Post by Rabbi Neil on Mar 4, 2023 0:08:46 GMT
Four seemingly unconnected things led me to writing this sermon – an interview, a piece of mail a comic strip and an online conversation.
We pre-record the Soul Searching radio shows. One of the forthcoming episodes is with Ned Walpin, member of our community, who is also a tutor at St. John’s College. During our most recent interview, we discussed Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and at one point in the conversation, we looked at how Tocqueville was concerned with a possible decline in public discourse caused by democracy. I found that challenging but quickly came to understand Tocqueville’s point when applied to today – giving everyone a platform in a global dialogue space does not necessarily improve dialogue and, in turn, humanity, even if that was the original intention. The reason for this is because not all dialogue is good dialogue. When there are people saying that vaccines aren’t real, or that we never went to the Moon, or that the Earth is flat, society is not improved. Instead, what happens is that basic facts become questioned and intellectualism declines as the debate space is filled with ways of having to prove facts that have long been established. Not all dialogue is good dialogue.
The second seemingly unconnected thing that led to this sermon was that someone sent me an article this week. I don’t know who because they didn’t share their name. They didn’t attach a letter to it in the hope to engage in dialogue. There wasn’t a little note “Found this interesting, would love to know your thoughts.” It was just totally anonymous. This person sent me an article about COVID that implied criticism of the safety mechanisms that our community has taken in order to keep our members safe. It could have been a member of the Temple who sent it, it could have been someone from outside the Temple. There’s literally no way to know. The article itself was flat-out wrong in a number of places, and it mistakenly inferred things in other places. But I can’t discuss that with them because I don’t know who they are. We can’t sit and learn together because they didn’t want to. That wasn’t the point of sending me the article.
The third seemingly unconnected thing was the ending of the Dilbert cartoon. The illustrator this week publicly described African-Americans as a hate group and urged white Americans to stay away from them. The result was almost immediate cancellation by the majority of newspapers that carried the cartoon. I spent the last few days wondering if anyone was going to write in the New Mexican in defense of the cartoon, and today in the letters page I was not disappointed. The letter tried to demand a return of Dilbert, said that the Without Reservations strip had expressed “anti-white bigotry,” said that freedom of speech was essential for newspapers to be viable, blamed left-leaning cancel culture and threatened to end their subscription if the strip was not returned.
How are these three things connected? I see a very clear connection between them in the decline in nuance. There’s hardly any nuance any more. There’s one side or the other and anyone who tries to suggest that the situation is more complex than either side suggests is ridiculed for being indecisive, for allying themselves with the other side, or for lacking moral character. Rabbinic Judaism is all about nuance. It asks questions, it explores, it gives differing halakhic answers based on nuanced differences. Of course, nuance can be the hiding place of cowards. It can be a place to avoid taking a moral stand. Nuance can even be used as a tool to aid the oppressor and to avoid protecting the victim. But I believe that nuance is also the key to resolving conflict and I am certain that the absence of it leads to the perpetuation of conflict. Take examples from the news this week. The murders of Hillel Menachem Yaniv and Yagel Ya’akov Yaniv were absolutely wrong. The resulting violence in Huwara was absolutely wrong. There’s no nuance there. Who’s to blame for the perpetuation of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? That’s where the nuance lies. Blaming one side without blaming the other does more to continue conflict because it fails to address how rarely conflict is totally one-sided. To take a conflict that has raged for decades and reduce the blame to one side only makes literally no sense to my mind. There have been failed opportunities on both sides over the years and failing to accept that nuance means not learning the lessons from those failures.
So, why has nuance disappeared? In part, it’s because of the way social dialogue has become framed in the internet age. Quick communication almost necessarily lacks nuance. Tweets and Facebook posts seem to create the space for dialogue but the immediacy of the medium necessarily dilutes complexity, which leads to the lack of nuance. The four-letter phrase “TL;DR,” meaning “Too Long, Didn’t Read” is evidence of the lack of attention span necessary for nuance. Contemporary society is predicated on a definition of progress as being related to the increased speed of satisfaction. The quicker we get what we want, the more we consider ourselves to have progressed. Don’t want to spend an hour washing the laundry by hand? Let a machine do it for you so that you save time. Don’t want to spend an hour hanging the laundry outside? Let a machine save that time for you. Want a coffee but don’t want to take the time to prepare it? Pop this pot in the machine and it’ll produce it for you in no time. Want to travel from A to B? We can satisfy that need in one hour where it used to take ten. Our society reads speed and efficiency as progress. Sometimes that is true, but in the realm of morality or debate, that is not the case, because speed and efficiency lead to the lack of nuance and to easy, oversimplistic answers.
