PDF Version: AncientInjustice.pdf

Growing up, my Jewish education consisted of an after school program (‘cheider’ to the Yiddish inclined) while I attended public school by day.  On my walk to Hebrew School I would often try to marry the two bodies of knowledge from the two respective school systems.  A happy romance occurred around 1987 between the religious and secular bodies of knowledge.  As many may recall 1987 was the year of the big crash on the stock market.[1]  Debt and the economy were on the lips of many in those days.

In the secular world there was tremendous talk of personal and national debt, interest rates, unemployment and the like.  All the while, the Torah I was reading in Hebrew school was definitely running on about the sabbatical forgiveness of debt and the precept that “there should be no poor among you”. (Deut 15:1-4)  Now my mental image of the ancient Israelites was that of a pastoral, agrarian people.  With hindsight I can say that this image was only slightly misguided.  Despite the rumored grandeur of the Davidic kingdom, archaeologists hold that their society was more rural than urban.

But this left me with a theological problem:  I saw debt as a product of banks which were on city streets.  I failed to conjure an image of rolling agricultural fields dotted with banks and/or ATMs at the Temple gates. (Parenthetically, it turns out that if the Gospels have any historical veracity, there may have been just such an ancient equivalent of an ATM at the Temple gates.  More to follow shortly.)  Failing to imagine ancient banks, I was puzzled about what the ancient Israelites knew of debt and how then did this prescient warning against the accumulation of debt make it into the Torah?  I questioned my Hebrew school teacher along these lines and I was given the answer that ‘the Torah contained the writ word of God and all His wisdom.  It was written for all times and addressed all the problems that we would encounter until the end of days.’

Platitudes such as this are to young inquisitive men, such as I was, like drinking sea water when thirsty:  quenching only at first and then leaving you more thirsty than ever.  If my teacher’s answer was to hold water (pun intended) then there were conspicuous absences from the ‘writ word of God’.  Where were the foundations for democracy?  Where were the specific prohibitions against slavery (beyond the sabbatical release of Hebrew slaves)?  Where was the discussion about protecting the environment beyond the scant ordinances for burying excrement beyond the outskirts of camp (Deut 23:14)?  From those grandiose absences there were more mundane absences like: Where were the prohibitions against smoking and where were the prohibitions against high cholesterol foods?  My attempts to marry the religious and secular belief systems were thwarted by the absence of these secular guidelines which I had determined to be legitimate and necessary.  After a brief flirtation the attempted marriage failed in divorce with the judgment pronounced by my rationality decreeing that the Torah was not indeed the writ word of God.

Literalists may be tempted by the previous sentence to toss this work out of hand directly into the fire.  Indeed this may provide needed warmth to those suffering the effects of debt.  Just the same, with a bit of patience on both sides of the theist/atheist debate, I believe there is commonality to be found in the good intentions of the Torah.  While we may debate its authorship I will not debate that it was written with the best of intentions.  Further, I hold that it was written to describe an ideal rather than the actual practice of the day.  There is a common modern Israeli expression: “The synagogue I don’t go to is Orthodox.”  Similarly, I believe that the Torah describes an ideal set out for the people to follow which was likely, based on archaeological evidence, considerably different than religion actually practiced by the ancient Israelites.  Specifically, archaeology reveals the rampant practice of polytheism and idolatry up to the Babylonian exile.[2]  Biblical archaeology contends that the Torah was a compendium of tales written by a reformist movement railing against the practices of the day.  Setting aside the issue of biblical authorship, I will continue the discussion in the context of the good intentions of the author presently.

The now dubious authorship of the Torah made my original question even more pronounced.  If the Torah was not written by God, then who wrote it and how were the ancient Israelites aware of debt and its effects?  My research would lead me to the field of biblical archaeology.  I studied the works of William Dever and Israel Finklestein amongst others with the following results.  The ancient Israelites never conquered Canaan as told in the Torah canon.  They were instead Canaanites themselves who survived and replaced a decaying social order with a more egalitarian one.  For those interested in how I arrived at this conclusion there is a wonderful précis of biblical archaeology available on Public Broadcastings’ NOVA series: “The Bible’s Buried Secrets.”[3]  There you’ll find a terrific summary of all the archaeological and scientific findings to date.  I only wish this series had existed at the outset of my research for it would have saved me much trudging through many inaccessibly written academic works on the topic.  Researching biblical archaeology was much like archaeology itself: sifting through piles of academic detritus to yield occasional relics and then putting the pieces together.

So, accepting for the moment that the Israelite race emerged from the nadir of the Canaanite civilization, Zephaniah 1:11 becomes ever more clear:
“The dwellers of Machtesh [, a quarter of Jerusalem,] howl;/ For all the tradesmen [nation of Canaan] have perished, All who weigh silver are wiped out.”
Two things are critical in this passage.  First the time of Zephaniah, well past that of the Canaanite era, and second the reference to the weighing of silver.  Zephaniah was not admonishing the Canaanites but rather the Jewish merchants of Jerusalem who were acting like Canaanites.[4]  As to the reference to the weighing of silver, silver was then as it is now, a monetary metal.  All throughout history, every society has been plagued by the manipulation of their currency leading to their ultimate downfall.  Economists call the process seigniorage gain.

Seigniorage gain is the process by which the minter (usually the government) gains on the difference between the face value of the coin and the actual value of the metal used to make it.  I often think it is the job of economists to construct palatable names for what in the end turns out to be sheer larceny.  Those unfamiliar with the term may be more familiar with the contemporary synonyms such as ‘inflation’.  Whatever you choose to call it, ‘a lemon by any other name would taste as sour’ and inflation, currency manipulation, or seigniorage gain is quintessentially a tax on the middle class leading to widespread debt, poverty and wealth inequality.  It is a fundamental violation of the biblical injunction to have “fair weights and measures” (Deut 25:13-16).

It is my supposition that it was an economic collapse brought about by currency manipulation which spelled the end of the Canaanite civilization.  I will support this supposition by reviewing the log roll of history vis a vis currency manipulation and the subsequent unfolding of the relevant civilization.  Biblical archaeology tells us that the proto-Israelites literally fled for the hills in the face of the collapse of the Canaanites.[5]  There they regrouped and sought to set themselves apart from the evils of their past.  After the dust had settled they returned with a renewed spirit and purpose to set out a more equitable system.  To that end they developed laws against the accumulation of debt and the slavery that results.  Those laws were later canonized in the Pentateuch around the end of the Babylonian exile (4th to 6th centuries BCE).[6]

Some 600 years later we know that these laws were largely being ignored and that corruption again loomed large.  We have the historical testimony of the gospels of Luke and John which recount Jesus’ banishing of the money changers from the temple gates.  Around the time of the year 0 CE Roman currency was the common currency in the holy land.  These coins typically bore the images of pagan gods and were unacceptable for use in temple worship.  At the temple gates, benches of money changers would exchange these coins, at predatory exchange rates, to Levite coins for use in temple services.  These same money changers would charge the Levites unreasonable rates to change these coins back into Roman coins such that the Levite priests could make purchases in the markets.  Jesus found the entire process abominable and forcibly drove them from the temple.[7]  Whether you believe the historical veracity of the gospels is beside the point here.  What is known is that currency manipulation was clearly on the mind of the authors of the gospels and the gospels were known to be written around this time (admittedly within 400 years).  As a pertinent aside, the word ‘Bank’ comes from the Latin for ‘bench’ precisely referring to this historical antecedent.[8]  I believe it is social disarray caused by the financial ruin of Israel which led to its overthrow by the Romans.  There is textual evidence for this in the bible itself:  Jeremiah 7:11 reads “Is this house, whereupon My name is called, become a den of robbers in your eyes?”  Amos 5:7 reads “Ah you who trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the ground, and make the humble walk a twisted course.”

It is an irony of history, if not a recurring leitmotif, that the very same financial snare which destroyed Israel also destroyed its captors.  In Hebrew school we all learned of the famous (infamous) “Judea Capta” coin.[9]  This coin depicts the pride of the Romans in defeating ancient Israel.  It is in the silver or precious metal content of roman coinage with which we can track the decline of the Roman Empire.  The backbone coin of the Roman economy was the Denarius which started out with a silver weight of approximately 4.5 grams.  Have you ever noticed the ridges on the edge of a quarter?  These same ridges were present on the Denarius and there intention is to make any shaving of the coin obvious.  This made it harder for individuals to debase the currency but the government was free to mint coins with less and less silver content.  By the year 274 CE under Aurelian’s reign the coins had almost no silver content at all.[10]  The causes of the fall of Rome are admittedly complex, including the outsourcing of their military defense to barbarian mercenaries.  Just the same, the economic decline of Rome is certainly one of the principle causes and is yet another exemplar of the debasement of currency leading to the debasement of the underlying civilization.

The collapse of the Roman Empire led the world into the dark ages.  The Christian religion took hold championing the cause of the poor all through these long dark ages.  Eventually a fair monetary system was developed called the tally stick system.[11]  Very strict Christian based laws against usury (interest) prevented any monetary abuse.  However, in the 1500’s Henry VIII, obviously unaware of the peril, deregulated the economy and allowed for certain forms of usury.[12]  The economic maelstrom unleashed destroyed the English economy.  In the wake of the upheaval and in the aftermath of the English revolution of 1642, the Bank of London was established.  Oddly enough, the initial shares were bought with no other currency than talley sticks.  The bank of England replaced this monetary system with their own manipulated (or ‘fiat’) currency.  Currency manipulation was now institutionalized in the form of this ‘Central Bank’ put in place to ‘protect and regulate’ the money supply.

