Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

The Rabbis and Biblical Interpretation

by Leave a Comment

Mike Heiser makes a compelling case against referring to the rabbinical authors uncritically when trying to understand the Bible:

You have to realize appealing to rabbis means nothing. Rabbinic thought and biblical thought (and academic work) are miles apart. Hey Christians enamored with rabbis: The rabbis can’t even get the messiah right (or, to be more charitable, the two powers in heaven doctrine right — that belief they used to have in Judaism until it became uncomfortable due to Christianity). If you’ve ever listened to Ben Shapiro (I’m a fan of the show) you know what I mean. He often does “Bible time” on his podcast. But what you get isn’t exegesis of the text in its ancient context. What you get is rabbinic opinion (with all the contrarian rabbinic opinions shelved to the side). Rabbinic interpretation (think Talmud and Mishnah) contradicts itself over and over again. That’s what those works do — they fling opinions at each other. That Hebrew food fight got codified into the Talmud and Mishnah. And Judaism is fine with that. We shouldn’t be. Most of what you’d find in rabbinic writings bears little to no resemblance of exegetical work in the text understood in light of its original ancient Near Eastern worldview. Not even close. They’re frequently making stuff up (they apply biblical material to situations in which the community found itself in; the work of the rabbis was responsive to community circumstances — it’s very applicational or situational).

I thought I would preserve this valuable paragraph before it got somehow removed from the internet.

But I will add that the Rabbis, while not worth reading at length if you read slowly, is not utterly without merit. For instance, sometimes material in the Talmud makes arguments for an interpretation. Such an interpretation is either right or wrong, in whole or in part. He observes that his anti-rabbinical argument is effective against early Christian writers as well:

This is also why the church fathers aren’t authorities in biblical exegesis, either. They are centuries (even millennia) removed from the biblical period and had no access to things like ancient Near Eastern texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls for help in interpretation. They were brilliant, but far removed from the right contexts and under-sourced.

While I think that early Christian Biblical interpretation, particularly of the New Testament, is more valuable than Heiser does, I do understand his point and it is valuable. The antiquity of an opinion no more makes it right than it’s Hebrew-ness or Greek-ness. To think an opinion’s source guarantees it to be right or wrong (excepting that the opinion come from God) is the genetic fallacy, a short-cut in thinking.

Do read the whole piece.

Were the Spartans Pederasts?

by 2 Comments

A great deal of “the literature” about ancient Sparta includes the citizens of that great city in the numbers of those ancient Greek perverts who practiced pederasty.

Paul Cartledge is among the many academicians who have accepted this myth:

One particularly striking instance of this displaced or surrogate fathering was the institution of ritualized pederasty. After the age of twelve, every Spartan teenager was expected to receive a young adult warrior as his lover – the technical Spartan term for the active senior partner was ‘inspirer’, while the junior partner was known as the ‘hearer’. The relationship was probably usually sexual, but sex was by no means the only or even always the major object. The pedagogic dimension is nicely brought out in the tale of a Spartan youth who made the mistake of crying out in pain during one of the regular brutally physical contests that punctuated progress through the Agoge.

Paul Cartledge, Sparta: An Epic History

But where are the sources for this? Well, I found two ancient sources that mention adult to child relationships in Sparta:

I think I ought to say something also about intimacy with boys, since this matter also has a bearing on education. In other Greek states, for instance among the Boeotians, man and boy live together, like married people; elsewhere, among the Eleians, for example, consent is won by means of favours. Some, on the other hand, entirely forbid suitors to talk with boys.
The customs instituted by Lycurgus were opposed to all of these. If someone, being himself an honest man, admired a boy’s soul and tried to make of him an ideal friend without reproach and to associate with him, he approved, and believed in the excellence of this kind of training. But if it was clear that the attraction lay in the boy’s outward beauty, he banned the connexion as an abomination; and thus he caused lovers to abstain from boys no less than parents abstain from sexual intercourse with their children and brothers and sisters with each other.
I am not surprised, however, that people refuse to believe this. For in many states the laws are not opposed to the indulgence of these appetites. I have now dealt with the Spartan system of education, and that of the other Greek states. Which system turns out men more obedient, more respectful, and more strictly temperate, anyone who chooses may once more judge for himself.