A second reason for lack of nuance in public discourse seems to me to be feelings of inadequacy and the attempt to hide those feelings. With more information at the fingertips of humanity than ever before, there is the risk that those who are not specialists in a field suddenly consider themselves to be one. This is expressed best in the conspiracy theorist mantra of “Do your research.” But why should someone feel the need to do that? Why not trust experts? One of the challenges of a technological society is the need for so many specialists to keep it running. Where the general person in society used to have a fair understanding of how to fix things, for example, now those same things have become so complicated that they have to go to a specialized mechanic to be fixed. Information used to be gathered locally and everyone had a part in the collection of social data, but now complicated programs do that work for us. Trade used to be a very simple exchange of goods, but now our entire lives are held in a global economic network that is totally inaccessible to most of us. In some sense, none of that is different to at any other time in human history – the people in the land have always been at the whim of their economic or political rulers. But the difference is that we were meant to be freer now. Increased ability to travel, increased finances, increased opportunities, increased knowledge, were all meant to give us more freedom, but they didn’t, they just entrapped us in differing systems of control. So we yearn for freedom in differing ways, and in a society ruled by intellectual and technological specialists, one of the ways to try to reclaim that freedom is to imagine ourselves as specialists when we’re not. That leads to lack of nuance because then, believing that we are a specialist, we no longer need to listen to the opinions of ignorant others online. That’s where the fourth thing that happened this week comes in – the online conversation. Someone mentioned on Facebook that the universe was created from nothing and they know that because the Bible says so. I explained that in the original Hebrew, there’s actually a rather different message – that it was created from pre-existing matter, not from nothing. “Prove it!” they retorted. So, I did. I shared Rashi’s perspective, I explained how “In the beginning, God created” is a mistranslation based on later philosophical assumptions, I explained about the construct form of Hebrew grammar and why actually Genesis 1 and 2 is one sentence written in the construct form, I laid out a very clear, calm and well-constructed case as to why Genesis doesn’t say what they think it says. I also explained my credentials with it – that I’m a Rabbi who has been trained in the Hebrew text itself – just in case they thought I was a random internet troll. Their response? It wasn’t to say, “Wow, that’s interesting, I did not know that, and I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to explain that,” although it could have been. Their response was to ignore everything that I had said and to try to start another entirely different conversation with “But the Bible says….” That phrase right there shows their profound need to be an expert – “I’m an expert in the Bible because I have eyes and have read it.” The nuance of the Hebrew grammar was irrelevant. The need to be an expert is intimately connected with the profound loss of power and relevance that people feel in society today. Loss of power leads to lack of nuance as people become entrenched in their positions that justify who they are. In this case, “too long didn’t read” becomes “too informed, didn’t need to read.” So, immediate gratification and the loss of power are two modern psychological drives that lead to the loss of nuance.
What do we learn from the letter about the Dilbert cartoon? Beyond Reservations is a funny comic that does occasionally point fun at “the white man” as a comedic way to respond to hundreds of years of abuse toward the Native American community. In its humor, we learn of historical trauma and how humor can be used to deal with it. It is a comic strip of the oppressed mocking their own community and those who have made their lives more difficult. That is not the same as an illustrator saying that African-Americans are a hate group and that white people should avoid them. It's honestly stunning, depressing, that someone could even attempt to connect the two. Not all speech should be free or, perhaps to put it a better way, all speech should be free but not free of consequence. That the letter’s author started to rant against “left-leaning propaganda” reveals another reason for the loss of nuance – the toxic political situation in this country that has been festering for a generation, partially derived in a deliberate anti-intellectual movement, and partially derived in the need for those in economic and social power to remain so despite profound social changes. To be clear, I do think that there is such a thing is cancel culture on the left in this country – I’ve seen it, I’ve been on the receiving end of it, I’ve seen the lives of individuals profoundly damaged by it. But what happened with Dilbert is not cancel culture – it’s the inevitable consequence of the free market that consumers can choose whether to give their money to racists or not. It’s not the suppression of free speech at all. So why would someone think it is? Because some things aren’t nuanced. Some things are just racist, but few people in general society to be called racist, or to be told that they support racists or associate with racists.
I’ve identified a number of possible reasons for the decline in nuance. The first is that the general content of public discourse has become impoverished by including everyone, including those who know nothing about the topic being discussed. The second is that a misunderstanding of progress means that people consider expedient conversations to be “better.” The third is that feelings of exclusion in a highly specialized society can easily lead some people to seek cheap and easy specialization that leads them to dismiss others. The fourth is pride and that it can be very difficult for people to realize that they have contributed to, or rewarded, systems of oppression or individuals who engage in it, so they shut down the conversation instead of seeing the nuance of their actions.