Just around this time, gold was being used as a currency.  Carrying ones gold on their person could be cumbersome and moreover, dangerous.  A robbery could erase ones savings.  The goldsmiths of the day agreed to hold gold for consumers at a nominal fee and issued them a certificate which they could then use to redeem their deposits.  These little slips of paper were much easier to work with and in a very short time, the slips of paper would be used in transactions instead of gold.  The goldsmiths made an astute observation.  Not all of their clients came to collect their gold at one instant.  As such they could lend out some of the deposited gold at interest making money on money they did not really have.  While this seems relatively harmless provided customers do not all come for their gold at once, it is in fact at the core of everything wrong in the world today.  The fraud is subtle yet essential to understand.  By using gold that say a farmer had deposited to make loans, you are using the hard labour of the farmer to make money with very little labour.  In a nutshell, this practice siphons up the value of labour and puts it in the hands of the advantaged few who are in a position to leverage it.  This is the practice of fractional reserve banking with is with us to this very day.[13]  When a middle class family takes out a loan to get an SUV, the bank does not lend you their money.  They lend you the savings of an auto worker who drives a compact sedan.  The banker turns interest on money s/he never owned and drives a luxury sports car on the profits.  Such is the food chain of fractional reserve banking.  Bankers love the practice for obvious reasons.  Politicians love it because they can finance their projects without reaching for tax dollars.  Projects can now be financed with thusly conjured money with only a nodding concern for inflation and the ever growing national debt. The average person neither loves it nor hates it because they do not understand it.  Hopefully, that is, until now.

The Bank of England was aware of the practice of the goldsmiths but instead of outlawing it, embraced it.  As such they succeeded in protecting and regulating the money supply insofar as her citizens of wealth were concerned but all to the detriment of the English parliament and the general public.  The bank so bankrupted England that England was forced to place a heavy tax burden on its colonies.  The American colonies revolted to the cry against ‘taxation without representation’ in the war of independence of 1762.  By the end of this revolution, with the effects of the Bank of England in mind the Americans set out to “form a more perfect union”.  Into their new constitution section 10 forbids “…emit[ing] Bills of Credit; mak[ing] any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts…”.[14]  It was pursuant to this section that the United States was on the Gold Standard for most of its existence up until 1933.  The Gold Standard ensured that every bill was backed by gold.  Bills printed prior to 1933 were marked “redeemable in gold”.  After 1933 they were marked as only “legal tender”.  The founding fathers knew of the threat of a manipulated currency but that memory and warning was, as we now see, historically fleeting.

The Americans had the first and second Banks of America which again started to manipulate the currency.  Andrew Jackson famously put a temporary stop to the banking cartels saying: “You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out.”[16]  For a short while he succeeded.  From 1836 to 1913 the United States was free of a central bank and the currency manipulation they bring with them.

During this hiatus in central banking while financial crises persisted, inflation was flat.  That is to say that one dollar was worth one dollar for this interim period.[17]  This allowed for the accumulations of savings which is the true practice of capitalism.  Indeed by the early 1900’s bankers were concerned with the prevalence of self-financing of business development.  So concerned were the bankers that they sought to reassert themselves and in 1913, taking advantage of a recent (some say engineered) financial crisis, the Federal Reserve was born and central banking was reborn in America.[18]  Again too, the promise of the Federal Reserve was to regulate the money supply and again, so it did, to the advantage of the wealthy few.  As it has always been throughout history, currency manipulation manufactures debt and poverty.  Since the inception of the Federal Reserve, the purchasing power of the dollar has decreased by 95%.  Inflation has increased by 1929% (that’s 19 hundred and twenty nine percent!).[19]  The effect of this is that wealth inequality is now staggering.  As of 2001, in the U.S., the top 20% held 84% of all the wealth.[20]  For those who have trouble dealing with math, what this means is that if you are in the class of the remaining 80% (most of us are) then in a more fairly distributed economy – which would necessarily feature a fair currency – you would have approximately 5 times your current assets.

As common as monetary manipulation is throughout history, so too are the attempted fixes when the system gets out of whack.  A fiat currency (recall a ‘fiat’ currency is an ‘on faith’ currency) is a sort of monetary Golem: this time made of minted coins instead of clay.  Generally it functions impeccably as designed, siphoning wealth upwards but occasionally and often dramatically, it causes large financial upset.  When this Golem takes a swat at its banker creators the solution is to placate it with, yes, ever more printed or minted money.  This maneuver results in one of two results: 1) a temporary stabilization of the monster or 2) a hyperinflationary death when the monster collapses under its own weight.  Note that in either outcome, the best that can be accomplished is a temporary shoring up of the system.  Inevitably, the Golem collapses back into the imaginary ore it came from, only after raping the value of the land and passing it into the hands of the elite few.  Revisiting the economic death of Rome, Nero and other Emperors debased the currency via inflation fiddling and minting as it were while Rome burned.

However, one need not look as far afield to find a terrific example of the hyperinflationary death of an empire.  Just recently, the Weimar republic died just such a death.[21]  In the 1920’s Germany forced under the WWI reparations act to make payments to the victor nations.  The victor nations, most notably France and England who were in their own financial distress due to – you may have guessed by now – their own currency manipulation, pressured the Germans to make good on their obligations.  The German coffers were largely empty and as a result they decided to print money to meet their obligations.  The German citizens were wary of the stability of their currency and began to hoard cash fearing a crisis.  Simultaneously the German creditors began to fear default on their loans and closed the taps of credit.  The German economy stalled and went into a brief bout of deflation.  The Germans did what every other economy has tried all throughout history to solve the problem:  they threw more money into the market to try and jumpstart it.  The German citizens feared for their nest eggs which caused them to attempt to convert any cash they had on hand to real assets.  This unleashed a torrent of cash on the market which immediately lead to hyperinflation.[22]  Hyperinflation is runaway inflation fueled by panic and distrust of the underlying currency.  A corollary to the loss of trust in currency is an inevitable loss of trust in the government that promotes it.  It was thus that the Weimar republic fell leaving a political vacuum in its wake which would soon be filled by the Nazis.  Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that: “It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.”[23]  History will record that this is equally applicable to the cessation of belief in government.

Historians and economists alike may be quick to point out that there would appear to be a historic precedent for economic spending or stimulus as an escape to recession.  They undoubtedly would point to the Roosevelt era and the “New Deal”.  So hope filled were the citizens of the day that the New Deal was rhapsodized into the Great Depression era musical: ‘Annie’.  Daddy Warbucks swooned “I know the depression is depressing… But we’ll get a new deal for Christmas this year.”[24]  The character Daddy Warbucks was modeled after Paul Warburg.[25]  It was common knowledge at the time that this was so.  Warburg was one of the chief architects of the Federal Reserve which is the United States arm of the Bank of England.  The bitter irony here is that it was the Federal Reserve System which caused and exacerbated the Great Depression.  They were anything but the cure.  The famed economist Milton Friedman spent a lifetime promoting this interpretation of events.  On the occasion of his 90th birthday Ben Bernanke, the current chairman of the Fed said: “I would like to say to Milton… Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”[26]  While I believe that Roosevelt was well intentioned, he was fatally naïve.  His New Deal served only to confiscate all public monetary gold and transfer yet more power to the Federal Reserve to manipulate currency.  The hidden tragedy of the musical Annie is that while she shares a stage with the theatric Roosevelt and Warbucks (Warburg) singing their accolades as her saviour, she is actually praising the instrument of her orphan plight.  (Annie was orphaned due to the financial insolvency of her parents.)

While unwittingly kissing the hand that starves you may be tragic when it occurs on stage, it is far more tragic when it occurs in the real world.  It is still a mainstream notion that Roosevelt’s New Deal was what rescued the Americans from the Great Depression.[27]  Even though all through history, government salvation through spending has led to financial ruin at every attempt some still espouse the idea that it is possible to spend our way out of the damage wrought by currency manipulation.  Currency manipulation is good for bankers and bankers fund business schools which produce bankers.  It is no wonder then that currency manipulation which goes hand in hand with government spending ‘has’ to be a good thing.  If you want to be at the top of this pyramid scheme you have to support the bricks that build it.  In this light, when the financial meltdown of 2008 hit, how did the pyramid builders propose to deal with the ‘Gre08er Depression’?  You guessed it, with more government spending.

Journalists are already pointing out the similarities in circumstances between Barack Obama and Roosevelt.[28]  I believe the comparisons are justified and that Obama is, like Roosevelt, well intentioned but critically misguided.  Mind you, not only is Obama misguided but most people are ill aware of monetary policy and its implications.  Obama promises trillion dollar deficits running for the next many years.[29]  It is his hope that this massive spending will shock the economy back to life.  The only shock it can reasonably hope to achieve though is shocking the Frankenstein of currency manipulation to life to turn on its creator.  The only reason Roosevelt’s New Deal appeared to work was that by the end of WWII, the US had developed tremendous manufacturing capabilities and the US was a burgeoning economy; the US emerged from the Great Depression despite Roosevelt’s New Deal, not because of it.  The situation in this Gre08er Depression is different.  There is no new manufacturing potential, indeed it is declining.  The US is not a burgeoning nation but is instead a declining one.  Thus the only shock government spending is capable of producing on the US economy is an electrocution.

