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The Big Question

Jewish Immigration Activists Look Out for Jewish Interests. So What?

A Jewish Perspective Can Be Both Fully Universalist and Fully Particularist

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

No immigration policy can be wonderful for everybody
From: John Derbyshire
To: Gideon Aronoff
Subject: Good for Jews? Good for America? Good for Everyone??

Gideon,

I don't think I shall get anywhere arguing scriptural interpretation with you. Are Jews at large driven by the calculating ethnocentrism described by Kevin MacDonald? Or by the universalist humanism you profess? Something of both, would be my best guess, the mix being different under different circumstances and at different degrees of religious intensity. My strong impression of the Haredim, for instance, is that they don't give a fig about Gentiles and would not subscribe to your moral universalism. On the other hand, a lot of secular Jews I know are idealists like yourself, whose idealism embraces Gentiles too.

In any case, I gather you don't agree with my suggestion that for Jews, the issue we are discussing—where should Jews stand on immigration?—really comes down to: Good For The Jews? or: Good For America? You seem to think our organizing principle should be: Good For Everybody In The Whole World!

That is so preposterous I can't even summon up any admiration for the high idealism that must underlie such a position. I actually prefer the ethnocentrism Kevin MacDonald imputes to your people. At least it is recognizably human. Perhaps you are familiar with Pascal's wise observation that while man is neither angel nor beast, he who would act the angel acts the beast.

While I am with you in wishing to see "a considered, rational approach to the immigration problem," it was not "a small group of pontificators" who derailed the recent Senate bill by "lathering up their base." Do you really regard ordinary Americans with such contempt? Do you really think that they can be "lathered up" to oppose something that a small group wants them to oppose?

The recent Senate bill was derailed by great masses of ordinary citizens overwhelming their representatives with mail, email, phone calls and faxes because they were outraged at the shoddy dishonesty of the bill's contents, and were inclined to believe that the 1986 experience, when the government promised us strict enforcement in return for amnesty, then delivered the amnesty but not the enforcement, would be repeated. This was not an army of brainless automata "lathered up" into action by some small, sinister clique of manipulators. It was popular democracy at work, and a proud moment for freedom and the rule of law in these United States.

Nor is it true that "a majority of Americans actually want comprehensive immigration reform that includes a realistic path to citizenship for those already here." It took me less than two minutes on Google to locate a poll, by a respectable market-reasearch firm, showing 68 percent of respondents favoring deportation as an answer to illegal immigration.

I don't myself believe that "America needs more people to keep our economy running smoothly." That the Chairman of the Federal Reserve says this is so, does not make it so. Even a Fed Chairman can be mistaken. There was very nearly no immigration at all into the U.S.A. from 1945 to 1965, yet the economy boomed as never before. How did that happen? A national economy is a very flexible and ingenious thing, certainly able to cope with shortages, of labor or anything else, by means other than immigration. It might raise wages, or automate, or outsource. Indeed, many economists tell us that automation, and technological advance in general, is retarded by a large supply of cheap manual labor. I am not an economist, but this seems plausible to me.

"The role of immigrants in our economy is ... a well-established plus." Is it? Does that include both legal and illegal immigrants? Both high- and low-skilled immigrants? Is your "well-established plus" net of the costs of educating immigrants' children, supplying health care to immigrants who cannot afford it, incarcerating immigrants who commit crimes, and defending ourselves against immigrants like the nineteen who committed the 9/11 atrocities? In any case, even if this were true in some general sense, it would not get us very far with the questions I thought we had agreed were central: How many immigrants? With what skills and education levels? From where?

The various names and studies you cite as claiming to have proved that immigration increases our prosperity can easily be countered by others who claim the opposite thing. I named George Borjas and Robert Rector in my previous post. But again, even if I were to concede this point, which I do not, some issues would be left dangling. For all I, or you, know, the American people at large might be willing to sacrifice that claimed 0.1 percentage point in GDP growth if they could be relieved of the social, cultural, political, and fiscal problems arising from mass immigration. I personally would certainly be so willing. Man does not live by bread alone... Speaking of which, what happened to your ringing declaration, five paragraphs earlier, that: "The Torah is a unique attempt to create a nation governed not by pursuit of power or the accumulation of wealth but by recognition of the worth of each person as the image of God"? If the accumulation of wealth is not, according to the Torah (which "We Jews take ... very seriously") a governing principle, why are you bringing it forward to justify your views on immigration?

I think you are quite right to say we "can't predict who's going to make the greatest contributions." I certainly wouldn't depend for accurate predictions on those functionaries in the immigration bureaucracy who, in practice, end up as the decision-makers.

But what follows from this truth? In a situation where you can't accurately predict, you have no choice but to "go with the percentages." In this case that means preferring some groups over others. Groups who have thrown up great numbers of entrepreneurs, generated plenty of jobs and helped increase our national prosperity, or who have enriched our cultural and intellectual lives—groups like, oh, say, the Ashkenazi Jews—should be given preference over groups whose members are more inclined to vegetate in low-skill employment or welfare dependency.

Don't you agree? Or, if you don't agree, what would be your prescription for increasing the probability that our selection of immigrants (remember, we have already agreed that selection is unavoidable) will be optimal for our nation? What, actually would be your criteria for selection, Gideon?

You say, correctly, that I want more diversity in our immigration. You then say: "this point makes no sense." You then go on to argue that your program "would promote diversity and fairness." Why do you want to promote something that makes no sense? I am afraid I did not follow the logic of this paragraph. I also object to your assertion that "people migrate to neighboring places." No, they don't. I didn't; neither (I am pretty sure) did your ancestors. People migrate to places that (a) offer them a better life than the one they currently have, and (b) permit them to come in and settle. Migration flows are not governed by irresistible laws of nature. They can be—and, among sensible nations, always have been—controlled by borders, visa procedures, and laws.

I am sorry to have "astounded" you with my caution towards persons claiming to be fleeing persecution. However, a generous attitude to such persons will result in massive fraud. As an illustration, I point you to Britain, where the phrase "asylum seeker" is now a synonym for "illegal immigrant." I can guarantee that an open-hearted program such as you favor will provide, for every genuine refugee from real persecution, at least ten, and more likely a hundred, persons who are taking advantage of your generosity. Many of them will be, almost by definition, people of criminal or amoral character.

I do not want these people. I don't think I am a callous person—I am pretty sure than no-one who knows me would describe me so—but I am not generous towards strangers with things I own that are precious to me, that I have struggled and sweated to acquire. If the stranger has a hard-luck story I may do him the courtesy of listening to it; but the world, you know, is full of hard-luck stories.

Of course we can deport 12 million people if we want to. (And according to at least some polls—see above—we do want to.) Our nation has, by acts of collective will, done far more difficult things than that. If sensible policies were implemented, great numbers of illegal immigrants would anyway self-deport.

I am not clear why Auschwitz came to your mind. We are speaking of deporting people back to their home countries. Are you supposing that those home countries would gas the returning deportees and incinerate their corpses? Why on earth would you suppose that? My own opinion of the government of (for example) Mexico is pretty low, but not that low. As to families of mixed status being "ripped apart," again I'm afraid I don't quite follow. Are you suggesting that, in a case where one family member is legally resident and another is not, we should deport the illegal resident while forcibly preventing the legally-resident member from accompanying them? That is certainly not something I would favor, and I don't see how it could lawfully be done. Our government has no power to prevent persons from leaving our territory, unless they are guilty of some crime.

I am flattered and pleased by your kind remarks about my accomplishments since coming to the U.S.A. They seem to me, honestly, to be very slight. Again, though, this is individualist stuff. Any given person might make great contributions after settling in the U.S.A. Unfortunately, as I said before, this is not a thing that we—certainly not our overworked and ill-paid immigration officials—can predict on an individual basis. We can only "go with the percentages."

I have ended up as a writer of (I hope) modestly useful books and (I hope) mildly entertaining commentary. I might, for all anyone knew when I first entered the U.S.A., have ended up as an axe murderer doing 25-to-life in some state correctional facility. Who can tell? As I said in a previous post, the individualistic approach, though highly congenial to the national temperament, and appealing to the universal human interest in the life particulars of other human beings, does not get us very far with policy-making, which must primarily be based on statistics, modified slightly, and very cautiously, around the edges to take account of some few particular and exceptional cases.

You conclude with further expressions of regret that this year's Senate immigration bill was "shot down" by a "vocal minority." This account of the bill's fate is not true, though. See here and any number of other places. The U.S. public at large was hotly opposed to that bill, the more so the more they learned about it. The principal reason for such widespread opposition was that the bill promised amnesty in return for enforcement; and the American public has been given that promise before, and remembers that it was flagrantly broken. Fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us.

I, at any rate, am not ashamed of what happened to that wretched, deplorable, and dishonest bill. To the contrary: I should be proud and glad to think that I contributed in some small way to the slaying of that dreadful monstrosity, that gross and impertinent fraud on the citizens and lawful residents—Jew and Gentile alike—of the United States.

Next: Jewish immigration activists looked out for Jewish interests. So what?


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The Torah, the Talmud, and the Undocumented Worker

Hard numbers are important. So is human dignity.
From: Gideon Aronoff
To: John Derbyshire
Subject: Numbers are only part of the story

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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Why Such Colossal Favoritism Toward Mexicans?

If you want to give foreigners a better life, why not bring them in from Burundi?

From: John Derbyshire
To: Gideon Aronoff
Subject: Pardon my goyish skepticism, but...

Gideon,

Every statement of immigration restrictionism should begin with the observation that British restrictionist Enoch Powell took pains to include in all his speeches on the topic: Numbers are of the essence. This seems to be especially difficult for us Americans, with our individualist ethos, to grasp. The settlement of one (or ten, or a hundred) people from Algeria, Bangladesh, or Chile is of no consequence to America's future. The settlement of ten million is of mighty consequence. An individualist approach to immigration issues, while occasionally illuminating, does not scale up well.

After many exchanges of this kind, to-ing and fro-ing with advocates of lax immigration policies, I have come to the conclusion thaA Patriot. And Numerate, Too.: Enoch Powell understood that, with immigration, "numbers are of the essence."A Patriot. And Numerate, Too.: Enoch Powell understood that, with immigration, "numbers are of the essence."t the real gulf in immigration talk is not between conservative and liberal, cruel and kind, nativist and xenophile, or practical and sentimental. It is between those who are keen to discuss numbers and those who, for whatever reason, are unwilling to do so.

Your response (which, if you don't mind my saying so, is not really a response, more a mission statement) to my first post illustrates this truth in several places. Your second paragraph, for example, has this:

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...

I'm afraid I don't see the parallel at all.

