A Stranger in a Strange Land
I
Call me Gershom.
That’s my “Torah name,” my Hebrew name, given to me by my parents at birth. גרשום . “A stranger there.”
By custom, it should have been “Gershon” (גרשון), the Hebrew name of my maternal grandfather, Gustave. Gershon, which is a fairly common Hebrew name, was according to the Book of Genesis the eldest son of Levi, the son of Jacob and Leah, the founder of the tribe of the Levites, who later on became the assistants to the High Priests, the kohanim. But my family is not Levite. And my father knew that.
My father was a very learned man, steeped in history, both Jewish and secular. He also loved being intellectually clever and had a reasonably strong ego. (The apple does not fall far from the tree.) So he made a little joke. Instead of גרשון, he (and of course my mother) chose the name גרשום, the name given by Moses to his firstborn son. “A stranger there.” A “stranger in exile” is another way of interpreting it. In English, they adapted the name as “Gerson” so as to be distinguished from the more common “Gershon” and presumably to sound better in the Anglophone ear.
I have been stuck with that name ever since.
As a child I was known not as “Gerson” but as “Gerry” (with a hard “g”), which itself, in turn, was a highly unusual name. Nobody ever got it right. I was Jerry, Geery, Gary, anything but Gerry, except to my family and friends. I hated it. I also had a dim awareness as a young child of my given name, but it sounded even weirder than my nickname. So I went through my early life hating my name, which surely had some intangible impact on my psyche. But that’s another story.
As I got older, I began to understand at least the literal meaning of my Hebrew name, but probably didn’t think about it much until I was in college. For one thing, even more people there had never heard of the name “Gerry” pronounced with the hard “g” and invariably got it wrong. For another, I was beginning to understand what being a stranger actually meant.
As a public school student at Yale in 1965, I was in the first class in which public school graduates outnumbered private school kids, but not by much. It was a culture shock. I became friendly with a group of kids in my dorm from a private school but not one in the absolute first rank. They were not like the snobby kids from Andover and Exeter, and we have been friends ever since. But I was different. The culture of partying, drinking, and cavorting was alien to me (and to my private-school friends) but second nature, it seemed, for many of the prep-school kids. I became close friends and roommate with another public-school student who was also very much a stranger, from the South, who was revolted and I think ashamed of the racist culture in which he grew up, also finding himself also a fish out of water at Yale. We bonded and became lifelong friends as well.
Yet I did not yet feel like a stranger among “my own people,” the Jewish people. That moment came later.
It was in 1967, perhaps in the summer but more likely in November, when I was home for Thanksgiving, that I sat at the family dinner table for the traditional Erev Shabbat Friday night meal. As always, my father was at the head of the table, my mother at the other end, and across from me was my maternal grandmother, Sadie, the widow of Gustave after whom I was named. Sadie was a very tough lady. It would be entirely fair to call her a battle-axe. She had to be, in a way. Her husband Gustave died at the young age of 40 from kidney failure in 1933, leaving Sadie to bring up their only child, Rita. She was a loving mother — and grandmother — to be sure, but she was tough as nails. You didn’t disagree with Sadie and get away with it.
That night, talk at the table turned toward the 1967 “Six-Day War” in the Middle East, which had taken place in June. My grandmother stated categorically that all the lands taken from the Arabs in 1948 were acquired legally, under contract. I objected, saying that much land was taken by force. She then stared me straight in the eyes and said, “You’re an anti-Semite.”
That was when I knew I was indeed a stranger. A stranger to my own people.
A stranger is not intrinsically an enemy. A stranger is not intrinsically a threat. The stranger can become a threat in the eyes of the main group, however, when they question their assumptions, when they refuse to participate in their untruths and myths. And of course the stranger can easily be or become an enemy when they look different, when they are seen as a threat to the group’s security and position, when they worship in different ways, and more. I was a stranger of the first type, seemingly overnight.
But it did not happen overnight. From my father I inherited, or had cultivated and even browbeaten into me, an intellectual combativeness bordering on hubris — I freely admit it — that often resulted, whether I desired it or not, in being treated as a stranger. I took my Yale education very seriously and learned the skills of thinking critically, expressing myself fairly well, and challenging assumptions and values lurking below the surface.
At that Shabbat dinner, I had dared to contradict my grandmother, something even my father would not do, not on such a sensitive topic as Israel. I recall that as this transpired across the dinner table, he studied his dessert plate in uncharacteristic silence. He knew better but was not going to upset shalom ha-bayit (the peace of household) on Erev Shabbat. I think I was as shocked by Sadie’s reaction as she was shocked by my words. It was a pivotal moment for me. Whenever I think about my Jewish identity, this is the first image that comes to mind.
1967 was also a watershed year for the entire country, and in particular on college campuses. It was the time of the beginning of serious protests against the Vietnam War, as well as the time when the mores of campus life changed in deep ways. Women were a much more frequent sight in the dormitories of all-male schools, and I’m told, the reverse was true at all-women’s schools. Intoxication came increasingly from smoking as compared with drinking. Everything was up for grabs. Everything was being re-examined.
In my early college years, I continued to use the nickname, “Gerry.” That changed, I believe, at about this time. Perhaps I was consciously acquiring a new persona, “Gerson.” The stranger in that place. My childhood friends still call me Gerry and I tolerate it out of affection. My college friends switched eventually from Gerry to Gerson. Everyone else now knows me as Gerson.
In my last job, there was a horrible man who later became Board chair who was, frankly, a Georgia redneck who either never went to college or dropped out and was for a while a successful nuclear contractor. I knew I was in big trouble with him from the moment I saw him in my initial interview, which was a terror-filled experience because I was still pretty unstable after my most recent bout with severe depression. I overheard that his first words after hearing my name were, “What kind of name is that?” Well, we all know what that means. And I knew it too. My subsequent experience bore out those fears in spades. I can still hear him intoning my name in the most contemptuous, sneering, insidious manner, as he did throughout Board meetings and personal conversations — which I tried to avoid but sadly couldn’t. But it was a small comfort that I knew that aside from disliking me personally for who I was, his enmity came from a deeper place focusing on what I was.
But heck, that’s just my name.
The ancient Romans had a saying, “in nomen est omen.” A person’s name, it says, is a sign — of the person’s destiny. Is that really so strange? It was the custom among East European Jews — and doubtless of people all over the world — to name children, in some cases, in special ways so as to endow them with magical properties. A sick child might get the name “Chaya” (“life”) as my grandmother did; she was “Chana” but after a childhood illness, she became “Chana Chaya.” In other cases, the name “Alter” (“other”) was given so as to confuse the Evil Eye and keep it away.
According to Wikipedia, there is a term of recent origin, “nominative determinism,” which is “the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names.” This theory has its roots in Jungian psychology. But of course it goes much deeper than that. How we name things — and that we name them at all — is a fundamental characteristic of human existence with deep philosophical and theological meaning. That I should have gravitated toward my name, toward the omen, then, is not that unusual. Though if it had been John or Joe or Alex, I doubt I would have given it a second thought.
II
What is a stranger? Who is a stranger?
Here’s what Merriam-Webster says:
The dictionary definition is clear enough. But this just scratches the surface.
Let’s first look at scripture for guidance. Scripture, after all, helps to define our moral view of the world, our sense of ethics, of right and wrong. And in Jewish scripture, in particular — I use those words deliberately — the jury is out.
The Torah tells us thirty-six times, in one formulation or another, that we are to care for the stranger — the “ger” (גר). The first part of my Hebrew name — גרשום.
My personal favorite scripture, Leviticus 19:33–34, part of what is often called the “Holiness Code”. It puts it this way, focusing on the principle of justice and the very roots of Jewish identity:
“And if a stranger (“ger”) sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”
Unlike many other of the thirty-six formulations of the Great Commandment, this one is given special prominence, punctuated with the Divine exclamation mark: “I am the LORD your God.”
A few verses earlier in this passage, we find the famous words common to both the Jewish and Christian faiths: וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). I am told that in the traditional Jewish interpretation, the word for “neighbor” used here, רע, is more intimate than גר (“stranger”), so in this discussion, we’ll focus on the the stranger and not the neighbor.
Be that as it may, it would appear that there is not universal agreement on this interpretation of רע “neighbor”. There’s a very interesting essay in The Forward (“Neighbor, Fellow or Friend?”) that argues that on this subject, “Judaism and Christianity on the whole parted ways.” The author, Philologos, writes:
The word re’a in biblical Hebrew (the form re’akha has added to it the second-person singular possessive ending — kha) can mean “friend,” “neighbor” or “fellow man…” Whereas Christianity romantically followed Jesus and Paul in insisting that “Ve-ahavta le-re’akha kamokha” means we should love everyone, such love being a surer guide to conduct than a dutiful cleaving to legal precepts, Judaism pragmatically retorted that it was hard enough to love one’s friends and that sticking to the moral commandments was all that could be reasonably demanded in regard to the rest of the world.