Growing up I had trouble relating to the ancient Israelites I was reading about.  I could relate only to their enslavement in Egypt which I read as an allegory for my forced attendance at school.  Beyond that, they were a people very far from me both spatially and temporally.  My time was dominated by discussions and anxious anticipation of new technologies and new scientific discoveries.  While I could ‘upconvert’ an ordinance to help a neighbour right a fallen cattle to a more modern equivalent of assisting ones neighbour with a crashed computer in general the setting for torah morality written in terms of cattle, oxen and sheep failed to connect with me.  I was always amazed then as to how these seemingly simple people understood concepts such as debt.  Most debt in modern times comes from securing shelter.  In ancient Israel this could be accomplished by erecting four poles and securing canvas.  So where did these biblical injunctions come from, what wrong were they trying to right?

In trying to answer that question I would have to journey through studies of biblical archaeology and general history.  After so doing, I have found a new connection with the ancient Israelites.  They were trying to solve a very old and fundamental problem:  how to govern a large group of people equitably while preventing corruption.  Currency is one of the fundamental cornerstones of any civilization.  It is fundamental to most of our interactions and if it is corrupt, so too will inevitably be anything built on top of it.  Disappointment then comes in reading the scroll of history with each entry echoing the previous:  “Empire rises with high ideals.  The high ideals erode under complacency.  Corruption then leads to inequality and fiscal malaise.  Empire manipulates the currency to buy time.  Empire runs out of time.”

The tenet of monotheism according to the bible started with Abraham.  What the Torah describes as a moment of epiphany is revealed by biblical archaeologists to in fact be a long arduous process which took several hundreds of years.  Key here is that a stated ideal can become a practiced ideal with exertion of effort over time.  It is thus to the commandment that we “should have no poor among [us]” that we must redirect our time and efforts.  I have recently come to a conclusion that the reformed Canaanite predecessors of the world’s ‘big 3’ monotheistic religions likely came to long ago; poverty is not the result of a lack of wealth but instead a lack of justice.

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[1]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)
[2]   William G. Dever: “Did God Have a Wife?”
[3]   http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/program.html
[4]   http://books.google.ca/books?id=sIWn6lYS-MQC&pg=PA171
[5]   Smith, Mark “The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities of Ancient Israel” (pp 6-7)
[6]   McDonald & Sanders, editors of The Canon Debate, 2002, The Notion and Definition of Canon by Eugene Ulrich, pg 4
[7]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_money_changers
[8]   http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bank
[9]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaea_Capta_coinage
[10]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Michael_Rostovtzeff.2C_Ludwig_von_Mises.2C_and_Bruce_Bartlett [11]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talley_stick
[12]  http://books.google.ca/books?id=pnszAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA8
[13]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#History
[14]  http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec10.html
[15]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
[16]  http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_by/andrew+jackson
[17]  http://www.economics-charts.com/cpi/cpi-1800-2005.ht ml
[18]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve
[19]  http://postworthy.com/Worthy/ex/US_Dollar_Purchasing_Power_Decline/205.aspx[20]  http://mwiner.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/wealthdistribution.gif
[21]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s_German_inflation
[22] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
[23]  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/malcolm_muggeridge.html[24]  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2vGeaqM33g
[25]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Warburg#Legacy
[26]  http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/default.htm[27]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
[28]  http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20081124,00.html
[29]  http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-01-06-obama-economy_N.htm

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Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Review of:
“Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever”
By: Walter Kirn (Doubleday)
Reviewed By: Martin C. Winer
June 28, 2009

When I picked up “Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday), I expected a semi-dry expose on the problems facing the American Education system with an emphasis on the Ivy League schools.  The only semi-dry thing in the book was the champagne Kirn poured over two fawning exchange students during a graduation night orgy on his way to Princeton.  Told with prose and wit more common to novels, Kirn details his experiences as he rises out of the rural Minnesota winning one of 20 transfer student spots at Ivy League Princeton.

By Kirn’s account it is a wonder that there is any ivy left due to the propensity of the students to smoke any mildly herbaceous looking thing.

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around … held that drugs, … especially plant based psychedelic drugs helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” (p. 124)

Recreational drug use was pervasive at Princeton as were many other illicit activities, with education taking a back seat.  I was so engaged with the stories that I was half way through when I reexamined the title and asked “what is a meritocracy anyways?”

Meritocracy was introduced as a more equitable replacement for aristocracy. Insofar as education, Harvard’s James Conant championed the cause of educational reform towards meritocracy as a realization of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a “natural aristocracy among men, founded on virtue and talents.” (Jefferson used the term ‘natural aristocracy’ instead of ‘meritocracy’ because it wasn’t coined a term until the 1958 book “Rise of the Meritocracy” by Michael Young.  Incidentally it was intended pejoratively.) As with many high minded theories, the implementation often renders an imperfect reflection of the ideal.

Conant set the controversial School Aptitude Test (SAT) as gatekeeper for the bastions of higher learning guarding all the rewards of power that lay beyond.  When Walter Kirn took the SAT, he discovered he “had a natural talent for multiple-choice tests [which] landed [him] without the vaguest survival instructions [at Princeton]”. (p. 6)  Throughout the course of the book which details his experiences at Princeton Kirn suggests that his education consisted of learning how to succeed in the education system;  this is a far cry from becoming educated.

The distinction is eloquently revealed when Kirn is asked to discuss the ‘critical assumptions’ he’s made in reading the Norton anthologies;  unfortunately, Kirn had done little reading at all:

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the [Princeton Student] Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” (p.119)

Throughout the course of the book Kirn refers to himself as a fraud – sometimes proudly but more often with remorse.  But is Kirn a fraud or instead a sufferer of “Fraud Syndrome”?  Fraud Syndrome (also Impostor Syndrome) is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, but it is a topic well known and documented by psychiatrists and psychologists.  It is an intellectual condition where the intellect feels disconnected from any accomplishments or abilities.  If the intellect were a tree, then the tree would lack any knowledge of its roots and thus mistakenly think that its ability to grow upright was the result of undeserved serendipity.

Kirn’s notion that he somehow managed to beguile and finesse the system into accepting him to its highest ranks is significantly, and ironically, weakened by the quality of the writing he uses in making said point.  What follows is an example of Kirn’s average writing:

“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.” (p. 30)

Witty and clever turns of phrases such as these are found on every other page.  While this made for a delightful read, it served to undermine one of his main tenets.  It seems far more likely that Kirn didn’t finesse the system, but that the system managed recognized his talent despite his own inability to do so – marshalling him exactly where he ought to be: in the commensurate Princeton English Program.

If Fraud Syndrome ever does make it one day to be an official diagnosis, then Kirn should appear on the Public Service Announcement poster.  The text is rife with examples of Kirn’s detachment from his talent and feelings of being a fraud:

“My genuine tears [over the news of John Lennon’s death] flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.” (p. 77)

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery [(using catchphrases)] — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.” (p. 121)

“I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes.” (p. 122)

“[My poems] were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of “personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.” (p.140)

“I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that [my] Bittman [character] was a hybrid version of Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” (p.144)

“I felt in [my friend’s] company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.” (p. 168)

One of Kirn’s Princeton encounters offers a possible cause for Fraud Syndrome.  Kirn has a conversation with Julian — undoubtedly Dr. Julian Jaynes best known for his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” – in a bar following the production of one of Kirn’s plays.  Julian explained that the human mind was actually two distinct entities, that in ancient times were:

“… virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  …  But who was this being?  …  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.” (pps. 93-94)

When Julian asked Kirn: “did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?” Kirn replied: “Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.” (p. 94)  Perhaps this is why Kirn was unable to identify with his obvious talent; it felt external to him.  While Kirn makes this point incidentally in his book, it is nonetheless a very important one.  While Kirn fails to connect with his talent due to this separation of the mind, many more do something far worse:  Many fail to express their talents at all – failing to listen to that other ‘voice’.

While Kirn fails to impress upon me that his placement at Princeton was either coincidental or accidental, he does make some well taken points about the education he received once there.  It seems that when reading in the English program, pretension superseded comprehension.

“We … concluded, before we’d read even a hundredth of it, that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.” (p.121)

“To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long live the king.”  (p.122)

Kirn found that many of the supposed ‘greats’ they were asked to read were completely incomprehensible by students and professors alike:

“Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking “heteronomous’ and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across – tucked in a footnote –“unreadability.”

That word I understood of course.” (p.120)

For Kirn, university was a process in learning to jockey jargon words and phrases effectively.  Phrases like ‘semiotically unstable’ (referring to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) and words such as ‘hermeneutical’, ‘gestural’, ‘recursive’, ‘incommensurable’ were all synonyms for ‘hard’.  Kirn was extremely confused by the works he read but he realized that confusion was not something to be escaped by understanding, but instead something which could be exploited by mirroring it back at its source.