If, as I insist, numbers are of the essence, then we should scrutinize the numbers in the two cases. In 1900 there were about 11.2 million Jews in the world. About 9.0 million were in Europe; about 5.2 million in the Russian Empire (which at that point included Poland). The population of the U.S.A. in 1900 was 76.2 million. The worldwide pool of Jews from which the "great wave" came therefore represented about fifteen percent of the receiving population. The actual pool so far as the main sending countries were concerned was a tad more than half that— let us be generous and say ten percent. (And let us note that both figures are slightly inflated by the fact of substantial Jewish immigration 1881-1900.)

Now to your "parallel." Leaving aside "others" (I am determined to be generous to your argument!) your Latin American and Asian total—depending on precise definitions, and again I am trying to be generous to you, taking only the 1999 figures—is about 5,780 million. Dividing by the current population of the U.S.A. (estimated at 301.1 million) I get a sending-pool to receiving-population ratio of 1,920 percent.

Fifteen percent... ten percent... 1,920 percent... Forgive me, Gideon, but I don't quite see your "parallel"—though I'll admit that the numbers are indeed "striking."

Just so with all your other assertions, when I try to reduce them to numbers. You say, for example, that: "American immigrants founded or co-founded some of the world's most prominent tech companies, among them Intel, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Yahoo! and Google."

Well, let's see. Wikipedia lists a total of eleven people as founders of those five companies. Of the eleven, five are foreign-born: one each from Germany, India, France, Taiwan, and Russia. If you want to slice the cake a bit thinner, you can note that the French-born entrepreneur (Pierre Omidyar) is of Iranian parentage, while the Russian one (sergey Brin) is Jewish.

A cautious conclusion one might draw is that our immigration policy ought preferentially to admit more Germans, Indians, French-Iranians, Taiwanese, and Russian Jews. Further thought suggests that if (as is apparently the case), you, Gideon, want U.S. immigration policy to have, as one of its aims, the growth of imaginative entrepreneurship in our country, we ought to carry out a close numerical analysis of entrepreneurship by country of origin, education level, religious affiliation, and so on. Depending on what that tells us, we could then adjust our immigration policy to favor the most entrepreneurial groups.

Such studies have in fact been done. Here is one (though a bit out of date, I'm afraid—a more current one might throw the argument in your favor...) from the Center for Immigration Studies. Sample quotes:

...The difference between Middle Eastern immigrants who have a self-employment rate of 28.2 percent, the highest of any region, and the self-employment rate of 4.8 for Central Americans, the lowest of any region, is extremely large. By region of origin, immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and Canada ... have self-employment rates that are four or more percentage points higher than those of natives. In contrast, immigrants from Mexico ... and Central America have self-employment rates that are more than four percentage points lower.

Koreans, Cubans, Canadians, and immigrants from the United Kingdom have the highest self-employment rates, while immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines have the lowest rates of self-employment. There is also significant variation within regions. For example, Cuban immigrants are much more entrepreneurial than Haitian or Dominican immigrants, even though they are all from the Caribbean.

Age and education ... do not account for all of the differences between immigrant groups. For example, 27.5 percent of college-educated Middle Eastern immigrants between the ages of 35-44 are self-employed. In contrast, college-educated Mexican immigrants in the same age group have a self-employment rate of only 10.5 percent. Thus, much of the difference between the two groups remains even after controlling for these two factors.

It is clear that current immigration policy does not produce a flow of immigrants that fundamentally alters the overall level of entrepreneurship in the United States.

Under a perfectly open immigration policy, several hundred millions, perhaps two or three billions, of people would come to settle in the U.S.A. This prospect is absolutely unacceptable to the American people. (Trust me on this one, Gideon.) It follows inescapably that U.S. immigration policy must perforce be selective. We must—we must—say to this one: "Yes, you may come and settle in our country." We must say to that one: "No, you may not come to settle in our country." We—we, the people, the citizens of America, not the Wall Street Journal editorial board, nor Gideon Aronoff, nor John Derbyshire—we Americans must decide, by consensus, how many immigrants we want, from where, with what skills and education.

If we shirk this decision, as in fact we have, we shall just get great numbers of people from nearby poor countries, with a weighting towards those willing to break American laws. Hence our huge population of Mexicans and Central Americans, unknown numbers of them present here in defiance of our laws. The 2000 census showed—see Table 2 here—Mexico running away with the percentage of our foreign-born population, at 29.5 percent. Number two, China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong) was far behind at 4.9 percent. France and Russia do not even appear in the top ten. El Salvador sends us more people than Germany. Perhaps, Gideon, you can point me to a high-tech company founded by a Salvadoran immigrant?

Since, as I have noted above, U.S. immigration policy cannot help but be selective, we really ought to give some thought to the selection criteria. Why such colossal favoritism towards Mexicans, for example? Mexico is not even a particularly poor country. Of the 179 nations listed here by per capita annual GDP, Mexico ranks No. 54 with $8,066. El Salvador is No. 98 with $2,619. Good grief: 47 countries—count 'em, 47!—have per capita GDP less than one-tenth of Mexico's. What about the struggling people of Cambodia ($503), Madagascar ($299) and Burundi ($119)? Around five billion people worldwide are poorer than the average Mexican. Are you not outraged, Gideon, that these unfortunates have such vanishingly small representation among our foreign-born population? Where's that famous Jewish compassion?

Having exceeded my word count, I can offer only sketchy responses to your other points—though if you would like me to expand on anything, please say so, and I shall.

To your invocations of the Torah and Talmud, I am afraid I must respond with goyish skepticism. The one thing that is plain to even the most casual inquirer into Judaism is that it is an exclusivist religion. What, otherwise, does the phrase "chosen people" mean? Many commentators fluent in the relevant languages and studies (this commentator, for example) tell us that "stranger" in these texts means "Jewish stranger." Some of these commentators tell us that the extension to Gentiles is a result of the Enlightenment liberalization of classical Judaism; some, that it is a well-intentioned but ignorant misapplication of the texts; some, that it is part of the conscious deception Jews engage in when presenting themselves to Gentiles. I am not competent to judge which, if any, of these commentators is correct. I must tell you, though, that if you want to confront the Kevin MacDonalds of the world, you had better be ready with responses to points of this kind. "The Torah says..." will pass with a general audience. With a skeptical—not even necessarily antisemitic—audience, you will have to do better.

The rest of your questions:

"How generous should we be to people who are fleeing persecution?" Not very, would be my answer. (1) It is in the nature of persecuting regimes that actual evidence of persecution is hard to come by, so there will be many bogus refugees. (2) The U.S. government should place the interests of U.S. citizens before all other considerations. Some people are persecuted for excellent reasons. The fanatical (and fanatically antisemitic) Muslim Brotherhood is savagely persecuted in Egypt and other Arab countries. Will you be generous to them? (3) Where persecution is the norm in a country, that country needs major reform. The only people who can carry out such reform are the people of that country. As Dr. Johnson observed, sometimes martyrdom is the only test of truth.

"If we practically can’t deport 12 million people..." Your premise is false. Not only can it be done, it has been costed. The National Policy Institute will email you Ed Rubinstein's report, whose conclusion is that: "No matter how high the costs of deporting illegal aliens may seem, the costs of not deporting them are larger still." (Ed actually computed the cost at "between $41 billion and $46 billion annually over five years." That's about the cost of 92 Space Shuttle launches a year.) The Eisenhower administration deported, or caused to self-deport, several hundred thousand illegal aliens in a few months, and it didn't even make newspaper headlines.

"What policies best serve to promote the integration of newcomers?" Well, some diversity would help. One of the most troubling aspects of our immigrant numbers in recent years has been the decline in diversity.

"Since we can't accept everyone in the world, what are the criteria for a controlled, liberal immigration system?" Aha! Why don't we ask the American people? But I am very glad to know that we are in at least general agreement on this central point: Numbers are of the Essence.

NEXT: The Torah, the Talmud, and the Undocumented Worker


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Let's Roast Some Old Chestnuts

We need rational analysis rather than emotional judgments

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 AmericaStriking 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 economyAn 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 21st century American Jewish movement for immigrants and refugees.

NEXT: But why such favoritism to Mexicans, Gideon?


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Where Should Jews Stand On Immigration?

The persistence of extravagant pro-immigration sentiment among American Jews is astonishing

John Derbyshire is a columnist for the National Review, a critic of mass immigration into the US, and has publicly described himself as Jewcy's "shabbos goy." Gideon Aronoff is the head of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the zeyde of all Jewish-American immigration orgs. In this installment of Jewcy's Big Question series, they square off on the question, "Where should Jews stand on immigration?"

From: John Derbyshire
To: Gideon Aronoff
Subject: An astonishing pattern

Gideon,

I hate to act the Philadelphia lawyer here, but my attention got snagged right away on that word "should."* Where should Jews stand on immigration?

"Should" implies either some desired goal (If you want to ace that interview you should get your hair cut) or moral obligation (You should be patient with veMake it Stop: Does fear of antisemitism explain Jewish attachment to liberal immigration policy?Make it Stop: Does fear of antisemitism explain Jewish attachment to liberal immigration policy?ry old people). Which "should" are we looking at here? I shall try to tackle both.

Goal-wise, the starting point for discussion is our old pal Kevin MacDonald—to be exact, Chapter 7 of his book The Culture of Critique. The chapter heading is "Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy." Kevin gives a very full account (the chapter, with its notes, is 59 pages long in my 1998 hardback edition) of Jewish efforts, from the late 19th century on, to shape U.S. immigration policy in what American Jews perceived to be their group interests. In a nutshell:

  • Fear of antisemitism was the main force driving Jewish activism on immigration issues.
  • Jewish activists perceived a strong group interest for Jews in making U.S. society as ethnically heterogeneous as possible. To be the lone identifiable ethnic minority in an otherwise homogeneous society would, they believed, be to invite antisemitism.
  • Destroying the WASP hegemony—or, later, the white-European-Christian hegemony—was a key goal. MacDonald: "[T]he historical record supports the proposition that making the United States into a multicultural society has been a major Jewish goal beginning in the nineteenth century." [p. 260]
  • There was a contradiction (MacDonald says an insincerity) at the heart of this program, in that while the propaganda for more immigration stressed the harmonious blending of many ethnicities into a "proposition nation," many of the propagandists—MacDonald cites Israel Zangwill as an example—were themselves ardently ethnocentric, opposed to (for instance) Jew-Gentile intermarriage.
  • "[T]he rejection of national interest as an element of U.S. immigration policy" was "a hallmark of the Jewish approach to immigration," says MacDonald [p. 288] Again: "Reflecting the long Jewish opposition to the idea that immigration policy should be in the national interest, the economic welfare of American citizens was viewed as irrelevant..." [p. 292]

Thus MacDonald. Is he right? Certainly the extraordinarily tenacious attachment of American Jews to liberal immigration policies calls for some explanation, and social commentators aren't exactly vying with each other to provide one. Faute de mieux, I think MacDonald's explanation is a pretty good one. I would qualify it with two points:

  • Practically all of that chapter deals with the period 1881-1965. The subsequent 42 years have seen much dilution—assimilation, in fact!—of Jewish identity in the U.S. As Yuri Slezkine notes in his book The Jewish Century: "In 1940, the rate of outmarriage for American Jews was about 3 percent; by 1990, it had exceeded 50 percent."
  • In MacDonald's view, there is never anything of idealism or selfless charity in anything Jews do. All is Machiavellian group self-interest. He convinces me that group self-interest is indeed in play, but there is more to human beings than that. The Jews one actually knows seem to be moved at least in part by genuine idealism.

