To Divide Human Beings By Fear

The Enlightenment's Apocalypse: Harvard, Antisemitism, and the Future of Science  (Marginalia Review of Books)

The future of science now depends on whether we can resolve the crisis of antisemitism. One need not agree with the truth of this claim to recognize the importance of its plausibility and the scope of its significance. Harvard’s current loss of over two billion dollars in scientific funding due to antisemitism has implications far beyond its own campus. Science underlies or influences practically every aspect of the contemporary world, not least its economic growth. When the Cambridge mathematical physicist turned historian of science Derek de Solla Price discovered a quantitative law (now called Price’s Law) governing the growth rate of science, he created the basis of a new field, scientometrics. Price’s Law was the discovery that science grows at an exponential rate, roughly doubling in size every 10-20 years. The field of scientometrics provides significant evidence that economic growth depends increasingly on scientific innovation, with America playing a role so large (87% of the most important science-dependent patents between 2012 and 2016 were American) that if one imagined away American science, one not only imagines away much of the current global science system, but also much of America’s economic power. But what does any of this have to do antisemitism?

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Science and antisemitism are intertwined in three important ways, one of which is obvious (Harvard’s current crisis), the second of which is clear but not widely appreciated (the Jewish contribution to science in America), and the third of which is subtle and complex (the deep historical context of antisemitism). At the heart of these connections are debates, going back to the Enlightenment, about scientific values, and whether science can resolve conflicts in values. The current crisis of science is not new, but is the last of three waves of assaults on scientific scientific authority. The first wave began as an esoteric crisis in German academia over a hundred years ago, then came to American academia in a second wave, after World War II, reaching its peak in the so-called “Science Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, and is now crashing into popular consciousness and politics in its third wave as the Harvard crisis. 

Understood in the larger context of the history of science and of antisemitism, the Final Report of the Harvard Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias (hereafter abbreviated as the Report or the Report on Antisemitism) makes it clear that there is a deep internal crisis in academia about what constitutes a properly scientific or academic approach to reality. 

This sets up the problem well enough. And there is much here to digest, but I am a bit annoyed with this:

The fact that America’s most distinguished university is in danger of losing its leadership role in science is reasonably interpreted as symbolic: since Harvard is the “head” of the American academic establishment, the logic seems to be: if Harvard can effectively address its antisemitism crisis, then its example can be followed throughout higher education since it is the leader in global research and education. The connection between antisemitism at Harvard and a loss of funding for science might be dismissed by some as local and temporary: some student activists got out of hand, Harvard has a crisis and lost federal money, but that is all there is to it. In short, the Harvard crisis is overblown, and one should not bother to read anything deeper into it about antisemitism, science, and universities.

Is Harvard really at the head of American academia? Political power, I will agree with. But do we look to Harvard or MIT (or add your own comparison - I am picking on Cambridge, MA) for great science? 

The fact that America’s most distinguished university is in danger of losing its leadership role in science is reasonably interpreted as symbolic: since Harvard is the “head” of the American academic establishment, the logic seems to be: if Harvard can effectively address its antisemitism crisis, then its example can be followed throughout higher education since it is the leader in global research and education. The connection between antisemitism at Harvard and a loss of funding for science might be dismissed by some as local and temporary: some student activists got out of hand, Harvard has a crisis and lost federal money, but that is all there is to it. In short, the Harvard crisis is overblown, and one should not bother to read anything deeper into it about antisemitism, science, and universities.

Could this not be a wider and deeper issue than merely Harvard?

I suppose - fear - the following is true.

Hollinger’s broader argument is that the secularization of American public culture in the post-WWII era is connected to a movement of intellectuals, many Jewish, to promote a more inclusive culture, centered on science as the unifying ideal of a democratic society. The extent of antisemitism in America and the world in this era is often forgotten or ignored, but it is crucial to realize antisemitism is the historical norm, not the exception, in Western institutions and history, and it has been a sign of great ethical and intellectual progress that it was, for a time, overcome.

Antisemitism makes no sense to me. I know of no injury done to me by Jews, or even of any particular Jew. I have done so much injury to myself; blaming anyone else seems hypocritical and, thus, cowardly. No, I will keep my dislike for those who do harm to me or mine. That will always be individuals.

There is philosophy and history discussed at length that should be read as a whole. It makes clearer the essay's conclusion.

If Harvard fails, Max Weber and the fate of the German university remain our context and probable future. If Harvard succeeds in this admirable charge, it will not only solve the outstanding crisis of science and values it has inherited. It will inaugurate a new stage of the Enlightenment project, one in which the history of the Enlightenment’s failures are not denied, but are acknowledged, and in that very process, overcome.

That Germanic failure ended with the success of Allied military forces in 1945.

 The Christian Origins of Racism (Marginalia Review of Books) broadens the problem and brings it even closer to home.