Xenophon, The Polity of Sparta 2:12-14

So, while Xenophon speaks of ideal friendship, here, it can in no way mean anything sexual. This, by the way, is a major theme in the Memorabilia of Socrates. Now, one could make the case that Xenophon is not the greatest of historians, but the source we have is the source we have. And he claims that among the Spartans, ideal friendship was encouraged among old men and their wards, but that pederasty was an abomination. There is a ring of plausibility to this because Xenophon notes that the Spartan laws were unique among the Greek states, and this is a theme in other writers as well.

The other key source is quite late, but it may nevertheless be valuable. From the Historical Miscellany of Claudius Aelian:

Of the Lacedemonian Ephori I could relate many excellent things said and done; at present I shall only tell you this: If amongst them any man preferred in Friendship a rich man before another that was poor and virtuous, they fined him, punishing his avarice with loss of money. If any other that were a virtuous person professed particular friendship to none, they fined him also, because being virtuous he would not make choice of a friend ; whereas he might render him he loved like himself, and perhaps divers ; for affection of friends conduces much to the advance virtue in those whom they love, if they be temperate and virtuous. There was also this Law among the Lacedemonians; If any young man transgressed, they pardoned him, imputing it to want of years and experience ; yet punished his friend, as conscious and overseer of his actions.

Book III, X

The passage above, while almost certainly too late (third century) to be considered a key piece of evidence about Spartan friendship, is used as a moralizing tail about the nature of friendship. Now, Claudius leaned Stoic in his outlook, and the Stoics, at least as far back as Musonius Rufus thought homosexuality was against nature. What this means is that he was almost certainly not writing with a nodding approval toward pederasty here. He was, rather, using the culture of friendship in a unique and powerful city as an example for his curious readers. Scholars, for reasons I dare not speculate upon, take the passage above to be evidence of Spartan friendship being pederastic. The evidence is entirely against such a perspective.

Historian Helena Schrader does a good job further ripping the Myth of Spartan Pederasty to shreds from a similar but distinct angle:

In conclusion, contemporary sources suggest that Sparta was not a particularly homoerotic society, and certainly there was no institutionalized pederasty or homosexual behavior prior to the mid-5th century BC. On the contrary, in Sparta women’s sexuality was not only recognized but respected and to a degree encouraged.  Spartan artifacts furthermore suggest that Sparta was indeed more prudish than other Greek societies.  The evidence suggests that sex in Sparta was a private matter, sought inside marriage, rather than public entertainment pursued at symposia and on the streets as in Athens. The Spartan ideal of sex was an activity between equals, not an act of domination by an adult male upon a child, a slave, or an illiterate and powerless wife. 

The Parody of Modern Conservative Ideology

by Leave a Comment

Conservatives rarely conserve anything. This is well known.

What they like to do is make conservative cases for making society worse. For instance:

henever you find an article that begins with the title, “The Conservative Case” for or against something, lock your door, check your wallet, and grab your gun. You know what’s coming is an unadulterated sell-out of everything “conservatism” purports to hold dear.

The words directly following the ellipses usually denote some obviously non-conservative thing, like “a $5 trillion budget” or “transgender bathrooms” or “4-foot-11, 80-pound female Navy SEALS.” Do any liberals ever write “a liberal case” for something obviously conservative, such as the traditional two-parent family or constitutional originalism?

No, this self-sabotaging practice is unique to the American Right, which perhaps helps explain why it’s in such disarray.

Publius Decius Mus

Here are some examples:


Now, an even better one:


What does this mean? It means that the same neo-cons (I’m not including Trump, who likely doesn’t care about homosexual marriage one way or another) who opposed gay marriage in the United States just a few years ago, used their influence in American foreign policy formulation to use gay-rights in Iran and elsewhere as a pretext for more infinite foreign wars. The conservative case for sending your sons to die for the right to engage in a practice condemned by conservatives in a country hostile to your way a life. The conservative case for more government spending to support rights abroad we oppose in our land. The conservative case for making your grandchildren live in a world unrecognizable to you. The conservative case for being a loser.

