A Prophet of HaShem Whose Name Was Oded

Culture, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

One character in my current novel-in-progress remarks at a point that God’s non-existence is a joke that proves He is a Jew, a sentiment that’s guided my own non-relationship with the Old Man since around the time the act curtain dropped on my bar mitzvah and we all retired to the Uniontown Country Club for bad chicken. I became a bar mitzvah in a Conservative synagogue—it was the slightly more stable of the two aging congregations in Uniontown—but I was really raised Reform. I am still moved by the High Holy Day liturgies, and I retain a great fondness for the Friday Night Shabbat service. But.

Somewhere along the way, someone smuggled in the Prayer for the State of Israel, a scandalous little piece of political agitprop that’s always made me cringe. Depending, I think, on the congregation and the prayer book, it either joined or supplanted the silly but less objectionable prayer for political leaders, a sort of broad wish-to-the-wind that our rulers comport themselves decently and conduct themselves with sage restraint—you can understand why a diasporic community would consider that a reasonable hedged bet, a proper blessing for the Czar, so to speak.

The Prayer for the State of Israel, on the other hand, has the Cold War stink of a kindergarten classroom being drummed to its feet to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Written in 1948, the year of the Nakba, it further affirms in the minds and hearts of so many American Jews an indelible link between spiritual Judaism and political Zionism. I always wonder that it doesn’t seem out of place in a Temple full of Americans, but then, I see some Miami Beach shonda babbling excuses for atrocity on the cable news programs, and I think, Oh. Oy.

American Jews have been bought off with Birthright beach vacations in Tel Aviv and campfire temple trips and a pack of lies about an empty desert waiting to be planted with those trees we bought in Sunday School with the leftovers of our Tzedakah money. The next time you see some terrible white man wondering where are the Muslim moderates who will condemn whatever dictator or terrorist or cartoon-villainously acronym’d insurgency the great minds behind CNN et al. are on about in a given week, ask yourself, where are the American Jews who will speak against the Israeli pogrom in Gaza? They are out there, of course, but too quiet, and too few.

The terrible truth is that Israel was infected from the moment of its birth with the European evils whose virulent, 20^th-centurty apotheoses necessitated, in the minds of so many, the creation of Israel in the first place, and we Jews, through Israel, have become a sick reflection of our own historic persecutors. I am not even speaking of the still unique evil of Nazism, although in the more extreme eructations of Israeli hard-liners, you do hear the debased language of racial purity and superiority. I am thinking of the old, durable, seemingly ineradicable traditions of pogrom, persecution, expropriation, and colonization. The Israelis possess the imperial arsenal of a modern Western nation-state, which camouflages the essentially primitive, pre-modern nature of their policy toward the Palestinians. The state of Israel is behaving like a village mob. Palestinian tunnels are the poisoned well. The Israelis are killing and lighting fires. “We will drive them out!” Where will they go? How will they escape? “They will have to figure it out, the devils!” But you forced them into the ghetto in the first place. “Yes, and they should be happy for what they have!” The US stands by like a distant monarch, its silence and occasional provision of more kindling a kind of majestic assent.

It would be comforting to say simply: I wash my hands of all of you. But we have accepted a state made of our religion, and that state is behaving abominably, unforgivably. It is a shame that we will not erase in a hundred years.

Bossa Nova

Culture, Economy, Media, Sports, War and Politics

I’m only a casual soccer fan—hardly even a fan at all—but I do love hockey, a sport that’s in many regards soccer’s bruising inverse, a sort of deranged, wintry fraternal twin to the beautiful game. Hockey is America’s fourth big-league sport, and despite two consecutive Stanley Cups for Los Angeles and a general conviction among the cognoscenti that Western play is the superior style these days, it’s only in the icy, soggy band that stretches from Minnesota through the Great Lakes before curling up to Boston that the sport has anything like real prominence in the US. In bad football years in Pittsburgh, of which, lately, there’ve been more than a couple, the Penguins become the preeminent local team. But even here, any real appreciation and understanding of the sport is elusive, and Pittsburghers will sit over their big Yeunglings at the bar arguing with a straight face that Lemiuex was better than Gretzky before turning to the screen to shout, alternately, “Hit him!” and “Shoot the puck!” Almost invariably, neither would be a good idea. Hockey’s speed and bottled violence distract from the fundamental tactics of the game: position, possession, and puck movement; the critical importance of lines, line-changes, and specific match-ups. Besides which—there is the unaccountable power, especially in the playoffs, of the hot goalie. After a miraculous 2009 Stanley Cup run that kicked off with a mid-year coaching change, my Pens have fallen, again and again, in the pre-Cup playoffs, outclassed by lesser squads playing superior tactical hockey. The Penguins have two of the preeminent stars of the current game, which is fine during the looser, slower play of the regular season, but in the playoffs, stars matter less than systems. This is true in most team sports played at the highest professional levels. Hey, San Antonio.

