to anyone else. I know only this: I am not keeping the gate. Don’t follow me. Find your own path. Listen to me only as a fellow traveler. Believe what I say if it makes sense to you. That’s how the real world has always worked in any case, even in the days when “professional” was an honorific and a signal of status, like “Lord” or “Duke.” It is especially true now, when the rank of professional has been eroded by the ability of amateurs to master the most arcane field. In fact, in one of the few parts of your book where you report data, Andrew, you make this very important point:

“In January 2006, Edelman PR’s ‘Trust Barometer’ revealed a dramatic societal shift, in whom we trust, from traditional media, to trust in ourselves and our peers. In 2003, only 22 percent of American respondents reported trusting a ‘person like yourself or your peer.’ In January 2006, just three years into the Web 2.0 revolution, this had more than tripled to 68 percent.”

We’ve come to see that professionals are not the arbiters of truth. Even our own doctors (the apex of credential professional status) may not know as much about our own ailments as we acquire through our own research. Most working actors, photographers, and athletes are technically amateurs. Most inventors are amateurs. Amateurs have played and still play a key role in the natural sciences.

The mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson, who spent his whole life in academic institutions, and is a bona fide professional if there ever was one, writes:

“When we look at the wider society outside the domain of science, we see amateurs playing essential roles in almost every field of human activity. Amateur writers such as Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys do as much as the professionals Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky to plumb the heights and depths of human experience. In the most important of all human responsibilities, the raising of children and grandchildren, amateurs do the lion’s share of the work. In almost all the varied walks of life, amateurs have more freedom to experiment and innovate. The fraction of the population who are amateurs is a good measure of the freedom of a society.”

Amateurs have their faults. There is no better spokesperson for the ills of the amateur than you. I agree with you that amateurs on the web have brought us rumor, conspiracy, and narcissism run amok. Untrained enthusiasts are messy, imperfect, hard to control, unlikely to take the long view, and they gravitate to base instincts and appetites. The same faults plague democracy and free-market economies.

The argument against democracy is that if you let ignorant, untrained amateurs try to navigate the complex details of governance, you get dumb mob rule, the worst of crowd politics. That argument is accurate. You encounter similar problems when you run an economy by having ignorant amateur citizens decide prices, inventory, and future innovations. Letting amateurs run the media is equally messy. Amateurism is a terrible way to run these institutions—except in comparison to having them run by professionals!

As a father who is often uneasy with our ego-filling popular culture (we’ve never had broadcast or cable TV at our house; my kids have grown up without it), I sympathize with your long list of negatives. I don’t sympathize with your solutions about what to do about it (state intervention and more cultural gatekeepers) for two reasons. One, I find it very easy to turn off anything we object to. It’s not hard to unplug, stop driving, live simpler, go back to the land, get offline, or whatever. Two, I really do believe that most people are like me: a good person, eager to do good and help others if given a chance and the means to do so.

Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, says he built his empire on the belief in human benevolence, which many critics told him was utopian. He made his billions by building an auction system around the idea that total strangers could trust each other—including buying a car unseen—if you gave them the tools of trust and assumed the best at the start. You could fill a library with all the rotten scams that have been committed on eBay, but, in the end, there’s been more happy cases of trust between strangers than not. That’s why it’s still growing.

Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, who I don’t know much about, said a marvelously true thing: “There is more good than evil in the world—but not by much.” “Not much” is all we need. Only a few percent of the transactions on eBay are fraudulent, which means a much higher percent are benevolent. When we look around the web, we may find a lot of it objectionable. But more of it is wonderful. Even if 49 percent of everything made is horrible, that leaves 51 percent good. So long as we can create 1 percent more than we destroy each year, that 1 percent compounded over decades produces civilization.

So I am a 1 percent optimist. That differential is what moves us forward. Give me 1 percent more good than evil, and we can make progress, even if we sometimes have to look hard to find that one percent. I spend my days focused primarily on the 1 percent “not-much-better” because I think that is where we find God and holiness. I acknowledge the need to work on our weaknesses, which are often substantial (49 percent!). But for me, the Great Work being done by the web, and technology in general, lies in the holy 1 percent.

I appreciate your clarity in writing and your willingness to debate these ideas. Thanks for your gracious spirit, and thanks as well to our hosts at Jewcy.

—kk

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This is the sixth email in an eight-email debate between Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, and Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Here, Kelly argues that the unapologetic amateurism of online culture is precisely what will make this medium so revolutionary a force in the history of human culture.

From: Kevin Kelly
To: Andrew Keen
Subject: Out of Crap, Brilliance

Andrew,

Like you, I enjoy my self-image as a radical (though in my case it’s all talk). But the difference between our rhetoric—other than the opposing sides we represent—is that I have no animosity toward the other side. I love books, albums, magazines, movies, silver photographic prints, and all the rest of the analog world that I am supposedly trying to make disappear. And I do not “want to get rid of copies.”

As I write this I am surrounded by my two-story library of tens of thousands of books, albums, magazines, catalogs, and photographic slides, which I have spent my life enjoying and which I plan to keep enjoying into the future. I don’t need John Updike to remind me of the value and benefits of the old-fashioned paper book; I am in no hurry to see it go. But, more importantly, there’s really nothing I can do to prevent its slow replacement by digital and hybrid versions.

In response to my “manifesto,” Updike issued a wonderfully lyrical call for book lovers to build aTilting at Bookshelves: John Updike fights the oceanic changes of digital technology fortress to keep out the wave of digital change. It was beautifully written, sweet, nostalgic, and of course totally inept, because it is clear that a tiny fort of book lovers cannot stop the oceanic change swamping the analog world. And I am enthusiastic about digital technology simply because I believe that in the end writers, readers, and publishers will gain more from the change than they lose.

As new business models evolve, publishers/labels/studios will make more money—and more creative works—in this new regime than before. Everyone will benefit. Readers will have more choices in content. Authors/artists will have more opportunities to create than ever before. In 50 years people will marvel at all our hand-wringing and screams of bloody murder, because the creative outpouring that has just started online will produce a degree and volume of creative work that will dwarf the greatness of the last 50 years.

