Kuzari: Final Thoughts

After yesterday's post on my emails with Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb, I want to tie up that discussion with some final reflections.

• Gottlieb initially said that I had not engaged the empirical support of his argument. However, I believe that anyone who reads yesterday's post will see that I carefully and conclusively show how his argument actually brings in no empirical support at all. His mantra was, and remains, "show me a false NET." He continues to demand evidence (i.e., a false NET) but points to none himself. He is therefore engaging in apologetics rather than establishing a positive case.
• Gottlieb challenges others to show him documented "real" false NET events. He reasons that if there are no such false NETs, then we are left with only a hypothesis that NETs can be false--only a hypothesis, not a case based on direct evidence. The hypothesis frame is important to Gottlieb because he claims that his "empirically-based" support for Kuzari trumps the hypothesis of false NETs, but Gottlieb is actually incorrect on many levels here. First, as I have already shown, his support for Kuzari is anything but empirically-based. Second, we cannot base a belief in Sinai's truth on whether we can find sufficiently parallel real or fictional events. We can base such a belief on physical evidence, on interpretation of historical data, on the authority of certain figures or certain texts--but the presumed uniqueness of the Sinai story is not a criterion of its accuracy or truth. Third, the tactic to limit matters to the existence of NETs is nothing short of evasion: the case against Kuzari is based on a range of empirical data. Yesterday, I explicitly identified the main categories of this data. The existence or non-existence of NETs has little-to-no bearing on Kuzari's serious problems in logic, on the lack of physical evidence for Sinai, or on the evidence we do have concerning the history and composition of the Torah.
• One item getting lost in the discussion and its too-loose terminology is that we cannot automatically grant that Sinai itself is true or even a NET event. Without presuming that Sinai is either true or false, we see that NET events are quite subjective and slippery. What defines a "nation"? What defines "witness"? How do we assess the nature and level of belief in "The story was in fact believed to be true? I am not asking trivial questions of semantics but serious questions of philosophical and empirical grounding. These serious questions have not to date been answered satisfactorily, as far as I know.
• Gottlieb criticizes my argument for being hypothetical, which is to say it consists of a "plausible" scenario that is not, in fact, real. This is puzzling for two reasons. One, my argument has a much wider scope than the two examples I use as Sinai parallels. Indeed, as I have said, "It does not take real cases of false NETs to defeat [Kuzari] because it's already a flawed principle!" Two, Gottlieb's argument in support of Kuzari is itself hypothetical. I give a hypothesis as to how the Sinai story developed, and that hypothesis is one part of my overall argument. Gottlieb gives another hypothesis about Sinai: that what it reports is true and was later recorded by some combination of witnesses and recorders. We are both dealing with the hypothetical, and what we are trying to do is come up with a sensible way to determine which hypothesis is better suited to the truth.

Whether or not we are convinced by Kuzari, we must never ignore or forget what it actually is. It is a principle designed to favor a certain interpretation of Jewish history and texts. It is not evidence and it is not proof. Most of all, it is itself unproven. The basic claim, asserted positively for once, is that there are some stories so big and important that people will only believe they are true with lots and lots of evidence (however defined). I think this is a claim that can be tested, to a limited extent, and that can be adjusted for sliding matters of what's big and what's important. With testing, I think I would be willing to revisit my intellectual disdain for Kuzari.

Another big data point to keep in mind is that outside of the Torah's report of Sinai, there is no positive case for the event. To my knowledge, we have no reason to believe Sinai actually happened other than the Torah's ambiguous description of an event. As thinkers, we have a responsibility to ask what sorts of evidence might reasonably have been produced from the Sinai event in the Torah. For instance, should we expect that other nations might have seen something from afar and reported it? If we say "no" in this case, then perhaps we need to address the problem of Sinai's being an enclosed event. Kuzari downplays other revelations as being "semi-private," yet the Sinai revelation is private in its own way because only the one group has received the revelation. Had Israel, Sinai, and the Amalekites all experienced the same revelation and recorded it, then we would have strong evidence of a most momentous event in human history.

Kuzari Keeps on Giving, or Pay No Attention to the Assumptions Behind My Principle!

 [The Kuzari Principle is not so wonderful as it first may appear.]

I have been exchanging emails recently with Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb concerning my post on the Kuzari Principle. When I finished that post, I emailed Gottlieb to let him know it was up. He emailed me the following:

I appreciate your sending me the link to your article. Although well written and clearly presented, I find that it does not engage my argument at all. Below are the sections of my essays that are relevant.

I could just copy them onto your blog and post them on mine, but I will wait a while to see if you want to revise your article.

In this note, he includes relevant selections from his previous writings, and he also gives a link. Here is my response to him:

Thank you, truly, for your reply. I have carefully read the material below (I was familiar with it already) and considered whether a revision to my article would be necessary or prudent. I simply don't see any points in my piece that warrant revision based on the text below.

Please know that I am grateful to you for emailing me and for reading my article. I appreciate the descriptions "well written" and "clearly presented," as I do work hard at communication and am often not nearly as successful as I would like.

I really thought we were done at this point, but no....