It remains the case that the generality of American Jews, certainly among the commentariat, are very hostile to immigration restriction. They believe that wellnigh unrestricted immigration from absolutely everywhere is ... is what? Good For The Jews? That would be MacDonald's interpretation. My own impression, talking to these people, is that they actually believe it is good for the U.S.A. Indeed, given that most of present-day immigration is of either (a) Muslims, who are antisemitic almost to a man, or (b) Latin Americans, which is to say, people from countries where antisemitism is more common, and more frank, than it ever was in the U.S.A. (where do they think all the old Nazis retired to?)—given that, the persistence of extravagant pro-immigration sentiment among American Jews today is rather astonishing. Perhaps the only explanation can be that Jews have so thoroughly internalized the Good For America justification that it overrides the understanding—which they must surely possess—that it is Bad For The Jews.

And it should be said, of course, that there are now numerous exceptions to all the above—many American Jews, including some prominent and activist ones, who are off the old reservation on immigration issues—Stephen Steinlight, for example.

So: If the "shoulAmerican Mosaic: Will the country be improved by floods of new immigrants?American Mosaic: Will the country be improved by floods of new immigrants?d" in our title implies a goal, and the question mark invites us to offer suggestions for attaining that goal, we need to know what the goal is. MacDonald would say that the goal is Jewish group self-interest, best attained by making Jews just one minority in a nation of minorities, a multiculturalist bouillabaisse, arrived at via unrestricted mass immigration from everywhere. I myself would be more charitable. For many Jews, I believe, the goal is a better U.S.A. Some, apparently really believing the catch-phrases about "diversity," "vibrancy," "nation of immigrants," and so on, truly think that the country will be improved by floods of immigrants from everywhere. Others, like Dr. Steinlight (I wonder what motives MacDonald would ascribe to him?) disagree.

So much for a goal-directed "should." What about a moral-obligation "should"? All matters of interest, Jewish-group or other, aside, what is the right stand to take, the good and moral stand?

As a conservative, I would say that the right stand, for Jews or any other Americans, is the one that conserves. That is to say, it is the one that best keeps intact our national values, our national coherence, and our national interests.

It is simply not true that our national values have always included openness to immigration from everywhere. Until the 1965 Act—which is to say, for 82 percent of our nation's history—they never did so. (And even that Act included quotas on immigration from Latin America.)

How it improves our national coherence to import an entire new racial minority, doubling our opportunities for racial discord, is mysterious to me. (And if you don't think Hispanics are a race, you had better go argue with them about it. Their main lobbying organization is called National Council of The Race).

Our national interests, like those of any other nation, center on peace, prosperity, and domestic tranquillity. On the last of those three, I have made my opinion plain. I think that "diversity" is a bust, and that we should solve the race problem we have—have always had—before introducing another one. On peace there is little to say. A nation as powerful and remote as the U.S.A. has not much to fear in the way of existential threats. Since the entire Muslim world is currently hostile to us, and inclined to express its hostility in acts of civil terror, I do think it is foolish of us to permit Muslims to settle in our country, and I think I would think this more intensely if I were Jewish. The prosperity issue is one where we can have real debate. Does unrestricted mass immigration from everywhere make us richer? I myself am persuaded by the arguments of, for example, George Borjas and Robert Rector that it does not, but I acknowledge that there are some cogent arguments on the other side.

In summary: If "should" implies means to an end, it depends on the end: Good For The Jews, or Good For America? If "should" calls on a moral obligation, then as a conservative, I would say that the obligation is to conserve those qualities that made us a good, strong, just, and prosperous nation, and not to endanger those qualities by embarking on dramatic demographic adventures.

* This post has been modified since publication.

NEXT: Let's Roast Some Old Chestnuts


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Back to the Future

Another Great Leap Forward. Fantastic.

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 JewsCold 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 21st century is ripe, even if the 20th 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?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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The Coming Jewish Schism

We must break from the Orthodox

From: Joey Kurtzman
To: Jack Wertheimer
Subject: A Viable Judaism Requires Breaking from the Orthodox

Jack,

You are right: I don't regard the Jewish people as my family. I feel a great affection for Jewish culture, I value the Jewish tradition, and I feel a connection to other Jews. But there's no point in pretending that this is at all comparable to what I feel for my family.

At Jewcy we've talked about our "impulse to Jewishness," our persistent desire to connect with our Jewish heritage. As frustrated as we sometimes feel, as many times as we have been turned off by the Jewish community, we keep finding ourselves drawn back. But whereas our love for family may be inexhaustible, this impulse to Jewishness is not. And whereas we ask nothing from family in return for a role in our children’s lives, we demand something specific from Judaism in return for such a role.

Jacob Neusner has said that “the reason that Judaism has persisted and flourished as the religion of the Jewish people for nearly the entire span of recorded history…is that Judaism, in all its forms and manifestations, succeeds in explaining to the Jews the world in which they live.” Judaism simply no longer accomplishes this. Our demand is that it resume doing so.

A Jewish life ought to be one in which the wisdom and insights of Jewish scripture and Jewish historyVos Macht a Amish Guy?: Does Judaism show us how to engage with the world, or how to retreat from it?Vos Macht a Amish Guy?: Does Judaism show us how to engage with the world, or how to retreat from it? help us more effectively engage with, and navigate in, the world in which we actually live. It shouldn’t serve as an alternative to that world, a sort of soft Amish-ism by which we retreat to the narrow, particularist concerns of one traditional community.

For decades, young Jews have voted with their feet, their hearts, their minds, their money, their lives, their children: we’re telling you in as many ways as we can that Judaism is being humiliated in the marketplace of ideas. You wonder how we can make young Jews shoulder the sturdy “yoke of Torah,” but this battle for relevance is the yoke that Torah itself is struggling to bear. I think you are right to fear for the future. I would encourage all Jewish-American leaders to surrender their optimism and begin panicking.

The Jewish-American leadership must eventually confront the reality that Judaism cannot thrive amongst a significant proportion of young American Jews unless we jettison the language and ideology of peoplehood. You say we need to "work towards a consensus on who is a Jew." There can be no positive outcome to that discussion. You would advertize the obsolescence of the tradition even by having that conversation. A Judaism that works will be one in which such antiquated concerns are retired once and for all, and a Jewish person is anyone who makes an effort to enrich his life with the wisdom of the Jewish tradition and Jewish scripture.

I understand that a shift to Judaism-after-peoplehood would be a historic change, as radical as the shift from a Judaism of the temple cult to a portable Judaism based on study and prayer. It will take scholars and others whose desire to make Judaism viable for the next centuries is stronger than their attachment to the old framework of peoplehood-centered Judaism. And it will inevitably mean a schism with the Orthodox and all others who choose to retain that peoplehood-centered Judaism. But we’ve been moving toward this schism for the past two centuries. This is why I talk about the mongrelization and impurity of my generation, our being new Samaritans, a people of polluted culture and ancestry whose Jewishness should not be trusted by the Orthodox. I use this harsh language because I want to shatter any delusions that this schism is preventable. All we can do is defer it.

Judaism-after-peoplehood must also be one in which moral obligations outside the Jewish community are of fundamental importance. You speak dismissively of the Jewish attraction to universalism—it’s a "flight of internationalist fancy," "adolescent emoting," and a "resort to motherhood and apple pie talk." And you ask why I don’t do volunteer work abroad, skeptical that the “yoke of Torah” has anything to do with universal concerns, or that someone can be morally serious unless they spend their time fretting about whether young male JeIs This Worth a Responsa?: The good news is that he doesn't have to worry whether a peanut is a grain or a legumeIs This Worth a Responsa?: The good news is that he doesn't have to worry whether a peanut is a grain or a legumews can daven like their great-grandfathers.

Well, for what it’s worth I’ve done a good bit of volunteer work overseas. But for now I content myself with donating as much as I can to the best causes I can identify. Where is the responsa on how a privileged Jewish-American should go about picking a charity? The mitzvah commands that we donate ten percent of our income, no? But in cases in which further sacrifice on our part may mean the difference between life or death for someone else, do most Conservative rabbis hold that ten percent is still enough? One prominent philosopher says that middle-class Americans should donate at least 25% of their income to the fight against extreme poverty. How is this debate playing out at the Jewish Theological Seminary?

An intense and universalized ethical sensibility is something many of us associate with our Jewish heritage. Both my socialist grandparents and the Conservative Jewish day school I attended as a child communicated to me that moral issues were Jewish issues. "Tikkun olam," "justice, justice shall you pursue," "be kind to the sojourner," "pikuach nefesh": All of these were presented to me as universally applicable, rather than as the limited, ethnocentric injunctions of rabbinic interpretation.

Perhaps this was just happy talk, an attempt to persuade all these children of liberal American parents that their heritage was beautiful and visionary, without expecting we would actually buy it. But many of us did buy it. In the liberal movements of Judaism there is too much of this bullsh*t ambiguity about the content of our religion, too many fundamental disagreements obscured with intentionally vague language. Instead of working toward a consensus on “Who is a Jew,” how about working toward a consensus on whether it's pikuach nefesh or pikuach nefesh b'Yisrael?

The lesson you seem to have learned from the fate of Jewish unversalists like Rosa Luxemburg is that universalism is a fool's dream. But belief systems are not invalidated by the murder of their adherents. Jews know this, of course. Nor does the waxing and waning of antisemitism in 20th century Europe tell us very much about how things will play out in 21st century America.

Instead, the lesson I think we should learn from socialism's incredible appeal and longstanding influence in the Jewish world is that Emancipated Jews have been desperate for a belief system that instructs us in how to make moral and conceptual sense of the larger world, and that mediates our desire to play a positive role in moving human history forward. I see that same hunger today, and I believe that a reinvigorated, universalized Judaism, a Judaism-after-peoplehood, could sweep Frankenjewish America with all of the wildfire ferocity with which socialism once swept Jewish Europe.

Whether the necessary willpower and clarity of purpose exist to begin this new stage in the history of Judaism, I don't know. But I don’t think we can afford to wait any longer.

Thanks for doing this dialogue, Jack.

Joey

Next: Another Great Leap Forward. Fantastic.