Anyway, I mention this because Franklin Foer has a weird piece in The New Republic arguing something or other about the World Cup. This tournament, he frets, “lacked a historically great team”; the Germans only beat Brazil because of something to do with psychology; “Germany doesn’t have anything close to a transcendent player.” Well, let’s unpack that last bit:

Despite a roster filled with excellent players, Germany doesn’t have anything close to a transcendent player. (Neuer, at goalkeeper, is the only player who comes close.) And there’s nothing paradigm-shaking about the German style of play. The fourth German World Cup will likely be remembered much like the past three—the triumph of a great system and a team that doesn’t squander its chances.

That “despite” is doing yeoman’s work. The romance of movie-theater sport is the transcendent player; the reality of championships is blocky teamwork, especially in a game like soccer, where scoring chances are generally few. A cliché of American football may be appropriate here: “We’ve got to convert.” That is to say, the difference between winning and losing at the highest level of team sport is not squandering chances.

Yes, Messi was relatively quiet, but the championship game was really quite thrilling, and Germany’s single, winning goal in extra time was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Since I had no natural rooting interest in the tournament, I was hoping for Argentina to pull it out, based on no special affinity beyond a vaguely political preference for a national—if not sporting—underdog. Ah well. The game was a thrill because it could have gone either way. The pyrotechnics of scoring are dull; a sport in which most games are close games is a good sport. The Brazilian collapse was a wild outlier, but the Group Stage that Foer calls “affirmative, almost joyous”—meaning something by those words that no native speaker of English has ever meant before, I’m quite certain, as I haven’t the foggiest idea what they could possible mean in context—did not “[reflect] a buried side of human nature”; it reflected regular season play. Then the best teams moved on and things tightened up. The Germans were a great playoff team. Here’s another sports cliché: they didn’t make many mistakes. The ability to read a cultural moment into the style of a sporting victory is, I suppose, the sort of thing that gets you a job at The New Republic, but if that’s the sort of thing that turns you on about sports, then here, let me explain to you in great detail how American football is sublimated homoeroticism while you’re biting your nails over a critical field goal.

This ability to distill any fundamentally human activity into some dour reflection on “the geopolitical situation” strikes me as the saddest, most pathetic of psychic pathologies, a sort of illness of the soul that makes real joy and affirmation impossible to those who’ve been infected by it. It is, of course, also a prerequisite for writing for that certain kind of middlebrow American magazine that more and more resembles an outdated sanitarium full of mad—but not too mad—patients padding around the gardens believing themselves to be some combination of Clausewitz, de Tocqueville, Hans Castorp, and Jesus Christ. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes a cigar is Vladimir Putin’s surely immense . . .

“Vladimir Putin loomed at the center of the Maracanã today. And in a way, he’s loomed over this whole past month of soccer.” I can fairly guarantee you’re the only one who thought so, Franklin. Forgetting the months of protest in Brazil’s major cities, the forced evacuations of neighborhoods, the official violence, the waste and fraud of the whole affair, Foer pronounces the Brazilian games merely acceptably corrupt—a charming, minor, Latin-American corruption, unlike those dastardly Russians and evil Qataris. This is pure projection of the fixations of the American political class onto an unrelated event; the obsessions of the pundit class are the Vaseline rubbed on the lenses through which they view the world. The distinction between “the grotesque spectacles of preening authoritarian regimes” and the “moment of relative innocence” that was the Brazilian record of minor “misdeeds” is one largely without a difference. Authoritarianism is just a name for any country whose politics you don’t like at any given moment, not a descriptor of an actual political system. I am pretty convinced that Dilma Rousseff is somewhat less personally odious than Vladimir Putin, but she still sent in the riot cops. Meanwhile, I dare you to compare, for what it’s worth, their approval ratings in their respective countries. The world is more complicated than the never-correct and now-less-correct-than-ever teleology of West vs. East. There are real differences between conferences in the NHL; in “geopolitics” rather less so. Were the London Olympics really any less a “grotesque” and “preening” a “spectacle” than the Beijing Games; were either qualitatively different from Sochi? Maybe Western Europe and the US have just been more successful at pre-relocating their poor out of the attractive potential Olympic villages.

International sporting events are—of course—opportunities for the governments of host countries to transmogrify their failures into tawdry demonstrations of national purpose and unity. Hey, it beats invading Iraq, I guess. Is Russian state media sweeping Putin’s record on gay rights under the soccer pitch really more morally odious than the pages of the major organs of American media giving over their editorial and opinion pages to the endless stream of reactionary Neoconservatives and “National Greatness” Conservatives arguing that our own national renewal is just one more bombing sortie away, forever? Qatari slave labor is utterly hateful, but so is America’s internment of tens of thousands of child refugees in desert concentration camps. There is no precise taxonomy and rubric of national wrongdoing that allows us to rank these things like a deranged Wikipedia list: the world’s largest freshwater lakes by volume; the world’s most populous urban agglomerations; the world’s most evil national regimes. I would be perfectly pleased to have no more international sporting events ever, anywhere, but if we must, then the surest way to keep the grotesquerie to a civilized minimum is to always and ever insist that they are only games.