The passages below from your article indicate that you did not even consider my argument that the support of KP is empirical, and not "logical" or intuitive. Your critique is to imagine a plausible scenario via which the tradition could have come into existence even if the event did not occur. I argue explicitly that the ability to imagine such a thing has no bearing on an argument based on the real experience of real human traditions. At no point do you engage this argument.

The person who prefers Kuzari thus chooses a weak and indirect logical argument over an argument developed using empirical data. [LT]

My point is that in truth, the roles you describe here are precisely reversed. You are using a weak, intuitive argument concerning what it is reasonable to assume about collective human behavior. I, on the contrary, am using empirical data.

We also have scientific knowledge of the real workings of the natural and social world – and this knowledge leads us to see the truth as being ever less likely as portrayed in ancient religions. [LT]

What about the logical proofs offered by Gottlieb to explain Kuzari?

The evolutionary nature of both stories and societies thus undermines Kuzari's premises. This evolutionary development is extremely plausible and very well attested. [LT]

Not for anty cases meeting the conditons of KP. There is not even one such case.

Kuzari supports an illusion people can afford to have and often feel like they cannot afford to live without [LT]


Just an appeal to intuitive psychology.

Thus, neither the Sinai event nor the laws purported to have been given at that time seem to represent anything of radical uniqueness or difference [LT]

You are ignoring the uniqueness of the event by focusing in stead on the content of the treaty.

Above, I have signaled with an [LT] those places where my article has been quoted. At this point, I am focused on Gottlieb's idea that he has an empirically-based argument. He doesn't, and I do. This is the argument I continue to make in my response to Gottlieb's last email:

You say that "the support of KP is empirical." Please tell me, then, what the empirical data is; after all, providing such data is the burden of your argument. To my mind, that burden has not been met thus far because the evidence of real human experience and of real human cultures suggests that a naturalistic, cultural-evolutionary hypothesis is far more likely than a genuine divine-human interaction (which by definition is practically the least likely explanation).

My argument, however imperfect, focuses on several empirical domains: (a) The rhetoric of KP proponents, which is driven by "spin" in language; (b) the modern form of the Documentary Hypothesis, which draws on seven types of empirical data; (c) cultural parallels to Sinai elements and relevant biblical passages bearing on general arguments made by KP proponents; (d) scrutiny of the logic expressed in and through the KP; and (e) an examination of the relevant Torah passages, in English, regarding the Sinai event.

I find the logical proofs on Kuzari unpersuasive for reasons I explain in my article: (1) The very possibility of a divine-human event is itself not established satisfactorily; (2) the definition of "evidence" used is too imprecise; and (3) the seemingly arbitrary tethering of cultural beliefs to single events is overly simple and not sufficiently nuanced to deal with real cultural history. The events themselves are not the only or the most important elements in shaping public belief. However, all three of these reasons point to major flaws in reasoning based on KP.

Sinai may be a unique story--although in some elements it actually is not--but in my opinion KP needs more than the quality of uniqueness to be truly compelling.

I thank you again for clarifying your critique and for allowing me the opportunity to clarify my position. I enjoy this dialogue, but I don't wish to press you into an argument if you don't want one. Nevertheless, I am interested in your responses to my challenges to you, which are to have you be very clear about what your empirical data actually is and to have you defend your argument against the three reasons I give above for finding the logical proofs on Kuzari unpersuasive.

Gottlieb's email back starts to complicate matters. He persists in claiming that his argument appeals to empirical data, and he re-states his argument in favor of Kuzari:

The empirical data I appeal to are highlighted in blue below [LT note: In the email, Gottlieb has color highlighted sections from his writings. I do not reproduce these writings here, as they are too long.] that . The red section expresses what I take to be your argument. Please review them before continuing my argumentation here.

Now I can put my argument directly, in two stages. Stage 1:

a. Assume there are no historical parallels - no known false national traditions of national unforgettables - no known false NETs. .

b. Then the evidence in favor of the Sinai tradition being such a false national traditions is all indirect. It is all of the form: people do other things that seem similar to forming false NETs.

c. In a conflict of evidence, direct evidence takes precedence over indirect evidence. In other words: indirect evidence can only show possibility and plausibility. It does not show probability. If we have a total absence of direct evidence, then there is no positive probability - only possibility and [psychological] plausibility. But the real world often does not agree with our judgments of plausibility. So only direct evidence can justify a judgment of real probability. [See Q+A below.]

Now stage 1 starts with the assumption a. I present no direct investigation of its correctness. Even so, at this stage the critic ought to recognize that the argument is valid [as opposed to sound], so that if a is correct my conclusion follows. If the critic does not know a to be false, what he ought to say is: "We do not know whether the KP argument succeeds or fails. It depends upon an unverified - and unfalsified - empirical assumption. Thus we cannot pas judgment on the argument at this stage." Now stage 2:

If the psychological process(es) the critic is appealing to is/are to be probable [that is, the process(es) that produce false NETs], they must have occurred more than once or twice in all of human history. I think we should expect a good dozen verified cases at least. The fact that there are no well known cases should give the critic pause. But here is the key point: until and unless he finds such cases, then all the direct evidence we have is that there are none, and the argument should be regarded as [at least provisionally] valid and sound.