Will there be crap? Of course there will be. Ninety percent of everything made is crap. And that is good. One of the reasons TV went stagnant while online bloomed is that there was not enough bad—I mean really bad—TV. Television and movies cost so much to make and distribute that the system could not generate really, really bad TV in the same way a web page, or even a book, can be really crap. Instead, the huge expense of producing TV and movies meant that the bad never had a chance. But neither did risky greatness, so all we got was mediocrity. We got middle-of-the-road TV, some shows better than others, but little of it either genius or total mind-numbing bad (and yes, I’ve seen daytime TV).

You don’t know crap until you’ve trolled the depths of the web and self-publishing. But now with the advent of YouTube, digital-video tools, and cheap DVD rentals and sales, really bad TV has been liberated! And in the midst of this morass of total crap comes the freedom and risk to make really great TV. I think it’s no coincidence that with the advent of the web, TV is now in its golden age. Shows like Lost, 24, The Sopranos, and The Wire will rank as this generation’s greatest cultural contributions. They will be taught in university courses in centuries to come.

The greatness of these long-form TV shows was unleashed by the digital technology that made re-watching important, time-shifting easy, audience infatuation contagious, and new complexity totally engaging. They are produced by professionals with big budgets, and more shows like them will continue to be made and watched by large audiences. But shorter, amateur-made films will also reach the heights of greatness, now that the tyranny of the mediocre has been broken by really easy-to-make crap.

Two admissions: One, we don’t yet know how this bountiful new world will economically reward creators, and, two, the transition is likely to be ugly. The transition from the agricultural economy to the industrial was wracked with losses of livelihood, civil unrest, and bankruptcies, as well as fortunes and great uncertainty. Buggy whip–makers, who were real craftsmen, with real families, disappeared from the economy. Should we have stopped industrialization in order to save their jobs? Should we have stopped industrialization until we could explain to them how the new economy actually worked?

I believe a better remedy would have been to accept their occupation’s demise and retrain them for Transitions Hurt: The shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial one wasn't painless or gracefultheir future. We can each make our own list of the sins of industrialization, but by our very participation in this industrialized world, we acknowledge that the benefits of industrialization were worth the loss of the beauty of an agricultural economy. Unless you are living like the Amish (which you can choose to do), you’ve voted for the costly advantages of industrialization. We are making a similar vote today with computer bits.

The web is all of 5,000 days old. It may take another few thousand days to figure out viable systems of law, business practices, and cultural norms that will reward audiences, creators, and the middle industries. Or it may take a generation. But that is still a relatively short time in the lifecycle of an economy.

What’s the evidence that these new models will come? My expectations are largely the product of my own experience. While I am a published author, with commercial books still in print generating royalties, the majority of my income does not come from paper books. It comes from a plurality of sources: syndication rights, speaking fees, online advertising, direct digital sales, and associative marketing revenues on the web. Am I an exception? I don’t think so. The one thing I’ve learned is that whenever I think I am an exception, it turns out that I am only a little early and the rest of the world will soon be there to make it clear my ideas are not mine. My pattern will be ordinary.

The principle that will ensure an income for the world’s artists and publishers, bands and labels, is that wherever attention flows, money will follow. If you are able to sustain the attention of an audience, and keep them interested over time, then money will flow to you. It will come both directly and indirectly (ads, sponsorship, middle folk), but it will come for two reasons. One, because we are bored and will pay for something that elevates us above life’s averageness, and, two, because we crave to connect with creators who elevate and equip us. We want to pay; just make paying easy, just, and beneficial.

The funny thing about the supposed demise of high culture (authors and books, musicians and music, directors and films) supported by classic industrial economics is that we see the demise everywhere except in the statistics. There are more books, songs, films, etc., being made every year, and more artists, authors, and musicians working than ever before. Every bit of data I have been able to find points to yet more artists and more art in the coming years. It could be that this outpouring is a heroic last gasp before culture’s ultimate disappearance by digital technology, but I doubt it. Far more likely is that this outpouring is due to the peculiar and nearly metaphysical properties of digital technology, which has turned many millions of consumers into prosumers.

You can call them amateurs, but I call them a miracle. During the 1980s and even into the early ’90s, I struggled to convince the heads of media companies that the participatory nature of the Internet was real. They were convinced that online enthusiasts like myself were exceptions. The Internet was a young male domain, they insisted, that would not appeal to females, anyone older than 19, or those living in the heartland. They were even more adamant tIt's Your World, Now: So get up off that couch and create somethinghat “no one would ever get up from the couch to make their own videos,” let alone write text. The idea of millions of videos being made by the audience was absolutely unthinkable. It was impossible. My own experiences living online, prosuming media with many others, were declared an aberrant exception. My vision of a billion people owning computers, actively creating text, videos, and music in some kind of online network was dismissed as raving utopianism.

Who can argue against the goodness of having a billion people get off the couches and start making stuff, even if 90 percent is crap? That means 10 percent is great. And not only is that 10 percent more than we had before, I will argue that eventually some of that 10 percent will be superior to the best we get from the established media industry. And even if the greatest is never made by prosumers, it is still wonderful they are off their butts and using the talents that God gave them.

—kk

NEXT: Not Everyone Can Be Kevin Kelly

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Andrew,

I’d hate this discussion to get bogged down in the gritty particulars of music copyright. It’s a very well-worn topic, and, like the abortion debate, there seems to be no middle ground.

A few years ago, before I wrote the infamous “Scan This Book” piece about copyright and books, I published another similar piece for the New York Times Magazine on the future of the music business. In it I outlined how technology has changed the business and the nature of music for the past hundred years, why it will continue to do so, and how people will continue to make music no matter what the business does. I suggested that the attraction of digital music was not just its supposed free-ness but also its liquidity—the ability to mess with, mash up, and manage the music.

Not much has changed since I wrote that article, except that some musicians have adopted my ideas on how they might make their living in the new copy-full world. The funny thing about all the dire predictions about the end of music is that there are more songs released and more musicians playing than ever before. Music is not dying, although the old business practices around it are. In other words, the establishment is changing. And change can hurt.