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.”  (p.122)

Kirn was adrift in a sea of confusion but it seemed that he was managing to navigate it by drinking the sea water and rolling with the currents.  It wasn’t long before Kirn’s thirst for meaning caught up with him, just as he had become completely intellectually dehydrated, basking in the scorching sun of the top percentile.  Kirn suffered a collapse, unable to continue the charade:

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. I began most of my sentences with “the.”  Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. “The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” (p.178)

Eventually Kirn recovered after undertaking a course of self guided education which he found more fulfilling.  He continued his academic career at Oxford as a recipient of the “Keasbey Prize”.  Kirn draws two broader conclusions from his experience.

The first is a ‘roll with the punches and everything will turn out alright’ sort of message.  “… I discovered the truth — if words like “truth” mean anything.  And even if they don’t perhaps.  Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.”  (p. 205)  This advice may bear meaning for someone like Kirn with an innate and wonderful talent.  Its relevance to the rest of us who must work at it is somewhat questionable.

The second conclusion comes out more strongly in the interviews surrounding the book, but it is mentioned briefly.    In an interview (The Colbert Report: May 19, 2009.) Kirn claims that the current meritocracy does not reward depth, but instead rewards the “ability to define ‘incipient’. “Basically people who are very good at cross word puzzles end up running the country.”  “They are able to shine in every cocktail party they attend, but when it comes to running the economy, fighting the war on terror, … not very good.”  Kirn is referring to Donald Rumsfeld and to certain Lehman Brothers board members, who are Princeton Alumni.  Given Kirn’s experiences, it is easy to imagine jargon slinging economists brandishing terms like “Collaterized Debt Obligations” and “Credit Default Swaps” using them as talking points, rather than understanding their deeper implications.  Terms like these undoubtedly are mentioned in numerous A+ Ivy League Economics theses, confounding both the authors and the readers while leading to economic ruin.

This second summation is made in the book when Kirn discusses a run in, after graduating Princeton yet before going to Oxford, with an old friend who was self taught and well read.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” (p. 210)

AID · aig · ale · America · artist · author · cent · CHIEF · Coming · Deconstruction and Criticism · drugs · economist · Economy · God · Harvard · head · http · ILS · Impostor Syndrome · Ivy League · Jacques Derrida · John Lennon · Julian · Julian Jaynes · Karl · king · lehman brothers · logic · Martin C. Winer · Martin C. Winer June · Minnesota · MIT · OJ · Oxford · Princeton · professor · quote · Ralph Waldo · RAM · Red · Rome · Stephen Colbert · The Colbert Report · video · Wallace Stevens · Walter Kirn · Walter Kirn (Doubleday) · writing

Lori Gottlieb, the 43 year old single author, having learned from her failed experiences in dating has penned a book due out this spring:

“Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough”. 

The reviewer suggests that Gottlieb’s “stark message ran directly counter to the neofeminist Sex and the City perpetuated mantra that we should all hold out for The One because we’re worth it.”  Feminisms however is typically anti marriage and against romantic love. 

The phenomenon of un-marrieable females goes well beyond the simple explanation offered above.  I can’t offer a few sentences to summarize what would take a novel to explain except to say that the answer is as involved as my now retired ‘black book’ is full of un-marrieable women I’ve dated over the years.

I think Kierkegaard said it best:

“If you marry, you will regret it.  If you do not marry, you will also regret it.  If you marry or do not marry, you will regret both.  Whether you marry or do not marry, you will regret both."
– Soren Kierkegaard.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article7009556.ece

author · Lori Gottlieb · single author · Soren Kierkegaard

Randall Mills Holding A Hydrino Reactor

BlackLight’s physics-defying promise: Cheap power from water – Jul. 2, 2008.

“For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.”

  — G. K. Chesterton

It would seem that the same is true regarding our worship of fossil fuels.  As fuel prices skyrocket there has been a run on alternative energy ideas.  I’ve covered several on this blog. 

http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/over-unity-cavetation-water-heater/
http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/thane-heins-perpetual-motion-free-energy-or-simply-releasing-a-brake/
http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/perpetual-motion-claim-if-its-a-hoax-its-a-good-one/
http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/solution-to-the-energy-crisis-aluminum-hydrogen-cycle/

This one, like that of Thane Heins breaks some laws of physics.  In the case of Heins, it was the Law of Conservation of Energy.  Randall Mills has broken some laws of Quantum Mechanics in suggesting that there is a lower energy state below the currently known ground state of hydrogen.  Mills terms such hydrogen atoms in this new lower energy state: ‘hydrinos’.

Electrons orbit the nucleus at well defined distances.  These distances (states) are finite, discrete or quantized as it were.  If an electron is excited by an influx of energy, it jumps to a higher state.  Conversely when an electron jumps to a lower orbital state, it releases some energy (a quanta of energy).  There is a theoretical limit to how low an electron can go in this scheme.  It’s called the ground state and it’s analogous to the lowest floor an elevator can go.

Hydrogen is the simplest, and most studied atom in modern science.  It consists of a proton and an electron.  It’s no wonder then that when Mills claims to have discovered a new ‘basement’ state below the known ground state that many physicists dismiss him out of hand.  If Mills is correct however, then this new ‘basement’ state could be used to cause hydrogen to release much more energy than simply burning hydrogen.

The crown jewel of science is the scientific method.  It avoids any political and otherwise human failings.  In short, can Mills produce this effect reproducibly and reliably.  The answer so far appears to be yes.  Mills’ company Blacklight has released prototype commercialized applications of his technology which are slated to be installed in power stations in 2009. 

During the interim, there is soft evidence which is also compelling.  Mills doesn’t want your money.  He has plenty of it in the form of $60 million in investments.  Mills also doesn’t want your help.  He has plenty in the form of an all star board of directors featuring many energy magnates.  All Mills needs to do now is to demonstrate his technology working on industrial scales.  He promises to deliver energy at 2 cents per kilowatt hour, whereas the current national average is 8.9 cents. 

This blog will continue to track events on this front.

ale · alternative energy · aluminum · author · blacklight · blog · Case · cent · energy · energy ideas · energy magnates · flu · God · http · hydrinos · hydrogen · king · lower energy state · MIT · quantum mechanics · randall mills · Red · technology working · thane heins · USD

I recently downloaded a plugin called Mobilize by Mippin(http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mobilize-by-mippin-wordpress-plugin/) to make my blog: www.martincwiner.com mobile compatible.  It was a very simple install with zero configuration required.  It was so simple in fact that I wasn’t quite sure if it was working at all. 

I went to a mobile emulator site and viewed my blog through it.  The results exceeded all my expectations. 

http://emulator.mtld.mobi/emulator.php?emulator=sonyK750&webaddress=martincwiner.com

I recommend this simple and powerful plugin for all wordpress blog authors to enhance exposure to the mobile web.

9/11 · author · blog · cent · http · king · mobile emulator site · mobile web · php · Red · web · www.martincwiner.com

Many discuss, argue and berate the contents of the big three religious texts: the Quran, The Old Testament and The New Testament.  Discussions have been going on for millenia about what is contained therein.  I’ve been more interested, indeed dismayed, by what is missing.  These books are held to be the writ word of God by the adherents of their respective faiths.  Now, if God be the author of these texts, I wonder how it was possible to omit some critical information.

Slavery:  All the aforementioned texts allow slavery.  Sure, they may put limits on it.  They may even dictate humane ways to treat your slaves, but slaves be they just the same.  It was humans, noble humans at least, that put a stop to the practice only not so long ago.  All of humanity has been enriched by the emancipation.  Wouldn’t God know that?

Environment:  “Be fruitful and multiply” the Lord of the Old and New Testament declares boldly.  But what of population control?  What of greenhouse gasses?  The Old Testament contains passages urging the ancient Israelites to bury their excrement outside of the camp to keep the place clean.  But what of the future generations?  Religious texts are supposed to be written for all generations.  Otherwise why should we at a later generation be compelled to abide by them?  So true, at the time of their writing, there was no concern for population control or emission of greenhouse gasses, but there would be for future generations.  Wouldn’t God know that?

Democracy:  Democracy isn’t the perfect solution; far from it.  Just the same it’s far better than any other system that’s come along so far.  Moreover democracies are largely peaceful compared to their predecessors.  So why then is there no mention of it in any of the religious texts?  Why is it a Hellenic invention?  Centuries of warfare might have been averted had democracy taken an earlier hold which it certainly would have if it were sanctioned by the big three religious texts.  Wouldn’t God know that?

Health:  The big three religious texts go to excruciating details into what can and cannot be eaten.  Restrictions of shellfish, rules for butchering methods and the like go on and on for pages and pages.  Yet on those pages we find narry a mention of things which are currently obvious.  How about a few words about high fat, high cholesterol diets?  How about a few words about not smoking?  Now this knowledge may not have been accessible to the people of the day but wouldn’t God know that?