I would add that the traditional Jewish distinction about loving “x” — be it a neighbor or a stranger — is suspect. In both cases we are told to love “x” as yourself. But in the case of the stranger, the Torah adds, “because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” In other words, in the case of the stranger, a direct connection is made with the formative experience of the Jewish people, and thus with the identity of the subject of the statement as a Jew. Thus, one might conclude that something else is up with the traditional Jewish interpretation that the “neighbor” version of this commandment is more proximate than the “stranger” version — perhaps, retrospectively, to differentiate a “Jewish” version from the more universalistic formulation of Jesus? Oh well.
So, we’ll elide past the discussion about “neighbor” and stick with the concept of the “stranger” that is to be treated as “the home-born among you.” There’s a lot to unpack here.
Who is this stranger? The root of the word “sojourns” (yigur — יגור) is actually the same as the one used in the same passage for “stranger” (ger — גר). Thus, a stranger is a sojourner. A sojourner is a traveler, one who may settle for a while and move on. That’s all the Torah says about this person. So if this “stranger” refers to anyone who wanders into the camp and moves on — just as the proto-Jews did in Egypt — then the passage must mean that Jews are obliged to treat all people — at least the people in the camp — regardless of religion or other characteristic, as “the home-born” among us.
How does this work out in a country like Israel, which sees itself as a “Jewish state” and confers special rights and privileges on Jews that are not available to other residents? There is a vigorous debate about this that is familiar to those much more learned in Torah and Talmud than I, but which I will risk taking the liberty of summarizing without citations in my own words.
Conventional Jewish interpretations of these texts have traditionally held that the word “stranger” applied to proselytes — people who joined the community and willingly adopted its religion and practices — in other words, converts. This definition, in its narrowest form, which one can find on the most fundamentalist Jewish websites, absolves one of responsibility to treat non-Jews in the same way as fellow Jews. But if that’s what is actually meant in the Torah, then why would it go to such pains to make it a Prime Directive punctuated with the Divine exclamation mark, “I am the LORD your God”? Are we really being instructed with such Divine authority to do what which comes naturally anyway, to care for one’s own and not for others? To say that we exclude the stranger in our midst who is not a convert/proselyte or close to becoming one from our code of behavior is far too harsh and surely not worth the effort of being repeated thirty-six times in our most sacred writings.
Accordingly, in such interpretations, one comes across other texts, Talmudic or otherwise, suggesting that we are to treat people who are not members of the Jewish community-at-large with some manner of fairness as well — for example, according to the Noahic code. These are kluges, but necessary kluges to help assuage the consciousness of good Jewish folk whose moral sensibilities are in need of placating. But in its essence, this interpretation is narrow, exclusionary, and particularistic. It is tribal justice, not universal justice. Tribal love, not universal love. A Jewish carpenter a couple of thousands of years ago was one of undoubtedly many who found the tribal interpretation unacceptable.
Thus, while there may be clever ways of softening the edges of this interpretation of the word “ger” through contorted rhetoric, in its basic form, this definition of “stranger” makes it clear that our fundamental moral obligations are not universal, but only particular — to fellow Jews. This understanding of what it is to be a “stranger” is also convenient for a strict modern Zionist interpretation consistent with the new Basic Law of Israel passed in 2018, in which Jews have a legally sanctioned privileged status that is denied to others. Indeed, the new Basic Law, formally defining Israel as a Jewish Nation-State, reserves the right of self-determination in Israel to the “Jewish people” alone, relegating others to the status of being treated “with dignity.” This is the logical conclusion of the traditional, particularistic interpretation of the Great Commandment and specifically the critical word “ger” — stranger — when applied to legal norms in a political entity — a state.
In contrast, progressive Jewish interpretations hold that the word “stranger” pertains to anyone in the midst of the community, regardless of their faith, color, ethnicity, or national origin. In this view, the injunction to treat the stranger as “home-born” means to treat the stranger as a full citizen with equal dignity, equal privileges, and equal rights.
Now, it might be pointed out by the advocates of the tribal view that the Torah passage under discussion refers only to “sojourners” rather than everyone. So okay, let’s continue to split hairs. Where Jews are a majority population, we might consider it charitable to extend our good graces to our non-Jewish neighbors. But what happens when the neighbors or strangers live not in the midst of Jews, but when Jews live in the midst of strangers and neighbors of other faiths — where they are the minority, as they are in the worldwide Diaspora? How does it work out for Diaspora Jews to treat only each other with the full weight of Torah principles, but not others?
Badly. From the time they left the Levant in about 300 AD and wandered throughout Europe and elsewhere, it worked out very badly indeed.
Next, what does it mean to treat the stranger as “home-born” among you? Does that mean that the sojourner who wanders into your camp temporarily must be treated as a full citizen, with full rights and responsibilities under law?
Here, we must consider the historical setting of the times. At the time depicted in Leviticus, the concept of citizenship did not exist. In ancient Rome and Greece, citizenship was accorded to only to certain classes of people — male, wealthy property owners. It was not until the French Revolution that the notion of national citizenship appeared — that by being a member of a “nation” (however defined), one is entitled to certain rights and responsibilities. Thus, we may well surmise that a “strict constructionist” view of Leviticus 19:33–34 would hold that the stranger need not be treated with the full rights and responsibilities of those with full membership in the larger community, in this case, the Hebrews.
But over the course of centuries, new concepts emerged. The French Revolution initially granted full citizenship only to men and even allowed, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that “social distinctions” could be “founded on the common good” — as defined, presumably, by the “citizens.” The American Revolution granted full citizenship to all males, but instituted neat tricks to limit the political rights of some males, most notably by defining slaves as three-fifths of a person in terms of calculating the voting power of states, and of course excluding women.
Not until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868), was it established in the United States that any person “home-born” in this country automatically acquired the status of full citizenship. Yet we have sharp differences about the “sojourner” and the extent to which, and process by which, the stranger/sojourner can become a full citizen.
Israel, on the other hand, is not a “birthright country” in the same sense. Citizenship by virtue of birth (jus soli) is not automatic; it must be applied for. It does not extend to people born, for example, in militarily occupied territories unless they are Jewish by ancestry or other approved rite.
So it is clear that in different societies, in different countries, at different times, the words “home-born” can mean different things. I would submit, however, that for Jews living in the United States, where the meaning of “home-born” is very clear (though the process for others of obtaining citizenship is not), it is entirely reasonable to say that the Torah obliges us to ensure that all strangers, whether sojourners or not, are treated with exactly the same principles of justice as those with full citizenship by virtue of birth.
In countries where there is not full and automatic birthright citizenship, the stranger may or may not be accorded such rights. Where they are not, where it is a matter of political choice left up to the “citizens,” things tend to end badly. In the most extreme form, apartheid is the most perfect manifestation of this principle.
This long discussion has presented a framework — one that I find useful, anyway — for understanding two very different Jewish interpretations of the Great Commandment. On the one hand, there is the “traditional” one, which emphasizes fine distinctions, all of which in one way or another tend to undermine a universalistic interpretation of the commandment. Let’s call that one the “strict constructionist” interpretation. On the other, there is a “loose constructionist” interpretation, which takes into account changes in social mores and political systems, which acknowledges that Jews may live in minority or majority status in the modern world, and which supports a more universalistic interpretation and obligation of the Great Commandment. It should be no surprise that I associate with the latter.
That is why the “progressive” interpretation of these commandments, codified in America by Reform Judaism, is suitable for modern times. (By saying this, I am not claiming that my “loose constructionist” understanding is fully consistent in all particulars as the “official” Reform Jewish one.) For adherents of this view, one has an obligation not only to ensure equal treatment under law for all, but also to reach out to others of different faiths, colors, origins, and status who suffer from being denied such treatment on account of these characteristics and to support them in their quest for justice, for we “were strangers in the land of Egypt” [emphasis added]. These few words are so powerful.
So we might then conclude that the view of Jews in majority-Jewish societies about the treatment of the neighbor and that of Jews in minority-Jewish societies is fundamentally different and at odds. And I think that would be correct. We American Jews often hear the condescending words that because we do not live in Israel, we cannot understand, or cannot even comment, on conditions and politics in Israel. Even many Reform Jews in America embrace this point of view. To me, this deprecating view of criticism of Israel by American (and other non-Israeli Jews) is unacceptable.