However, because this is a no-middle debate, I doubt you will be swayed by my arguments on howPost-Apocalyptic Nightmare: The collapse of Tower Records freaked us out technology is forever changing the music business (emphasis on business). It is clear that this economic shift is very important to you; indeed, in your book, you attribute your epiphany (that amateurs are at the root of all Internet evil) to the demise and bankruptcy of the Tower Records chain store. When this corporate superstore fell, it felt like music fell, because Tower was the GM of indie music. It kept many small labels going. And if music-as-we-know-it shifts, our sense of self shifts with it. I understand that feeling of loss.

What I don’t understand is this remarkable statement of yours: “I don’t see anything gray about this…It’s people stealing music and movies from their rightful property owners.” According to your logic, the culprits undermining the goodness of the music-business-as-we-knew-it must be the “amateurs” unleashed by new technology. Because when people lose their jobs, who better to blame than people with no jobs? Setting aside that sloppy logic, I’m still baffled by your insistence on seeing black and white where gray reigns. If there were no uncertainty about the old business model, it would not be meeting a steady rising tide of widespread resistance.

Despite the misguided laws, draconian enforcement schemes, and high-priced lobbying financed by the status quo music, publishing, and broadcast industries, there is now more music (and text and movies) being shared than ever, as you admit. Indeed, many musicians (in contrast to music business owners) now also clamor for regime change in the music biz. I don’t believe your ignorance nor your absolutism are so great that you don’t see the inherent ambiguity in digital copyright. I believe that you see the gray, but find it more useful to ignore it and engage in polemic. And I think your absolutism is wrong. We can see the uncertainty in this realm by asking some simple questions:

· If I sing “Happy Birthday” in a restaurant at my kid’s party, am I stealing music?

· If I copy a song—from a CD I have purchased—onto my iPod, am I stealing music?

· If I download a song—found on a CD I have purchased—from a file-sharing network to put on my iPod, am I stealing music?

· If I copy a song—that I have purchased online—to a CD, am I stealing music?

· If I quote three bars of someone else’s song in my song, am I stealing music? Two bars? One bar? One note?

· If I quote three phrases from someone else’s book in my book, am I stealing words?

· If I read a book at a library instead of purchasing it, am I stealing the book?

· If I listen to music at the library instead of purchasing it, am I stealing music?

· If I listen to music—copied from a purchased CD and mounted on the server at work—instead of purchasing it myself, am I stealing music?

· If I listen to music—copied from a purchased CD and mounted on a file-sharing network—instead of purchasing it myself, am I stealing music?

You don’t even need to answer these questions. My point is made simply by the fact that when I show these questions to lawyers, musicians, business people, fans, amateurs, and pros, I get very different answers. There is no clarity.

In the last hundred years the mass—the physical weight—of exported economic goods has dropped in proportion to their economic value. We make more desirable and useful things with less material. As goods have dematerialized, they have become more valuable. However, it is not the loss of mass per se that makes them valuable; it is the acquisition of intelligence, design, interaction, and ideas. We are embedding our creations with a bit of ourselves: some of our mind, some of the intangible spirit that makes us alive. So now, rather than having an economy governed by the movement and cost of matter, we have an economy that is increasingly governed by the movement and cost of ideas.

But there’s a big problem with an economy of ideas. An economy requires a system-wide rule of law that will reward both innovation and the commons. Over many centuries we evolved a very good set of laws to govern property rights. We can all agree that the U.S. struck the right balance in the trade-off between protecting inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs for their risks in creation, while feeding their creations back to the commons as fast as possible for the benefit of society. That worked great for an economy run on matter—an economy in which it was very clear who owned what.
An Eye for Ambiguity: Thomas Jefferson understood complexity of intellectual property two centuries before digital age
Ownership of ideas and digital copies is almost an oxymoron. As Thomas Jefferson himself noted, ideas are problematic because I can give you my idea and yet I still have it. Often my idea increases in value the more people share it. Who owns the idea in your head if I gain value from it? Can you return an idea? Even more complicated is the fact that any idea is valueless by itself; it only has value as part of a web of other ideas, which others may claim as theirs. Remove those supporting ideas and the new idea is empty.

We also admit that many ideas are unowned, or unownable. As we use high technology to generate and discover new ideas (combinatorial sweeps, etc.), it is becoming harder to distinguish between obvious and non-obvious ideas, between concepts and information that can be claimed by us, and concepts and information that have always been out there in the commons. Digital creations share some of these almost metaphysical qualities. They spin off copies all the time in the course of their creation, distribution, storage, transmission, and consumption. These copies have nothing to do with property.

In fact, the more one delves into the nature of property—how does one own a gene, say?—the more uncertain the fundamental notion of ownership becomes. Can one own a note of music, a particular sound? Can you own someone else’s rendition of your song? What does it mean to own it if everyone in the world is singing it in their heads? Do you own all of a song, or just parts of it? If you use computer software to create the music do the “owners” of the software own part of it? These are unanswerable in the generic, and, in many cases, unanswerable in the specific."Give it Back!": Who owns a human gene, and how will they enforce ownership?

Anyone holding a gadget can see how it is transmitting not just electrons but also ambiguity. The paradoxes of information (what is information anyway?) buckle under the old rules, and everyone can smell this. The natural rules of ideas are not clear and evident.

Yet you cast it as an unambiguous black-and-white conflict, the good guys and the bad guys, angels on one side and the devil on the other. “When I look at today’s Internet, I see the eruption of rampant intellectual property theft, extreme pornography, sexual promiscuity, plagiarism, gambling, contempt for order, intellectual inanity, crime, a culture of anonymity, hatred toward authority, incessant spam, and a trash heap of user-generated content.” My goodness, what fundamentalism!

The problem with this good/evil absolutism is that it belittles the truly evil things we ought to be righteous about. Let’s start with unjustified war, ethnocide, and infanticide, as examples.

The second problem with this absolutist view is that it hurts your own agenda. I sympathize with some of your concerns, particularly with respect to “fragmenting the self into a series of invented beings.” Many people, myself included, would agree with you that our identities are turning into “a hall of mirrors.” It is becoming harder and harder to answer the once-obvious questions—what does it mean to be a male or female, an American, or even a human? But when you suggest that the students copying music online are “thieves” or “digital narcissists,” this is small-minded trash talk. Where does this impulse to degrade come from?