Why do Academics believe stupid ideas?

by 1 Comment

I’ve wondered this for a while. Why do folks with doctoral degrees, who look down on others for their stupidity, nevertheless reject the value of IQ tests? Why do academics who believe in the power of ethnic solidarity and identity politics also believe that human beings are born as blank slates? Why do academics who oppose fascism, support larger government all the time? Why do academics who believe in the sexual revolution decry rape culture which is essentially the direct result of that revolution (devolution)?

Here’s a nice summary of Jacques Ellul’s explanation:

A related point, central in Ellul’s thesis is that modern propaganda cannot work without “education”; he thus reverses the widespread notion that education is the best prophylactic against propaganda. In fact, education is largely identical with what Ellul calls “pre-propaganda” – the conditioning of minds with vast amounts of incoherent information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes, posing as “facts” and as “education.” Ellul follows through by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons:

(1) they absorb the largest amount of second hand, unverifiable information;

(2) they fell a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all indigestible pieces of information;

(3) they consider themselves capable of “judging for themselves.”

They literally need propaganda.

Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 2

This is basically right. Nicolaus Taleb calls them “intellectual yet idiots.” Bruce Charlton calls them clever-sillies. It’s probably best to start calling them goobers and weirdos. Sometimes mockery is the best medicine for bad ideas.

What’s the difference between propaganda and education? I can think of one thing: propaganda provides ideas, habits, and attitudes while not providing its consumers with the tools to reject its influence. On the other hand, education provides a tradition of ideas, habits, attitudes along with the tools to reject them if they are inconsistent with apparent reality.

Appendix

Words and Rhetoric

by Leave a Comment

When using rhetoric or dialectic, your currency is words, they’re backed by definitions which reflect concepts or terms, and they’re used to buy emotions and thoughts.

When you’re using dialectic, you want to be sure that you and your conversation partners agree about definitions. For instance, I was a part of a classroom management discussion recently, and the author of the material we were using eschewed the use of threats, manipulation, and shame. But those words all have conceptual overlap with these terms, “explaining consequences,” “persuading,” and “social proof.” The author of the materials was even against explaining consequences to students because he believes that changing student behavior only happens through the poorly defined concept of “relationality.” Here’s the point. Teachers were very confused about whether or not they had any discipline tools at all. The author of the material was also a Christian who talked a lot about showing grace to students, but he defined grace in a confusing way. So the main way available to teachers who need to manage their classrooms is basically forgiving them for things.

A discussion about the science and art of classroom management needs clear definitions, stipulated for that dialogue so that nobody is confused about what is occurring. But instead, the author tried very hard to make teachers feel guilty about using “threats,” but he defined threats as something like this, “If you talk, you’ll get your name on the board.” Here’s what he did: he chose a loaded term, defined it in a non-standard way (using an example rather than a technical definition). But the term “threaten” pulls negative emotional energy out of people, so that they feel guilty about doing it even though they are utilizing appropriate classroom management. Now, why would somebody sell a product that guilty tripped teachers into not using guilt? I do not know. I cannot fathom, but this technique of persuasion is very popular and there are many such cases.

You could think of this process as the inflation of terms, whereby you get more use out of a word by adding more concepts to the word while still trying to get the same emotional response from people.

Another example is the inflation of the term racism. Most people think of racism as “hating somebody for their race/skin color/culture.” People feel nasty feelings toward racists of this sort. If you simply hear the word, you feel negatively toward racists. Here’s the inflation: Over and over again, the term racist is broadened to include (and I’m not exaggerating) teaching your kids to read, caring about their education if they’re white, believing in the concept of western civilization, moving into a homogenous neighborhood (white flight), moving into a heterogeneous/diverse neighborhood (gentrification), identifying with your own culture (insularity), enjoying other cultures (cultural appropriation), and so-on. On the other hand, writing thousands of articles with explicit anti-white bias is not considered racist, which is funny because lumping all Asians into one group is racist, but lumping all Europeans and Americans into one group called “white” makes perfect sense…it doesn’t. It’s a trick.