Forget, for a moment, that it is true that we American Jews do not live in fear of extermination by surrounding countries (but recently have become quite aware that our democracy is under attack by the enemy from within), or that American Jews’ financial support is existentially essential for the State of Israel. (Or maybe, after all, it’s not.) Just think about the core Jewish values. We must acknowledge that our values, even within the same faith tradition, may diverge based on circumstance (as they have in many other religions). Are they both “Jewish” as defined in the Torah? This question is unanswerable because it is the wrong question, because ultimately it is based on faith, sentiment, fear, and historical experience as well as the vagaries of daily life.
It’s no surprise that I adhere to the second interpretation and consider the first one revolting and blasphemous, primitive and tribal, and no different in principle than any other doctrine of exclusion and oppression.
I won’t get into interpretations of how the injunction about the stranger or neighbor are treated in other faiths, though my reference to the Jewish carpenter is suggestive that, opposed to the particularistic traditional Jewish take on the issue of the stranger/neighbor, there may also exist universalistic interpretations. But at least historically and traditionally, such interpretations seem to have required the establishment of new belief systems in new religions, which in turn, as is the way of the world, have themselves run into trouble on this account.
Unless we are all universally tolerant, universally open to each other and universally accepting of each other, the faith-based point of view of “strangeness,” at least in Judaism, is wrought with problems, though I continue to adhere to the Reform Jewish interpretation as the morally correct one. For we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Strangers in exile. Not a majority population, but a minority and very persecuted population.
Strangers in a strange land. A band of strangers who are obliged by our God to treat other strangers as “the home-born among us.”
III
Let’s now consider a secular, philosophical discussion of the concept of being a stranger. Here, there are many options from which to choose. The two that I have studied most closely are those of Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx. Again, this is my gloss, and with Kant I will admit that I am a lot rustier than with Marx. I will thus treat Kant lightly and Marx in more depth.
First, a fleeting reference to the Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber, of whom my knowledge is admittedly superficial. But it’s important to acknowledge his work in this context. Buber, in my understanding, sees the critical existential issue as being the duality of “I-Thou.” This is a universalistic frame of reference. “Thou” is anyone at all, not just “neighbors” or even more distant members of the community. It is a phenomenological perspective, in the tradition of Husserl and others, in which the “Thou” is in principle unknowable and can easily become “the Other,” a potential threat to the “I.”
This “I-Thou” framework has become often used in discussions recently of racism, in which the problem of race is cast as a manifestation of the existential, universal problem of dealing with “the Other.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but for me, it just scratches the surface. It puts interaction with people of other races and classes on the same footing as with your cousin or even your spouse. In my experience, it is again a consciousness-assuaging kluge, nowadays allowing White folks to grasp their fear of Black folks through the premise of a universalistic duality of existence in all circumstances. This is good, insofar as it at least allows one to acknowledge the fear and perceived antagonism in racial and class relationships. That is progress. But it is not progress enough.
Going more deeply, it was Immanuel Kant, staring out of his window at the clock-tower in Kőnigsburg (now Kaliningrad, one of the few cities in the Russian Federation retaining the name of a Bolshevik leader), who formulated the phenomenological premise in what I believe to be its purest “modern” form. Kant differentiated between the noumenon, that which we as sentient beings perceive through our experience, and the phenomenon, the internal essence of that which is perceived, the “thing in itself.”
The phenomenon is in principle unknowable; all we can “know” is subject to our experience, which imperfectly grasps that which we perceive. It is intrinsically, necessarily, strange — always has been, and always will be. Kant’s framework is the basis of phenomenology, but one that does not differentiate between people and things. Everything that is not noumenon is phenomenon, whether we speak of people, rocks, or even ideas (or pipes). Later philosophers, such as Husserl and Buber, elaborated this phenomenological perspective by focusing on both the subject and object as sentient beings, so now we have two subjects who imperfectly perceive each other. Much modern psychology, such as that of Karl Jung I believe, is also based on this premise.
Going back to Kant: From his phenomenology, Kant proceeded to develop a rigidly universalistic moral philosophy, which is summarized in his famous Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Kant further developed this injunction into a philosophy of law — a political philosophy — that endorsed the notion of a “republic” in which equal laws and equal rights would be accorded to all. This was an emerging concept of his day. It was beginning to spread across Europe. The French Revolution was brewing, and in North America a republic had already been created. It is one of the values by which we live today and consider very natural. At the time Kant wrote, however, they were practically seditious. There were other philosophical frameworks that led to the same recommendation, but without the phenomenological framework. I’ve focused on Kant to set the stage for the next discussion.
I will add, however, that to my mind the Categorical Imperative is indeed the most perfect guide for moral behavior. It is not merely the Golden Rule, whether in its positive (do unto others as you would have them do unto you, ascribed to Jesus) or negative (refrain from doing to others that which you would not have them do unto you, ascribed to Hillel) forms, because it eliminates personal preferences from the proposition. It says, imagine if everyone acted that way; would it come out well or badly? It requires one not only to understand how one would feel about being treated in this or that way, but to reason about how the action would affect all people if directed at them. Moreover, the Categorical Imperative does not require insertion of divine command or agency to underwrite morality; instead, it requires what Kant called “practical reason” — rational consideration of the likely consequences of actions — something of which believers and non-believers alike are (presumably) capable. At least, that’s what Kant thought.
Looking back at the previous chapter, let’s return briefly to the discussion of how one treats the stranger in light of the Categorical Imperative. In Leviticus 19:33–34 we are obliged by commandment to treat the stranger as the home-born among us. The strength of this commandment is rooted in the fact that our origin as a “people” was in a society where we were the strangers and where we experienced the blunt end of the stick; as it says in Exodus 23:9, “And a stranger shalt thou not oppress; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The Kantian Categorical Imperative reframes this proposition in the following way, using not faith and commandment, but “practical reason”: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Thus for Kant, it is reason and free will, not fear of Divine punishment, that compel us, or ought to compel us, to care for the stranger — lest others not care for us when it’s our turn.
But there’s a serious problem even with the Categorical Imperative. A fascinating recent op-ed in The New York Times (remarkable for its depth and apparent lack of association with current events — or maybe not?) by philosopher Crispin Sartwell explores the proposition that “Humans Are Animals. Let’s Get Over It.” From earliest times, philosophers have sought to distinguish between we humans — with the capability of reason — from animals. “[I]f we truly believed we were so much better than squirrels,” he asks, “why have we spent thousands of years driving home the point?” Kant was solidly in this age-old tradition, writing in his Critique of Practical Reason, “The moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality.” But in this statement, he had it exactly backwards, and in contradiction with his own basic premises. First, the proposition that humans essentially differ with animals is itself a premise, not a conclusion. And when Kant uses the word “reveals,” he even seems to violate his own fundamental distinction between the unknowable (for humans) noumenon and the phenomenon, which is knowable through “practical reason.” (This would have made a great paper in my graduate course on Kant and Hobbes; alas, a missed opportunity.) The language of revelation is not that of the human limitations of knowing; only through revelation, one might say in other words, can we actually penetrate the veil of the unknowable. That is the basis of all faith and all religion. For shame, Immanuel Kant.
But this leads to another troublesome question: If in fact we humans are also animals, which we pretty commonly accept nowadays, are other beasts also capable of “practical reason”? In other words, are they capable of linking actions to consequences? We may certainly presume that they do. A tool-making chimp clearly does. And even the ants who build a hill or the bees who pamper their queen at least instinctively perform purposeful acts.
I make no claim to being a philosopher, except in the sense of the young Marx (we’ll get to him next), who mused, in his only reflections on what communist society — the ultimate transcendence of class society, of the division of labor, of the alienation of creators from the objects of their creation —would be like, that one could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (The German Ideology). But somehow this essay has led me there.
One more thing — about Kant and Hobbes. You could hardly imagine two more opposite philosophers. Kant, who believed in the human capability to behave morally, and Hobbes, who was skeptical at best about that. But in a final reference to Sartwell’s excellent op-ed (an op-ed, mind you!), he quotes from Hobbes’s Leviathan: “‘The savage people in many places of America,’ writes Thomas Hobbes in ‘Leviathan,’ responding to the charge that human beings have never lived in a state of nature, ‘have no government at all, and live in this brutish manner.’” Think about it. Try to put aside the offensive reference to First Peoples, and think about the mind-set of certain “savage people in many places in America” and their view of government.
Next up: My favorite philosopher, Karl Marx. The “young Karl Marx.”