The 18th Brumaire of Samuel Alito, et al.

Economy, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Religion, War and Politics

As usual, the problem in the broadest possible view is the existence of men.
Since I haven’t got a quick fix for that, a few thoughts on the Hobby Lobby, the ACA, (the) God(s), and the Supreme Court, in no particular order.
Short of a divine program/pogrom to eliminate men via the rapid evolution of some kind of viable mammalian parthenogenesis (Are you there, God? It’s me, Jacob), the problem is less the historical animosity of the major religions to sexual freedom in general and women’s sexual freedom in particular—more about these below—than it is the specifically American weirdness of crafting a broad national policy in which the healthcare of most working-age adults and their children is provided by those adults’ employers through contracts with rent-taking private health “insurance” companies.
Of course, the US does have a public healthcare provision for the elderly and (some) of the (very) poor. Medicare and Medicaid broadly undercompensate hospital systems and providers, who in turn vastly inflate the billed costs of services, which are subsequently “negotiated” down by private “insurers”, who in turn mark back up their own costs to the companies and occasional individuals who contract with them. These so-called insurance companies are really more brokers than insurers. Hilariously, most companies actually hire 3^rd-(4^th?)-party brokers to negotiate rates with these very insurance companies. Along the way, any number of other con men, from vastly overpaid doctors to millionaire health system administrators to big pharma firms dip into this huge pool of sloshing money to extract their share of the racket. It is the stupidest system of public provision ever dreamed up in the mind of man; it makes the most corrupt developing-world griftopia look like a paradise of reasonable governance. At least when you bribe a policeman for a bogus traffic stop, you know exactly what it costs and what you’ve got out of it. Can you say the same for your latest hospital bill or “statement of benefits”?
No, duh.
The Hobby Lobby decision itself is a good bit narrower than the more dire reactions would have you believe, and it does appear that the ACA’s existing mechanism for allowing religious non-profits to opt out of certain coverages for moral reasons by effectively shifting the cost back to the government provides a reasonable mechanism for continuing to subsidize the contraceptive coverage for women whose private, for-profit employers opt out.
Naturally—this being America!—the deranged result here is another row of dominos in the Goldberg device: the federal government mandates a private business purchase a marked-up employee health coverage plan from a different private entity with the proviso that some of the mandated coverages are actually optional and the business may direct its insurer not to include such coverages, in which case the government will step back in to pay for them semi-directly. Does that sentence make sense? No, not really. Yes, exactly.
Obviously, this expensive, stupid system would best be replaced by a national, single-payer system, like all the other good ones in the world.
“We woulda, if it wasn’t for those evil ReTHUGlicans intent on opposing anything that President Obama wanted to do.” –Liberals
Yeah, who’s the superstitious religious nutsos who believe based on faith in the absence of evidence here? A historical note: the ACA passed with no support from the opposition party. The reason the Democrats did not pass single payer is that the Democrats did not pass single payer.
Returning to the Supreme Court for a moment: has ever any cryptomasonic gaggle of semi-intellectuals in the history of human society labored so conspicuously to cloak their inevitable arrival at their own obvious a priori conclusions in an evidentiary process? Again, you wanna talk religion? How about the belief that nine concurrent lifetime Popes operating under a principle of practical infallibility that makes the claims of the actual Vatican seem positively modest by comparison are going to utilize some marvelous hybrid of inductive and deductive reasoning to protect the holy principles of democracy, whatever those are. Of course this was going to be the outcome. Hey, I cheered too when Anthony Kennedy laid down the unassailable mandate (pun intended) that we gays can marry, but I ask you, is the system/institution that put that question beyond appeal a good one, now that the worm turned and the same old codger decided that, while gay marriage is good, ladies having too much sex is bad?
As for the Hobby Lobby, I’ve got an MBA and shit, and I cannot come up with a definition of a “closely held company.” Or, rather, I can come up with any number of definitions, all of them perfectly reasonable, which I could very easily apply to almost any company on earth, from the corner store to Exxon/Mobil.
Now, in general, I have more sympathy for religious peculiarity than your average American liberal; I am the sort of person who looks upon the word Balkanization with something less than total horror. I think that the conservative/orthodox religious opposition to contraception is wrong and incoherent, but I’m almost as skeptical of the use of the coercive power of the government to force them into moderating those views as I am of the notion that drone strikes in Pakistan will free women from the burqa. Are the Hobby Lobby owners hypocrites, investing in birth control on one hand while forbidding it on the other? Yes, they are human. But let’s take the Hobby Lobby owners at their incoherent but nevertheless sincere word: they believe God doesn’t want them to pay for their employees to use (certain) forms of female contraception.
Is this sexist, odious, and inequitable? Yes. But.
If the US had a functioning labor market that didn’t force so many people, especially women, to work for whatever checkout line would deign to hire them, this would all be much less critical. We could go on believing that corporations were voluntary associations rather than effectively feudal fiefdoms and that those who don’t agree with Ma and Pa Hobby Lobby could just vote with their feet.
Of course, we all know that that’s not the case. Labor is unfree. People are stuck in these shitty jobs. The Hobby Lobby is actually a good one in that it pays better wages than your average WalMart. A person’s access to healthcare should not be subordinate to the crackpot morality of their bosses. But here is the thing. It shouldn’t be subordinate to the perfectly rational desire of their bosses to save money on the health plan either. And here we are, back at single payer as the only equitable solution.
Just as a side note, the Court’s other opinion, Harris v. Quinn, regarding the mandatory payment of union dues, also made liberals mad. Hey, remember earlier this month when President Obama busted the Philly Transit strike? Yeah, I thought so.
The way to protect individuals from the whims of their employers is to provide everyone—everyone—with a basic provision of food, shelter, clothing, medical care. Forget the “employer mandate.” Give everyone healthcare. Forget the minimum wage. Give everyone a guaranteed minimum income. Scarcity, by and large, is a scam.