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From Rosa Luxemburg to Jewcy

Adolescent rebellion still rages in the Jewish community

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, anywayFive 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 LuxemburgA 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?They 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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The Ethnocentric Cult Is Finished

Cries of "We are one" will go nowhere in today's America

From: Joey Kurtzman
To: Jack Wertheimer
Subject: Reporting, not Prophecy

Well, we do agree on some things, Jack.

I have to admit that when I first read you described as the Cassandra of American Jewry, I scoffed. It gives you too much credit and your ideas too little. “The man’s no prophet,” I thought. “He’s a reporter.”

I’m a reporter, too. I use words like mongrelization not to insult myself, but to describe myself, and to convey the enormity of what’s taking place among this generation of Jewish Americans. And when I say “Judaism and Jewishness have never had so limited a claim on the identity of young Jews,” I’m neither conceding a point nor, I think, showing any great insight. People who are raised with multiple cultural influences will simply not have the same relationship to Judaism as people who are raised in a “Jewish-only” environment.Unstoppable: Intermarriage is a function of modern lifeUnstoppable: Intermarriage is a function of modern life

I don’t believe intermarriage is the cause of all this turmoil, but rather a consequence. Jews are marrying non-Jews because we’re also growing up, studying, working, and socializing with them. Do you really believe that when all these barriers have fallen, endogamy can be sustained? Your enemy is not intermarriage, but the pluralistic, endlessly permeable culture of the modern American city.

To me, this is no “disaster,” but the realization of the dream for which my great-grandparents uprooted themselves from Europe in the first place. They came to America for a better material life, of course, but also because they desperately wanted to live where they would be free to practice whatever profession they chose, associate with whomever they chose, and generally live their lives how they chose.

When they got here, they found that America wasn’t quite the Promised Land they’d fantasized about. They could be Jews in the home and men on the street, but only in the eyes of the state. Their fellow citizens had different opinions, and great swathes of American life remained off-limits to Jews. No longer. Today’s America is the one they dreamed about. We are now free to be whatever we want in the home, the street, or anywhere else.

This is why the cosmopolitan pluralism of American life is very much my “patrimony.” I think you are wrong to scoff at the word. This polyglot, postmodern American creole culture may not be the world of my fathers, but it surely is the world my fathers gave to me. My great-grandparents did not grow up, as I did, with more close Christian friends than Jewish ones. But they made it inevitable when they left the ghettos, shtetls, and corporatism of European life to go to a country that sought to make all associations voluntary, all men equal before the law, and all decisions of faith a matter of free choice. So my Sundays at Baptist Bible study with Korean-American friends were as much their legacy to me as were my years of Hebrew School.

I disagree with your assessment that all this amounts to a “fractured” identity. Personally, I feel quite whole. Those around me in the Jewcy offices do not seem fractured either. We’re confident in who we are, we feel excited and privileged to live in such a singular time, to have received so unprecedented and exceptional a heritage. If you want to find people who are confused and fractured, I think you’d find better specimens among Orthodox baalei teshuvah who reject their complex cultural backgrounds and instead claim to be simply Jews, “unambiguous” Jews, Jews like their ancestors were Jews, when in fact they are nothing of the sort.

You mention young Jews who defend Israel. I am, it’s true, not a Zionist. I think it’s a disproven proposition that a Jew can live a full life only within a Jewish state. Herzl’s dilemma has been solved. He thought Emancipation had failed, and that only disappearance or a nation-state could solve the problem of antisemitism. But America has delivered on the promise of Emancipation. If Herzl had had the option of hopping on an Austrian Airlines flight to 21st-century Los Angeles, do you believe for one second that he would have written Der Judenstaat? Even Zev Jabotinsky might have been impressed by the self-confidence of this generation of Jewish Americans.

Still, I am intensely pro-Israel, feel great affection for the country and culture, and go as often as I’m able. I spent several years in college in Europe defending Israel against the absurd insults and ignorant mischaracterizations of the European left; I defended Zionism, too, as nothing akin to the defamatory caricature so many in Europe prefer to imagine.

I mention my thoughts on Israel only to demonstrate that we do not need to “pick one people” in order to engage enthusiastically and confidently with Jewish identity or Jewish thought. We Jewcy Jews are hungry to make Jewishness an important part of our lives. Of course we know that Judaism is different. Of course all traditions are not the same. They have different strengths, elaborate concepts in different ways and to different depths, and have different insights to offer. We are at Jewcy because we believe that the Jewish tradition has the brilliance and depth to help us navigate in this new world.
Welcome aboard, Herr Herzl: One-way ticket from Vienna to Los Angeles not yet available in 1893Welcome aboard, Herr Herzl: One-way ticket from Vienna to Los Angeles not yet available in 1893
We do not want mealy “I’m okay, you’re okay” pablum. Obviously, that’s inadequate. The future of Judaism may not be okay. Our world is not okay. We are confronted every day by the most intense imaginable moral challenges: Six million children die every year of severe malnutrition and consequent infections, while people of privilege, people like us, waste ever-greater wealth on ever-more-frivolous luxury. The challenges of our world are intense. We crave Jeremiahs who can offer coherent, principled approaches to these challenges.

But Rabbinic Judaism is not enough. Portable Judaism is not enough. It’s not portable enough to travel into a world without peoplehood, a world of intense impurity and diverse influences and loyalties, where binary definitions of “Jew” or “not-Jew” grow increasingly inadequate.

Jewish identity based on ethnocentrism is not just undesirable to us, it’s deeply alien to us. It’s from another world, a world we can read about, but to which we can’t return. You ask an "unambiguous" Jewishness which is difficult for us even to comprehend. Can we be "unambiguously Jewish" when we have such a swirl of cultural influences, and so many loyalties outside the Jewish community?

And yes, ethnocentrism is horribly inadequate to the moral challenges of a world in which Jewish Americans are empowered and privileged, but masses elsewhere suffer unthinkable violence and deprivation. It's a world in which genocide in Darfur and mass child-death-by-malnutrition make a moral monstrosity, an inestimable averah, out of these obsessions with the bloodlines and marital practices of one of the world’s most privileged communities.

And finally, yes, ours is a world in which it is unspeakably alien, almost laughable, to imagine that someone is a less appropriate object of our love and commitment because of the particulars of their genealogy.

The fantasy is not in imagining that Jewishness can survive in this world; it’s in imagining that cries of “We are one” can ever again resonate with a significant portion of Jewish Americans. People like you, Jack, are who we hope can be our new Zakkais. You’re the ones with the knowledge and seriousness and brilliance to create a new Yavneh, to refashion Judaism for this world. But first you have to accept that the old battle is lost, the old ethnocentric cult finished.

Joey

NEXT: Adolescent rebellion still rages in the Jewish community


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Pick One People, One Religion

Mixing Multiple Religious Traditions is a Fantasy

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 letterthat 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 outreachyou 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 ChristThis 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 yetAre 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 aroundnamely, 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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The End of the Jewish People

Judaism must prepare itself for a world after peoplehood

Jack Wertheimer has been called "American Jewry's Cassandra." The Chief Academic Officer of the Jewish Theological Seminary rails against the decline in ethnic identity among American Jews and warns of the disastrous consequences of our predilection for universalist ideas and mixed marriages. This week, he debates the future of Jewish peoplehood with Jewcy's Joey Kurtzman.

From: Joey Kurtzman
To: Jack Wertheimer
Subject: The End of The Jewish People

Jack,

In a recent Ha’aretz interview, Jewcy editor in chief Tahl Raz was asked about the meaning of Jewish peoplehood. Tahl caused a bit of a kerfuffle with his answer. Was he right? Is it true that “American life has annihilated Jewish peoplehood"?

It seems plain to me that the answer is yes. Modern American life is the most corrosive acid ever to hit the ghetto walls. Young American Jews are whoring after Moab so fervently that the boundaries between Israel and Moab are being washed away. We‘re not merely influenced by the non-Jewish world—we‘re inseparable from it. Judaism and Jewishness have never had so limited a claim on the identity of young Jews.

At Jewcy we‘ve half-jokingly referred to ourselves as part of the first generation of Jewish-American mongrels, or Frankenjews. The majority of Jewcy‘s staff is the product of intermarriageAs Authentic As Tchuva: ChrismukkahAs Authentic As Tchuva: Chrismukkah. To a one, we regard the traditional Jewish revulsion toward exogamy as an anachronistic holdover from premodern life. Needless to say, we are of dubious halakhic Jewishness. This will be truer of our children than it is of us.

Our cultural influences are more polluted than our bloodlines, and that is the important part of our mongrelization. We‘re evolving new ideas and new forms of religious expression informed by non-Jewish traditions. This is not because we have poached from alien traditions, but because those traditions, too, are our patrimony. I believe that Conservative Jews say that tradition has a vote, not a veto. For most young Jewish-Americans, it would be truer to say that Jewishness has a vote, not a veto.

For most of Jewish history, peoplehood was straightforward. In most places and most times, Jews retained their separateness in every respect: Economically, linguistically, and socially, they were a distinct people in lands not their own. And this separateness was reinforced by a religion that instructed them that they possessed an exclusive covenant with a deity who favored them above all others. Their nationhood was both sacred and real.

Today, all of this is goPlan B: If you can't fight off a siege, prepare for life without wallsPlan B: If you can't fight off a siege, prepare for life without wallsne. What capacious definition of peoplehood could possibly include a population such as the generation of Frankenjews I‘ve described? It seems to me that if Jewish-American leaders wish for Judaism to survive, they‘ll have to acknowledge that the era of peoplehood has ended, and help reinvent Judaism for modern life.

Yochanan ben Zakkai prepared Judaism for a new world rather than let it be destroyed in hopeless defense against a siege that couldn’t be denied. America’s siege is as undeniable as Rome’s. Yet when I read your writings about the dangers of universalism, the threat to Jewish peoplehood, the details of Jewish demography, I see a Zealot who‘s choosing to stay behind and continue fighting when the city walls have already been irreparably breached.

How am I wrong about any of this?

Joey

NEXT: Pick One People, One Religion


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The Mega-Question of the Coming Centuries

Humanity will use digital technology to remake itself. But into what?

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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Not Everyone Can Be Kevin Kelly

Good digital citizens need to be nurtured. Unless they're you.

From: Andrew Keen
To: Kevin Kelly
Subject: If only everyone was kk

Kevin,

Have we changed the original question? Now it’s not whether we can save the Internet, but whether the Internet can save us. You believe that it can. The Internet, you say, will get us off our butts andAge of Aquarius 2.0: The millenial zeal of digital visionaries seems strangely familiarAge of Aquarius 2.0: The millenial zeal of digital visionaries seems strangely familiar make us more creative and energetic, thereby transforming traditional top-down culture into a participatory culture. To you, the Internet is a radically emancipatory force, the digital version of the ’60s eruption against cultural conformity, political hypocrisy, and ethical mendacity. The networked computer, you imply, frees us both from our own slothfulness and from the dull conventions of mainstream media. What the counterculture couldn’t do, the Internet is now doing.