IV
Skipping over Hegel, a major omission to be sure, let us proceed directly to Karl Marx, who famously boasted that he had “turned Hegel on his head.” As far as I know, Marx never referred to Kant by name, but the vestiges of the phenomenological framework remained in his early philosophical writings, but with an important twist — the concept of “estrangement.” In this discussion of Marx’s ideas, particularly his early philosophical foundations, I will go into more detail, not only because I am familiar with these texts, but also because this is a “revisionist” interpretation of Marx which, I believe, is more authentic, deeper, and far more provocative than his later writings.
The critical idea here is “estrangement” — the process of becoming strange. For Marx (as for Hegel), everything was process. It is not a static world of things and people that are eternally and existentially separate, but one in which things become separate, evolve, change, and transform into other things.
Back to 1967 and the spirit of those times. “Alienation” was the word of the day. Everyone was alienated. That is how socially aware students around me, at any rate, expressed their discontent. The word was floating around in the popular literature too, based on the work of Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and others, that you could buy in cheap Penguin editions. I had heard that it was an important concept in Marxism too. But what was it, this alienation?
In my junior year at Yale, in the spring semester (first half of 1968), I took a great Soviet history course given by a guest professor, Wolfgang Leonhard. Leonhard was a most interesting man. Trained as a Stalinist communist in Russia as a child and teenager, he entered Berlin in 1945 along with Walter Ulbricht to lead the East German Communist Party (the Socialist Unity Party of Germany). Leonhard was the party’s Second Secretary, in which, in the Stalinist system, he was responsible for ideology — Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology, to be precise. He took his job very seriously, and he took his philosophy very seriously, too. Because he genuinely believed that the communist utopia was around the corner, he became horrified at what he saw happening in East Germany under the new communist regime. It was “anything but.”
Leonhard was well informed about what was going on in other communist countries in Eastern Europe, including Tito’s renunciation of Stalinism in 1947 and his break with the Soviet Union. Tito not only broke with Stalinist foreign policy; he did so on the basis of a theoretical critique of Stalinism as inconsistent with the idealistic vision of a communist society. Here, for Leonhard, was a way for him to continue to be a Marxist and a communist but to reject the reality of the Stalinist system under in which he had been indoctrinated and which he now realized was a fraud. He became so disillusioned and indeed alienated from that system that he fled — fled — to Yugoslavia in 1949.
So it was that in the Spring of 1968, when alienated students were rioting in Paris and occupying buildings at Columbia University, after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., I decided to ask Leonhard about this “alienation” thing as a part of Marxism. He became very animated and said,
“Ah! You must read the journal Praxis!”, with the German guttural “r.” I had no idea what he was talking about, so he explained that in Yugoslavia there was an important group of philosophers who grounded their work in Marx’s theory of alienation and who were using it as a tool to go so far as to criticize their own government for not living up to Marx’s vision. I knew that the Yugoslav government had criticized Soviet Stalinism, but now I was hearing that the same process was replicating within Yugoslavia, still based on Marx’s ideas, and that it was part and parcel of a larger body of thinking in other countries as well.
This was the kind of ambiguity within ambiguity that has always fascinated me. I had not yet read Marcuse or Merleau-Ponty but had a passing familiarity with Fromm and I wanted to learn more. More than that, this conversation changed my life.
V.
Google the word “alienation” and you’ll immediately find multiple references to “Marx’s theory of alienation.” It was his singular contribution to ontology (I freely and no doubt incorrectly use the term), and it all revolved around strangeness. In his early writings, which were in German, he talked about Entfremdung (estrangement). The process of becoming strange. (I would argue that the process of becoming strange is subtly different than the process of becoming alien. An implication of “alien” is almost hostility, whereas “strange” is just that — strange but without any kind of value judgment.) Marx also used the term Entäusserung — externalization — which is not interchangeable with either of the above; it is an objective process that does not depend at all on the perception of the “subject.”
The important thing here is to keep in mind that no matter what you call it, for Marx the philosopher, the process of things becoming externalized — strange, estranged, alien, and even hostile to the creator — is the central problem of all human existence, and the act of creation is the essential human characteristic. This is the core of the Marxian dialectic, Marx’s earth-bound inversion of Hegel’s abstract dialectic of ideas, the engine which for Marx drives human history.
(It is popularly thought that Marx spoke of “iron laws of history,” but I do not believe that is correct. It is true that some of his followers, particularly the Russian revolutionary Georgi Plekhanov used the term, but Plekhanov and others, including Lenin and Stalin, did this and much other violence to Marx’s thought. The notion of “iron laws” was floating around in the nineteenth century and the only instance, to my knowledge, Marx referred to them was in criticizing Ferdinand LaSalle’s “iron law of wages.” Marx was not so simple as to believe in predestination.)
While Marx’s predecessors, such as Kant, thought of the dichotomy between the human subject and the external world in a static form, where (for example, in Kant) it was just a fact that on the one hand there’s the sentient being perceiving the world, and on the other there’s that mysterious and unknowable “thing in itself,” for Marx these were two sides of the same coin, and points in a process that is a dynamic continuum. Marx particularly focused on the act of human labor — more accurately, of human creation.
When I create a tool or a book or an idea, I do so with purpose and an image of how it might look, function, and be an expression of my being. But from the moment of creation, that which I create becomes a separate entity. This is the process of “objectification” or externalization (I am not sure that Marx used these words interchangeably). Down the road, the tool might also be used by someone else (perhaps I intended it that way) for someone else’s purposes, not mine. The book may serve someone else as a footstool, and the idea might be misunderstood and corrupted by others. But what’s immediately important is that at the very moment of creation, it acquires an existence independent of me. Objectification.
Further, when that tool or book or idea is picked up by others, it has the potential of being completely disassociated from me. To others, it simply becomes a thing, devoid of my conception of it, my ideas for it, my love of it, my expression of self. This process of an object I produce becoming a completely independent thing is reification. If I make a lot of these things, they can be marketed by someone else, who may or may not adequately recognize my contribution by giving me the full benefit of recognition or equal value. (I’m skipping over the entire issue of the creation of money, which itself is a thing.)
In fact, that’s the usual way it works out in society, because in addition to a bunch of creators sitting around, there emerge social structures for the maintenance of order, in which some are uniquely given the legitimate right to compel others to behave in certain ways. And as it usually works out, the former people (the rulers) have more privileges than others, including the ability to set rules setting aside some of the proceeds of their subjects’ labor for their own needs as rulers. And so it goes. Economic power and political power become mutually reinforcing. This inevitably creates grumbling in the ranks, so the rulers have special people who create narratives that serve the purpose of justifying the rulers’ privileges, and they persuade the masses to buy into them in many clever ways. In their fully developed form, these narratives are called “ideologies.” And sometimes, religions.
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (Karl Marx, The German Ideology).
It can be argued that Marx’s philosophical framework was itself a product of 19th-century capitalist society and the role of the worker in it. Certainly, that is true. It is hard to imagine, for example, Marx’s theory of alienated labor and the marketization of the products of labor as arising in the Neolithic age, or even later, for example, in feudalism. In fact, in The German Ideology (1845–1846), Marx provided a detailed account (from his vantage point, of course), of the evolution of the man-society relationship (I use the term “man” because Marx used it, not because I prefer it) under succeeding forms of economic-social organization (which he called “the mode of production”) and its characteristic tools (“the means of production”). That in fact these forms were not always and everywhere unilinear is not particularly relevant here, because he was, indeed, a creature of his times and place in Europe.
So, if Marx’s philosophical framework was defined or influenced by its times, does that invalidate it as a means of understanding the human condition in general, or society today? No, I don’t think so. For one thing, capitalist society is alive and well today, with all the forms of oppression that troubled Marx, and more. He did not consider the role of information technology because it did not exist.
Much more seriously, he failed to account for the role of race and other forms of class oppression, a key drawback that was carried on by his disciples, but then again, the society in which he lived was not multi-racial. To be sure, he had opinions about Jews — he himself was of Jewish lineage — but he framed Jews in the form of their economic-social role in a much-misunderstood and maligned early essay, “On the Jewish Question.” Here, I believe that his central point was not that Jews were intrinsically evil or racially different, but that they were both tools of, and objects of, an oppression that was part and parcel of the capitalist society of his day. My takeaway from that essay — although he did use offensive terms about Jews — was a notion that was spreading throughout Europe in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Code: The Jews will not be free until all men are free. That is as true today as it was then, and not only for Jews.