Of course, in argument appraisal, this is the fallacy of equivocation. It’s a fallacy because it means being vague to make your case less subject to criticism. But it’s also a powerful tool to the rhetorically uninitiated. You use a term in a highly stipulated way, that you do not make clear, in order to take advantage of the emotional associations with the standard use of the word. Other words for which this happens frequently include privilege (it’s a technical term for social advantages, but it is used to make people feel guilty for advantages), nationalism (Hitler was an imperialist who used nationalism as the name for his effort to take over other nations, the association stuck), Nazi (Americans, the descendants of the men who killed the Nazis are accused of Nazism almost as though the movement was their fault in the first place), women’s health care (which literally now means abortion and birth control), the Tea Party (they defined themselves as a small-government political group was branded as fascist), and on and on and on.

When this inflation of concepts happens on a mass media level, it is propaganda. Why? It changes your attitudes toward things by using emotional associations tied to a word’s standard use and associating them with a different concept. When you’re reading or listening, try asking, “what does the author actually mean by this term” rather than letting your feelings guide you.

Sex Laws: Do They Pass the Reality Test?

by 2 Comments

If you know me, you know I’ve got an anti-authoritarian side. This is temperamental first and only then morphs into ideology. I noticed this about myself in my late teens. Because of that, I typically found myself siding w/libertarian in most areas of political theory. But I knew, even in high school, that pure anarchy wasn’t reasonable because even at the level of neighborhoods, people with short time preferences or low IQs would just live in chaos in a society bereft of deep organizing mythology as is our own. But I’ve never been sure just how far a modern society can or should go with respect to regulating individual morality outside of contracts and violence.

I’ve recently gained insight as I’ve revisiting Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology: The Works of God and reading Camille Paglia’s Vamps and Tramps: New Essays. Paglia is a libertarian, Jenson is a social-realist of the sort that, if he tweeted, would be banned from Twitter (I mean, it’s difficult to describe how much “bad talk” Jenson makes…Paglia too, but from a different angle entirely).

Both of books were published around 2000. Here is a quote from each, exemplifying their points of view with respect to sexual law-making:

My libertarian position is that, in the absence of physical violence, sexual conduct cannot and must not be legislated from above, that all intrusion by authority figures into sex is totalitarian. (No Law in the Arena, Paglia)

We may get at the matter so: sexuality is the reality test of the law…Where law fails its reality test, it is indeed but a product of dominance…A sexually anarchic society cannot be a free society. For no society can endure mere shapelessness; when the objective foundation of community is systematically violated the society must and will hold itself together by arbitrary force. Nor is this analysis an exercise in theoretical reasoning; it merely points out what is visibly happening in late-twentieth-century Western Societies. (The Works of God, Jenson)

Two authors of above average intelligence see the opposite modes of legal reasoning as necessarily totalitarian!

Interestingly, Paglia revels in the “objective foundation of community” insofar as she sees the masculine and feminine archetypes as the result of evolution and necessary. She even chides the political left for failing to realize that the Christian right is concerned to preserve the inviolability of reproduction as the locus of argument in sexual ethics. She even says that the nuclear family will work (as an enforced social unit) “in a pioneer situation” where everybody is preoccupied w/survival and passing on wisdom to children.

Every emotional fiber of my being tends toward Paglia’s idea as I just prefer to leave people alone and let them do what they will and to be left alone in turn. But the fact of the matter is that the laws on the books tend to have the psychological effect of translating into assumed moral norms (I suspect that most of OT case law functioned this way in practice). And so having unenforced laws in favor of the traditional family unit, even from a utilitarian, evolutionary standpoint makes sense.

The idea that laws and the philosophical justification behind them need a reality test is absolutely the case and a law that accommodates, promotes, and is based on the reproductive necessities of the species is about as real as it gets.