Medieval claims about the Jews’ criminal role in the crucifixion consigned them to an enslaved status, indicating their inherent inferiority relative to Christians. Ecclesiastical law required Jews to behave in accordance with their subservient position; violation of these regulations constituted an additional Jewish crime. Myths of continuing Jewish violence against contemporary Christians also contributed to a view of Jews as inherent criminals, permanent and eternal enemies of Christianity. This idea undermined neighborly relations between the two faith groups, eroded sympathy for Jews, and licensed state, church and popular hostility against them.

The same elements used so effectively to racialize medieval Jews are also at work in American anti-Black racism. (While a similar argument could be made of the intersection of charges of crime and inferiority as constitutive elements of Nazi anti-Jewish racism, this era falls outside the focus of my research.) The charge of Black criminality was employed during and after the period of slavery to delegitimize the Black struggle for freedom. Although Blacks were the victims of violence from the dominant culture, they were presented as perpetrators.

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Early modern authors reinterpreted the Biblical narratives proving criminal Jewish inferiority to explain and ascribe the same status to Black Africans. Augustine’s coordination of the figures of Cain and Ham to signify Jewish servitude as punishment for crime reappears in Iberian justifications for the enslavement of Blacks. In his fifteenth-century Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, Gomes Eanes de Zurara conflates Cain and Ham in his etiology of slavery. He explains that the enslavement of Blacks resulted from the curse Noah inflicted on his son “Caym,” which resulted in the subordination of his offspring to all other peoples. The name “Caym” combines the persons Ham and Cain, who respectively originate slavery and criminal murder in Biblical history. This amalgamation echoes Augustine’s use of both figures in his formulation of the Jews’ criminality that establishes their cursed hereditary inferiority. Alonso de Sandoval’s seventeenth-century Un tratado sobre la escalvitud explicitly pairs Cain and Ham in his account of hereditary African enslavement. He offers two explanations: the first identifies Ham as the original slave, whose offspring, the Ethiopians, were punished with dark skin; the second posits that because of Cain’s irreverence for his father, Adam cursed him with enslavement. This primal servitude manifests in the color of Cain’s skin, who, as Sandoval explains, “was of light-skinned lineage, [although] he was born dark. Thus blacks are also born as slaves, because God paints the sons of bad parents with a dark brush.” This account confusedly ascribes to Cain the punishment for Ham’s dishonoring of his father that results in the curse of hereditary slavery. While skin color does not appear in either Biblical account, by early modernity Blackness has become a sign of slavery. Transgression results in the enslavement of the perpetrator’s offspring, and Black becomes the color of permanent criminal inferiority.

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By blaming criminality on the victims of racism, Trump and his ilk not only absolve themselves of finding reparative and just solutions to the sources of violence in our society, but more disturbingly, evade responsibility for their own history of violence against Blacks that continues to perpetuate racism today. The idea of Black criminality works to normalize and justify violence against Blacks, rendering them “deserving” of incarceration and death. It gives white people an excuse not to care, leading to the further devaluing of Black life and suspension of compassion for Black suffering, just as similar attitudes held by medieval Christians produced the same outcomes for Jews characterized as criminally inferior.

Recognizing these pernicious thought systems helps us identify their modern manifestations in order to discredit chimerical, racist allegations of criminality, resist them, and commit to changing the institutions that devalue and debase Black life. Studying the long history of racism sadly again proves William Faulkner’s dictum, invoked by candidate Obama in his 2008 speech on racism, that “the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Recognizing the continuing effects of the past may help us more effectively challenge and abolish systemic racism today. 

No, I cannot think of antisemitism and racism as the tool of divide and conquer, to divide human beings by fear so that the propagators of hatred can rule over all.

But it works, doesn't it? 

Chumps.

Closer to home: The Continuing War On Science (Sheila Kennedy)

AP had a recent headline warning that the numerous anti-science bills hitting America’s statehouses are stripping away public health protections that have taken over a century to pass. The headline triggered my recollection of the MAGA “freedom” folks who refused to get vaccines or wear masks during the pandemic. Subsequent research tells us they died in far greater numbers than those who listened to their doctors.

According to the AP, more than 420 anti-science bills have been introduced across the U.S. just this year, attacking longstanding public health protections. Primary targets have been vaccines, milk safety and fluoride. The publication notes that the bills are part of an “organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law.”The proponents of these bills like to portray the MAHA movement as a grassroots uprising, but it turns out that it is being fueled by a “web of well-funded national groups led by people who’ve profited from sowing distrust of medicine and science.”

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History tells us that science denial–especially in the field of medicine– has been a constant, especially among fundamentalist religious believers. (When smallpox vaccines first came on the scene, religious figures who embraced the new science, like Cotton Mather, were accused of being “ungodly,” since smallpox was obviously God’s punishment for sin, and man had no business interfering with God’s judgment.)

Be sure those in power are vaccinated. More fear to keep control of the citizens. 

sch 11/15