What I really like about Karl Marx and his attitude toward social theory, despite his grumpiness, carbuncles, and bad temper, was his self-awareness of the limits of his theories and the extent to which they were vulnerable to misunderstanding and corruption. This was almost totally absent in his disciples, including, importantly, his partner, Frederick Engels (as well as Plekhanov and others, as mentioned above). In 1882 Marx famously said, “Moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.”
By the same token, where I really find fault with Marx were his serious lapses — one could argue, lasting almost 40 years — in speaking out against corruption of his theory by more simplistic thinkers — such as Engels (after all, Marx depended on Engels, the son of an English industrial magnate, for his income) and Russian revolutionaries such as Plekhanov. Perhaps these were not lapses at all, but instead vanity and complicity. It took the Yugoslavs, a half-century after his death, to turn ideological Marxism (Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism) on its head, as Marx had done to Hegel, and employ it as a methodical critique of what purported to be communist society.
This is all my personal take on how Marx laid out his theory of human existence and history in his early work — its strengths and its weaknesses. It may not meet the rigorous tests of all Marx scholars, but as a one-time Marx scholar myself, this is the thought path that has helped me grasp his historical and political theory that he developed as a young man.
And it all revolves around the concept of becoming strange.
VI.
“It’s not easy being green.”
Kermit knew whereof he spoke. He was strange. Being green in a world where everyone else is, say, purple (my apologies to those who love the color purple), is a challenge, because the natural consensus among the purple people is that it’s normal to be purple but that if there’s someone who is green, that person is obviously not normal.
This profound observation leads right into a discussion about race, but I’m not going there right now — although it might not look that way.
When you’re green and you look at the purple world, you see things that other people don’t see or really notice. You question why purple should be normal while green is not. You might notice that green people are treated very differently across the board just because they’re green, while the purple people don’t seem to notice that or care. You might wonder about their motives: Do they see you as a threat just because you look different, or because they suspect that you resent being treated differently? Nice green Kermit? Do they think you’re inferior and will never succeed in a purple society?
I use this example for a reason. While it obviously pertains to the injustice of racial oppression, it also pertains to the injustice of all class oppression. When we differentiate any group of people or things by their ascriptive characteristics and put them in special categories, we put them in classes. The characteristics may be skin color, economic status, economic role (worker or manager), religion, or so much more. Again, “as it usually works out,” these differentiations tend to reinforce each other, because in the real world, it all comes down to power and privilege.
Marx and many other social theorists understood that the tendency of most people — especially people in power but also those beholden to the people in power — is to see the world in “purple” terms. It’s too threatening or painful to do otherwise. Most people willingly go along with the purple narrative, and some narratives even stranger than that. It’s not easy to be green — so much easier to be purple or at least pretend you are.
So we’re back to ideology, the ruling ideas of the ruling class. The “false narratives” of every age.
Marx started out his intellectual career not as the foe of 19th-century capitalism, but as an intellectual brawler. He was constantly issuing lengthy, verbose, contentious diatribes against his contemporaries, in particular the Young Hegelians who were trying to ground Hegel’s detached dialectic of ideas in the real world but who, in Marx’s view, were just hopeless utopians who had no understanding of history. In the process, he developed a theory and world view in which everything — literally, every thing — had to be examined with a skeptical, inquiring, open, critical mind. He reserved special priority for the ideas of his age and of his contemporaries who were similarly challenging them but, in Marx’s view, not critically enough.
In 1843, the young Karl Marx wrote a letter to his friend Arnold Ruge railing against what he (rightly) saw as the half-hearted political reforms of the day. Among much else, he wrote the following to Ruge:
Now philosophy has become worldly, and the most incontrovertible evidence of this is that the philosophical consciousness has been drawn, not only externally but also internally, into the stress of battle. But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present — I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.
The attentive (critical) reader will immediately note that Marx might have done better by keeping to his own advice and avoiding “the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions” in his later years, but I’ll leave that hanging because while it is an interesting point, it is not directly relevant to this discussion.
Here’s the “thing”: Since estrangement — the process of becoming strange — is at the core of our human existence, we must constantly uncover and demystify the strangeness in our world if we are ever to make it a little bit less strange and more human.
Let me try to put this in more conventional words. If we wish to be truly conscious of the world around us and of ourselves, we must be prepared to subject it — and ourselves — to unrelenting questioning, never to accept received truth, always to compare intentions with results, and trust that only in this way can we build a better future for ourselves and those who come after.
“Moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.”
It’s not easy being green.
VII
There is nothing more alienating, no form of alienation more terrifying and more lethal, than alienation from one’s self.
For Marx, alienation from one’s self meant alienation from one’s own human essence, the essence of the whole person, the creator, the pre-division of labor “man for all seasons” (not his phrase, of course), the truly free human being. While Marx suffered from painful carbuncles and from the angst of the working class, and while he battled with those who disagreed with him and had contempt for his acolytes who he believed misunderstood his work, it is hard to imagine Marx having had crises of conscience or confidence and, I believe, unknown as to whether he suffered from any form of mental illness.
For those who do have biological tendencies toward depression, either unipolar or bipolar, or those who have suffered depression through grief or other misfortune, the sense of separation from how we normally see ourselves and alienation from our own personality, the awful awareness of being a complete stranger to our own selves is literally the most severe existential crisis.
This form of alienation is harder still on those around the depressed person, the beloved family and friends, because they are seeing before their eyes a person who looks the same as the one they know but acts very differently and seems unshakeable in the clothing of their new personality.
I will not dwell on this, but there is one important point I would like to make here that is actually relevant to the discussion about Karl Marx and his worldview, in particular about false narratives (ideology).
In the 1990s, when SSRI medications made their first appearance, there was book called Listening to Prozac by a psychiatrist named Peter D. Kramer. It became an instant non-fiction best-seller. As I had just started taking Prozac and was finding it unusually helpful, I bought the book and started reading it. At first, I liked the book a lot, because it validated my own experience of sensing a change in personality in myself, for the better. Then, as I read farther, it dawned on me that Kramer was saying that this wasn’t a good thing, this medication-based personality change. He seemed to be arguing that relying on medication to change one’s personality for the better — specifically, for relief from depression — was a crutch, an artificial and superficial remedy, a weak excuse of a substitute for the hard work of therapy and self-awareness needed for true healing. By that time I had had enough painful exposure through personal experience to this debate within psychiatry and therapy, and had regained enough self-awareness, to recognize that this book was not my friend. I put it down and eventually threw it in the garbage.
Obviously, Dr. Kramer had either never been depressed or was one of the lucky few who in the days before really effective psychotropic medicines was lucky enough to emerge from it without medication. The latter experience could explain his heated opposition to drugs; if I could do it, then you can too. But even more likely, regardless of the foregoing, was that he was mounting a vigorous defense of traditional psychiatry, especially “talk” psychiatry, in which as a practitioner he additionally had a vested interest in preserving, not to mention pocketing a whole lot of money from a pop psychiatry book written at just the right time.
Listening to Prozac did a great disservice to those suffering from mental disability of all kinds, to their families, and to Kramer’s own profession. It’s fine to hold differing views of the effectiveness of one method of psychiatry over another; it’s quite another to advocate against effective alternative treatments because, well, they are effective, and to make a lot of money by doing it.
I’ll acknowledge that I did not read Listening to Prozac to the end and that I may have missed nuances about the importance of treating mental illness through a combination of medication and therapy. I am sure that I was not alone in reading to the end of the book — who does? — because Kramer’s categorical statements in the beginning were quite enough for me. And by the same token, they were no doubt quite enough for other readers, including those who agreed with Kramer’s apparent crusade against medication, or at least against SSRIs.
It would have been instantly clear to Karl Marx, had he included the practice of psychiatry (which had not yet been invented) in the “ruthless criticism of everything that exists,” that the good Dr. Kramer was noisily and vigorously promoting an ideology that he clearly understood was threatening his worldview, his profession as he understood it, and his livelihood. Furthermore, as with ideologies in general, it resulted in the benefit of the few as against the misery of many, and in essence it was the exercise of an instrument of power. As all ideologies, it incorporated elements of truth with other elements of self-serving myth. And in the end, I believe, it failed gloriously.
SSRIs — Prozac and then Zoloft — have been a life-saving medication for millions of people suffering from depression. Granted, they are not the whole answer. For one thing, different types of depression respond better to other, newer medications. In my case, it was typically a cocktail of medications — complemented, importantly, by therapy, specifically Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — that helped to return me to my whole personality, and not only that, but to “improve” it through deeper self-awareness and changing unproductive habits of thought. But as my therapist once wisely remarked, “Gerson, before this therapy can help, you’ve got to get your meds straight.”