The Responsibility to Protect

Culture, Poetry, War and Politics

I am a poem, he says; he sets out to
destroy a country merely made of prose,
the words all justified in even rows,
inelegant and literally true,
doing merely what they’re meant to do,
dictionarily-defined. He blows
them up. Later, a guest on the cable shows,
he’ll note the syntaxless fragments scattered through
the once-ordered pages that he edited;
Incomprehensible, he’ll say, They are
incompatible with order and
responsible for their too-common dead
metaphors; but a redline here and there
is all they need: a pinch; a guiding hand.

De Rerum Natura

Culture, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and Politics

Reihan Salam and John McCain have scored
a six-pack and a fix of krokodil;
the war is over; both men need to feel
the war is never over. They are bored.
The decadent world they hate is drifting toward
. . . well, something. Sense-starved, they’ll steal
right up to death, which is all that’s really real:
irrevocable promise of its own reward.
Outside the window of the Georgetown study
where they melt in leather chairs among the shelves
of Boots and Kagans leans a homeless vet;
war muddied his boots; now his mind is muddy
with several sectarian civil-warring selves.
Someone calls the cops, reports this threat.

A Sulz on Women

Economy, Education, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

A few brief thoughts on the New York Times-Sulzberger-Abramson affair.

It’s awfully difficult to feel badly for income discrepancies where people are making hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars. Beyond a certain income level, which I would set at significantly less than $100,000 per year, it’s all just surplus value; its only purpose—if that word applies—is luxury purchasing for purposes of status signaling. This is not to say that women executives should be paid less than their immediate male counterparts; rather, no one should be paid so much money to be a general manager.
In any case, the focus on corporate income inequality between men and women is a classic example of mistaking a symptom for a syndrome. Women are not paid less than men—whether in the executive office or at the greeters line in WalMart—because late capitalism is malfunctioning, but rather because that is a function of capitalism. Yes, women’s inequality long predates the modern economy, but the systems of capitalism incorporate preexisting forms of social and material inequality to their own end. A great deal of time and attention and political will is about to be frittered away “addressing the growing concern” over income inequality in the nation’s corporate media. Meanwhile, the question of what it means to have the nation’s singular newspaper a publicly traded corporate entity and the nation’s media in general an elite enterprise accessible as an occupation almost solely to those whose families have the previously acquired resources to support their effectively unpaid labor for as much as a decade will go largely unasked and entirely unanswered.
In other words, yes, it is a problem in a narrowly defined sense that a woman reporter for the Times is making eighty grand a year while her male colleague is making ninety-five, or what have you, but it is a problem in a much broader sense that she went to Bryn Mawr and he went to Brown and both of their New York rents were floated by their parents for 4-5 post-undergraduate years of internships and sub-$30K reporting gigs; that these two employees consider this a natural state of affairs; that their employer considers it so (obviously) as well. These are the people who report on “income inequality.” In a very circumscribed sense, they experienced and performed low-income labor—for them, a rite of passage, a way station.
Here is where the difference between the C-level and the checkout lane start to look a little more important. Let’s go back to that certain level of income. For all practical purposes, the difference between $400K and $500K—this is roughly the range we’re talking about for these Times editors—is meaningless. There is nothing of actual value that these people can’t buy; they can buy anything they reasonably want or need many times over. The idea that the arithmetical equality of dollars-per-annum for a bunch of rich people is a measure of anything beyond mere counting is the fundamental error here. What is at stake is a status claim.
Meanwhile, a representative sentence from The New York Times:

Republicans contended [that Seattle’s attempt to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour] would be a job-killer, while Democrats asserted it would help alleviate poverty. Economists said both might be right.