In contrast, I see the Internet as a mirror. It reflects us rather than reforms us. So what you see as creative energy, I view with nervousness. I believe that the Internet culture reflects our deep cultural and political malaise. What troubles me most about contemporary America—the infinitely fragmented self, our instinctive sense of entitlement and moral righteousness, the failure to respect traditional sources of authority, the cult of childish innocence, the privatization of citizenship, media illiteracy—is compounded by the democratized Internet. Your ideal of emancipation through artistic “prosumption” is a metaphysical seduction. I don’t really understand how it works. Nor do I see much evidence of its efficacy amongst the coach-potato class. All I see is a Web 2.0 self-broadcasting culture grafted onto the cacophonous media of talk-in radio and American Idol–style democratization.

I think you and I pretty much agree with what’s wrong with America. Like you, I don’t like crap. Like you, I want an energized, well-informed citizenry willing to take responsibility for their actions. Like you, I would relish a future in which people become genuinely creative citizens and community members. I also agree with your arguments about the profound historical significance of all these changes. Yes, this digital revolution is akin to the Industrial Revolution in both its constructive and destructive potential. And, yes, you are right that “the web is all of 5,000 days old.” It may indeed “take another few thousand days to figure out viable systems of law, business practices, cultural norms, and expectations 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.”

Like you, I want people to get off their couches and become responsible, media-literate consumers. Your final question, while obviously rhetorical, is memorably lyrical:

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.

I hope you are right. I really do. I just finished Benjamin Barber’s engaging new book, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole. I agreed with everything in the first 336 pages of this 369-page book: Barber’s critique of the cultural consequences of the free market, and his observations about media addiction, voyeurism, and the ubiquity of advertising. And then, just when I assumed Barber would have been totally in favor of my argument in Cult of the Amateur, he turned away from me. On page 337, he introduces the ideal of the creative commons as the solution to what he calls “civic schizophrenia.” Barber suggests that “the idea of the civic calling relies on innovative forms of the traditional commons, including a new information commons rooted in new technology.” So maybe I’m wrong and you, Lawrence Lessig, Barber, and the free culture movement have a point. Maybe this new commons really does have the potential to transform the infantilized American media consumer into a responsible grown-up.

So how to (re)make this new citizenship? How do we transform a nation of couch potatoes into a nation of creative, media literate prosumers able to digest complex news and appreciate sophisticated culture? And how do we do this while the institutions and business models of traditional media—publishers, newspapers, record labels, and movie studios—are crumbling all around us?

Your strategy is libertarian. For you, it seems, all change comes from within. Your proof? Kevin Kelly. When everyone becomes KK, you suggest, the world will be a better place. The problem is that not everyone can be KK. Not everyone can be a successful author like you and earn money giving speeches and selling your intelligence directly to the consumer. You are a remarkably self-motivated, independent person who trekked around the world, fathered Wired magazine, mothered the new rules for the new economy, uncled the Web 2.0 revolution. You are an exception rather than the rule. Where do unexceptional people, the un-KK’s of the world, get the aesthetic sensibility to make movies, the intellectual training to write books, or the reporting skills to accurately cover politics?

Who is going to teach us to become good digital citizens?

Will it come transcendentally from within, KK-style? Or will it emerge, in a similarly transcendental
N is for Netizenship: Who will teach us to be good digital citizens?N is for Netizenship: Who will teach us to be good digital citizens? fashion, from the free market? No. Neither solution—what I call the libertarianism of the left (countercultural) or of the right (free market)—works. 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. The good digital citizen is as trained in listening as in speaking. The test of good digital citizenship is silence rather than noise.

So can the Internet be saved? Yes, it can. But only when we stop relying on an idealized self and an equally idealized free market to transport us into the promised land. The Internet can be saved if we save ourselves by synthesizing the vitality of the Internet with the professional authority of the mainstream media. As this catastrophic Bush presidency has underlined, media literacy is the key issue facing America today. But to create a truly media-literate and intellectually disciplined citizen, you need to educate him to critically consume content and entertainment. Otherwise, the lazy television couch potato will be replaced by the equally lazy digital opinionator. And instead of entertaining ourselves to death, we’ll end up creating ourselves into oblivion.

ak

NEXT: The Mega-Question of the Coming Centuries


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The Internet is 90% Amateur Crap

And therein lies its greatness

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 a
Tilting at Bookshelves: John Updike fights the oceanic changes of digital technologyTilting 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 gracefulTransitions 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 t
It's Your World, Now: So get up off that couch and create somethingIt'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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The Cult of the Audience

An artist and his fans are not equal

From: Andrew Keen
To: Kevin Kelly
Subject: Dylan went electric, and it wasn't your damn business

Kevin,

You are right, of course, that I’m being intellectually crude (what you call “fundamentalist”) in my polemic on behalf of intellectual property. And you're certainly right that digital thievery seems pathetic when compared with “unjustified war, ethnicide, and infanticide.” However, I neverEven Worse Than Internet Kleptomania: Andrew Keen would happily steal music if it made a difference in DarfurEven Worse Than Internet Kleptomania: Andrew Keen would happily steal music if it made a difference in Darfur suggested that today’s kleptomania on the Internet is ethically equivalent to human tragedies like Darfur. Indeed, I would happily steal songs myself if it eased the suffering of innocents in Africa.

You write tendentiously about “no-middle” debates as if your own natural intellectual terrain is commonsense realism. But I don’t see a lot of middle in your arguments either. I see you as an un-commonsensical provocateur with the intellectual nerve to take outrageous positions while keeping a straight face. That’s what you did in
New Rules for the New Economy. And you did it again with your “Scan This Book!” piece, in which you announced the death of the physical book, perhaps the key cultural product in human history. Your obituary for the publishing industry was politely articulated, but that didn’t make it any more palatable to the editors, writers, or publishers who depend on the economic value of physical books for their livelihood.

Last May, I was at a prominent publisher’s office on the 50th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. It was the heart of the traditional media economy—ground zero of the print content business. As the publishing executives shuffled into the room, they all carried copies of “Scan This Book!”. In spite of its reasonable tone, your grenade of an article had offended these people to the core. I might be public enemy number one on the blogosphere, but you aren’t exactly a hero to the publishing moguls of downtown Manhattan.

“This Kelly cowboy, he wants to get rid of copies. That’s the end of content. He wants to give away books for free,” one of the publishing execs said to me, open-mouthed in astonishment. “Is he serious?”

Good question. Do you seriously believe that a “universal digital library” will soon replace the physical book at the heart of the ideas economy? That physical books no longer have economic value and that the author of the future will make money only by monetizing his own brand through public appearances and consulting? Are we really on the brink of what an indignant John Updike called a culture of digital “snippets”? I somehow doubt you genuinely believe any of this—especially since you are a bestselling author yourself. My guess is that your outrageous obituary was intended to provoke discussion about the future of printed content.

Anyway, enough trash talk. Let’s get beyond all this good and evil. To regain your trust, let me try to discuss the copyright issue with more subtlety. I like your phrase “paradox of information,” so I'll
offer my own paradoxical theory of information in the hope of clearing up our collective muddle over intellectual property.

You are right that everyone is confused about what is rightfully theirs in this new economy. I love the elegiac manner in which you describe this bewildered generation:

“They are not cagey pickpockets, but aliens in a strange land; not pirates, but lost pioneers; not devilish, but generous.”

So what makes them aliens in this strange land? What has happened to transform Kevin Kelly into a poet and our youth into a band of intellectual pirates?

The paradox is that technology and culture have become so entangled that what we think our debate about technology is actually a debate about culture. My book and my argument are part of a broader critique of popular culture. The ideas about narcissism are borrowed (legally, of course) from Christopher Lasch, my cultural critique of capitalism from Daniel Bell, my defense of high culture from Alan Bloom and Robert Hughes, my polemic against democratized mass media from Neil Postman. These issues have converged because today’s digital technology radically personalizes both the delivery and consumption of culture. Thus Time magazine’s celebration of “You” (as in, all of us) as their 2006 Person of the Year.

Did We Ever Say Congratulations?: Time Magazine says you're the best thing since GutenbergDid We Ever Say Congratulations?: Time Magazine says you're the best thing since GutenbergWe—you and I and hundreds of millions of people with an Internet connection—are all Gutenberg now. But we are 21st-century Gutenbergs, weighed down by the baggage of the 20th-century culture industry.

So what does all this have to do with the confusion over intellectual property ownership?

The goal of popular culture, particularly in music, has been to make the consumer feel as if he is the rightful owner of the cultural product he is consuming. Mass media obsessively cultivates an intimate relationship between the artist and the audience. The real “cult” in all this is the cult of the audience. When Dylan went electric in July 1965, he was greeted by indignant fans who felt they knew him better than he knew himself. Why? Because, as a popular music icon, his followers felt they “owned” him, his sound, his brand. This pre-Internet confusion over ownership had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with culture.

Today’s Internet technology—with its interactive, personalized tools of intimacy—is simply catching up to cultural reality.

Today, we (the culture businessmen and the alienated youth) are equally lost in a “strange land.” Today’s digital tools give consumers the means to appropriate content, which, in their minds, was rightfully theirs in the first place. Ownership and authorship have been turned on their heads. Thus the remix, mashup ideology in which the effort to free our culture from the grip of media oligarchies has been confused with a “free culture” campaign to completely eliminate the exchange value of cultural products.

So what is the answer to this paradox of free culture? How can we escape from a mass culture in which intellectual ownership has been so radically democratized that it’s lost all economic value?

I believe we should return to a more traditional understanding of artist and audience, one rooted in Locke’s idea of intellectual ownership. We need to remember that it is the artist who labors, and the audience who consumes. To subvert the 20th-century mass media subversion, we need to give up
You Are Not Mozart: "Collective authorship" did not produce the Ave verumYou Are Not Mozart: "Collective authorship" did not produce the Ave verum the narcotic of cultural intimacy that muddles up author and audience. The most lasting works—by Hitchcock, Van Gogh, or Mozart—are owned and created only by the author himself. Sure, they were all influenced by other traditions, thinkers, and artists. But great art does not come from delving into the (il)legal grayness of intellectual property law to steal from others.

You, I suspect, will disagree. And that’s the crux of our debate. You seem to believe that the ideas economy is a social phenomenon, driven by sounds, images, and words that are collectively owned. You don’t believe the modern artist can avoid intellectual theft. But why is 2007 different from 1907? Why should artists find the digital economy so much grayer than the analog economy of the early 20th century? Is the law really so different today than it was a hundred years ago? (And do you know anyone arrested for singing “Happy Birthday” in a restaurant?)