Not surprisingly, the moment when I truly felt that I had returned to my full self was the moment I “retired.” What “retired” meant in practice was that the small, peculiar nonprofit I was running (or helping to run, depending on when you looked), was driven out of existence by the funder. I was 65 and, through the generosity of previous generations and a federal pension, in no urgent need of further full-time employment. In particular, it ended my unfortunate stream of conflicts with boards of directors of any kind. I was free, like Marx’s man of communist society (the only time he ever wrote about it), to be a hunter in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon, and a philosopher after dinner. (Also a pianist after going fishing.) The division of labor no longer had any meaning for me. Wage labor was a thing of the past. I was free to create things — objects and ideas — without the risk of adversarial reification and their becoming menacing, oppressive monsters. This was the third element of my recovery from depression which has lasted solidly to this day.
I did, in fact, listen to Prozac. I listened to it and through it, heard echoes of the self from which biology and circumstance had alienated me. Though I watched myself through a fog and often feeling like a stranger, the recognition of that stranger as myself was one of the biggest breakthroughs of my life.
VIII
Who wants to hear all this stuff? This whining and complaining about the travails of being green, this constant carping criticism, this self-pity, this skeptical and negative world view in which everyone walks around in a self-delusional fog? Not many people, not for long. It’s better left to the pages of inert magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker that you can pick up and put down whenever you want and impress people that you have read them. Given the choice, most people would much rather spend their leisure time talking about their grandchildren or the weather, or watching a sitcom, than hearing a rant about the Protestant Ethic or the false theology of Milton Friedman.
I can’t blame them.
But let’s continue.
IX
I’ve written two books, forty years apart. Both have the words “criticism” or “critical” in the subtitle. Whatever time-bound observations Marx made about the society in which he lived, what has survived in social theory is the concept of critical social theory. We find it especially in Europe, with the works of French philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and especially in the Frankfurt School. We find it in North America too, in the works of Marcuse, Fromm, Maslow (I think), and others, including some thinkers (but far too few) in my own “discipline” of political science (where I am not up to speed so will not name names). Much modern sociology and social psychology has a critical perspective. But what is it, this critical method? Why did I dare use it so presumptuously in the title of my latest book?
(The book has now been translated into Chinese. I still can’t get over it! So funny.)
Let me approach this question not by trying to bluster on about critical social theory in general. My only really deep exposure to this area was to a group of Yugoslav philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s who employed the Marxist critical perspective to criticize their own society and government. Instead, I will talk about what I know best, my recent book, From Pugwash to Putin: A Critical History of US-Russia Scientific Cooperation.
From the beginning, I felt that my including the word “critical” in that title was somewhat preposterous. This was not because I didn’t wish to be critical of one thing or another, because I had criticisms to make about a lot of things, but because it suggested a deeper, disciplined method, the similarity of which I had no idea how closely or distantly it resembled genuine critical social theory. I do not read much, I confess, and I read academic papers even less, though my favorite genre is critical history, both non-fiction (e.g., Barbara Tuchman) and fictional (Umberto Ecco).
Early in the process of writing, it dawned on me that I knew a lot of the actors in the subject area of the book, both from the United States and the former Soviet Union, and knew them well enough to ask them to talk with me. Not being a trained survey researcher, I didn’t quite know how to go about this, but I sensed that if I asked the same questions of everyone it would help. Moreover, I wanted to encourage folks to talk more deeply about their experience than just about the science, and I sensed that there were wonderful stories to be told, as well as a meta-story. And stories by their nature are made up of expectations, successes and failures, and outcomes.
So I developed four simple questions: How did you get involved, and what were you thinking? How did it go? Looking back on it, how do you evaluate your initial expectations? What are your favorite stories?
As I began the actual interviews, I quickly realized that a pattern was emerging. Expectations were not always commensurate with outcomes. Sometimes the subjects (interviewees) were self-aware of that, sometimes not. Then I realized that the meta-story begging to be told was about the meta-expectations and -outcomes, that is, the stated as well as unstated intentions behind the policies behind the collaborative structures and programs developed by the sponsors (governmental and nongovernmental) and their actual outcomes. Additionally, just as the nature of US-Soviet and post-Soviet relations was one that evolved and changed, so did the intentions, and indeed they were to a certain extent influenced by those external changes.
This perspective grew on me inductively as I had more and more interviews and delved more deeply into the history of US-Former Soviet Union scientific cooperation, wove the testimony of some of my interviewees into that narrative (in the first part of the book), and reflected on my own experience. To be sure, my experience was not that of others in similar positions and programs, and undoubtedly the outcomes of other programs than those in the basic sciences differed as well. But I knew only the story I experienced and writing a comprehensive, multi-volume work of similar depth was way beyond my capabilities or interest.
What really troubled me when I got to the end was the answer to the question I love the most: “So what?” It’s the question that too few programs of any kind ask continuously of themselves. I had a sense of the “so what?” but no objective measures. My approach leaned heavily on the subjective perspectives of the participants, including myself. Moreover, the conventional way of assessing the outcomes of basic research is to analyze the publication and citation data, the bibliometrics, but because Soviet scientists tended not to publish in the international scientific literature for many reasons, this approach was simply not available. Today, it is possible to at least look at post-Soviet bibliometric data, which by the way is not very impressive, but that is another matter. I would guess that if scientists were able to publish internationally in the Soviet period, it would look very different and reflect much better on the actual quality and volume of the Soviet scientific enterprise.
So what to do with all this subjectivity in the absence of objective measures? And how do you measure the outcomes of nonscientific goals, such as promoting US foreign policy? I could think of only one way: Do it subjectively and fess up to the shortcoming that it’s only subjective. So I did, for better or worse. I outrageously issued a “report card” on goals vs. outcomes, with a column for effort, assigned grades from A to F, and put it in the manuscript. Fortunately, the publisher (Indiana University Press) thought that was a bit over the top and not deep enough and suggested that I summarize the findings in prose, which came out much better.
I am very pleased with the book. It is controversial, and even some of the interviewees probably disagree strongly with one or another conclusion (I can think of a particular very senior diplomat whose views I criticized, though I hope respectfully). Some of my science-administrator colleagues will disagree on some points, including those in my home agency, the National Science Foundation.
The first pre-publication review I got panned the book totally. It was poorly written, “unreadable,” lacked a central argument (that criticism was repeated by another more favorable reviewer, with merit), was an “insider account” (which it was), and so on. This reviewer was a very senior academic authority in the history and philosophy of science. It was immediately clear that, despite the merits of some of his criticisms, his main problem is that I was not writing in the idiom of the history and philosophy of science, under which rubric the prospective publisher was considering the manuscript. I found the review offensive but didn’t take it personally, and actually had a good chuckle at it, because that wasn’t what I was trying to do, and because it was in fact extremely readable. That it was an “inside story” with many individual inside stories was, in my view, the stupidest criticism of all, unless you take into account the idiom of academic works on the history and philosophy of sciences. That said, one of the most popular and well-regarded works in that field lately have been books like Galileo’s Daughter and Longitude, which are both wonderful storybooks as well as important contributions to the history of science.
My recent book is not the only one on US-former Soviet Union scientific cooperation, nor the only one with critical comments. It does happen to be the only one with a historical account of the full range of cooperative and assistance programs after 1991. But what I will say is that while it indeed lacked a stated central argument, it did employ a critical method of looking at the subject, and ended up being rather highly critical of some of the results. It may not always have been totally fair, and certainly not totally objective, and I accept that.
It’s not easy being green.
X
Let’s go back a few sections and return to the feeling of being a stranger among my own people.
First of all, what’s a “people”? Is it a tribe, a racial group, a religious group, a genetic group, a group of citizens of the same nation-state, a social or economic class? It’s all of the above — and, I would argue, none of the above. It’s a metaphor. It’s a term we commonly use for a group of individuals who feel bound together by a sense of deep commonality, a natural commonality — a commonality that includes the group’s members and excludes others. Think about it. All people are people. What then, is the meaning of “my people”? If all people are people, then what does it mean to say “my people”? Indeed, what part of speech is the word “my”? Is it a determiner, an adjective, an interjection, or a pronoun? Again, it’s all of the above, depending on the context. While we use the phrase “my people” freely, myself included, it is in fact a highly questionable formulation open to different interpretation and misinterpretation, and to some extent a pure contradiction in terms, unless you accept the abhorrent notion of the ownership of people. What we really mean is, “the group of persons with whom I associate” or something along those lines.