When you suggest that the Internet has brought us a world of sin—that millions of ordinary people around the world who are pouring their time, energy, and creativity into building it (the fastest, largest human construction ever)—have really just sold their souls to the devil, almost no one believes you. Five minutes with any student who’s been blatantly downloading music will tell you that they are not cagey pickpockets but aliens in a strange land; not pirates, but lost pioneers; not devilish, but generous; and very aware of the karmic debt they intend to repay. And they will.

So when we can’t believe you on that trumped-up charge, it’s hard to take you seriously on the rest.

—kk

Next: The Cult of the Audience

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From: Kevin Kelly
To: Andrew Keen
Subject: Social contracts vs. digital code

Let’s begin where we agree.

You say: “We must resist the siren song of anonymity—perhaps the greatest of all digital curses.” I agree. I summarized my argument against anonymity when I answered the question, “What’s Your Dangerous Idea?”:

Anonymity is like a rare earth metal. These elements are a necessary ingredient in keeping a cell alive, but the amount needed is a mere hard-to-measure trace. In larger doses, however, these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They kill. Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishingly small doses, it’s good for the system by enabling the occasional whistleblower, or persecuted fringe. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system...Like all toxins, anonymity should be keep as close to zero as possible.

You and I disagree on what to do about this toxin. Your solution to most of the corruptions online is very direct, very simple, and very clear: “We need laws, a series of social contracts, to constructively regulate our behavior on the Internet…. I’m not suggesting the imposition of draconian Internet laws. But I think we need some laws and certainly more aggressive social policing to control our worst impulses.”

Spam is a cancer caused primarily by anonymity. (In fact most of the failings you rail against in your book are rooted in anonymity rather than amateurs. It should be properly called “The Cult of Anonymity.”) If the senders of spam could be outed, they’d soon disappear. In my early frustration with spam I often thought we could eradicate it by outlawing anonymous mail. But I’ve hung around hackers long enough to knowWhat's All This About a Social Contract?: Hackers won't be deterred by new laws they would quickly hack a way around the law (impersonating and hijacking legit sources, say). I’ve come around instead to rely on technological means (spam filters, etc.), which have essentially removed spam as an issue for me.

Laws tend to try to remedy a problem by a global top-down solution. Technological solutions, on the other hand, tend to work more locally, more adaptively, and for that reason I believe they are more likely to create the change we wish.

Even a “social contract” is more top-down than may be useful these days. What form would it take? Peer pressure? Education in schools? Op-ed page editorials? I can’t imagine any of these being very effective in “curing” anonymity. But there is one very effective tool in diminishing anonymity: code. The folks who create online social systems and marketplaces can regulate the degree of anonymity by coding it in or not. Through technological means, we can tweak how much anonymity we have.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, has said that he regretted allowing anonymous book reviews, but it was too late to outlaw them when he realized the harm they could cause. So Amazon implemented a “true names” function, wherein reviewers willing to reveal their true names and be accountable for what they said would have more standing, a higher reputation and weight than a hit-and-run anonymous review. Those arenas where anonymity is kept microscopic by design of the system are the zones where civility reigns.

There is an immense difference between trying to regulate people’s moral behavior indirectly by design and code versus directly by law, and it’s the key difference between reformers and engineers. I suspect you are a reformer and I am an engineer.

Let’s take another corruption that upsets you: digital piracy. As you say, “I am in favor of laws that unambiguously punish digital piracy.” That word unambiguously is very telling, because if there is anything clear about copyright laws in this new Internet world, it is that not very much is clear and unambiguous. There are a lot of laws already on the books about copyright, but those laws have not stopped file-sharing, mashups, or even commercial counterfeiting.

Every survey of these behaviors show them steadily increasing. Some of these uses are blatantly illegal, but many are not blatant, stuck in a gray zone, awaiting clarifications of the law. For those who believe that they are on the wrong side of the law, there is a frustration at their ubiquity, and the primeval impulse is to want even more laws. Laws on top of laws—unambiguous laws. But there cannot (yet) be unambiguous laws because we haven’t yet as a society sorted the nature of property in this new realm. If the many laws existing have not stemmed the tide, more laws will not either. All that these unenforceable laws do is weaken respect for the law, which in the end is a far greater corruption.

The solution for the ambiguity of ownership in an idea economy will come as we develop further tools forCode, Not Law: Anonymity should be written into our digital infrastructure, not our legal code regulating people’s behavior, such as digital rights management technology, new instruments of property protection (between patents and copyrights), new methods of adjudicating priority, and new emerging societal norms for fair use. Only then can the law cement—codify—what technology and society allow.

Regulating morality by law has been a disaster everywhere it has been tried in the modern world. I have lived in some of those places, particularly Iran. Here the law unambiguously punished the sins you rail against: “pornography, illegal gambling, hubris, sexual promiscuity, contempt for meritocratic hierarchy, shameless narcissism, and political, sexual, and racial hatred.” And here is what I know happens when regimes like Iran try to regulate morality:

1) It is not very effective in the short term.

2) It is not sustainable in the long term.

3) The costs of laws, even when effective, are not tallied. That is, the psychological costs of regulating sins is very heavy. Ask any fundamentalist kid.

Like many places where morality is regulated by law, Iran is not a place conducive to innovation and change. And it is not just Islamic sharia. We see the same results in places where Hindus, Jains, Jews, and Christians try to make their usually well-intentioned preferences universal by mandating them with laws.

In short, legislating morality and civic virtue doesn’t work. And it particularly doesn’t work if your neighbors (next door, next city, next country) have a different regime. And it especially doesn’t work if there is not universal agreement on what the sins are, which is where we are right now.

Good character? Virtuous lives? Civic discourse? Public humility? I am all for them.

By regulation and social strong-arming? No way.

I am no anarchist. I think we need “some laws” as you put it. My problem with national laws for fixing Internet problems, at least in America in 2007, is that this is a very slow, overly broad hammer for problems that can be addressed faster and more effectively by rewriting, reinventing, and re-imagining the technological matrix that holds them. I think the laws that regulate our moral compass should be as few, concise, and minimal as possible. Like the Ten Commandments.