Wait, that isn’t fair! The Times has strongly editorialized in favor of raising the minimum wage!
Well, sure, but then again, a few months later.
Stop looking at the stories and start looking at the coverage. The narrative it builds is of a fraught and deeply technical political and economic question being argued passionately at the highest levels of government, in academia, and in the media—a debate mediated by and, in a perverse sense, for people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars—the sort of people for whom there is something called “the economy.” “Both might be right”!
These are the sorts of ersatz and imponderable conversations that capitalism, personified by its functionaries, likes to have both with and about itself. Have you recently used the phrase “rising inequality.” Ding-ding-ding! You listen with some anguish to NPR pieces on the “growing gap between the rich and the poor.” You, like the Times, recognize that it’s impossible to live on the minimum wage alone, and that even $15/hour condemns a wage-earner to a life of struggle and fretting over the bills. But isn’t it true that mandated upward pressure on the low end of wages will force businesses to slow hiring? The unemployment rate is so high! We need more jobs! No, we need good jobs! Oh, woe, what is a “the economy” to do?
Pause. Here’s a question that you rarely hear anyone ask. What is money? I’ve always been very fond of the late author Iain M. Banks formulation in his first science fiction novel. Money is a “crude, over-complicated and inefficient form of rationing.”
Rationing! You mean, like communism?
Yes, Virginia.
Stay with me. In 2010, women comprised 47 percent of the total US Labor Force. Now, estimates differ, as the Times might say, but broadly speaking, women are assumed to make somewhere between 75-85% of what men make in, as the Times might say, broadly comparable positions.
Okay, I want you to imagine the Times, or any similar publication, publishing an editorial that says women should not make as much as men for the same work because of the fundamental damage that “some Republicans” or “some economists” say that “equal pay” would do to our old friend, the economy.
Because, after all, the cost of bringing the compensation of all women in the workforce into wage/salary parity with men would far exceed that of increasing the minimum wage—even dramatically—for the just several million people who earn it. So why, then, is the one a debate and the other a moral imperative?
I’m glad you asked! Capitalism is a system of surpluses, and it allocates them upward. It gives more rations to people who already have a pile. Should women make as much as men, blacks as much as whites? Yes. But these debates are moral proxies for debates that we are not having, at least, not in the pages of the Times. The answer to the question of whether a woman line worker should make as much as the guy next to her is yes. The answer to the question of whether Jill Abramson should have made as much as Bill Keller is smash the system of state capital and reallocate the surpluses in the form of lifetime guaranteed housing, clothing, food, and study for everyone. I am not being crass here. There is, quite literally, plenty to go around.
Yeah, well, how does this affect Hillary’s chances in 2016?
There is, of course, a corollary debate. This debate has to do with the question of why it is that women in leadership roles are pushy and opinionated while men are strong and decisive, or, well, you pick the opposing pairs of adjectives—why, in short, is the behavior of women judged on measures of temperament, and men’s on measures of will? It strikes me that the actual question being asked here is: why, upon achieving a position of dominance, aren’t women as free to act like monstrous dickheads as men? The management behaviors ascribed to both Abramson and her predecessors are the worst kind of B-school blowhard psychopathy: management based on fear; power maintained by its own inconsistent application. These sorts of hard-driven, hard-driving, chair-tossing, dressing-down applications of personal power within a rigid hierarchy of authority are, like that big ol’ salary, a kind of surplus; an excess; an overage. So the question can’t be: how do we permit a few more women to behave like the lunatic men who’ve been running the show all these years, but how do we prohibit or prevent anyone from acting this way? And here, too, the answer is a more fundamental sort of levelling, because the other option, which is the false promise of our society, which is the belief that it is the duty of each person to scramble madly from the broad base toward the unattainable height, is a Sisyphean punishment where we all—well, most of us—under the weight of our own bodies are forever sent tumbling down the sides of the same brutal slope.

The Crimean Snore

Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

“I’m not sure how many schools prepare students for this kind of love.”

–David Brooks

Again this morning news out of Ukraine,
revanchist Russia shoots down helicopters
and NATO loads its fearsome teleprompters
—we’ve been here before—we’ll be here again.
The world is fucked, but in its rubble and pain
ordinary people find the time
for family, sex and music, petty crime
—for love and death and staying entertained.
There are great loves, and there are great books;
let’s not deny the world its poetry,
but let’s not pretend the world is aging past
some youth—passion moderated, looks
declining, romance gone, because some twee
old journalist got his divorce at last.

Is this Your Homework Larry?

Culture, Economy, Media, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

Among a certain class of Americans, those of us who go to “good” colleges and take, sometime during our freshman and sophomore years, some sort of introduction to sociology course, there is the universal experience of that one student. He is inevitably, invariably male; he is either in or has recently completed a course in biology, although he is almost certainly not a biology major; he finds, in almost every class, an opportunity to loudly and circularly suppose that some or other human social phenomenon is a direct analogue of some behavior in ant colonies or beehives or schools of fish or herds of gazelles. Mine was a boy who, after a section on suicide clustering, suggested that it could be explained quite easily, really; certain ants, after all, when ill or infirm, remove themselves from the nest, lest they burden their kin. So all those kids in Jersey, they, like, you know, they like knew that they were going to, like, be, like, a burden, you know, to society, because they weren’t, you know, going to, like, be successful or whatever, so, you know, you know what I’m saying.