You write:

“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.”

This is a fascinating paragraph, and it deserves a book-length response. But I'll leave aside the metaphysical and industrial implications of your statements and just point out that you appear to have gotten sucked into the cult of the audience. When it comes to a contemporary book, a film, or other creative work, how is the product “lighter” than a hundred years ago?

I don’t agree that books or films today have any more “intelligence, design, interaction, or ideas.” In 1907, the physical or intellectual act of writing a novel, a song, a symphony, or a play was no different than it is today. Were these creations embedded with any more of “ourselves,” with our spiritual “intangibility”? No. (Btw, aren’t you stealing from Emerson and Thoreau here?) You might be correct in terms of the value of software, but culture is no more (nor less) valuable today than it was in 1907. Culture has always been unbearably light. That’s what makes it so hard to pin down.

So can the Internet be saved? Yes, it can. But not with your argument that digital technology has revolutionized the economy of ideas. The Internet is a great marketing tool for the creation, distribution, and sale of ideas. But the Internet hasn’t changed the intellectual labor of creating ideas. Nor has it made intellectual products any more or less metaphysical. The physical copy of a book is neither ambiguous nor intangible. It has a cover, pages, and a lot of words. It is written by an author and read by an audience. And it is exchanged for cash. Long may that continue!

ak

NEXT: You call them amateurs, I call them a miracle


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Analog Fundamentalism, Digital Ambiguity

Black-and-white arguments in a world of gray
From: Kevin Kelly
To: Andrew Keen
Subject: Absolutism amidst ambiguity

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 outPost-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 ageAn 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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Don't Scan My Book

Will the idea economy save the professional artist, or destroy him?
From: Andrew Keen
To: Kevin Kelly
Subject: Death or Salvation?

Kevin,

You say that my book should be called the “Cult of Anonymity” rather than The Cult of the Amateur.

:-)

Yes, the cult of the amateur and the cult of anonymity do indeed seem to be opposite sides of the same coin. The Web 2.0 amateur, that digital narcissist, seeks to endlessly broadcast himself; the anonymous Internet commentator seeks to endlessly broadcast somebody else. One is all self; the other is no self. Both are toxic.

What, I wonder, is the cause of this cult of anonymity? I’m less concerned with spammers, who are noSchizophrenia: Do we want a world in which the self is a set of avatars?Schizophrenia: Do we want a world in which the self is a set of avatars? better than common criminals, and more interested in the anonymous reviewers on Amazon who want to express themselves without revealing their real identities. I’m concerned that this cult of anonymity—by fragmenting the self into a series of invented beings—is transforming identity into a hall of mirrors. In a world in which we have no center, what becomes of such traditional epistemological anchors as religious belief, citizenship, or secular morality? Speaking for once like an engineer, I’m not sure that human beings were designed to be driven with such reckless abandon.

I’m intrigued by your idea of using code to fight anonymity. You say:

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. Not by laws, but by code.

So software coders should regulate social systems and marketplaces in order to eliminate anonymity? Interesting idea. But aren’t you then turning codemakers into lawmakers, crowning them as digital engineers of the human soul? In his Republic, Plato wanted to turn philosophers into moral legislators. I suspect a dash of Platonic idealism in your faith in the moral wisdom of coders. But why do you so trust the honesty of coders? Shouldn’t we fear their economic, political, or ethical agendas—especially since they are neither popularly appointed nor transparently accountable?

Unlike you, I am not against the top-down legislation of morality and civic virtue. But, in our representative democracy, this legislation needs to be created openly and unambiguously—by elected officials, by accountable judges, and by civic leaders such as schoolteachers and op-ed writers in daily newspapers. I don’t trust codemakers to distinguish between right and wrong any more than I trust American lawmakers to write software code. Let’s leave ethics to the ethicists and code to the coders.

You cite Jeff Bezos’ regret at “allowing anonymous book reviews” on the Amazon site. And you’re skeptical that morality can be effectively imposed from above, by schoolteachers or op-ed writers. But I trust legislation from a schoolteacher or an op-ed writer much more than from a plutocrat like Bezos, whose only responsibility is to his shareholders.

You say you aren’t an anarchist and that you recognize the need for “some laws” on the Internet. But, leaving aside Jeff Bezos and his coders, how would you suggest we determine the moral criteria with which we craft these laws? You reject the regulation of morality and civic virtue, suggesting it is neither “effective” nor “sustainable.” You don’t believe in social contracts as a foundation for an ethical consensus. You want laws that are “few, concise, and minimal,” “like the Ten Commandments.” And you seem to believe that this moral code will come out of what you call a “technological matrix”:

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.

Please explain how this “matrix” works. How will it help us save both the Internet and ourselves?

I agree that the Ten Commandments represent a simple, concise, and attractively minimal moral framework. Remember #8: Thou shalt not steal—a particularly unambiguous stateA Legislative Model for the Digital Age: Ten Commandments are simple, concise, minimalistA Legislative Model for the Digital Age: Ten Commandments are simple, concise, minimalistment, which, if applied to the Internet, would find intellectual pirates guilty of blatant criminality. And yet, in your section on digital piracy, you insist on the ambiguity of intellectual property law. For you, the remix artist and the file-sharer exist in the moral “gray zone,” “awaiting clarification of law.” Meanwhile, the music and movie industries are collectively losing tens of billions of dollars a year from intellectual piracy. I don’t see anything gray about this zone. People steal music and movies from their rightful owners.

Once again, you see the answer in technological tools, rather than in morality:

The solution for the ambiguity of ownership in an idea economy will come as we develop further tools for 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.

I’ve been in the Internet entertainment business since the mid-nineties, and I see little, if any, evidence of “emerging societal norms for fair use.” I suspect more music is stolen on the Internet today than in 1999. Broad social problems such as rampant intellectual property theft require broad hammers. Instead of “tools” to regulate our behavior, we need to develop a common collective morality that distinguishes intellectual theft and plagiarism from genuine authorship and ownership. Tools don’t regulate people’s behavior; people regulate people’s behavior.

Speaking of intellectual-property ambiguity, let me end with a question. What, exactly, do you mean by an “idea economy”? I think I understand the “idea” part, but I’m having trouble with the “economy” bit. Is this your provocative “Scan My Book” vision that you laid out in last year’s New York Times? The one that almost killed old John Updike? Is this an economy in which we give away our work for free and collect money through speaking or other entrepreneurial punditry? I understand the logic of this vision. But aren’t you concerned that it will turn all creative artists into sales and marketing hucksters? (Btw, everyone should buy my book The Cult of the Amateur). Will your vision mean the death of the serious professional creative artist, rather than his salvation?

And is this discussion an example of the idea economy?

ak

Next: What Fundamentalism!

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The Cult of Anonymity

Social contracts cannot save us from the madness that comes with anonymity

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 lawsWhat'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 codeCode, 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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Can We Save the Internet?

The WWW is a scary introduction to primeval man

Andrew Keen is the author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture. Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine. In this week's Big Question, they debate "Can we save the internet?"

From: Andrew Keen
To: Kevin Kelly
Subject: Can We Save the Internet?

Hi Kevin,

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. The authors of the Internet are you, me, and the rest of us; information technology has no will of its own, no spiritual autonomy, no existence independent of us. So when we look at the Internet, we are looking into a mirror, we are gazing at ourselves. The salvation of the Internet is, therefore, a human question. It’s no good blaming technology for the corruption of the Internet. We have to take responsibility for our own collective invention. That is the first and most essential step toward digital salvation. To save the Internet means saving ourselves.

When I look at today’s Internet, I mostly see cultural and ethical cha
A State of Nature: Today's internet is a Hobbesian dystopiaA State of Nature: Today's internet is a Hobbesian dystopiaos. 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 (whew, what a mouthful!). I see a chaotic humans arrangement with few, if any, formal social pacts. Today’s Internet resembles a state of nature—Hobbes’ dystopia rather than Rousseau’s idyll. For most of human history, this state of nature has been theoretical—a fiction which thinkers like Hobbes or Rousseau have had to invent. With the Internet, however, we get to see a non-fictional state of nature. In real-time. Just go to an unregulated bulletin board or a sex chatroom. Take a quick tour of the blogosphere, that echo chamber of digital narcissism. This is an introduction to primeval man, Homo sapiens 1.0. It’s how we behave when there are no social customs or formal laws governing our behavior.

Can we blame the Internet for all this human corruption? Of course not. There has always been and always will be extreme pornography, illegal gambling, hubris, sexual promiscuity, contempt for meritocratic hierarchy, shameless narcissism, and political, sexual, and racial hatred. But, on the Internet, such corruption is exaggerated, and it is always on. Now we can gamble 24 hours a day on our networked computers. Now we can consume pornography without ever experiencing the social humiliation of going into a sex shop. Now we can taunt and insult and threaten our enemies anonymously without looking them in the eye. Now we can twitter to the whole world about what we ate for breakfast. Now we can steal our neighbor’s wife, his credit cards, indeed his entire identity, with one click of our mouse.

So can the Internet be saved?

Yes, I think it can. But we need laws, a series of social contracts, to constructively regulate our behavior on the Internet. Even though I live in Berkeley, I’m not a digital Maoist and 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. I am in favor of laws that unambiguously punish digital piracy, more controls to stop kids accessing pornography, a tighter rein on online gambling, and tougher punishment against the spammers and the marketing scammers who are even ruining good old email.

We are all responsible for saving the Internet. Parents must teach kids self-control to resist the addictive nature of Internet gaming. Teachers need to clamp downThe Internet Needs Rules: You don't have to be a digital Maoist to favor social policingThe Internet Needs Rules: You don't have to be a digital Maoist to favor social policing aggressively on intellectual plagiarism. We all need to go back to paying for our content and replacing the Web 2.0 cult of the amateur with Western civilization’s traditional cult of the author.

And we must (re)learn the ability to be silent, to listen to others more learned than ourselves, to value the wisdom of the expert.

How else can we save the Internet?

We must resist the siren song of anonymity—perhaps the greatest of all digital curses. The Internet holds much promise for social interaction. But this potential is undermined by the culture of anonymity. Much of the Internet’s lack of civility is caused by our unwillingness to accept responsibility for our own words. We behave badly when we can hide behind fake identities. We are naturally obnoxious when we don’t have to face the consequences of our own action. So, if we are to save the Internet, we need to confront the curse of anonymity. Let’s all agree to discard our masks and end anonymity once and for all. The alternative is the statist Chinese model that makes anonymity punishable by law. And nobody—not even a kvetch like me—wants that.