In the end I agree with you that to “save” the Internet we need to save ourselves. But I don’t believe we can save people by regulating them to salvation.

—kk

Next: Don't Scan My Book

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Yes, it is indeed a shame that you addressed none of my points—most prominently, Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, in brazen violation of international law. I don’t recall making any “personal attacks,” as you put it, unless you consider pointing out Israel’s violation of international law to be a slur against your person. And, of course, “extraneous taunts” can sometimes illuminate larger issues, such as the exact value of Israel to the U.S., although the lack of specificity in this regard renders your complaint mysterious, at least to me.

The great problem in “dialogues” of this sort is that, all too often, the “dialoguers” wind up talking past, or at, one another. This is unfortunate, but also, perhaps, unavoidable. I will, however, try to bridge the gap, and hopefully we can at least be talking about the same subject, even if we aren’t agreeing in any measure.

As with the case of Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” the “evidence” of Iran’s vaunted nuclear weapons program doesn’t really exist. Nor was there anything “illicit” about the “secrecy” in which you insist the Iranians cloaked their nuclear research. Unlike Israel, which refuses to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran has acted in full compliance with guidelines set down by the IAEA. The IAEA didn’t require disclosure of the facilities you mention until its rules were amended (after the disclosures). As for not allowing a more stringent inspection policy by the IAEA, this news article points out that “diplomats in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, said Iran had the right to reject any inspector it wanted and such a step was not prohibited by its accord with the agency.”

Former IAEA Deputy Director-General for safeguards Bruno Pellaud, when asked if Iran was bent on building a nuclear bomb, replied: “My impression is not. My view is based on the fact that Iran took a major gamble in December 2003 by allowing a much more intrusive capability to the IAEA. If Iran had had a military program they would not have allowed the IAEA to come under this Additional Protocol. They did not have to.” Former British Foreign Minister Jack Straw has said: “There is no smoking gun and therefore no justification for a military attack.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded, contra Freund, that Iran is a decade away from developing usable nuclear weapons. As for their “racing to develop intercontinental missiles” that could supposedly hit New York and Washington, here is what one Iran expert has to say:

Iran’s medium-range Shahab-3 missiles are modeled after the North Korean Nodong missiles, which are, in turn, based on an early Soviet model. Most experts agree that the Iranian missile system has reached its maximum potential and cannot be stretched into developing longer-range missiles. Iran would need to master the extremely complex “multistage” missile technology in order to build them. So far, only a few countries have been able to reach this advanced stage of missile development and some of them, i.e., India and Israel, reportedly have had significant difficulty manufacturing reliable long-range missiles.

Experts note the technical difficulty of manufacturing such missiles, which is why only the United States, Russia, and China have developed them. In the event the Iranians do develop such long-range missiles, it would be hard to conceal that fact from the international community—and, then again, there is the question of tipping them with nuclear warheads, a technology way beyond present Iranian capabilities.

It may be that Israel cannot afford to take the risk, however small, of leaving Iran alone. The United States, however, being on the other side of the globe, could well afford to wait before acting precipitously—and recklessly. Last time we did that, we landed ourselves in a quagmire. As Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt put it in their Harvard University study of the Israel lobby: “Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not pose a direct threat to the U.S. If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China, or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the [Israel] Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the U.S. would hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but U.S. policy would be more temperate and preventive war would not be a serious option.”

You point to Iranian support for “Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, and the Iraqi insurgency” as evidence that Tehran is the enemy of the U.S. as well as Israel. But this conflation of widely disparate groups with various goals and ideologies into a single, monolithic anti-U.S.-Israel conspiracy is really not in accord with the facts. Hizbullah’s enemy is Israel, not the U.S., and, as for Hamas and Islamic Jihad—these guys, too, are Israel’s problem, not ours.

The Iraqi insurgency is a problem that could be easily solved by an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, which is precisely what ought to be done. In any case, evidence for Iranian “aid” to the “Iraqi insurgency” is extremely dubious, and seems to be of the same tenor and character as the pre-invasion “evidence” of Iraqi WMD, i.e., cherry-picked “raw” intelligence that is unverified and based on supposition, speculation, and outright disinformation.

I am glad to see that you have mastered the art of linking. But let me give you some advice: When putting in a link, make sure it has something to do with what you are trying to prove. For example, if you are trying to prove that Iran is a threat both to Israel and the United States, then the links you provide should contain some significant mention of the United States as well as Israel. Unfortunately for you, the articles you link to—essentially a collection of bad-boy quotes from the Iranian president compiled by the Anti-Defamation League—do not mention the U.S. as a target of Iran’s wrath, except for the rather cryptic comment that “there is no significant need for the United States”—whatever that means.

You intone that this issue is a matter of “grave international significance,” and yet one wonders if you realize just how grave. Do you understand what you are advocating? An attack on Iran would plunge the entire region into a maelstrom of violence from which it would not soon emerge. It would mean a land war, and not just antiseptic bombing raids, with Iranian soldiers and Iraqi Shiites arrayed against U.S. forces: It would mean many thousands of Iranians killed in bombing raids, and, finally, it would give Al Qaeda a huge propaganda victory. Osama bin Laden’s contention that the U.S. is allied with Israel in a genocidal war against Muslims would gain new credibility. And the U.S. itself would be in increased danger of a terrorist attack.

Ah, but Israel would be safe from the almost purely imaginary “threat” of annihilation from Iranian blustering. Another enemy of the Israelis would be humbled, and the Americans would be doing all the dirty work. How convenient—and grossly exploitative. But, then again, that’s always been the essence of the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship.”

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You purport to speak not only for the entire nation of Israel as well as the United States, but now also “the rest of mankind.” And this from someone who entitles his last email: “Facts, Not Fantasy”! You give new meaning to the word chutzpah. I also have a very hard time reading comments like “you appear to inhabit…a…fantasy world.” Especially when they are written by someone who has totally ignored my arguments, and appears to be involved in a “dialogue” with himself. I am having trouble figuring out if this is an ethno-cultural trope, or a political statement: Perhaps it is a little of both.