He’s not without his charms. If consciousness is a continuum, from bacterium to baccalaureate, rather than just some crowning and discrete achievement of a select and tiny sliver of the mammalian class, then surely animals have plenty to teach us about ourselves, and surely animal societies have plenty to teach us about our own. And likewise, while I like to believe that our lives and beings are something more than the dull, material expression of DNA, that biology is not, in fact, destiny, I know that this belief amounts to a kind of self-praise and willful self-regard. “Oh, honey, you are special.” I believe in free will and self-determination, but let’s just say I accept that they must be subject to some reasonable natural limits.

But now over at Vox.com, Ezra Klein’s intrepid effort to out-USA Today USA Today, Zach Beauchamp has discovered two political scientists who have discovered “circumstantial” evidence that human wars are the genetic remnant of animal territoriality. DNA is mentioned, but there are no double helices in sight; what’s meant is something more akin to the “animal spirits” that Tristram Shandy was so concerned with, or perhaps a kind of pre-genetic, crypto-Mendelian, semi-hemi-demi-Darwinian understanding of trait inheritance. In this case, the authors of a study, and the author of the article, notice that animals are territorial, that humans are territorial, that both come into intraspecies conflict over territory, and therefore, ergo, voilà. It has the remarkable distinction of being both self-evidently correct and skull-crushingly wrong. The deep roots of human territoriality are animal, but explaining organized human warfare in this manner has the motel smell of a husband telling his wife that he’s been fucking other women due to evolutionary mating imperatives. “Babe, calm down! Have you ever heard of bonobos, huh?”

Beauchamp treats territoriality among animals as an imponderable feature of “animal psychology”—he doesn’t mention, and you’ve got to assume he just doesn’t know, that the behaviors are largely about resource distribution, and, well, ya wonder if that’s got anything to do with warfare? Eh . . . He says that we “evolved from” animals, which is another one of those strictly true but effectively incorrect statements, a recapitulation of the old teleology that makes evolution a unidirectional progression from low to high, with humans not only its ultimate achievement but also its point. (He also—this is an aside—confuses accountancy and finance, claiming that a $100 real loss is identical to $100 in opportunity cost, all this by way of clumsily explaining loss aversion.) He uses the phrase “just a theory.” He gets to the end of the penultimate paragraph, then:

Toft and Johnson just don’t have any studies of human biology or evolution that directly show a biological impulse towards territoriality.

Phlogiston! God Bless You!

I’m not a religious man, but I empathize with the religious when they call this hooey scientism, the replacement of one set of hoary mythological clichés with their contemporary TED-talk equivalent—I mean, talk about inherited traits. If this kind of thing is science, then it is less Louis Pasteur than it is Aristotle, the general observation of a couple of different things with some shared trait or simultaneity, and then a vast leap of logic alone across the evidenceless abyss. The purpose of such speculation is not to clarify, illuminate, or discover, and Lord only knows, we wouldn’t want to waste our time devising some kind of double-blind. This, after all, is political science. Its purpose, rather, is moral flattery, an up-from-the-slime story in which our more regrettable and barbarous traits as people are written off as the bad debt of our evolutionary ancestors. And speaking of moral flattery, you might notice that “gang wars” are mentioned, and “ethnic” conflict, and Crimea in this great gallery of weeping over our remnant animalism, but nowhere is it explained how land tenure explains what America was doing, for example, in Iraq.

Inferior Musicians Giving Great Pleasure to Themselves

Culture, Religion, War and Politics

HBO’s charming mid-aughts cosplay porno, Rome, habitually botched the broad canvas of history, but it did manage some excellent brush strokes, many of them dabbed around the series’ real star, Ian McNeice, who played the forum reader, a wonderfully amoral news anchor who stands in gorgeous fixity amid the whirl of war and upheaval, a pole whose flag is perfectly attuned to the breeze. McNeice gets the character precisely right: gaudy, congenial, sardonic, a little cruel. I remember one particular announcement, a throwaway, really, but an example of the show actually inhabiting its setting rather than dully commenting on it. In the second season, when Herod is scheduled to visit Rome and its squabbling rulers, McNeice casually announces to the forum: “On order of the Triumvirate, during Prince Herod’s residency here, all mockery of Jews and their one god shall be kept to an appropriate minimum.” It’s the way he says “one god,” the slight pause that precedes it, the implied chuckle in the pronunciation . . . It’s very funny, and it’s very good.

Pre-Christian Rome was religiously pluralistic, although it did have a state religion of sorts, and this was of a piece with the ancient world in general. It was accepted as a matter of course that different peoples had different gods, and over the centuries of migrations and conquests, people traded deities like we moderns trade vocabulary, with efforts to keep out popular foreign deities about as effective as the Académie française trying to keep out email. Even the Jews “and their one god” LOL had, in their past, occasionally adopted an idol, and when Adonai finally bothered to write down the bylaws, he admitted the dense population of the numinous world in his commandment: You shall have no other gods before me. The world is awash in divinities, but I am yours. The cheese stands alone.