Finance:  All religions have prohibitions against usury.  However, readers must be careful in that when they read these prohibitions they must realize that these prohibitions apply to lending with interest to someone of the same faith.  Lending to others, outside the faith is allowed.  So then what about financial disasters we’ve faced?  They were caused by manipulation of currency and powerful bankers taking control of our financial system.  How about some laws defining a fair monetary system?  How about laws preventing partial reserve banking ( a current system where banks lend money they don’t actually have on reserve )?  How about laws prohibiting the artificial contraction and expansion of the money supply which caused the Great Depression, the Great Inflation of the 70’s and now plays a major part in the current recession of 2008?  Now the people of the day may not have understood these concepts but wouldn’t God know that?

ancient israel · author · bank · banker · banking · cent · democracy · Environment · finance · God · great depression · Health · http · ILS · inflation · Israel · israelites · king · MIT · new testament · old testament · partial reserve banking · quran · Red · Religion · reserve banking · slavery · Torah · writing

TVO (public television in Ontario) recently aired a lecture by Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and an author discussing his latest book Musicophilia.  I’ve always been interested in the understanding music on a neurological basis.  Music seems so universal that I often wonder what is happening on a neurological basis to make it such?  I’ve jotted down a few key points from the lecture.  The lecture audio can be found here.

Points:

• Upon visual inspection of a brain, one can tell which individuals were musicians and which weren’t.  This isn’t the case for say a mathematician.
• Even with diseases of the cerebral cortex (Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, etc) musical ability is often retained.
• 10% of musicians and 20% of born blind musicians have absolute (perfect) pitch.  Absolute pitch is the ability to recognize a note as say a G-sharp upon hearing.
• It is theorized that in born blind musicians the visual cortex is reallocated to music and tonal perception.
• Absolute pitch appears to be universal in the early years of life and is pruned away during later years.
• Some people can suffer from musical hallucinations which are loud enough to drown out their ability to hear actual conversations.

absolute pitch · Alzheimer's · author · Case · cent · dca · hallucinations · http · levis · life · logic · mathematician · mp3 · Music · Musicophilia · neurologist and an author · neurology · Oliver Sacks · Ontario · Parkinson's · perfect pitch · pruning · Red · web

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Notes and Excerpts:

“Marine’s [Marine, Minnesota] elementary school was on a hill.  It was the largest man-made structure in town, one of the newest, and by far the ugliest.  Shape: rectangular.  Material: beige brick.  Constructed with tax money, it looked like tax money, a fiscal line item come to joyless life.  Even the playground equipment seemed bureaucratic: a stainless-steel slide and a set of iron monkey bars on which one could picture army recruits glumly sweating their way through basic training.  From the moment I entered the building’s long tiled hallway, its colorless walls inadequately brightened with red-and-yellow construction-paper maple leaves, I wanted out.  But out, I know, meant through. ” p.25

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“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.  What is Beauty?  The thing that made me like things when nobody was pushing me to like them. ” p.30

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On losing a debate…
“I’d harmed myself the night before the match by staying up till dawn trying to walk off and bathe away the phosphorescent curlicues of dread lossed in my brain by a drugged cupcake I’d eaten with a teammate in her motel room.  I hadn’t fully recovered when I found myself battling a girl with close-set eyes and the excessively brushed straight hair of a virginal prodigy.  Here was a force I’d never faced before: the supercharged purity of postponed puberty augmented by early viola training.” p.62

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In an early computer class, no one seemed able to use the computer yet it was promised to revolutionize the future:

“That’s when we stopped touching the device and chose to regard it as an icon or a totem.  Our classes turned into speculative chats about the wonders the object might perform if instead of addressing it in COBOL or FORTRAN, we could interact with it in English.  To heighten the atmosphere of possibility, we kept the thing plugged in.  This warmed its obscurely coiled and bundled insides, releasing unappetizing chemical vapors. ” p.66

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Upon watching a younger talented computer whiz work the computer…

“The exhibition unveiled no technical mysteries, but it did help me understand the term “conservative” as I’d once heard it used by a friend’s father while he was watching the TV news.  A conservative was a person who stopped adjusting once adjustment brought him no vital benefits.  The commandment to us from kindergarten on had been to grow, to expand ourselves, to stretch, but there was another option too, I saw.  Once could let others cope with the novelty and concentrate on the familiar.”  p.68

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On a graduation night romp with two exchange students:

Skirts came up, pants slipped off, and legs made V’s that turned into X’s and shifted on complex axes that allowed for wonders of sidelong friction that brought forth fetching squeaks and grunty purrs and primordially bridged all language gaps.  Some new bond was being stirred in that car, some fresh form of international understanding that the Rotary Club, or whichever organizations sponsored the exchange program, might not have planned on but shouldn’t have been displeased by, so intimately did it shrink our globe. p. 73

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Kirn feeling he was a fraud while mourning the passing of John Lennon:

“”All the lonely people,” he began [singing].

The choice was a magical piece of luck for me.  Afterwards, spent, having sung with my whole rib cage and fully emoted on every memorized word, I felt the urge to cry for real — from gratitude.  Thanks to my gloomy second-grade music teacher, I’d managed to respond convincingly, in the company of a well-credentialed witness, to a historic cultural tragedy that would be revisited for decades.  My genuine tears flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.  It represented ambition, longing, need.  It sprung from the deepest chambers of my soul.” p.77

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Drug use was rampant, even for the lighting guy during the performance of one of Kirn’s plays:

“The lighting guy, who’d eaten a hash brownie which he’d sworn would wear off before the show, toggled at random between clashing colors, turning the stage into a cruise-ship disco…” p.91

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Discussing a conversation Kirn had about  ‘the divided brain’.  Kirn may be a victim of this divided brain, leading to the impostor syndrome which he suffers from greatly:

“The best conversation of my life ensued — one I could never have had in Minnesota and one that helped me forget my recent troubles by occupying me with cosmic issues of just the sort a place like Princeton should raise but so far hadn’t, at least when I’d been listening.  Julian taught psychology, he said, despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he’d written as an amateur.  It had ground out of his reading of ancient literature and concerned, he said, “the history of consciousness.”  I asked him to explain but keep it simple.  He told me that he’d try.  The modern human brain, he said, was actually two brains functioning as one brain, but there had been a time, long, long, ago, when man’s double brain had operated differently.  It’s parts, its halves, had been separate then, divided.  In fact, they’d been virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  This voice seemed to come from another being, really.  But who was this being?  Who were these secret speakers?  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.

“Back when, before the Breakdown,” said Julian, “before the gods and voices fell silent, writers truly believed in inspiration.  They experienced inspiration.  It was real to them. Tell me: did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.  Should it?”

Julian shook his head, but not as vigorously as I would have liked.

“What was the ‘Breakdown’?” I asked him.  I had to know.  I had to know everything he did, suddenly.  Julian was a genius, I’d decided, even if everything he’d said was crazy.  And it probably was.  Because I understood it.” pps 93-94

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_Syndrome

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Kirn is brought before the Honor Committee accused of cheating on his Spanish mid-term:

“Guilty or innocent? Yes or no,” Rob said.

I ate a pretzel and let Rob’s anger hang there.  I thought he should have to feel it in the air.  I thought it might force him to face his ugliness.  Then I said, “I heard this from a senior.  In France, there’s a critic, I forget his name, who teaches that antonyms, words that mean the opposite, don’t really mean the opposite at all.  They aren’t the only alternatives, that is.  There are other words between them.  And all around them.”

“Fascinating except this isn’t France.”

“You tell me to choose, but the words I’m meant to choose from — ‘innocent and ‘guilty’ — aren’t my only choices.  I chose another one.  ‘Uncovictable’. p.109

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Kirn discusses the ‘critical assumptions’ he’d made in reading.  Unfortunately, Kirn had done very little reading at all.

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” pg119

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On the unreadability of some of the supposed ‘Greats’:

“This suffocating sensation often came over me ‘whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a. collection of essays by leading theory people that l spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force.  Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking ”heteronomous’ and ”invagination.” When I turned the page I came across- tucked in a footnote –”unreadability.”
That word I understood of course.” p.120

See: http://books.google.ca/books?id=igP67FXXQCEC

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

————————————————————————-

Kirn discusses the literary catchphrases for ‘hard’: ‘ semiotically unstable’ (referring to TS Elliot’s The Waste Land), hermeneutical, gestural, recursive, incommensurable. pps 120-122

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Kirn discusses his use of literary catchphrases to mask his ignorance of literature.

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.  We recognized one another instantly.  … We spoke of “playfullness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.”  p.121

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Kirn discusses how he used his confusion to his advantage:

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.  p.122

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On feeling a fraud for learning to regurgitate professors opinions rather than truly appreciating the classics:

I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes. In classrooms discussions and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic post-modernisn – that I had mastered almost without effort.  To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long  live the king.  p.122

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On page 122, Kirn holds a play of planters on a stage.  He watches in amazement as the audience waits for something to happen, which never does.  The play is titled: Planters and Waiters.  Double-entendre on “waiters”.

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On drug use at Ivy League schools:

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around the veggie house held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs — especially plant based psychedelic drugs — helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” p.124

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Kirn expresses a unique view on the relationship between literature and war:

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place.  That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything.  Without literature, humans would all be one.  Warfare was simply literature in arms.  The pen was the reason man invented the sword.”  p.145

This may not be as outlandish a suggestion as it may first seem.  If literature is based on pretence instead of substance, as it was in the case of Kirn’s education, then pretence needs to be defended by violence of all forms, military and otherwise.  Further if the great written works upon which the great religions of the world are based turn out to be not the writ word of God, they are then by exclusion, works of literature.  The swords that have been raised in the name of these literary works are well documented.

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More evidence of the theme of detachment.  Kirn seems detached from his inspiration.