There’s one other thing too. The Internet can be saved if we resist the education of virtual life, that opiate of online existence. David Weinberger is wrong. Not everything is miscellaneous. There is a difference—epistemologically, existentially, phenomenologically (and every other long word I can think of)—between physical life and virtual life. Internet sites like Second Life are not versions of alternative reality. This digital salvation is no better than that old wives’ tale of heaven and hell. Being human doesn’t mean transplanting our identities to an invented digital being. As I said before, when we look at the Internet, we are looking into a mirror, at ourselves. And when I look in my mirror, I don’t want an avatar grinning back at me.

I hope this makes a little bit of sense to you. And I hope it can help us save the Internet.

andrew k

Next: Kevin Kelly on The Cult of Anonymity


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A "Special Relationship," Indeed

America should not be persuaded to plunge the entire Middle East into violence
From: Justin Raimondo
To: Michael Freund
Subject: The Special Relationship


Michael,

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 thatdiplomats 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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The Logic of an Ostrich, the Temper of a Bully

Your taunts and mudslinging will not make Iran any less of a threat
From: Michael Freund
To: Justin Raimondo
Subject: Tantrums and Mudslinging

Justin,

What a shame.

I was looking forward to seeing how you dealt with the substantive points that I raised in my last message. But you couldn’t hack it. Instead of rolling up your intellectual sleeves and going about this dialogue in a reasoned and respectful manner, you attempted to drag it down to the level of a schoolyard brawl. You launched into an angry tirade of personal attacks and extraneous taunts, demonstrating the truth of the adage that “those who cannot argue inevitably choose to vilify.”

Justin, your temper tantrum and verbal mudslinging cannot obscure the fact that Iran remains a threat toSo, Uh...What Are You Going to Do With That, Exactly?: Iranian nuclear program has the whole world nervousSo, Uh...What Are You Going to Do With That, Exactly?: Iranian nuclear program has the whole world nervous Israel, the United States, and the entire Western world. Tehran’s illicit rush to acquire nuclear weapons has raised concerns across the political spectrum in both Europe and the United States. Ignoring this danger will not make it go away.

I showed that three of your key assertions were entirely baseless and without merit. I brought you facts, quotes, and proofs, and challenged you to rebut them. Here are several other questions for you to consider, and once again I challenge you to address them head-on:

If Iran had nothing to hide about its nuclear program, then why did they conceal its existence from the international community for over 18 years? And if their program was intended solely for peaceful purposes, then why have they repeatedly interfered with inspections and imposed restrictions on access to their nuclear sites?

If Iran does not wish to threaten the U.S., then why are they racing to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach North America? If their sole aim were to destroy Israel, then why is Iran investing so much time, effort, and money to develop warhead delivery systems that can reach Washington and New York?

If Iran has no devious intentions vis-à-vis Israel and the U.S., then why does Tehran provide training, guidance, and financial support to terrorist groups committed to their destruction and defeat, such as Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, and the Iraqi insurgency?

If Iranian leaders do not wish to destroy Israel and the U.S., then why have they consistently and repeatedly said in public that that is precisely what they wish to do?

In between the name-calling and ad-hominem attacks in your previous reply, you challenged the veracity of quotes in which senior Iranian officials call for the destruction of Israel and the United State. You seem to think the lack of hyperlinks in my e-mail somehow casts doubt on the authenticity of these statements.

Well, if it is hyperlinks you want, here are a few you might find enlightening. First, this Associated Press story from August 3, 2006, headlined, “Ahmadinejad: Destroy Israel, End Crisis,” which quotes the Iranian president at length on his desire to eliminate the Jewish state. I suggest that you also read the New York Times report here, in which Ahmadinejad calls for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

In addition, I refer you to compilations of quotes from the Iranian leader, which can be found here and here. A simple Google search reveals many more such results. All of this demonstrates conclusively that Iran’s top political and spiritual leaders have genocidal intentions—not only towards Jews, but towards Americans as well.

The logic behind your opposition to bombing Iran has boiled down to this: We do not need to fear Iran because, well, we just don’t.

Some Truths Are Weightier Than Others: When he hits 756, close your eyes and remind yourself he's not as bad as Ayatollah KhomeiniSome Truths Are Weightier Than Others: When he hits 756, close your eyes and remind yourself he's not as bad as Ayatollah KhomeiniNow, that kind of reasoning (if one can call it that) might be adequate when you are discussing, say, the merits of Barry Bonds’ record-breaking homerun totals over a couple of beers. But when it comes to addressing issues of grave international significance, this sort of “logic” is neither compelling nor useful.

The bottom line is this: the Iranian leadership openly threatens Israel and the United States with destruction, and they are investing heavily in the tools necessary to carry this out. How we choose to respond to this threat will determine not just the fate of our families, our children, and our societies, but of our very way of life.

Justin, you and others prefer to hide your heads in the sand and ignore this uncomfortable reality. But for those of us who take issues of life and death just a wee bit more seriously, there is no escaping the unavoidable and necessary conclusion: Bomb Iran now, before it is too late.

NEXT: A "Special Relationship," indeed


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Rid the Middle East of All Nuclear Weapons

If Iran dismantles its nukes, will Israel do so, too?
From: Justin Raimondo
To: Michael Freund
Subject: Taking chutzpah to a new level


Señor Freund,

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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Wake Up And Smell the Uranium

Ahmadinejad and Khameini want to destroy our way of life
From: Michael Freund
To: Justin Raimondo
Subject: Facts, Not Fantasy


Justin,

How nice it would be to live in a world without threats, dangers, or enemies, where the greatest hazard one might face would be spilling the morning latte while strutting over to the PC. You appear to inhabit such a fantasy world, Justin, and I wish you well. Unfortunately, though, the rest of mankind—and particularly the West—does not.

And much as we might wish it to be otherwise, policymaking has got to be based on rBad Dreams: Grand Ayatollah Khameini fantasizes of a world without America or IsraelBad Dreams: Grand Ayatollah Khameini fantasizes of a world without America or Israeleality, rather than on daydreams and flights of fancy.

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

They do not hide their intentions, nor do they conceal their efforts. You can cover your ears and pretend that the problem will simply go away, but that isn’t how things work in the real world.

You would have us believe that Iran does not pose a threat at all—neither to Israel nor to the U.S.—and that the regime in Tehran has been fully compliant with the demands of the international community. Your assertions are laughable, and demonstrate an alarming (if blissful) ignorance. I suggest you check your facts before making such baseless assertions.

Let’s go point by point.

Justin’s myth #1: Iran “represents no threat to America.”

Fact: Iranian leaders have repeatedly and explicitly threatened the United States. Last August, Iran’s so-called Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, said, “The American regime can expect a resounding slap and a devastating first-blow from the Muslim nation.” And Iranian President Ahmadinejad has vowed that, “God willing…we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism.”

Tehran has backed up its words by steadily improving its ballistic missile capability. The Iranian Shihab-3 missile, with a range of 1200 km (746 miles), has been operational for several years, and can hit all of Israel as well as U.S. military targets in the Middle East. Iranian military leaders have declared that they are working on the Shihab-4, with a range of 2000 km (1,243 miles), that will put parts of Europe within striking
Stiff-Armed Salutes And Nukes Shouldn't Mix: Would the Iranians give Hizballah a Bomb?Stiff-Armed Salutes And Nukes Shouldn't Mix: Would the Iranians give Hizballah a Bomb?distance, and that they are striving to build even longer-range intercontinental missiles that can hit the United States. All of these weapons have the ability to deliver atomic warheads.

Moreover, if Iran were to develop “the bomb,” what is to stop them from putting it into the hands of one of the myriad anti-American terrorist groups they support, such as Hizballah?

The threat posed by a nuclear Iran is readily acknowledged across the political spectrum, by Democrats and Republicans alike, and the facts bear out the danger this poses to the U.S. and its interests.

Justin’s myth #2: Iran “is no threat to Israel.”

Fact: The Iranian leadership has made clear in recent years that they view Israel as “a cancer” that must be removed from the Middle East. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said on countless occasions that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” And former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani speculated publicly a few years back that just one nuclear device would destroy Israel.

Iran trains, finances, and guides various terrorist groups that engage in acts of violence against the Jewish state, including Hamas, Hizbullah, and Islamic Jihad. And just six months Tehran played host to an international Holocaust-denial conference.

As former CIA Director James Woolsey said, speaking before the Ohio House of Representatives on May 3, “The regime’s threats to destroy Israel and, on a longer time-scale, the United States, are part and parcel of its essence. Recent official statements to this effect represent not a shift in policy. Iran’s regime has defined itself for nearly 30 years by its fundamental hostility to the West, and especially Israel and the United States, which it calls the 'Little Satan' and the 'Great Satan,' respectively.”

Justin’s myth #3: Iran “allows unhampered inspections and cooperates with the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Fact: The Iranian nuclear program was revealed in 2002 only after an Iranian exile group held a press conference and disseminated photographs and data regarding the country’s covert nuclear installations. It turned out that Iran had been working in secret for 18 years (!!!) on its nuclear program, which it had concealed from the international community. And the government repeatedly lied about its existence. Indeed, in recent years, since its program became known, Iran has prevented international inspectors from carrying out their work. They have blocked access to various sites, suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) a number of times, prohibited snap inspections, and imposed restrictions on the types of monitors allowed to visit certain sites. That is hardly the “unhampered” cooperation that you would have us believe is taking place.

Like it or not, Justin, the facts point to a mounting and compelling threat from Iran, one that is directed not only towards Israel but at the entire Western world. And the sooner you and others wake up and recognize this danger, the more united we can be in confronting it.

Michael

Next: Rid the Middle East of All Nuclear Weapons

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Charles Eisenstein Responds to Reader Comments

You think I just don't get it. You're wrong.

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 rebuttedUnbeatable?: 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 EisensteinIs 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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Iran is No Threat To America

This may be Israel's fight, but it's not ours
From: Justin Raimondo
To: Michael Freund
Subject: What's all this about "we"?


Michael,


Our topic is “should we bomb Iran?”—which immediately raises an important question. Who are “we”? America? Israel? I realize that
some people see no distinction, but, when it comes toThese Colors Don't Run Together: America and Israel are different countries, with different interestsThese Colors Don't Run Together: America and Israel are different countries, with different interests warmaking, we must acknowledge that the two countries have different interests.

I'd argue that Iran is no threat to Israel, and that there is no danger of Iran dropping nukes on Tel Aviv. Such an attack would poison the entire region with radioactivity, and boomerang right back in the mullahs’ faces in more ways than one. Also keep in mind that the U.S. intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear capabilities says we have ten years before the mullahs go nuclear.

However, if you—as an Israeli citizen who lives in Israel—want to advocate an Israel-led preemptive strike against the Iranians, far be it from me to interfere. But I don’t think it would be very wise—the Iranians would surely strike back, via Lebanon, and Israel might suffer in other ways (perhaps the thousands of Iranian civilians who would surely die in such an attack would present a public relations problem, if not a moral conundrum, for the Jewish state). But if the Iranian threat makes you so nervous that you can’t sleep at night—and you don’t have any compunction about throwing the entire region into chaos—then perhaps you shouldn't take any chances.