There are those who argue that “Jew” is a racial category. These people are generally of light complexion and Eastern European origin. This particular interpretation is particularly offensive, because it usually goes hand in hand with some notion, conscious or not, of inherent superiority, at least in some areas. To me it is as abhorrent as any form of racism, no matter who is excluded from the community of Jews.
And again, just as with “people,” it depends on what you mean — in this case, by the word “Jew.” Does that refer to a Jew by birth or a Jew by choice, a halachic Jew or a nonobserver, a shulgoer or a totally secular person, a believer or a nonbeliever? I have my ideas and others have theirs. This isn’t the place to resolve the matter, because in that level of detail, looking at the full range of those questions, it’s probably unresolvable.
There is the interesting case of Avrum Burg, a veteran Israeli politician and former Speaker of the Knesset, who has announced that he has separated himself from the Jewish community because the word “Jew” has become debased and corrupted by modern Zionism, the form of Zionism (which he claims itself is a corruption) expressed in the new Basic Law of Israel. That makes sense, in my view, only if one conflates being Jewish with being Zionist, which is precisely what the new Zionists do, as well as mainline American Judaism at least used to tend to do. I do consider myself Jewish, very much so, but not Zionist, not in the modern sense as defined by Israeli law.
As for defining “Jew” by belief in God, that, too, is a spurious notion. What is “God”? Can we, in fact, “know” “what” “is” “God”? Does not knowing simply mean that you are an “atheist,” a person without “God”? Is atheism itself a belief system, one which includes some and excludes others? (Richard Dawkins seems to think so.)
My belief, briefly, is that “God” is a metaphor, created by humans out of a need for the expectation of reward or punishment for good behavior, meaning that behavior which (1) meets the Categorical Imperative and (2) is essential for the survival of the species. In that sense, “God” is an instrument of control as well, to be used and manipulated by those who by whatever social consensus have the legitimate power to coerce obedience by others. Marx voiced that interpretation when he called religion “the opiate of the masses.” Sometimes it surely is just that. But where he was right more broadly was to argue that even “God” was created by human beings to satisfy a deeply felt need.
The conception of “God” as an external being or force acting independently of the subject of action — the human being — is one of an externalized, alien force. But that is not the only possible meaning. The idea that “God” is within each of us is one that I accept, in the sense of that to which one ought to strive. A fiction, but a convenient and perhaps necessary fiction. Trouble, but good trouble.
There are various scriptural definitions of “God” in the Jewish tradition. The one used in worship is the thirteen-fold description of the attributes of God: compassion, mercy, forgiver, and all the rest. Those are qualities, but not a definition. And what’s a “definition”? Something that defines, something that limits, something that makes something else a thing. That is why, surely, even the name of “God” in the Jewish tradition is considered intrinsically unpronounceable. It is unpronounceable because “God” is not a thing, because if “God” were a thing, then “God” would be subject to all the vagaries of things, including creation and destruction, appropriation, ownership, alienation, and all the rest in our vale of tears.
The Jewish scripture about “God” that appeals most to me is the one that defies definition: אהיה אשר אהיה. This is variously translated as “I am what I am,” “I will be what I will be,” or “I am what I will be.” This is all a matter of choice, but choice matters. The first variant, to me, is static and defining. The second is closer to the mark, and the third obviously, is what I like the best. “I am” in the processing of becoming.
Becoming what? Well, before we become that which we will become, we do not know what that will be. We may have a sense of it, but we cannot know it. In other words, it is strange.
I’ve gone very far afield of my subject here, which is what it means to be a stranger to the Jewish people. Let’s go back there.
I’ve always found the genetic argument both abhorrent and fascinating. Abhorrent, because of the implications, for some, of different abilities, including mental acuity among others. This goes much deeper than most of us are willing to admit, just as the resistance to the notion that the overwhelming majority of American Jews are White.
On the other hand, Jews have genes and transmit them from one generation to the next. That’s a fact. But the fact is, first, that they’re not all the same genes; second, that modern microbiology has established that environment does have an influence on inherited characteristics; and third, that environment certainly includes circumstances of social privilege or lack thereof as well as other factors.
What are the actual genetics? This turns out to be really interesting. There are scientific studies suggesting that the kohanim come from an identifiable genetic stock. It is also a fact that Jews in general have different genetic origins. That makes sense, because the ancient Hebrews themselves, being wanderers, surely came from different places and different genetic groups. What united them, according to tradition, was common experience and common belief. The subsequent history of Jews varies considerably, including the potential genetic “bottleneck” in 14th-century Lithuania-Poland surmised by Arthur Koestler that greatly restricted the genetic diversity of European Jews at the time — but not of Babylonian Jews, North African Jews, and perhaps Caucasian Jews (i.e., Jews from the Caucasus). To say that all Jews share certain genetic characteristics that make them a separate “race” is highly problematic, as is the concept of “race” itself. Let’s rule that one out. We don’t need to rely on a willfully ignorant and tendentious use of genetics — eugenics, basically — to understand who and what is Jewish.
I’ve looked into my own genetic history and it’s fascinating. On the paternal side, going back hundreds of generations (with mutations), I am in the Y-DNA haplotype called “E-P177.” Its origin was northwest Ethiopia — probably in the vicinity of modern-day Gondar, which incidentally was the home of the modern-day falashas (Ethiopian Jews). It is related to another E group that is present in one-quarter of Ashkenazi Jews. In general, E haplotypes are the most common paternal genetic heritage of African-American males.
This E group was also composed of wanderers. In this case, it’s clear that they wandered across northern or central Africa at the time of the Bantu agricultural expansion, ending up in West Africa — where many of them, 3,000 or so years later, were later forced onto slave ships bound for the New World. Perhaps my little band of E-P177s took another route, north, up the Nile River, ending up building pyramids and whatnot for the Pharaohs, mingling with the Hebrews from Mesopotamia and other assorted folks. Then, if the Biblical Exodus actually occurred or even not, perhaps they wandered across the Sinai with other former slaves who escaped Egypt and ended up in the Levant, branching out eventually from there to other places — including the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. This is speculation, but the genes are not.
Checking through publicly available genetic databases, I’ve found that I am not the only White male with an E haplotype, not even the only White Jewish male. Complexions can change. My nose is a bit broad, like my father’s nose and his father’s nose. So what? Does that make me African-American? My father-in-law used to say facetiously that he was “Egyptian-American.” Maybe so! No, I am white, and I am White. That’s how it all worked out.
And I am a Jew.
For me, what that means is something very specific. It’s not the genes, and it’s not the blood. It’s not even the accident of birth. For me, it is a matter of conscious self-identification, not biological or historical accident. I have a choice to associate with other faith traditions — Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, animalist, pagan, Wiccan, atheist, or more. I choose to associate with the Jewish faith tradition because that is what my parents did, their parents, and their parents, to the hundredth generation. Also, the Jewish value system — at least as it’s interpreted today in the progressive wing of Judaism, the most predominant in the United States — most appeals to my values and sense of modernity. That does not mean that I love the song “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof — in fact, I have very mixed feelings about Fiddler and “Tradition” — but that tradition is a powerful motivator when all else fails.
Asking yourself, “What would my great-great-grandparent think of my decision?” at least makes you think twice before taking an action. And “Why do I say this or that in communal worship, why do I praise this or that moral value or attribute, while I don’t always do it in reality?” The words of communal worship, though they change with time, are deeply important. Words are symbols, just like names or idols or concepts of Divinity. But beyond embracing the unattainable and the ineffable, which we as humans cannot do, words are our most common ways of approximating it and sharing it with others. (I won’t get into psychedelics because, again, I’ve never experienced it and don’t even like being tipsy.)
With tongue in cheek, I categorize myself as a “Jewish Marxist atheist.” I’ve gone into the Jewish and Marxist part. The atheist part is that I simply do not accept the concept of a Prime Mover or of a Presence that is separate from human beings. That there are forces in the universe that operate on us and through us is certainly right, and that we should hold ideal behavior in reverence as a constant goal is certainly good, but that there is some thing that started it all or governs it all is, to me, totally unnecessary. It is not necessary that there was a beginning or will be an end. Those are beliefs, an expression of our finiteness, our own mortality. Of course, it’s patently true that there are always beginnings and end to various phases and forms and the like, but A Beginning and The End just don’t make any sense to me.
What matters to me, and what matters most in Judaism, are my actions, right here and right now. That is why I’m a Jew and why others can be Jews without all the blood mythology, genetic material, and so on. And by the way, we can be and are both Jews and other things as well. If we are not, then we are the one-dimensional beings described by Marcuse, always being the same thing and never striving toward or becoming something else, always sitting around and not creating some thing new, feeling uncomfortable with anything strange just because it’s strange, whether it’s food or people or ideas.