“Tessa’s poems focused on harrowing emotions grief, self-loathing, panic while mine were concerned with grander matters Such as the creeping loss of ”personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.   I invented an alter ego, ”Bittman,” and in my poems I stretched him on the rack of   mechanization and macroeconomics In class, Tessa praised my poems as “Kafkaesque” but I could tell she didn’t like them.” p.140

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More on the impostor/fraud theme:

“Out of shame for this hypothetical failure and hoping to break through to intimacy, I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that Bittman was a hybrid version of Elliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry, two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” p.144

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Kirn had ongoing conversations with “V.” – an exchange student who “represented the best of the best of [his] entire country”.

“I felt in his company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.  And I felt flattered when he listened to me.  Here was a young man who represented the best of the best of an entire country — of an entire people, as I saw it — and I was holding his attention.” p.168

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The pains Kirn went to in order to write collegiate essays after he’d lost his fulfillment in so doing.

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. l began most of my sentences with ”the.” Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. ”The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” p.178

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Kirn develops a regime for deprogramming him self from his college ‘undereducation’ and pulling himself out of a resulting depression.

“My alarm clock woke me every morning at five, and for the next three hours I’d lie in bed, with my reference books propped open on my stomach, and repeat aloud, in alphabetical order, every word on every single page, along with its definitions and major synonyms. The ritual was humbling but soothing, and for she first time in my academic career I found myself making measurable strides, however minuscule. “Militate.” “Militia.” “Milk.”  I spent as much energy on the easy words as I did on the hard ones — my way of showing contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise. And in truth, they were all hard words for me by then.” p.183

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Reflections on having been awarded a post at Oxford.

“I’d soon be off to Oxford as a result.  “result” was not exactly the right word, though, because it suggested that logic governs destiny.  But now I knew otherwise.  Imagination does.  And though part of me had always suspected as much and certain teachers had coached me in the notion (“Image that you can be anything you want”), what I hadn’t understood at all was that our imaginations don’t act alone.  One’s own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another’s.

Imagine having been imagined.  Imagine.” p.205

Kirn’s summation of the book:

“… I discovered the truth — of words like “truth” mean anything.  Ad even if they don’t perhaps.

Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.

Some call this Grace.

I called it Marguerite.”  (Margerite Keasbey established the Keasbey Prize which Kirn received (enabling him to go on to Oxford)  after being denied a Rhode’s Scholarship). p 205

See: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/02/08/19971/

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Towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Kirn’s Uncle Admiral — a childhood mentor — was Robert W. Knox RADM USC & GS (Ret.).  Here is a brief biography:

http://www.history.noaa.gov/cgsbios/biok4.html

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Kirn’s second, broader conclusion:  Reflecting on a friend Karl who was self-taught and well read and wanted to meet up with after Kirn graduated Princeton.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” p.210

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News of the latest diatribe against Orthodox Judaism crossed my computer screen recently.  In his first book, R. D. Gold’s “Bondage of the Mind” attempts to lay out solid counter proofs against the supposed moral authority of the Orthodox.  In my 34th year of life this isn’t the first attempt I’ve seen nor is it likely to be my last. 

I haven’t read the book but I have read several reviews.  Some of the main points discussed are:

1. The Torah is a work of man, not the writ word of God.
2. The survival of the Jewish people throughout the millenia is remarkeable but not necessarily a work of God.  Many other peoples have survived in place for centuries
3. The Torah does not describe an ultimate justice citing the punishment of righteous king Josiah for the sins of Manasseh.
4. The problems of modern society are not related to a loosening of religious standards.  Religious standards themselves proscribe certain immoral behaviours.  Gold cites several examples including the Orthdox treatment of women.
5. Gold examines several controversial figures (Rabbi Ovadia Yosef) and several Orthodox scandals.  The subtext to his discussions would appear to be that the presence of controversial characters or scandals places the moral supremacy of the Orthodox under suspicion.

I can’t speak to Gold’s intentions in writing his book but I can speak to it’s anticipated effects.  It will and already has upset some of the Orthodox.  It may prevent some borderline candidates from becoming Orthodox.  It will not move many Orthodox to leave the ranks. 

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked…
– H. L. Mencken

That may sound as if it was intended as an insult.  Not so.  I, having been orthodox myself, fully understand the joy of belief.  Just the same, being a servant of the truth above all else, I must admit I was deluded during my stint of Orthodoxy.  There are no magic bullets that can be used to, in an instant, disprove Orthodoxy.  It isn’t a problem of logic, it’s a problem of psychology.  The fabric of belief is ripstop nylon which has been reinforced under centuries of attack.  Ripstop nylon in turn is the stuff of hot air balloons, full of hot air yes, yet they offer long peaceful rides just the same.  It’s only upon a paradigmatic shift away from Orthodoxy that one is able to look at the body of knowledge and notice many, not just a few, magic bullets of failed logic.  I have an armory of magic bullets at my disposal, which have come from a lifetime of reflection and re-evaluation.  I’ll share my favourite bullet.  It’s a subtle point but personally I find it undefeatable.

Orthodox Judaism holds two bodies of law to be of divine origin:  the Torah and the Talmud.  The Torah is the written law allegedly passed down to Moses at Mount Sinai and the Talmud is a compilation of the Oral Tradition.  In common law there exists the notion of Statutes and Regulations.  The former allocates the legislative authority and the latter are the laws created based on that authority.  Both reference eachother extensively and one is meaningless without the other. 

Orthodox Judaism likewise claims that the Talmud and Torah are inseperable.

The Gemara (also known as the Talmud or Oral Torah ), an explanation of the Written Torah, was given to Moshe at Sinai. Without the Talmud the Written Torah can’t be understood. There are a lot of critical facts and points that are only hinted at or not even mentioned in the Written Torah that were explained in the Talmud.
– http://www.beverlyhillschabad.com/gemara.htm

I agree that they are inseparable, in that the Torah makes little sense without the Talmud.  However, the Torah doesn’t mention the Talmud, not even once.  Now, not to be stereotypical, but Jews have no shortage of lawyers.  I find it very hard that God, the father of this nation, would write two bodies of law one of which contains no reference to the other.  It just wouldn’t happen.

The Orthodox, of course, disagree and claim that the following verse proves divine origins of both bodies:

And I will give thee the tables of stone, and the law and the commandment, which I have written that thou mayest teach them.
–  Exodus XXIV, 12.

Where is the mention of the Talmud?  It says the laws and commandments which I have WRITTEN.  Where is the mention of the Oral Tradition (Talmud)?  The Talmud itself tries to explain this away:

R. Levi b. Hama says further in the name of R. Simeon b. Lakish: What is the meaning of the verse: And I will give thee the tables of stone, and the law and the commandment, which I have written that thou mayest teach them?  ‘Tables of stone’: these are the ten commandments; ‘the law’: this is the Pentateuch; ‘the commandment’: this is the Mishnah; ‘which I have written’: these are the Prophets and the Hagiographa; ‘that thou mayest teach them’: this is the Gemara.  It teaches [us] that all these things were given to Moses on Sinai.
– Berakoth 5a -> http://www.come-and-hear.com/berakoth/berakoth_5.html

Am I to accept that an interpretation of God’s word is God’s word because a human interpreted God’s word to be God’s word?  If you’re confused by that previous sentence, it was intentional, and pretty much sums up my point.  To rephrase, you can’t claim that the Talmud is the divine word of God by interpreting the Torah in the Talmud to suit your purpose.  The only proof I’d accept is the Torah itself saying: “today I give you the oral laws and the written laws”.  Short of this, I say to the Orthodox when they play Moral Monopoly: “Do not pass Go, Do not collect 200 shekels”. 

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Some may say that the debate between Capitalism and Socialism has long been concluded with the fall of the Former Soviet Union. While it is true that large scale Communism will likely never be tried again, the debate continues in smaller forums. Michael Moore’s recent film ‘Sicko’ reignites this debate as it pertains to healthcare.

In so doing, the global pros and cons of either system need to be considered when applied to healthcare. The nutshell ‘con’ of Socialism is that it fails to motivate people and deliver supplies and resources efficiently. In turn, the nutshell ‘con’ of Capitalism is that it can be very cold and tunnel visioned, in that it is only profit seeking, which may go against the true desires of its citizens.

When we apply Capitalism or Socialism to healthcare we see the inherent strengths and weaknesses of either system manifest themselves. Specifically, we find Capitalism style healthcare too cold and non-inclusive. However, Socialized healthcare again has problems of motivation of healthcare providers and delivery of cutting edge technologies and services in a timely manner. We’ll work a few examples to flesh this out.

Suppose you are in your doctor’s office and, heaven forbid, you are given the most feared diagnosis in medicine: Cancer. You may or may not want to live in a country with Socialized medicine. This author lives in Canada which is far from the masterpiece of healthcare that Moore seems to paint in his film. I may remind Moore that another man’s grass is always greener and another man’s bill of health is always cleaner.

Canada has a long history of socialized institutions from gas, phone service, electric utilities, etc. to healthcare. But long gone are the halcyon days of government institutions. In recent years there has been a spate of privatization with private health clinics and tiered systems for healthcare already on the table. Having said all that, Canada still maintains a socialized healthcare system, at least for the moment.