Okay, okay, on with the “discussion.” To begin with, Michael, you don’t seem to know where you are, and this strange disorientation is immediately apparent in the following:

“You see, Justin, out here in the real world, there are people such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who want to kill you and your family and destroy our collective way of life.”

What is this “collective way of life” that we share? You, my friend, are sitting over there in Israel. I, on the other hand, am hanging around Pacific Heights in the City by the Bay. If you get on a bus, the journey may end in a blast from a suicide bomber; if I get on a bus, the worst thing that can happen is for one of San Francisco’s many homeless individuals to emit the organic equivalent of a stink-bomb, clearing the area around him in minutes. I am living on land that was stolen from the Indians many moons ago, so many moons that there are few of the original inhabitants left to claim it; you, on the other hand, are living on stolen land that has the original owners glaring though the fence that separates you from their wrath, hating you and plotting revenge.

Our “collective way of life”? We couldn’t live in more different worlds. You live the life of a settler colonist: dangerous, and even a little brutal. You live in constant fear. I have no reason to live in such a condition, and I refuse to make your enemies my own—which seems to be the entire thrust of your last note. Try that “assessment of reality” on for size.

You don’t give any references for your quotations from Iranian leaders, or provide links with which to back up your screed. This is typical of the War Party, which throws out assertions and expects we'll blindly accept them, just as we’re supposed to accept the “intelligence” provided by our leaders to rationalize a policy of relentless aggression. I would point out, however, that the alleged Ahmadinejad-Khamenei plot to blow up America—and, one assumes, the rest of the West—is contradicted by this comment from CNN State Department correspondent Zain Verjee:

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is usually praised for his defiance of the West. Now it seems he’s gone too far and his country has had enough. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei handed Ahmadinejad a stinging slap over the country’s nuclear policy in a newspaper he owns.

The paper says...Iran’s nuclear policy needed toughness, sometimes flexibility. Now 150 Iranian lawmakers, some from Ahmadinejad’s own party, are publicly blasting his nuclear and economic policies.

In the black-and-white world of the Likudnik ideologues, Ahmadinejad and Khamenei are cut from the same cloth, and both are poised to destroy the West. In the real world—as opposed to the Bizarro World universe inhabited by you, Michael, and your American and Israeli co-thinkers—the situation is a bit more complicated than that.

So what if Iranian missiles can reach Europe? The Europeans lived with the threat posed by Soviet missiles for the entire length of the Cold War, and lived to tell the tale. Israeli missiles, too, can reach Europe: Should NATO order air strikes on Israeli nuclear facilities on account of this?

Speaking of Israel’s nukes: Everything you have said about the Iranian nuclear program applies to the Israeli nuclear program. Israeli nukes were developed in secret: The Israelis refuse to allow inspections. And, unlike the Iranians, they refuse to allow “snap” inspections—or, indeed, any sort of inspections.

Iranians may not like the “international community,” and may ignore its pleas to stop pursuing the nuclear path. Yet is their contempt any deeper than the Israelis’, who have regularly flouted international opinion, not only in actually creating a formidable nuclear arsenal, but also in treating the Palestinians like dirt, killing them, occupying their land, and bulldozing their homes?

Israel may be threatened by Iran, but this threat can be diminished and perhaps even permanently ended if Israel dismantles its nukes in exchange for similar actions on the part of the Iranians. The proposal for a nuclear-free Middle East has long been a central demand of Israel’s Arab neighbors. Tel Aviv has steadfastly ignored this eminently reasonable request. You don’t even address it, although it was a central point in my previous email to you.

In trying to convince us that Israel’s fight is America’s fight, you assume that Israel and the U.S. are such tight allies that their interests are virtually one and the same. If that is true, how does he explain this, and this—not to mention this?

Israel is popularly viewed as our special ally, but it often acts like our adversary—and it is, increasingly, a problem rather than an asset. Many Americans are beginning to question the “special relationship,” and for good reason.

Justin

NEXT: Your taunts and mudslinging illuminate nothing

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I am surprised by how many people did not understand the distinction I tried to make between the meat industry, which stands guilty of all the crimes many of you mention, and the eating of meat. I consider it a given that today's meat industry is an abomination.

My main point was two-fold: (1) That meat eating can be consistent with a sustainable world where everyone is fed; and (2) There can be another basis for ethics besides minimizing death. The arguments for the first point are impossible to lay out in detail within the requested format; suffice it to say that animals should generally not be fed grains or other crops, but pasture, and that they should be part of a sustainable farm ecology. And it is true that much pasture land is not suited for horticulture. Some visionary thinkers in agriculture think it is usually destructive to "break ground" at all, an insight which is one of the inspirations of the permaculture movement.

As for the second point, doesn't anyone else think it is silly to assess the ethical weight of an act by adding up the total pounds of death it causes? Of course I am aware that animals eat plants, so that by eating animals I am eating lots of dead plants. But my whole point is that minimizing death is not the only possible basis of ethics. I place a higher value on harmony, wholeness, and beauty. These are harder to quantify than death; hence my digression into "what feels right". I am not saying, "Forget about ethics, do what feels right." I am saying that this is what underlies any system of ethics. And if we seek to live by ethics, we must sometimes return to that feeling level to reconnect them with our hearts. TheUnbeatable?: Charles Eisenstein claims veggie guru John Robbins can be rebutted purpose of ethics is to bring wisdom to situations when we are out of touch with feeling. It is not a replacement for feeling, but more of an aid or extension.

Most of the responses could be summed up as "Eisenstein just doesn't get it." Just doesn't understand the arguments for vegetarianism. Sorry, I've been there, done that. I've read John Robbins and I've read Frances Lappe. In my 20s I became fluent in those arguments and believed them fervently. Let's see, there was also "just doesn't get shamanism," thinks it is a single unified tradition. Just doesn't get Yoga, hasn't heard of ahimsa.

I would like you to consider that a thoughtful, compassionate, sensitive person could absorb all of this material and still eat meat. Have you read the counterarguments to Robbins and Lappe? I have read the best of both sides, and you know what? I gave up trying to decide based on reason who was right. I would have had to research their sources, gather my own statistics, maybe even do my own physiology experiments. That is why instead I went back to my own body, and my own feelings of what is beautiful, whole, and right. The result was that I returned to eating meat.

