FOOD FOR THOUGHT: OUR USE OF IDEAS OF THE OTHER SHAPES OUR REALITY

David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "We understand anti-Judaism--whether expressed in a casual remark or implemented on a massive scale--as somehow exceptional: an unfortunate mark of personal prejudice or the shocking outcome of an extremist ideology married to power. We consider it irrational, an anomaly in the Western tradition of tolerance and progress. But as David Nirenberg shows with deep learning and elegance, we are dangerously complacent if we confine anti-Judaism to the margins of our culture. This complex of ideas sits at the core of the Western tradition, where it has operated for millennia as a means of making sense of the world." From the text: "Throughout this book I have tried to show how, across several thousand years, myriad lands, and many different spheres of human activity, people have uses ideas about Jews and Judaism to fashion the tools with which they construct the reality of their world. The goal of my project . . . is to encourage reflection about our 'projective behavior,' that is, about the ways in which our deployment of concepts into and onto the world might generate 'pathological' fantasies of Judaism." Id. at 468. Reading this books during Black History Month, in the United States, prompted me to wonder whether a similar analysis would throw meaningful insights on to how the use ideas about Blacks and Black--or African American culture(s)--fashion the tools with which Americans generally, and White Americans specifically, construct the reality of their America. For instance, if comments by conservative journalists, talk-show hosts, newscasters, bloggers, and political pundits are any indication, one might reasonable conclude that most of America's problems would be significantly lessened, if not eliminated all together, were Blacks to suddenly disappear from the polity. In short, the perception of the Black in America, a four-hundred-year tradition, shapes our reality. Book proposal: "Anti-Blackism: The American Tradition.").

VIOLENCE AND RELIGION

Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Knopf, 2014) ("The Bhagavad-Gita has probably been more influential than any other Indian scripture. Yet both the Gita and the Mahabharata remind us that there are no easy answers to the problem of war and peace. True, Indian mythology and ritual often glorified greed and warfare but it also helped people to confront tragedy and even devised ways of extirpating aggression from the psyche, pioneering ways for people to live together without violence at all." Id. at 75-75. "In any traditional empire, the purpose of government was not to guide or provide services for the population but to tax them. It did not usually attempt to interfere with the social customs or religious beliefs of its subjects. Rather, a government was set up to take whatever it could from its peasants and prevent other aristocrats from getting their surplus, so warfare--to conquer, expand, or maintain the tax base--was essential to these states. . . . But for centuries now, Europeans had been devising a commercial economy that would result in the creation of a very different kind of state. The modern world is often said to have begun in 1492; in fact, it would take Europeans some four hundred years to create the modern state. Its economy would no longer be based on the agrarian surplus, it would interfere far more in the personal lives of its subjects, it would be run on the expectation of constant innovation, and it would separate religion from its politics." Id. at 234-235. "We can learn a great deal about fundamentalism generally from a crisis in one of the first of the movements, which developed in the United States during and immediately after the First World War. The term itself was coned in the 1920a by American Protestants who resolved to return to the 'fundamentals' of Christianity. Their retreat form public life after the Civil War had narrowed and, perhaps, distorted their vision. Instead of engaging as before with such issues as racial or economic inequality, they focused in biblical literalism, convinced that every single assertion of scripture was literally true. And so their enemy was no longer social injustice buy the German Higher Criticism of the Bible, which had been embraced by the more liberal American Christians who were still attempting to bring the gospel to bear on social problems. For all the claims that fundamentalisms make of a return to basics, however, these movements are highly innovative. Before the sixteenth century, for instance, Christians had always been encouraged to read scripture allegorically; even Calvin did not believe that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life, and he took severely to task those 'frantic persons' who believed that it was. This new fundamentalist outlook now required a wholesale denial of glaring discrepancies in scripture.Closed to any alternative and coherent only in its own terms, biblical inerrancy created a shuttered mind-set born of great fear." Id. at 303-304. "We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God, but we cannot claim the high  moral ground if we dismiss the suffering and death of the many thousands o civilians who die in our wars as 'collateral damage.' Ancient religious mythologies helped people to face up to the dilemma of state violence, but our current nationalist ideologies seem by contrast to promote a retreat into denial or hardening of our hearts. Nothing shows this more clearly than a remark of Madeline Albright's when she was still Bill Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations. She later retracted it, but among people all around the world, it has never been forgotten. In 1996, on CBS's 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl asked her whether the cost of international sanctions against Iraq as justified: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more than died in Hiroshima. . . . Is the price worth it?' 'I think this is a very hard choice.' Albright replied, 'but the price, we think the price is worth it.'" Id. at 391-392. "Every year in ancient Israel the high priest brought two goats into the Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement. He sacrificed one to expiate the sins of the community and then a laid his hands on the other, transferring all the people's misdeeds onto its head, and sent the sin-laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere. In this way, Moses explained, 'the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.' In his classic study of religion and violence, Rene Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community. In a similar way, I believe, modern society has made a scapegoat of faith." Id. at 3. In short, we have used religion as an excuse for, or an explanation of, our use violence when, in fact, we have other motives and aims. Also see James Fallows, "Unholy Wars," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/14/2014. ).