Returning to our dreaded Cancer diagnosis, the word on the street in Canada is that our doctors are often not aggressive enough in treating Cancer. Many hugely expensive, yet promising, courses of treatments are avoided due to long wait times or simple unavailability. It is a common practice of Canadians to drive into Buffalo for example for a faster MRI. Having said all that, suppose you are low on funds and are recommended a course of chemotherapy. In this case, ignoring the wait times, you’d want to live in Canada where this is covered. Make no mistake about it, socialized medicine is something that I’m quite proud of as a Canadian, however, it is necessary to make sure we don’t exalt it as a panacea when in fact, it is not. In the final estimation it suffers from the same inherent problems of Socialism, lack of motivation and problems with resource delivery.

Turning our attention to Capitalism as it pertains to healthcare, we again will use Cancer as an example and this time we’ll examine the Pharmaceutical industry. Imagine for a second that I told you there was a new substance which, in mice, was able to shrink lung, breast and brain cancers. This substance was able to target Cancer cells specifically eliminating most, if not all, of the side effects of conventional cancer treatments. You’d think the pharmaceutical companies would be beating a path to the researcher’s door but they’re not. The reason? The compound the researcher works with is about as common as table salt. DCA (Dichloroacetic acid) is a common laboratory compound already available from any chemical supplier. Most importantly, it’s not patentable. As a result, drug companies have no way of recouping any money they pour into its research in human trials. As a result the researcher (Dr. Evangelos Michelakis out of the University of Alberta) is left to ‘pass the hat’ to try to collect the necessary funds to conduct the human trials. Here we see the tunnel vision of Capitalist style healthcare, overly focused on profit, while failing to accomplish the task it was assigned: providing health care.

Thus we see that neither Capitalism nor Socialism make the perfect pill for solving the problem of healthcare. What then do we turn to? We need only parse out ‘healthcare’ into its two parts, health and care. The key to the problem is in the caring. We can try for as long as we want, and as hard as we want to apply different methodologies, but in the end they will all fail if we try to remove ‘care’ from healthcare. In a socialized healthcare system, we still need doctors who care and are motivated and we need politicians to care enough to manage to keep up with the frenetic pace of healthcare developments. In a Capitalist style healthcare system, we need the system to care enough to occasionally ignore profits and look at the more global picture to avoid having the system tunnel visioned and not inclusive. In any case, the key metric for any healthcare system should be measured in units of caring.

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The Kuzari Proof is a famous proof of the validity of Judaism and is commonly used in outreach programs to convince estranged Jews to return to the fold of observance. (1) It was developed originally by the 11th century poet Yehuda Halevi as a response to the loss of Judaism’s monopoly on monotheism. It was designed specifically to prove that the Jews had a unique theological gift: the direct and public revelation of God to all the ancient Israelites at Mt. Sinai. (2) In recent years, the ‘proof’ has been offered as a proof of many things. Most commonly it attempts to prove: the existence of God, His revelation to the ancient Israelites at Sinai, His authorship of the Torah, and the resulting inerrancy of the Torah. My purpose is not to argue for or against the veracity of any of the above claims, but instead to show why the Kuzari proof is not a proof of any of them. Part of the search for truth entails the culling out of implausible options. It is my hope that the de-legitimization of the Kuzari proof will lead the observant and the secular alike to come closer to the truth.

The Kuzari ‘proof’ has been proffered in several forms and incarnations but the gist is as follows:
1) 3 million Jews witnessed the revelation of God at Sinai. (3)
2) Starting with the witnessing generation, one generation has told the story to the next, leading us, in the current generation, to be inductive witnesses to this event.
3) It is impossible to fake a large public event and its subsequent intergenerational transmission (with inferred acceptance) as described in steps 1 and 2, thus the original event must have happened.
It would seem to be common sense that events with many witnesses cannot be faked. However, history has taught us that many who have invoked ‘common sense’ have been frustrated by how rare indeed a sense it is. Needless to say, I find many problems with this ‘proof’. I will take each in sequential order.

First, I address the ‘3 million Jews witnessed the revelation’ claim. In logical discourse, one cannot assume what one is trying to prove. You cannot assume that the Torah is inerrant in order to prove that it is inerrant. The 3 million figure (or 600,000 adult males to be more precise) comes from the Torah. (4) One cannot use this figure then, to prove that there were 3 million witnesses to an event which then makes the Torah inerrant. To do so is to construct a tautological proof, or in lay terms… a self-validating statement. The statement “if it rains, it will be raining” is syntactically valid, but is semantically meaningless, in that it is tautological. The proof of the inerrancy of the Torah cannot be made by using statements that require the Torah to be inerrant. In short, we do not know, independent of the Torah claim, that there were 3 million witnesses at Sinai, hence the proof falls apart right there.

Next we look at the ‘witnessed the revelation of God at Sinai’ part of the first statement. As I can recall from my Hebrew school days, the voice of God at Sinai was so powerful it could ‘tear the soul from your body’. I also remember descriptions of smoke and fire similar to the poor Technicolor animations of the DeMille classic depicting the same. (5) Now Joan Rivers has a voice that in my mind can tear the soul out of my body as she as she squawks and screeches about the stars’ fashions at the Oscars. I am in no particular hurry to worship Joan Rivers nor Cecil B. DeMille. What I mean to get across comedically is that special effects capable of being produced cheaply these days by Industrial Light and Magic and the good folks over at Lucasfilm hardly proves God for me. A simple retort might be “but no one believes the fantastic stories and special effects of today to be true”. Tell that to the people who suffered mass panic and hysteria at the radio transmission of Welles’ “The War of The Worlds” in the 1938. (6) In summation, as we build here, for statement 1, we have 3 million unproved witnesses witnessing something they say was fiery, scary and spoke with a loud voice. If one were to tell a Kuzari adherent of UFO sightings, they would likely start to ask questions as to what other explanations could explain this phenomenon: why not here too? (7)

Now we look at statement 2, specifically at the part which says: starting with the witnessing generation, we have an unbroken chain of transmission. The ’starting with the witnessing generation’ part is key. It says that it is impossible to get a generation (a large group of people) to accept anything as an accurate account of history which was not known to be an accurate account history. Yet when you poke a Kuzari adherent for proof of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt you quickly get this response: “The Egyptians did not record their defeats.” (8) Well hang on a second here, does not that suggest that the Egyptians published a history and the greater than 3 million Egyptians that read it accepted it as true even though they knew it was untrue? (9) So can you cause multitudes to accept a false history or not? Which is it? The answer cannot be, if we are to have a sensible conversation, yes in the case of the Egyptians and no in the case of the Israelites. It also cannot be the answer that the Egyptians were embarrassed by defeat and thus motivated to accept the faked history because we cannot know if the Israelites also were not embarrassed by some historical event and thus were motivated to accept a revised history of unique divine revelation. Recall, we cannot assume the Torah as an accurate account of history to prove that the Torah is an accurate account of history. Keeping our eye on the ball, it is NOT the issue here whether or not there were slaves in Egypt, nor is it the issue as to what the actual history of the region was. The issue is that you cannot, at once, claim that you both can and cannot cause a large number of people to accept a false history. The Kuzari proof and discussions of the Kuzari proof are fraught with these sorts of asymmetric applications of explanatory logic. You cannot suck and blow from the same explanatory pipe at the same time.

Next we address statement 3, the inerrancy and incorruptibility of generational transmission of this revelation. Note: this statement is really just a summation of points 1 and 2 where the true Kuzari argument rests. Many people have accused the Torah of suffering from ‘broken telephone’ transmission. The orthodox authorities have correctly retorted that they have proof, archaeological no less, that the Torah has shifted perhaps 2 or 3 letters at most during all of its transmission. Parenthetically, for those keeping score and who just noted an asymmetrical application of explanatory logic, a gold star to you. You correctly noted that all of the sudden archaeology IS an acceptable proof that the Torah has not changed through the generations, yet archaeology IS NOT acceptable as proof that there were not Israelites in Egypt.

If the Torah did not significantly change over they centuries, which is a statement I will accept due to archaeological supporting evidence, the question becomes: why would any people accept the Torah as history, as the ancient Israelites seemed to, if its contents (the description of the revelation at Sinai) were not known to be true? In typical rabbinic style, let me answer a question with a question: Why would the multitudes that accepted the Gospels as gospel, accept them unless they knew somehow that Jesus had indeed miraculously fed the multitudes fish and loaves of bread as the gospels describe? (10) “After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.’ ” (John 6:14) (11) The problem here exists in yet another asymmetrical application of explanatory logic. If you cannot pervert a generational transmission of a miraculous event, then adherents to the Kuzari proof must by definition, accept that Jesus fed the multitudes by miracle. To be clear, I am not saying whether Jesus fed the multitudes or not, nor am I proving or disproving a revelation at Sinai, I am simply saying that the evidence of cultural widespread acceptance of an event as a miracle cannot be the proof of Judaism because it proves antithetical Jewish and Christian miracles at the same time.

In summation we see that the Kuzari proof is a failed proof because of fundamental flaws in logic. The two main fundamental flaws are assuming that which is trying to be proved and asymmetrical uses of explanatory logic at the convenience of the argument. The Kuzari proof is an attempt to prove the divine revelation at Sinai which, in turn, is a cornerstone of Jewish faith. (12) For the orthodox that appear vexed at the decline of Judaism, the message is clear: The rest of us will accept what you have to say when you provide cogent proof. The Kuzari proof is not cogent and the burden of proof is on you.