If you are a committed vegan, how can you explain this choice? Well, here are a few theories to help you:

1. Eisenstein has given in to self-indulgence, hedonism, and general moral turpitude. He has abandoned his principles to revel in his own selfish pleasure. Shame on him!

2. Eisenstein is just inherently deficient in goodness. He is of a lower moral or spiritual quality. He simply does not care.

3. Eisenstein is a person of crude sensibilities, and completely out of touch with his body. Maybe he doesn't understand about whole grains or complete proteins or other basic principles of diet. He thinks he is healthy now, but he isn't.

Is This Little Flesh-Gobbler an Untermensch?: Perhaps not, claims EisensteinGeneralizing these explanations, you can create a whole class of moral untermenschen to hate. I think people on this site, at least, should be aware of the dangers of that.

I have nothing against vegetarianism or vegetarians. However, if you suspect that a meatless diet is not supporting your health, I urge you to investigate the moral and ethical complexities of this issue. There are many thoughtful, compassionate, even spiritual people who eat meat. Moreover, I have met many, many people whose health radically improved after they began eating meat again. I do not attempt to generalize that to everybody. I am perfectly willing to accept that vegans can be healthy too (though I've met many who are not).

Finally, I want to thank everybody who offered comments, even the vitriolic and vulgar ones. I see behind them motivations we all share: a desire to find truth and a passion to create a more beautiful world.

Charles Eisenstein

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A nuclear-armed Iran will be as catastrophic as "Hitler marching into the Rhineland," said John Bolton last week, eliciting headlines, hosannas, and seething rebukes from all over the planet with his call to get serious about preemptive military action against Iran.

"John Bolton for President!" cried the giddy apparatchiks at Commentary, where Zeyda Podhoretz earns loving, indulgent smiles this month as he inveighs against the Shia Islamofascists of Tehran. But the thought of an atomic ayatollah has got even the odd Guardian contributor feeling twitchy enough to offer a few words in support of Bolton. Now that's a tipping point.

Should we bomb Iran? That's this week's Big Question, put to Michael Freund of the Jerusalem Post and Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com. Through Thursday afternoon, they'll argue action vs. inaction, warmongering vs. appeasment, bombing vs. diplomacy. Freund leads.

From: Michael Freund
To: Justin Raimondo
Subject: Bomb Iran Now

Justin,

A few weeks ago, a celebration took place in Tehran that may come to mark a turning point in the history of the Middle East and the entire Western world.

Just as he had been promising for months, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced onCelebrating "National Nuclear Day": Iranian performance artists lift empty uranium vials to the heavens April 9th a dramatic expansion of his country’s ability to enrich uranium, triumphantly declaring that 3,000 centrifuges had begun operating at the Natanz nuclear facility in central Iran. Centrifuges—which spin and purify uranium gas—produce enriched uranium that can then be used to build a nuclear weapon.

Recently, the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies estimated that once Natanz’s 3,000 centrifuges become operational, it could take as little as nine months for Iranian scientists to generate enough enriched uranium to make an atomic bomb.

So no wonder the day of Ahmadinejad’s announcement was celebrated across Iran as “national nuclear day.” It indicated that by the end of this calendar year, the ayatollahs could very well have their hands on the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

Iran cannot and must not be allowed to acquire nukes. Israel and the U.S. simply cannot stand by and watch as Tehran goes nuclear and threatens the entire civilized world.

The only way to stop the Atomic Ayatollahs is with potent military action—fast, furious, and fierce. And soon.

The press loves to mock the Iranian president, portraying him as a nut, a kook, and a fanatic. But I take him at his word. He has made quite clear what his objective is, telling us over and over again that he plans to eliminate Israel and destroy the West.

Like it or not, we are all in his crosshairs, and we ignore him at our peril. And that is why it is time to show a little more couThey've Got us in Their Crosshairs: The Ayatollahs of Iran's "Guardian Council"rage and a lot more determination, and to tackle this threat head-on.

The fact of the matter is that diplomacy has run its course. Its only effect has been to give the Iranians still more time to progress toward achieving their malicious aims.

After the UN Security Council passed a resolution in December insisting that Iran end its uranium-enrichment program, Ahmadinejad dismissed it as “a piece of torn paper” and vowed to expand his country’s nuclear program, which is precisely what he proceeded to do.

For more than a decade, Iran hid its nuclear program from the international community. Its government has interfered with inspections of its nuclear facilities, and repeatedly defied demands to cease and desist from its dangerous actions.

Does anyone really think another UN resolution, and more empty words, are going to do the trick?

And while the West dilly-dallies, the ayatollahs have been busy expanding their military arsenal. Back in November, Iran test-fired dozens of missiles, including the Shihab-3, which is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and can hit targets up to 1,200 miles away—meaning that all of Israel is now within reach.

And if anyone still doubts Ahmadinejad’s intentions, he made them abundantly clear at the Holocaust denial conference he hosted in Tehran back in December. In his closing speech, the would-be Persian executioner gleefully declared that, “The life-curve of the Zionist regime has begun its descent, and it is now on a downward slope towards its fall…. The Zionist regime will be wiped out, and humanity will be liberated.”

And once he dispenses with the Jews, as we know, it is the West that will be next. So this is not just Israel’s battle, it is everyone’s war, and it is time for the decision-makers in Washington and Jerusalem to act.Action Will Be Scary, Inaction Would Be Terrifying: We must avoid nuclear blackmail

Sure, the thought of striking Iran is scary, particularly in light of the trouble America is having next door in Iraq. But as frightening as the idea might seem, it pales in comparison with the prospect of the ayatollahs having their finger on the button and being able to threaten the world with nuclear blackmail and destruction.

We must stop Iran at all costs. The alarm bells are ringing, and the danger signs are near. Like it or not, time is of the essence, and there is not a moment to lose. The U.S. or Israel should bomb Iran now, before it proves to be too late.

Michael Freund

NEXT: Leave America out of it. Iran is no threat to the USA.