The Jew is a stranger. The “Hebrew” is by definition a wanderer, a stranger. The Jew, whether by circumstance and birth, or by choice, of light or dark complexion, in Israel or in the Diaspora, is a stranger. That awareness of being a stranger is perhaps our most important characteristic.
Accordingly, the words that define my Jewish identity are those of the Holiness Code in Leviticus 19:33–34:
“And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”
And in Exodus 23:9:
“And a stranger shalt thou not oppress; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Do we Jews always act as if we “know the heart of a stranger”? In the country in which we live, or in the State of Israel, which has actually ruled the stranger out of full citizenship? I’ll just leave that one hanging.
Coming back to the beginning of this section, what does it mean, then, to feel sometimes that I am a stranger among my own people?
It feels like being Jewish.
XI
This essay has been very personal, very much about me. Being strange. Being critical. Being green.
But it’s not just about me. It’s about all of us, or so I would believe.
In this essay, I’ve discussed in my amateur way a few different philosophical perspectives on strangeness and the human condition. Each provides special insights, and each has its drawbacks. If one had to choose — as many do, either consciously or unconsciously — which one would you pick? Which one would I pick? To some extent it’s a matter of personal preference; in other ways it’s an intellectual decision; and yet in others we are influenced by the world around us, our upbringing, the kind of society in which we live our lives and experience the world.
It might be inferred from my extensive and sympathetic words in this essay about Marx that I prefer the Marxist (or “Marxian”) perspective. Yes and no. One thing I very much like about it, about his early writing in particular, is the emphasis on the act of human creativity and the process of what happens next, on critical thinking as essential to understanding the world and acting in it, and on a holistic, systemic view of society — the way we live in its broadest sense and its relationship with the world of ideas.
There are drawbacks in Marx, too, for sure. One is a tendency of Marxist thought to be uncritical of itself (a foible it shares with just about every other system of thought ever known); another is its tendency to underestimate the power of ethnic identification and racism as independent forces, even though they may be subsumed under “false consciousness,” which they are but so much more. Marxist thought also seems to have the tendency to attract more simplistic interpretations by those dedicated to action and to turn into an instrument of oppression. This capacity of easily being turned on its head is not unique to Marxism, which itself was the result of Marx turning Hegel’s philosophy on its head. Indeed, another very interesting characteristic of Marxism is its ability to serve as a critique of socio-political systems created in its own name.
The faith-based perspective is also appealing in many ways. In establishing immutable principles for right conduct, it serves a useful function. As a reminder of the continuity of these principles over many generations, it can be a powerful motivator. But the faith perspective’s deep flaws are, first, its ostensible aspiration to universality but its tendency instead to be particular and exclusionary; and secondly, is its unparalleled capacity to become institutionalized and employed as a means of oppression and persecution. Some see Marxism, what I would call corrupted Marxism, as a subset of religion, and not without reason. But religion, at least those Western religions with which I am most familiar, are notoriously subject to these flaws. One might distinguish here between faith and spirituality, but for the vast majority of humanity, the way spirituality is manifested is through faith and faith-based institutions. This is a major drawback of the faith perspective.
I haven’t talked much here about existentialism, but I do not find it personally helpful. I cannot accept that existence is meaningless, for one reason: When we act as human beings, we do so with meaning, with intention. Thus, my existence is meaningful — literally, it is full of the meaning I give to it through my actions, through their intentions and consequences — even if, say, the entire universe cannot necessarily be said to be meaningful. My existence, the constant negative entropy I exert to remain in existence, is meaningful. To insist that life, therefore, is without meaning is to throw up one’s hands and despair of taking any action whatsoever, in any circumstance, whether it be an act of of caring for oneself, caring for one another, of learning, of discussing, or even of writing excellent plays about the futility of it all. Waiting for Godot is great theater and very thought-provoking, but its impact on me is its own self-refutation.
Then there is the phenomenological perspective, of which I’ve sketched out two variants, the Kantian and what in my philosophical ignorance I would call the “interpersonal” perspective. (I really must do more reading of these philosophers but I don’t know if I have the patience.) These appeal to me because, in fact, while I can “know” a tree or a person by recognizing it, I cannot “know” that tree or person in the deepest sense because I am not it. At the root of this dichotomy is ambiguity and uncertainty, which suits my preferences well. It is also the way things work at the most fundamental level, as we now “know” thanks to quantum mechanics. Indeed one might think of the notion that we can know “the other” as Newtonian because we can be pretty certain about its behavior, while the phenomenological perspective is more compatible with the quantum perspective, where even knowing is full of uncertainty. Would that there were a “field theory” of human existence to tie it all together. Alas, there is not.
What attracts me most about Kant’s philosophy, as I’ve said above, is the Categorical Imperative. Marx was probably not happy with that idea, because it is independent of time, place, and circumstance. The Categorical Imperative is closer to the commandments I’ve cited in the Jewish Holiness Code, but the problem there is that the Holiness Code contains other commandments that are not capable of being universalized and in fact are very particularly products of their day and its mores — and in some cases, completely repugnant.
Kant’s Categorical Imperative is based not on “pure reason,” the subject’s ability to “know” the object, but on “practical reason,” the ability of a rational being to act according to principles. Since that’s about the limit of what I can do, I find “practical reason” defined in this way to be a very appealing concept. It’s about the ability to understand that actions have consequences, but much more, because through the Categorical Imperative it demands that we try to understand the impact of those consequences on others in all cases, at all times. Since I have not studied Buber or others, I assume that the “interpersonal” variants of phenomenology have similar outcomes, but that’s just a WAG.
Still, there’s something else about the Marxist perspective, in the earliest writings of Karl Marx, that I find extremely attractive and important, and a link with Jewish belief and lore. It’s about the act of creation. In defining creativity as the essential human attribute and objectification as a more or less inevitable consequence, to be followed by alienation of the thing from its creator and even acquiring its own oppressive power against the creator, there is a presumption of wholeness, the breaking of wholeness through human action, and the striving to restore the initial wholeness — that is, the “synthesis” of the Hegelian dialectic and, for Marx, liberation, the overcoming of oppression and even the division of labor, the universal restoration of human dignity to all. This sense of striving toward restoring wholeness seems lacking in the rigidly logical Kantian perspective. It leaves with me the image of an AI robot logically calculating consequences and then acting according to a lifeless, rigid conclusion. That’s not how we live, or how we should want to live.
The fracturing of wholeness and the striving toward its restoration is what is called in the Jewish tradition תקון עולם (“Tikkun olam”), the repairing of the world. It’s based on the legend that in the beginning, God contracted the world to enable the act of creation, placing the Divine light in vessels that became corrupted in some way and shattered. Our task in the world, according to this legend, is to repair the shattered vessels and thus return it to its wholeness. I recently came across a very similar narrative in an Eastern religion, I think it was Hinduism, and I’ve seen videos of African-American Christians performing exactly this symbolic ritual. There are references to it in the Mishnah and it was more fully developed in Kabballah in the 17th century by the mystical Rabbi, Isaac Luria.
In Judaism there have been several interpretations of the legend of the broken vessels. In modern Judaism there are basically two schools of thought. The Orthodox interpretation is literal: restoring wholeness refers to eliminating idolatry, referring to Avram/Abraham’s act of smashing idols. This, while superficially appealing, makes no sense: Why, indeed, would those who defined themselves by rejecting idolatry wish to make restoring those idols to wholeness as their life’s work? Some might even argue that this seeming contradiction is in fact natural to fundamentalist believers who are so obsessed with the idols of rigid tradition that they mistake them for true worship.
The more common interpretation of the legend, embraced by progressive Judaism, is figurative, based on the mystical legend: that we are obliged to restore the wholeness of the world through acts of charity, compassion, forgiveness, lovingkindness, and justice — the very qualities of the Divine that we recite (repeating them three times, just to be sure) on the most sacred occasions. More than anything else, I believe it is this principle of תקון עולם and the solid commitment to it of Reform Judaism, that continues to draw me in toward the Jewish faith tradition as interpreted in this way.
But if our duty in this world is to restore its shattered wholeness, then what are we doing but striving to overcome its strangeness, striving to overcome our own strangeness and our particularism, striving toward the universality of the universe, ourselves included in it? And in doing this, must we not also apprehend its strangeness and our strangeness in order to act? To see the world through a critical lens? Through the lens of strangeness?
It’s a constant struggle.
It’s not easy being green.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