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuzari

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1 http://ohr.edu/special/books/truth-6.htm
2 http://www.talkreason.com/articles/kuzari.cfm
3 Numbers (1:46) There were 600,000 adult males generally leading us to conclude a total population of 3 million.
4 ibid
5 http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=2047
6 http://radio.about.com/library/weekly/aa102302a.htm
7 http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9923316/
8 http://ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/2053
9 The number of Egyptians must have been greater than 3 million if the biblical account is true because it would be impossible to subdue and enslave a population of 3 million Israelites with an equal or smaller number of Egyptians.
10 http://www.gardenofpraise.com/bibl43s.htm
11 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%206:1-15
12 Aish.Com – Rediscovering The Revelation

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Toronto Plastic Bag Research Full of Holes

Martin C. Winer

The City of Toronto has undertaken a goal of 70% waste diversion from landfill.  In order to achieve this goal, City Council asked staff to prepare a report [1] which considers plastic bags along with several other ‘target materials’.  Insofar as plastic bags are concerned, both the preliminary research and the resulting plastic bag tax by-law are full of holes.  One hopes that they are printed on recycled paper because that is likely the only good either will do for the environment.

Legal Foundation:

City staff typically requests legal counsel in preparing their reports.  The October 2008 report concluded that the City of Toronto did not have the authority to impose a plastic bag tax based on the powers afforded it under the City of Toronto Act.  The City of Toronto Act (Section 8(2)) gives the city the right to issue by laws pertaining to the “Economic, social and environmental well-being of the City.” [2] The city staff believed that a plastic bag tax which would appeal to this provision “is not possible under the current City of Toronto Act, which only permits a sales tax to be applied to alcohol, tobacco and admission on places of amusement.” [3] The word ‘plastic’ is not only a noun but also an adjective meaning capable of being molded.  Evidently the legal eagles in City Council were able to use the latter meaning of ‘plastic’ to mold the blunt instrument of “environmental well-being” into a targeted attack on plastic bags.

Staff recommended a discount to incentivize reduction, not a punitive surtax

“A tax or fee on plastic retail shopping bags is not feasible under the City of Toronto Act, but the waste reduction benefit of a financial incentive is apparent.” [4] The city staff thus recommended that the City incentivize reduction via mandating a discount for using reusable bags.  “Staff recommends a per-bag discount of $0.10 to effectively drive source reduction behaviour by providing a reasonable financial incentive to reduce plastic retail shopping bag use.” [5] If City staff recommended a per bag discount, why does the resulting by-law impose a per bag tax?  Galen Weston, CEO of the Loblaws chain, caught wind of the impending legislation and paid Mayor Miller a visit.  He suggested that offering a 10 cent discount would be “prohibitive” and negotiated a 5 cent surtax instead. [6] Bearing in mind the ‘hard bargain’ Mayor Miller drove in resolving the garbage strike, it’s likely that Mayor Miller let Weston finish his plea and then in a ‘Jerry Maguire moment’ told him: “You had me at ‘hello’.”

Plastic Bags Levy has the luck of the Irish

In March 2002 the Irish government introduced a levy on plastic bags (colloquially referred to as the “PlasTax”).  The report to council claims that the Irish program was a huge success with: “a 94% reduction in the use of plastic bags (from 328 bags per capita to 21 bags per capita) in three years.” [7] As is often the case with political speak, the devil is in the details.  ‘A 94% reduction’ where?  Perhaps the supermarkets realized a 94% reduction in demand, but are we to believe that the Irish suddenly stopped lining their kitchen bins with plastic?  Charlie Mayfield chairman of UK retailer John Lewis remarked that the Irish tax “had reduced [retail] plastic bag usage, but sales of bin liners had increased 400 per cent.” [8] With regards to a meaningful reduction in plastic bags making it to the landfill, diminishing the supply at the supermarket ‘borrows from Peter to pay Paul’.

Why 5 cents?

Staff’s report also suggests that the Irish PlasTax “charged 15 Euro cents ($0.24 CAN) starting in 2002 and was raised to 22 Euro cents ($0.35 CAN) in 2007.” [9] The fee needed to be raised because “The use of bags increased to 33 bags per capita in early 2007, prompting officials to raise the levy.” [10] Staff’s further research revealed that: “a per-bag fee of $0.10 to $0.35 [(CAN)] would significantly reduce the consumer use of retail plastic shopping bags.” [11] Thus it’s a mystery how City Council arrived at a 5 cent levy in the face of their own research which suggests the amount is too low to be effective.

What about Paper Bags?

There is a conspicuous absence of paper bags in the staff report.  Recall that, historically, plastic bags were brought in to replace paper bags which were considered deleterious to the environment.  Conversely the final by-law states: “Persons carrying on a retail business in a retail business establishment who do not offer or provide plastic retail shopping bags to customers shall offer or provide alternatives, such as cardboard boxes or paper bags, at no charge to the customer.” [12] In fact, in Taiwan where a plastic bag levy was imposed, it was subsequently lifted in the case of fast food venues because too many were offering free paper bags, thus increasing overall pollution.

In Manhattan Beach, California the ‘Save the Plastic Bag Coalition’ launched a successful action against the municipality which had banned the sale of plastic bags.  In his ruling, The Honorable David P. Yaffe wrote: “The basis for challenge is that the adoption of the ordinance violates the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) because the City did not adopt an Environmental Impact Report that compares plastic bags and paper bags and determines which of the two has a greater negative impact on the environment.” [13] Ruling in favour of the challenge he continues: “The Administrative Record in this case contains substantial evidence to support a fair argument that the prohibition of the distribution of plastic bags to customers will result in a net increase, rather than a net decrease, in damage to the environment.” [14]

Misleading Statistics

A philosopher, a mathematician and a statistician are all asked “what is 2 + 2”.  The philosopher ruminates for several days and eventually asks “what do you mean by 2 + 2?”  The mathematician quickly says “4” and then proceeds to issue a 400 page proof thereof.  The statistician draws the blinds and closes the door and asks “what do you want the answer to be?”  There are evidently many statisticians at work in the city staff:

“Conclusions from Stewardship Ontario audit data (2005), presented to the In-Store Packaging Waste Diversion Working group, estimate an average of 8.8 plastic retail shopping bags generated, per household, per week in Toronto. This represents a total generation in Toronto of 457.6 million plastic retail shopping bags per year and, with each bag weighing 6 grams, 2745.6 tonnes per year, which is approximately 6,900 cubic meters of landfill capacity per year. Plastic bags do not degrade significantly over time and therefore this volume of plastic bags will persist if landfilled.” [15]

These statistics are meaningless in that they neglect to mention how many of the plastic bags are recycled or reused.  The plastic bags of concern are the ones which are the surplus bags which are thrown out empty.  These statistics make no attempt to distinguish between the source and use of the plastic bags.

The City of Toronto currently accepts plastic bags for recycling in their Blue Box Program.  How many of the 8.8 plastic bags per week are thus recycled?  Plastic bags are frequently reused as trash bin liners, indeed green box liners.  How many of the 8.8 plastic bags were used as garbage bags?  Succinctly, don’t judge a pile of trash simply by its cover.

While the City of Toronto decries plastic’s inability to degrade, they are talking out of both sides of their legislative mouths when they then forbid retailers from offering compostable plastic bags: “Retail business[es] … are prohibited from offering or providing … non-compatible plastic bags,” (City of Toronto By-law No. 356-2009, 604-4)  Non-compatible bags in turn are those “that are not compatible with the City’s blue bin recycling program and includ[ing] … biodegradable plastic bags or compostable plastic bags…” (City of Toronto By-law No. 356-2009, 604-1) [16] The use of compostable bags is prohibited because they interfere with the recycling of regular plastic bags!

Further, the staff report fails to mention how much 6,900 cubic meters of landfill capacity is as a proportion of the total.  The 2005 Solid Waste Multiyear Business Plan mentions that in “2003, about 1 million tones of material were collected from 1,000,000 units.” [17] So if we take 2745.6 tonnes per year and divide through by 1,000,000 tonnes per year, we get 0.2%.  So after all the fuss and commotion, City Council has managed to achieve 0.2% of its 70% goal.  There is an old Greek idiom which runs “the mills of the Gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.  If this be virtue, then Mayor Miller’s environmental stewardship is saintly in that his millstones have ground both very slowly and with exceedingly small results.

[2] http://www.canlii.ca/en/on/laws/stat/so-2006-c-11-sch-a/latest/so-2006-c-11-sch-a.html Section 8(2)

[3] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 12)

[4] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 12)

[5] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 12)

[6] http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/toronto/archive/2009/06/01/5-cent-bag-tax-now-in-effect.aspx

[7] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 11)

[8] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3508263.ece

[9] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (pps. 11-12)

[10] ibid

[11] ibid

[12] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/By-laws/2009/law0356.pdf (604, 3C)

[13] http://www.savetheplasticbag.com/UploadedFiles/Manhattan Beach ruling.pdf

[14] ibid

[15] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p.
[16] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/By-laws/2009/law0356.pdf

[17] http://www.toronto.ca/garbage/pdf/2005_plan.pdf (p.28)

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