Anyway, this all brings us by commodious vicus of recirculation back to America, our nova Roma, and the present to-do over gay rights and religious liberty. The general question is whether people of faith—another one of those hilarious taxonomic neologisms that are, I sometimes think, America’s sole remaining political export to the world—should be able, in a private capacity, to deny service to gays based on the religious and moral objections to homosexuality or gay marriage or what have you, or if this constitutes a form of discrimination as odious and intolerable to society as racial discrimination. Does refusing to bake a cake for a queer couple equal refusing to bake a cake for an interracial couple; does refusing to allow a gay parent to adopt amount to turning away black prospective parents at the agency door?

Obviously the general trend is in the direction of yes: yes, it is intolerable discrimination, and it isn’t permissible to raise the banner of free exercise in order to violate equal protection. Hmm, I suppose I find this logic a little weird. Now don’t get too worked up. I find religious objections to same-sex partnership and adoption incoherent; I find the Christian sexual ethics that supposedly stand in opposition to gay sex and gay marriage impossibly inconsistent and weird. The idea that there exists a such thing as “traditional marriage” and that some kind of post-War, pre-Beatles nuclear, two-generation family represents a sacred norm in human history is so laughably, ahistorically bogus as to represent, quite possibly, the dumbest idea in the magisterial history of dumb ideas. And like I said a few days ago, the old adage about reaping what you sow has few better examples than the specter of these people of faith, long perfectly pleased to link their religious institution to the packed list of state-sponsored and state-conferred benefits, now whining that this very same state should keep its muddy nose out of their churchy business. I hate the idea that I might be turned away at the door of a business because of my relationship with a man, but I am very suspicious of this constant appeal to the powers of the state, knowing, as I do, how the worm turns. Not very long ago, the same state that compels the baking of my wedding cake called my intimate life illegal. Or, the state that compels the lunch counter to serve black men also imprisons more than a million of them. What I am saying is, the problem of equality guaranteed by the police is the police.

The uncomfortable truth is that the idea of liberty sits uncomfortably with the free practice of religion. Another bogus idea is that liberty is some kind of natural state, a condition of freedom against which states and their governments set limits—reasonable and limited limits, if the state is properly constituted, yeah? But liberty in practical reality consists of a set of privileges and permissions; it is granted, not innate; it is a charter, not a condition of being, and as such, it is changeable, tradeable, and purchasable. It is not the same as freedom. The trouble with religious liberty as it’s come to be defined is that it asks the state to grant it the privilege to deny to others the permissions that the state has already granted. This is the strange demand: we wish to refuse what you permit.

I am a great believer in allowing many little cultures to flourish, and I think bad things happen when they start balling themselves up into the sorts of vast engines of wealth and authority that build thousands of prisons and stockpile nuclear weapons and invent aerial drones. But if we are to permit cultural peculiarity, and if we’re to permit broader exercises of moral expression, however attractive, however odious they may appear to us, then we must learn to live in a world of alien gods and weird wedding practices. A telling response to my last post was:

@j_arthur_bloom @jakebackpack Open borders, universal healthcare, gay marriage, & anti-religious liberty: All bad. @DouthatNYT

— Nathan Duffy (@TheIllegit) March 7, 2014

First we will deny you permission; then we won’t permit you to leave. This is why people find it so hard to believe that people of faith desire only to be left alone, to be allowed to run their adoption agencies, parochial schools, and sacramental marriage ceremonies without outside interference; live and let live; à chacun son goût; il faut cultiver notre jardin; um, etc. The plea to be allowed to be particular pairs poorly with an evangelical universalism; the desire to be granted liberty frequently shades into a wish to become its grantor; you shall have no other gods beside me, or before me, becomes rather more ominously, there shall be no other gods.

Ab hoedis me sequestra

Culture, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Religion, War and Politics

I like to describe my politics as anarchist by belief and conservative by temperament. I’m the product of a close, multigenerational family, and most of us still live within twenty miles of where my paternal grandparents were born. Individually, we occupy a wide spectrum of idiosyncratic political beliefs, but, as is the case with many groups bound by old familial ties and economic interdependence, we tend, at least among ourselves, to be broad-minded. The habit of linking clannishness to close-mindedness has its roots in a certain truth, but the countervailing truth is that close kinship permits a tolerance for eccentricity that larger society often does not. At least, that’s my experience. As a moody adolescent very convinced of his own uniquely poetical character, I was very much prepared for my coming out to be my operatic moment contre le monde entier, and I suspect, in retrospect, that I was a little disappointed when no one seemed to care very much. To my extreme mortification, my father bought me condoms.

I was raised Jewish; I’m a bar mitzvah—that was from my mother’s side, per tradition, although my father, despite having been raised Catholic (my grandmother is Italian), is also half Jewish. My paternal grandfather, Fritz, was of German Jewish descent. In fact, we learned through amateur geneaology that his people were not German Jews at all, but Spanish Sephardim who migrated out of the Catholic south to escape various waves of persecution. Well, my grandmother is fond of saying that theirs was a controversial marriage at the time, an Italian Catholic and a German Jew. “But,” she says, “your grandfather married the only Italian woman who can’t cook, and I married the only Jew with no money.”