What’s the remedy for all of this? How can a decline in nuance become a resurgence in nuance? I’d like to suggest some ways. In Pirke Avot (4:10), Rabbi Yishma’el says, “Do not say, “Accept my opinion,” for it is for them to decide and not you.” In other words, if we truly accept that no-one must accept our view, we have to immediately engage in meaningful dialogue if we think it is important for them to see our perspective. We have to explore the nuance in order to bring them to consider our perspective and maybe in so doing we realize that our perspective was not even the correct one anyway.
Another remedy is to stop just lobbing opinion pieces at each other. Having a discussion with people with whom we agree is far less interesting than one in which we disagree. That’s why I love recording my radio show, because I love engaging with people who hold a differing perspective to mine. I learn about myself when that happens, just as I learn about them. We need to create a culture of learning from each other and for seeing the opinion of the other is equally important. Our tradition teaches that for three years there was a single dispute between the schools of Hillel and Shammai over a matter of halakhah. In the end, a heavenly voice descends and says eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim chayyim – both these and these are the words of the living God. (Talmud Eruvin 13b). But, in order for the society to function, a decision needed to be made, so it added, “But in practice, the law follows Hillel.” Eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim chayyim – both these and these are words of the living God. That’s why I have no time for people who attack me by email for having a nuanced position, or who anonymously send articles and who don’t want a conversation because they’re missing a core value that is essential for society to improve. Dialogue is difficult but it’s essential. Nuance dies when dialogue is ignored.
Another remedy to the decline in nuance is specifically Jewish study! Jewish study is not about reading the text in one particular way, it’s specifically about finding variant readings, asking what they might mean, and seeing whether or not they might be valid. The prime Jewish study method is in chavruta – in partnership – not sitting by oneself learning text. Jewish study is dialogue. It involves learning from the other, seeing a differing perspective. Jewish study is an essential remedy. One final remedy is Shabbat. In a world where progress is measured by speed, we in the Jewish community measure progress by how much we can step off that ever-quickening treadmill. We measure progress by morality not technology.
Nuance is not dead, not yet anyway. But it needs help, it needs our help. May God help us as we slow down, as we search for divinity in every differing opinion, as we lift up those with differing opinions so that they feel valued for their own expertise, as we honestly face where we may be wrong, for such is the Messianic task incumbent upon us all, and let us say, amen.
We pre-record the Soul Searching radio shows. One of the forthcoming episodes is with Ned Walpin, member of our community, who is also a tutor at St. John’s College. During our most recent interview, we discussed Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and at one point in the conversation, we looked at how Tocqueville was concerned with a possible decline in public discourse caused by democracy. I found that challenging but quickly came to understand Tocqueville’s point when applied to today – giving everyone a platform in a global dialogue space does not necessarily improve dialogue and, in turn, humanity, even if that was the original intention. The reason for this is because not all dialogue is good dialogue. When there are people saying that vaccines aren’t real, or that we never went to the Moon, or that the Earth is flat, society is not improved. Instead, what happens is that basic facts become questioned and intellectualism declines as the debate space is filled with ways of having to prove facts that have long been established. Not all dialogue is good dialogue.
The second seemingly unconnected thing that led to this sermon was that someone sent me an article this week. I don’t know who because they didn’t share their name. They didn’t attach a letter to it in the hope to engage in dialogue. There wasn’t a little note “Found this interesting, would love to know your thoughts.” It was just totally anonymous. This person sent me an article about COVID that implied criticism of the safety mechanisms that our community has taken in order to keep our members safe. It could have been a member of the Temple who sent it, it could have been someone from outside the Temple. There’s literally no way to know. The article itself was flat-out wrong in a number of places, and it mistakenly inferred things in other places. But I can’t discuss that with them because I don’t know who they are. We can’t sit and learn together because they didn’t want to. That wasn’t the point of sending me the article.
The third seemingly unconnected thing was the ending of the Dilbert cartoon. The illustrator this week publicly described African-Americans as a hate group and urged white Americans to stay away from them. The result was almost immediate cancellation by the majority of newspapers that carried the cartoon. I spent the last few days wondering if anyone was going to write in the New Mexican in defense of the cartoon, and today in the letters page I was not disappointed. The letter tried to demand a return of Dilbert, said that the Without Reservations strip had expressed “anti-white bigotry,” said that freedom of speech was essential for newspapers to be viable, blamed left-leaning cancel culture and threatened to end their subscription if the strip was not returned.