But why drag the United States into it? There are those who treat Israel like the 51st state, but I am not among them. If Israel perceives a threat from Iran, and its military leaders decide to take out the mullahs, then so be it. But there is no reason for the United States to get involved, except, perhaps, to persuade the Israelis that negotiations are the only way to deal with the threat, real or imagined.

Iran, with or without nuclear weapons, represents no threat to America. Those Shihab-3 missiles you mention couldn’t reach the continentalIs the Shihab-3 a Threat To America?: Not unless it stops in Morocco for refuelingIs the Shihab-3 a Threat To America?: Not unless it stops in Morocco for refueling United States. After arguing the threat to Israel, you say “the West is next.” But is it? There is absolutely no chance the Iranians would launch a nuclear attack on the United States. In any case, the Soviets had nuclear weapons for half a century and more, as did the Chinese Communists. Both were genocidal regimes, and yet neither ever used nukes (America is the only nation on earth with that dubious distinction).

I would remind you that the Iranians, being signatories to the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), are perfectly entitled to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. They allow unhampered inspections and cooperate with the IAEA. This is more than one can say for the other nuclear power in the region. And, no, I don’t mean PakistanI’m talking about Israel.

Everybody knows the Israelis have nuclear weapons, and yet Tel Aviv refuses to acknowledge this, or to sign the NPT. When it comes to nukes, Israel is more a rogue nation than even North Korea, which at least has come out of the nuclear closet, so to speak. The Israelis, however, still won’t fess up (although the continuing harassment of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who first disclosed the existence of Israel’s nukes and was imprisoned for 18 years, speaks volumes about Israel’s lack of scruples in this regard).

No, negotiations have not “run their course”—they haven’t even begun. In 2003, the Iranians made an overture to the United States that would have put nukes, and all other outstanding issues—including the recognition of Israel—on the table: Tehran was ready to talk, but the U.S. wasn’t interested.

If I were Israeli, I would ask my leaders the following: Why the heck do we need nuclear weapons, anyway? It isn’t as though we'll ever use them. So why not trade them away, in return for an Iranian guarantee to refrain from developing such weapons? And, while we’re on the subject, how about creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East? The Syrians have been proposing it for years.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sure is a character—albeit no more so than, say, Avigdor Lieberman—but I wouldn’t overestimate his power and influence: Señor Ahmadinejad doesn’t makeWhat a Character!: Is there no end to Mahmi's shenanigans?What a Character!: Is there no end to Mahmi's shenanigans? the decisions, Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei does. And it looks like the Iranian hardliners are in retreat just now—although Israeli and American actions, as per usual, could always restore him to the good graces of the Iranian people through sheer stupidity.

For many years Israel tried to hide its nuclear weapons from the international community, and it was only due to the bravery of Mr. Vanunu that we discovered the truth. Israel has not allowed inspections, and it has defied the world on this issue. If Iran is developing nukes, too, then who can blame them? Or is Israel the only nation in the region entitled to self-defense?

Sincerely,

Justin Raimondo

NEXT: Wake Up and Smell the Uranium


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Bomb Iran Now

Only fierce military action can stop the Atomic Ayatollahs

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 heavensCelebrating "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"They'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 blackmailAction 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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Like, What is Space, Anyway?

Animals need your compassion more than rocks do. Duh.

Wow Charles,

I am surprised to see someone so liberated from things like right and wrong suddenly beholden to space constraints. I mean, like, what is space anyway? It’s just like this human construction, you know?

Anyway, yeah, I guess this debate is over. All I can hope is that someday you will extend some of your feelings towards our animal brothers and sisters, they need it more than the rocks do. Sometimes your heart and your ethics can work together.

Love, Isa (doesn’t read Adbusters, quit anarchism)

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Stop, for the Love of the Earth!

We don't need ethics to know what's right

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 adventureExpressing 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 meatHappy, 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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Yummy Vegan Food is My Mission in Life

The struggle against injustice begins on your plate

Hi again Charles,

My mission in life is to make yummy vegan food, because taste is usually the main complaint of people who see the ethical reasoning for veganism but can’t give up their old foods. I don’t usually debate these things because people get defensive. Even the mere thought of veganism seems to provoke some people.

I am vegan because it is an easy way to make a difference. I hate oppression. I hate racism and sexism and homophobia, and I want to see an end to the war in Iraq. All struggle is interconnected. I realized this at a fairly young age, mostly from participating in feminist and anti-racist activism. It made me look at my own life, and the changes I could make to create the world I want to live in. And no one has ever given me a good reason to believe that non-human animals should be exempt from this. People know it would be wrong to kill a dog, yet don't extend their empathy to a cow.

I don’t subscribe to the same spirituality as you, so your reasoning has no sway on me. I guess we are trying to persuade the audience and not each other. Maybe some people will become ethical omnivores and others will become vegans. More likely, people will just decide that we are both wingnuts. And of course someone will post something like “IF goD dint want Us to eat animalz Y did he Make them oUt of Meet??! ROFL!!!11111”
Arguing the Extreme: It'd feel great to listen to Neil Diamond 24/7, but would it be right?Arguing the Extreme: It'd feel great to listen to Neil Diamond 24/7, but would it be right?
Your main point seems to be: “I feel in my heart that it is right to kill animals and so it is right to kill animals.” But ethical systems don’t work that way. If they did, one could say, “We should all be listening to Neil Diamond, shooting heroin, and playing Dungeons & Dragons all day because my heart tells me it is right.” And even more to the point, how come my heart tells me not to eat animals and yours tells you that you should?

You ask if your personal eating habits are relevant to the discussion. Of course they are! Isn’t that the point of this debate? I think the only ethical issues worth tackling are ones that we can actually apply to our lives. I am curious what happens to the male calves where you get your dairy or the male chicks where you get your eggs. Also, how many eggs do the hens lay a year? Is the cow forcibly impregnated? Are her babies taken from her? Many times people hear the word “free range” and what they think they are getting is far removed from reality.

People claiming to be ethical meat eaters do not always eat the way they would ethically prefer, because the ideas that govern ethical meat eating are arbitrary. Why not eat “unethical” meat when you see no inherent flaw with eating meat?

Factory farming is cheaper because the full cost is not reflected in the price of the final product. As Michael Pollan points out in Omnivore’s Dilemma, factory farming is directly and indirectly subsidized, and externalities like aquifer depletion and animal welfare just don’t get priced at all. As long as this remains true, the cost of your idyllic farming techniques will also be unknown, since it’s a niche market that exists in the shadow of—and must compete with—industrial agriculture. If it becomes common farming practice, we will need to find cheaper protein sources to feed the people who can’t afford steak, and cheaper vegetable crops again become attractive.

But the fundamental vegetarian concern is still not being addressed here: Why kill the animal that we do not need to kill? Why not allow the chicken a pleasant and long life, instead of a pleasant and short one?

If we see all creatures on the farm as equivalent contributors to the ecosystem, would we shrink from killing the farmer who is too old to farm any longer, or the child born with a deformity that would prevent her from contributing to the ecosystem? If not, then how are you not creating a hierarchy of needs with humans at the top? Why not run the farm for the benefit of the chickens, who would live long and happy lives, regardless of whether they contribute, while everyone else lives or dies in order to accommodate their needs? Unless you embrace the idea of a chicken-centered farm, it seems like you fail to avoid the human-centric morality that you disdain.

In response to your claim about the ten-calories-per-each-meat-calorie argument, that’s nice but I wasn’t addressing the pasture land in terms of environmental impact. I was addressing your notion that plants have feelings. So regardless of what is grown on this land, if plants do indeed have feelings on par with our own (again, your thoughts on the subject, not mine) then you would be killing x amount more plants to produce your meat, and creating however many times more pain and suffering. But while on the subject, the less land we use for our meals, the more land that reverts back to wilderness, which would be more efficient and sustainable.

A Great, Wise Spirit, or Just a Kick-Ass Tree?: Redwoods are super tallA Great, Wise Spirit, or Just a Kick-Ass Tree?: Redwoods are super tall I have stood in awe of the redwoods. But I didn’t find myself in the presence of a great and wise spirit. I found myself in awe of a fucking amazing tree. I would say that for me it is up there among the most wonderful experiences of my life, and I’ve met Huey Lewis, so that is saying a lot. I would never say it’s “just wood," so I am not really sure who you are arguing with here.

I can’t help but notice that you avoided the choice I presented you with, between the redwood and the child, and instead inserted your preference for the redwood over your own life. I mentioned the child because she is more directly analogous than you or me: I am asking you if you would take your ethical foundation to its logical conclusion and kill the redwood, the seat of ancient and wise life, or the child. I assume you avoided answering this because the answer you would have provided was sociopathic.

“Shall we dismiss millennia of shamanic experience that says that plants have the ‘necessary hardware’ for sentience?” My immediate and emphatic response is yes. If to do otherwise would lead us to destroy the planet, then how is it that I, with absolutely no ties to shamanic beliefs, am doing my best not to destroy the planet? There are many ways to be an environmentalist, and they're not all spiritual. This is a fallacious appeal to tradition. Stating that something has been done for thousands of years doesn’t justify doing it.

Even if plants do indeed have some level of consciousness (or if rocks or air do, for that matter), with animals there is not the slightest doubt. Animals’ suffering is profound and intense. We don’t need shamans to detect it, it is easily recognizable. Animals’ joy is palpable and infectious. Most six-year-olds can see and feel these things.

It is not my desire to live in a natural world. That was a stated desire of yours, and so I was asking you how you reconcile your want for a natural world of beauty with doing things that are unnatural and unbeautiful, like taking calves away from their mothers and drinking the milk that was intended for them. Instead of answering my question you turned the argument around into something else.
The Animal That Follows The Noble Eightfold Path: Man is the only species that can liberate itself from samsaraThe Animal That Follows The Noble Eightfold Path: Man is the only species that can liberate itself from samsara
Animals generally do not choose to become Buddhists and are not capable of detaching themselves from suffering in the way you describe. If I have endured discomfort for something important, then it has been by choice. No animal is willing to endure discomfort or pain so that they can become our dinner. You focus on your feelings, but never consider the will of the cow, the chicken, the pig, and so on.

Death and pain may very well be part of life, but that doesn’t make causing death and pain acceptable. With that line of logic, you could justify everything from bullying a child in grade school to the torture or prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Of course animals are going to die whether or not we kill them. I am going to die, you are going to die. We’re all going to die. That is another reason why I usually don’t participate in these conversations. I would rather be bird-watching or dancing or baking or writing letters to my senator
. If you pay attention to what I'm saying, you'll see that my protest is not against death. It's against killing.

Love, Isa

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