In the strictest sense of the word, I am an atheist, which is not to say I’m wholly irreligious. I still go to High Holy Day services and still think of myself as a Jew, and I believe in some kind of superphenomenal, if not supernatural, world, despite being a strict non-believer in any sort of deities or controlling intelligences—even dei absconditi strike me as silly, willful anthropomorphizations of the jumbled taxonomies of the limits of human understanding. So, I suppose, I am an unorthodox atheist. I did spend a lot of time in my twenties heckling actual believers for their historical and ontological lacunae, but I find myself, more and more, in a sort of aesthetic sympathy with religious faith. Perhaps it’s only because, as a writer, I must believe in a magical world or else despair of my art.

Over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf took issue with a Slate article that conflated all opposition to gay marriage with hatred, which moved Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber to complain that Friedersdorf was engaged in a game of canny semantics, eliding hatred and bigotry in such a way as to confuse the more fundamental truth that “Principled bigotry is still . . . bigotry,” that “Bigotry derived from religious principles is still bigotry.” Friedersdorf’s reasoning is a little sloppy, but Farrell goes out of his way to ignore or minimize Friedersdorf’s caveats. All of this, in any event, springs from a Ross Douthat article that I’ve been chewing on since it appeared last Sunday. “The Terms of Our Surrender” is the title, although the tone of it is rather Jewel-Voiced: the war situation has not necessarily developed to their advantage. Douthat knows that the juridical apparatus of the United States, a monster of momentum if ever there was one, is presently steaming in the direction of national gay marriage, and nothing is going to turn it around now. He is more gracious than his critics and interlocutors give him credit for:

Christians had plenty of opportunities — thousands of years’ worth — to treat gay people with real charity, and far too often chose intolerance. (And still do, in many instances and places.) So being marginalized, being sued, losing tax-exempt status — this will be uncomfortable, but we should keep perspective and remember our sins, and nobody should call it persecution.

This may be no more than a rhetorical gesture; the other contents of the essay strongly suggest that’s the case. Still, it’s not nothing. “We should . . . remember our sins” is not an insignificant statement from a believing Christian, even if it’s in the service of an otherwise specious argument.

But as to that other argument, I’m really struck by a single line:

Meanwhile, pressure would be brought to bear wherever the religious subculture brushed up against state power.

This is the crux of Douthat’s complaint, not that the popular, cultural advancement of tolerance, acceptance, and understanding has eroded what he and others like to call “traditional” marriage and sexual morality, but that, having at last moved into the winners’ column after a few decades of pitched legal competition, the gay victors will now avail themselves of the coercive power of the state to mandate compliance—that adoption agencies will be forced to accept gay parents or close; that religious schools will find it that much harder to teach that it is wrong for two men to have sex with each other, two women to marry.

I’m not unsympathetic. The coercive power of any government is an extraordinary thing, and the American government is the richest and most powerfully coercive in the world. It compels us all to behaviors we find morally dubious. We are all dragooned into paying for wars and assassinations, for a vast archipelago of incarceration, for corporate welfare and bank bailouts, for dubious public works, for the excesses of legislators, ad inf. There are tens of thousands of laws on the books, and there is a fair case to be made that each of us is, in the strictest terms, a daily felon because of them. It’s bad enough when the municipal government keeps giving you extortionate tickets for alternate-side on-street parking when they don’t even bother to actually sweep the streets in the ostensible fulfilment of the rationale for the regulation; how then must it feel to have the full force and majesty of the state and Federal governments attack the core moral tenets of your faith? However incorrect or retrograde they may appear to outsiders, you still believe.

Yes, but it would all be that much more convincing were it not for all the decades in which precisely that power was used to prop up those tenets, often cruelly, often arbitrarily, and often brutally. And it would be more convincing if this sort of supposed moral traditionalism were not also tied to the rather incoherent economics and cultural nativism of American political conservativism. Let me suggest, as just a couple of minor examples, that actual universal health care and reasonably open borders would ameliorate some of the more dire injustices faced by gay partners denied access to legally recognized marriage. Legal marriage is larded with all sorts of benefits and privileges, and indeed, it was often the very proponents of marriage as a distinct social good who held the larding needle. Married people are a special class of citizen, and that is the crux of the matter. A society used inheritance incentives and insurance benefits to promote a sacrament; now you want complain that the sacred has been subsumed by the economic, the holy spirit swatted aside by the invisible hand. Quantus tremor est futurus, quando judex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus!

The easy rejoinder is that conservatives believe in “smaller government” and a less coercive state, but that belief has never been a practical commitment, only a rhetorical strategy. The state grows under conservatives, and it grows under liberals. The difference is only a matter of emphasis, and frequently not even that. The truth is that these marriage traditionalists were perfectly content with state intervention in and support of their sacred institution when it hewed, more or less, to their membership requirements. Only when a bit of money and a bit of politicking rendered it a bit less restrictive, only then did those same agencies of the state become dangerous and a touch tyrannical. Those who play with fire, you know, and those who live by the sword.