How are these three things connected? I see a very clear connection between them in the decline in nuance. There’s hardly any nuance any more. There’s one side or the other and anyone who tries to suggest that the situation is more complex than either side suggests is ridiculed for being indecisive, for allying themselves with the other side, or for lacking moral character. Rabbinic Judaism is all about nuance. It asks questions, it explores, it gives differing halakhic answers based on nuanced differences. Of course, nuance can be the hiding place of cowards. It can be a place to avoid taking a moral stand. Nuance can even be used as a tool to aid the oppressor and to avoid protecting the victim. But I believe that nuance is also the key to resolving conflict and I am certain that the absence of it leads to the perpetuation of conflict. Take examples from the news this week. The murders of Hillel Menachem Yaniv and Yagel Ya’akov Yaniv were absolutely wrong. The resulting violence in Huwara was absolutely wrong. There’s no nuance there. Who’s to blame for the perpetuation of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? That’s where the nuance lies. Blaming one side without blaming the other does more to continue conflict because it fails to address how rarely conflict is totally one-sided. To take a conflict that has raged for decades and reduce the blame to one side only makes literally no sense to my mind. There have been failed opportunities on both sides over the years and failing to accept that nuance means not learning the lessons from those failures.
So, why has nuance disappeared? In part, it’s because of the way social dialogue has become framed in the internet age. Quick communication almost necessarily lacks nuance. Tweets and Facebook posts seem to create the space for dialogue but the immediacy of the medium necessarily dilutes complexity, which leads to the lack of nuance. The four-letter phrase “TL;DR,” meaning “Too Long, Didn’t Read” is evidence of the lack of attention span necessary for nuance. Contemporary society is predicated on a definition of progress as being related to the increased speed of satisfaction. The quicker we get what we want, the more we consider ourselves to have progressed. Don’t want to spend an hour washing the laundry by hand? Let a machine do it for you so that you save time. Don’t want to spend an hour hanging the laundry outside? Let a machine save that time for you. Want a coffee but don’t want to take the time to prepare it? Pop this pot in the machine and it’ll produce it for you in no time. Want to travel from A to B? We can satisfy that need in one hour where it used to take ten. Our society reads speed and efficiency as progress. Sometimes that is true, but in the realm of morality or debate, that is not the case, because speed and efficiency lead to the lack of nuance and to easy, oversimplistic answers.
A second reason for lack of nuance in public discourse seems to me to be feelings of inadequacy and the attempt to hide those feelings. With more information at the fingertips of humanity than ever before, there is the risk that those who are not specialists in a field suddenly consider themselves to be one. This is expressed best in the conspiracy theorist mantra of “Do your research.” But why should someone feel the need to do that? Why not trust experts? One of the challenges of a technological society is the need for so many specialists to keep it running. Where the general person in society used to have a fair understanding of how to fix things, for example, now those same things have become so complicated that they have to go to a specialized mechanic to be fixed. Information used to be gathered locally and everyone had a part in the collection of social data, but now complicated programs do that work for us. Trade used to be a very simple exchange of goods, but now our entire lives are held in a global economic network that is totally inaccessible to most of us. In some sense, none of that is different to at any other time in human history – the people in the land have always been at the whim of their economic or political rulers. But the difference is that we were meant to be freer now. Increased ability to travel, increased finances, increased opportunities, increased knowledge, were all meant to give us more freedom, but they didn’t, they just entrapped us in differing systems of control. So we yearn for freedom in differing ways, and in a society ruled by intellectual and technological specialists, one of the ways to try to reclaim that freedom is to imagine ourselves as specialists when we’re not. That leads to lack of nuance because then, believing that we are a specialist, we no longer need to listen to the opinions of ignorant others online. That’s where the fourth thing that happened this week comes in – the online conversation. Someone mentioned on Facebook that the universe was created from nothing and they know that because the Bible says so. I explained that in the original Hebrew, there’s actually a rather different message – that it was created from pre-existing matter, not from nothing. “Prove it!” they retorted. So, I did. I shared Rashi’s perspective, I explained how “In the beginning, God created” is a mistranslation based on later philosophical assumptions, I explained about the construct form of Hebrew grammar and why actually Genesis 1 and 2 is one sentence written in the construct form, I laid out a very clear, calm and well-constructed case as to why Genesis doesn’t say what they think it says. I also explained my credentials with it – that I’m a Rabbi who has been trained in the Hebrew text itself – just in case they thought I was a random internet troll. Their response? It wasn’t to say, “Wow, that’s interesting, I did not know that, and I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to explain that,” although it could have been. Their response was to ignore everything that I had said and to try to start another entirely different conversation with “But the Bible says….” That phrase right there shows their profound need to be an expert – “I’m an expert in the Bible because I have eyes and have read it.” The nuance of the Hebrew grammar was irrelevant. The need to be an expert is intimately connected with the profound loss of power and relevance that people feel in society today. Loss of power leads to lack of nuance as people become entrenched in their positions that justify who they are. In this case, “too long didn’t read” becomes “too informed, didn’t need to read.” So, immediate gratification and the loss of power are two modern psychological drives that lead to the loss of nuance.