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Isa,

I cannot respond to all your arguments at once, due to space restrictions. But before I tell my own food story, I would, since you asked so pointedly, like to assure you that I would never kill a child under any circumstances. If presented with a choice of killing a child or a redwood, I would choose neither. Put a gun to my head and I would say “shoot.”

I suppose you could concoct a situation where someone has the gun to a child’s head and says, “Cut down that redwood or I’ll shoot her.” In that case I don’t know what I would choose. It would depend on my judgment at the moment of whether the threat was credible, and just how I felt, and my sense of what the child wanted and what the tree wanted. (But I’d say the killer was the gunman, not me.) Anyway, I don’t think questions like this can be torn out of context and decided on principle. How would such a situation arise? What choices would I have to have made in my life to bring it about?

If, as you say, only animals have the capacity to suffer, then what is wrong with cutting down trees? If your ethics are based on minimizing suffering, and since you think the tree is just insensate matter, without sentience or the capacity to suffer, then why treat it any differently from a rock? You say, “It’s an amazing tree!” That’s your heart speaking, not your ethics. We feel amazement, awe, and reverence in the presence of the sacred. We are moved.

“We don’t need shamans to detect [animal suffering].” We don’t need shamans to detect plant suffering either, or the sentience and spirited quality of all nature. We can feel it. When the bulldozers tear up the land to build a new highway, we can feel the suffering of the land. We can feel it. It is real. But often we ignore these feelings, or dismiss them as anthropomorphism, or discount them as an invalid source of knowledge compared to what can be measured and counted. Ignored, this capacity to feel atrophies over time. Hence we resort to cost-benefit analyses to determine whether a given construction project is justified. And environmentalists, impotently, cite the economic costs of global warming or rainforest destruction as reasons why we should stop. Better to say, “Stop, for the love of the earth!”

As a matter of fact, I am advocating “Do what feels right,” and I have dedicated years of my life to understanding what this means. Typically people respond with something like your Neil Diamond and heroin quip, revealing a distrust of self. The thesis of The Yoga of Eating is that we have become so cut off from our true selves, and so afraid of our natural desires, that we no longer are aware of what feels right. The book is about how to regain sensitivity and trust.

We think that if we just did “whatever we wanted” our lives would dissolve into a downward spiralExpressing Our Magnificence: Dungeons & Dragons meets the basic human need for adventure of indolence and hedonism. Soon we’d be the addict in the gutter, listening to Neil Diamond. But actually, the objects of addiction are not our true desires, they are substitutes for what we really want. What we really want is often hidden behind barriers of habit and fear, but when we access it, the addictions lose their allure. For example, Dungeons & Dragons substitutes for the basic human need for adventure and expression of one’s magnificence.

In my early 20s I went through a vegetarian phase. I’d done all the reading and was very careful to complement my proteins, eat whole grains, and so on. I convinced myself that human beings were never meant to eat meat and didn’t need it. I congratulated myself on my superior ethics, and marveled that meat eaters “just don’t get it.” A sanctimonious attitude accompanied a whole identity based on diet. So of course, I was greatly ashamed when I developed cravings for meat that intensified over time. I castigated myself for my indulgent, selfish desire. I also developed health problems, which at first I explained away as “detoxification” or “cleansing.” Eventually it became obvious something was wrong. My libido almost vanished, I was tired all the time, I caught colds that wouldn’t go away. I was eating “healthier” than all my friends, but I was less healthy! It wasn’t fair!

Well, one day I just gave up. I said, “I’m going to eat whatever I want.” Much to my shame, what I wanted most was a local dish (I was living in Taiwan) of sautéed pork bellies, cooked with scallions, garlic, and ginger, accompanied by rice and swimming in lard. As I ate, I was suffused by a profound feeling of well-being, and I thought, “This cannot be wrong. It cannot be wrong to feel this good.” Well, I didn’t listen to that voice right away, but eventually, more and more, I ate whatever felt right (i.e. pleasurable). And my health rapidly improved.

I had one more flirtation with vegetarianism eight years ago, when I underwent an extended yoga teacher training and imagined I was too pure to eat meat. After a couple months I developed acute prostatitis (let’s tell the world!) and then a double kidney infection, ten days of unimaginable pain. As for purity, I didn’t realize then that many spiritual people I admire, such as the Dalai Lama, are meat eaters. I believe meat is necessary for my body, and in my work I have heard countless stories similar to mine. I don’t believe it is universally true, however.

You know, Isa, I actually don’t live based on ethics at all, a system of principles superimposed over real desire. I follow desire, and learn more deeply every day what my true desires are.Happy, Ethical, Spiritual, Omnivorous: Dalai Lama likes his meat It is a constant unfolding. Interestingly, desire and pleasure lead me to the same behaviors that people consider ethical. I recycle and compost because it feels good, not because I should. I am kind and gentle in my relationships because it feels good. I do not participate in any livelihood that perpetuates the earth-devouring machine, because that feels bad. Lying, cheating, hurting, judging, punishing…these all hurt. To take an apple core and throw it in the garbage instead of composting it actually hurts. Because I am connected to it, and I know where it wants to go. Its pain is my pain. This is not a theory, it is a felt experience that everyone has access to. Not just shamans.

It is almost impossible to speak of ethics without using words like should and shouldn’t, right and wrong, good and bad. There is another way to think, though, and another way to live. In trying hard to be good and rise above desire, we enact a war against the self—an internalization of our civilization’s war on nature. Our technologies of self-control mirror the material technologies we use to control nature. On both sides, the result is ruination.

I apologize for not having responded to some of your other points about the pounds of dead plants embodied in an herbivore, about killing pet dogs, and so on. As for more details of my diet, let me say that the food I eat and the farms that produce it are improving but not yet perfect. Occasionally I will, usually for social reasons, eat a factory-farmed burger or a genetically engineered corn chip or an orange picked by an underpaid migrant labor and shipped cross-continent using fossil fuels. And when I eat, I offer the following prayer:

“Thank you for this food. Thanks to all the beings who created this food. I dedicate this meal to a child who is truly hungry.”

Warmly,

Charles (a tree-hugging, hippie-loving, Adbusters-reading, radical anarchist peacenik wingnut)

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