INTENTIONAL LISTENING

W. A. Mathieu, Bridge of Waves: What Music Is and How Listening to It Changes the World (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2010) ("This book primarily is about open, intentional listening, how to practice it, and what to expect from it. Because music is both embodied and free-flowing energy, it has the capacity to connect thing to thing, body to body, mind to mind, heart to heart, and spirit to spirit. Neither heaven nor earth, it is the middle way, a wave bridge between nameable and nameless, between relative and absolute, thinking and feeling, the grammar of language and the cadences of the sea. it weaves the world together in an energetic web, You can be anywhere in the weave you want--all you have to do is get there is to listen to it." Id. at xvi.).

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: A Novel, translated from the Japanese by Phillip Gabriel (New York: Knopf, 2014) (See Patti Smith, "Deep Chords," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 8/10/2014.).

Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 1995) ("We live in an advanced capitalist society, after all. Waste is the name of the game, its greatest virtue. Politicians call it 'refinements in domestic consumption' I call it meaningless waste. A difference of opinion. Which doesn't change the way we live. If I don't like it, I can move to Bangladesh or Sudan." Id. at 12.).

Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes: Stories, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 1994).

Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the Worlds: A Novel, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum & Jay Rubin (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 1993).

Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2000).

Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (London: Vintage Books, 1992, 1998).

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2002) ("Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth  put here just to nourish human loneliness?" Id. at 179.).

Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum & Philip Gabriel (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2001) ("Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no longer talking about reality. You might think--by following language and a logic that appears consistent--you're able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge." "The sad fact is that language and logic cut off from reality have a far greater power than the language and logic of reality--with all that extraneous matter weighing down like a rock on any at ion we take." Id. at 363.).

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2009) ("The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school." Id. at 45. "As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That's one of the few good points of growing older." Id. at 86. "In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain." Id. at 140. "No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you'll never see reflected what's inside." Id. at 163.).

Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2002) ("'Mediocrity walks a long, hard path,' says the man in the black suit." Id. at 341.).

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 1998) ("The address --an office building in the wealthy Akasaka district--was the only thing on the card. There was no name. I turned it over to check the back, but it was blank. I brought the card to my nose, but it had no fragrance. It was just a normal white card. 'No name?' I said. She smiled for the first time and gently shook her head from side to side. 'I believe that what you need is money. Does money have a name?' I shook my head as she was doing. Money had no name, of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability." Id. at 355.).

'EQUAL LIBERTY" AS A CORE LIBERAL VALUE

Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2014) ("An what of the United States? There is no room for complacency. The rapid growth of Christian fundamentalism--in part, no doubt, a reaction to the threat of radical Islam--may now jeopardize the traditional American understanding of secularism as the embodiment of Christian moral intuitions. In the Southern and Western states especially, 'born-again' Christians are coming to identify secularism as an enemy rather than a companion. In struggling against abortion and homosexuality, they risk losing touch with the most profound moral insights o their faith. If good and evil are contrasted too simply, in a Manichean way, charity is the loser. The principle of 'equal liberty' is put at risk." Id. at 362. "On neither side of the Atlantic is there an adequate understanding of the relationship between liberal secularism and Christianity." "Failure to understand that relationship makes it easier to underestimate the moral content of liberal secularism. In the Western world today, it contributes to two temptations, to what might be called two 'liberal heresies'. The first is the temptation to reduce liberalism to the endorsement of market economics, the satisfaction of current wants or preferences without worrying much about the formation of those wants or preferences. In doing so, it narrows the clams of justice This temptation reduces liberalism to a crude form of utilitarianism. The second temptation is best described as 'individualism', the retreat into a private sphere of family and friends at the expense of civic spirit and political participation. This weakens the habits of association and eventually endangers the self-reliance which the claims of citizenship require. Both of these heresies focus on the second word of the core liberal value--'equal liberty'--at the expense of the first word. They sacrifice the emphasis on reciprocity--on seeing ourselves in others and others in ourselves--which we have seen to be fundamental to inventing the individual and which gives liberalism its lasting moral value." "If we in the West to do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?" Id. at 362-363.).

SOME SUGGESTED READINGS FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH

James G. Basker, ed., American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (New York: Library of America, 2012).

Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls' Rising: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995).

Madison Smartt Bell, Master of the Crossroads: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000).

Madison Smartt Bell, The Stone That the Builder Refused: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004).

William Wells Brown, Clotel and Other Writings, edited by Ezra Greenspan (New York: Library of America, 2014) (From Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in The United States: "Get as much education as possible for yourselves and your children. An ignorant people can never be truly free until they are intelligent." Id. at 55, 167. Also see Nell Irvin Painter, "Truth Be Told," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/16/2014.).

Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2014).

Stanley Crouch, Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (New York: Harper, 2013).

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Knopf, 2014) ("The global outlawing of chattel slavery has already become an important precedent for abolishing human trafficking and other forms of coerced labor--as we read the shocking estimates of the number of women and men held today in different kinds of bondage. But as for inevitable moral 'progress.' when we view the present state of the world with respect to human nature, there is less cause for optimism. Many humans still love to kill, torture, oppress, and dominate. Moral progress seems to be historical, cultural, and institutional, not the result of a genetic improvement in individual human nature. One needs only to note what happened in a highly 'civilized' country like Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. If we imagine a worst-case scenario in which future climate change or nuclear war breaks up modern nations as we know them, antimoderernists and ultraconservatives might well restore chattel slavery on a large scale, especially in the Middle East. If my friends and I were suddenly stripped of our twentieth-century conditioning and plummeted to Mississippi in 1860, we would doubtless take for granted our rule over slaves. So an astonishing historical achievement really matters. The outlawing of chattel slavery in the New World, and then globally, represents a crucial landmark of moral progress that we should never forget." Id. at 36-337.).

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1999) ("History must have its heroes, and it is extremely difficult to believe that the causes we cheer were sometimes supported by scoundrels or feared by the men we most admire." Id. at 15-166.).

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1966).

Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown: An African American Life (New York: Norton, 2014) (See Nell Irvin Painter, "Truth Be Told," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/16/2014.).

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2014) (See Danzy Senna, "Face Value," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/23/2014.).

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014).

James McBride, The Good Lord Bird: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013).

Darryl Pinckney, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy (New York: New York Review Books, 2014).

Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers: The Life Of Nate Shaw (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1974) ("This big book is the autobiography of an illiterate man. It is the story of a black tenant farmer form east-central Alabama who grew up n the society of former slaves and slaveholders and reached maturity during the advent of segregation law. For years he labored 'under many rulins, just like the other Negro, that I knowed was injurious to man and displeasin to God and still I had to fall back.' One morning in December, 1932, Nate Shaw faced a crowd of deputy sheriffs sent to confiscate a neighbor's livestock. He knew they would be after his, next. Burdened by the indignities he has suffered in the past and awed by the prospect of overturning 'this southern way of life,' Shaw stood his ground." Id. at xiii. Also see Dwight Garner, "Lost in Literary History: A Tale of Courage in the South," NYT, The Arts, The Critic's Notebook, Saturday, 4/19/2014.)

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM OF RACIAL DISTRUST

Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Board v. Board of Education (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2004) ("A great deal of interracial distrust now is a product more of retrospection than of immediate personal experience and prevails along fossilized boundaries of difference. We still have economic policies and social patterns to frustrate yellow, green, blue, black, pink, brown and red. Yet continually this frustration--with unemployment, crime, and public education--is understood in racial terms. 'White' blames 'black' and 'black' blames 'white' and who knows what others blame one another and them slop also in the black-white muck. It takes time to build up a record of experiences and narrative to justify distrust, and our repeated fallback upon race as an explanation exposes history's gravity. Within democracies, such congealed distrust indicates political failure. At its best, democracy is full of contention and fluid disagreement but free of settled patterns of mutual disdain. Democracy depends on trustful talk among strangers and, properly conducted, should dissolve any divisions that block it." When citizenly relations are shot through with distrust, efforts to solve collective problems inevitably founder." Id. at xiii. As Ralph Ellison put it, 'This society is not likely to become free of racism, thus it is necessary for Negroes to free themselves by becoming their idea of what a free people should be." Id. at 23, citing Ralph Ellison, Working notes to Juneteeth. From the bookjacket: "'Don't talk to strangers' is the advice long given to children by parents of all classes and races. Today it has blossomed into a fundamental precept of civic education, reflecting interracial distrust, personal and political alienation, and a profound suspicion of others. In this powerful and eloquent essay, Danielle Allen ... takes this maxim back to Little Rock, rooting out the seeds of distrust to replace them with 'a citizenship of political friendship'." To label someone "Racist" is to assert, correctly or not, something about that other person, i.e., "You are a racists!" Similarly, to label someone "untrustworthy" is to assert, correctly or not, something about that other person, i.e., "You are untrustworthy!" or "You are not a person to be trusted!" However, to say, "I don't trust you!" or "I distrust you!" is make a statement about one's own self. It is a statement about one's own perceptions, rather than a statement about the other. I think it was Jack London who quipped, "There are two types of people in the world. Those you trust, and those you don't." On reflection, one realizes that he has not divided the world into two types of people--trustworthy and not tructworthy. Rather he has divided one's perception: I trust and I distrust. Perhaps some of the heat of the social and political rhetoric could be lessened were we to talk about our own racial distrusts rather than about the other person's alleged racism.).