What do we learn from the letter about the Dilbert cartoon? Beyond Reservations is a funny comic that does occasionally point fun at “the white man” as a comedic way to respond to hundreds of years of abuse toward the Native American community. In its humor, we learn of historical trauma and how humor can be used to deal with it. It is a comic strip of the oppressed mocking their own community and those who have made their lives more difficult. That is not the same as an illustrator saying that African-Americans are a hate group and that white people should avoid them. It's honestly stunning, depressing, that someone could even attempt to connect the two. Not all speech should be free or, perhaps to put it a better way, all speech should be free but not free of consequence. That the letter’s author started to rant against “left-leaning propaganda” reveals another reason for the loss of nuance – the toxic political situation in this country that has been festering for a generation, partially derived in a deliberate anti-intellectual movement, and partially derived in the need for those in economic and social power to remain so despite profound social changes. To be clear, I do think that there is such a thing is cancel culture on the left in this country – I’ve seen it, I’ve been on the receiving end of it, I’ve seen the lives of individuals profoundly damaged by it. But what happened with Dilbert is not cancel culture – it’s the inevitable consequence of the free market that consumers can choose whether to give their money to racists or not. It’s not the suppression of free speech at all. So why would someone think it is? Because some things aren’t nuanced. Some things are just racist, but few people in general society to be called racist, or to be told that they support racists or associate with racists.
I’ve identified a number of possible reasons for the decline in nuance. The first is that the general content of public discourse has become impoverished by including everyone, including those who know nothing about the topic being discussed. The second is that a misunderstanding of progress means that people consider expedient conversations to be “better.” The third is that feelings of exclusion in a highly specialized society can easily lead some people to seek cheap and easy specialization that leads them to dismiss others. The fourth is pride and that it can be very difficult for people to realize that they have contributed to, or rewarded, systems of oppression or individuals who engage in it, so they shut down the conversation instead of seeing the nuance of their actions.
What’s the remedy for all of this? How can a decline in nuance become a resurgence in nuance? I’d like to suggest some ways. In Pirke Avot (4:10), Rabbi Yishma’el says, “Do not say, “Accept my opinion,” for it is for them to decide and not you.” In other words, if we truly accept that no-one must accept our view, we have to immediately engage in meaningful dialogue if we think it is important for them to see our perspective. We have to explore the nuance in order to bring them to consider our perspective and maybe in so doing we realize that our perspective was not even the correct one anyway.
Another remedy is to stop just lobbing opinion pieces at each other. Having a discussion with people with whom we agree is far less interesting than one in which we disagree. That’s why I love recording my radio show, because I love engaging with people who hold a differing perspective to mine. I learn about myself when that happens, just as I learn about them. We need to create a culture of learning from each other and for seeing the opinion of the other is equally important. Our tradition teaches that for three years there was a single dispute between the schools of Hillel and Shammai over a matter of halakhah. In the end, a heavenly voice descends and says eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim chayyim – both these and these are the words of the living God. (Talmud Eruvin 13b). But, in order for the society to function, a decision needed to be made, so it added, “But in practice, the law follows Hillel.” Eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim chayyim – both these and these are words of the living God. That’s why I have no time for people who attack me by email for having a nuanced position, or who anonymously send articles and who don’t want a conversation because they’re missing a core value that is essential for society to improve. Dialogue is difficult but it’s essential. Nuance dies when dialogue is ignored.
Another remedy to the decline in nuance is specifically Jewish study! Jewish study is not about reading the text in one particular way, it’s specifically about finding variant readings, asking what they might mean, and seeing whether or not they might be valid. The prime Jewish study method is in chavruta – in partnership – not sitting by oneself learning text. Jewish study is dialogue. It involves learning from the other, seeing a differing perspective. Jewish study is an essential remedy. One final remedy is Shabbat. In a world where progress is measured by speed, we in the Jewish community measure progress by how much we can step off that ever-quickening treadmill. We measure progress by morality not technology.
Nuance is not dead, not yet anyway. But it needs help, it needs our help. May God help us as we slow down, as we search for divinity in every differing opinion, as we lift up those with differing opinions so that they feel valued for their own expertise, as we honestly face where we may be wrong, for such is the Messianic task incumbent upon us all, and let us say, amen.