That is how far the material I have so far made public should take the critic. Since Living Up was written I have done some considerable research, and engaged in lengthy debate with a professor of classics, all of which has reinforced my conclusion that there are no known false NETs. If you like, I will send you that material.

Concerrning "(1) The very possibility of a divine-human event is itself not established satisfactorily" please see http://www.dovidgottlieb.com/comments/Credibility_Of_Testimony.htm

I hardly think Gottlieb's two-stage argument is stated directly. In my view, my original critique of Gottlieb's reasoning stands solidly. I say as much in the latter part of my reply, but before I give it let me express some shock that Gottlieb wants us to accept Kuzari as sound, in the absence of perfect false NETs. That's not the way it works! The premises are not true, regardless of the existence of perfect false NETs. Unfortunately, I did not point this out in my reply to the Rabbi:

I see that you have highlighted in blue four main passages. You tell me that "The empirical data I appeal to are highlighted in blue below," but I see you bringing in no empirical data at all to support your position.

Passage 1 ("The question is...resembling such an event"): Here, you ask a question and demand Kuzari opponents to show you "real cases." But you are evading my request: I understand that you do not accept the evidence that I have brought in. I want you to explain what your evidence actually is. Your dismissal of my empirical data is not showing me evidence. Your demand to me for evidence is not showing me evidence. In this passage, you have not met your burden to provide actual empirical data that you claim is the basis of your argument.

Passage 2 ("If you think than an event...once in the history of the world!"): Again you are asking for parallels. I don't know why you do this, since you reject all the parallels brought before you. It seems that what you want is something identical to Sinai in every way, 100%, all the way through. Same thing with your claim of lack of historical parallels. In this second passage, no actual evidence is brought by you. You may want to know at this point what I think your evidence ought to look like. In my mind, you should be citing data on the nature of Jewish "belief in the revelation at Sinai." You could also bring in data on those earthquakes and volcanic eruptions you speak of.

Passage 3 ("We need reason...in national revelation."): This is a single assertion, but it provides no evidence itself. Again, the totality of your reasoning seems based on claiming insufficient evidence on the other side of the argument. But you are no providing any evidence yourself. In my last email, I explicitly listed the empirical data grounding my argument. I am asking you to do the same.

Passage 4 ("The very minimum indirect evidence...produced such a belief"): As before, your argument is all critique and no evidence.

So, I continue to assert that your argument in support of KP is not based on empirical data. I also maintain that I have met my burden to provide an empirically-based justification for rejecting KP as a proof of Judaism's truth. Please note that I am not saying here that "Judaism is false"; I am only saying that KP does not prove Judaism.

As to your two-stage argument:

I find item (b) in Stage 1 to be puzzling because it conflates the Sinai event (which can be true or false, i.e. there was or was not a single event) with the report of the Sinai event (which can be accurate or inaccurate). Now, my parenthetical notes already point to some of the complications we face: are we talking about a single event or many events? When, or over what time span? What's the relationship of the report to the event(s)? What purposes might have been achieved through such a report? What information was included and excluded?

My point here is that I don't think it's promising for any researcher to set out to "disprove" or to "falsify" Sinai or the Sinai tradition. Rather, I think the goal of the researcher is to understand as much relevant information as possible about Sinai and the Sinai tradition. I also don't think it's useful or necessary to be invested in a particular outcome of the research, i.e., Sinai being true or false. For this reason, I dislike your item (a), which seems unwarranted to me. I don't know why we want to start out by making this large assumption. Besides, if we assume (a), why do we need (b), since if there aren't any false NETs, then there naturally won't be any direct evidence of them?

Let me conclude by saying that I don't "get" why you want direct evidence of falsity. I imagine you are looking for something like a signed letter by Moses that says "I made the whole thing up." But I don't think KP opponents claim for the most part that there is direct evidence of falsity, in this or in most cases. My position is that "direct evidence of falsity" is a red herring, a tactic to distract attention away from the real problem of your argument: no direct evidence of veracity for either the Sinai event or the Sinai report. Even if KP is true as a principle, it is not itself direct evidence of the Sinai event and it does not necessarily corroborate the report of Sinai in Judaism's holy writings.

Please do not take my last statements here as a personal attack or as unduly harsh. I do not intend them so. I only mean to speak as clearly and frankly about my opinion of our arguments.

I have no objections to your using our dialogue in your websites and blogs. I only ask that you provide a link to my article so that people may read it for themselves and judge its merits and flaws as written. I hope you will allow me to do the same.

By this point, I think I've closed down the empirical argument. In Gottlieb's next response, I sense he is getting frustrated with our exchange:

Perhaps we can test our commuinicatin by focusing on one very small opint. I write:

a. Assume there are no historical parallels - no known false national traditions of national unforgettables - no known false NETs. .

and again

a. Assume there are no historical parallels - no known false national traditions of national unforgettables - no known false NETs.

And I define NET this way:

The condition of Sinai is this: it is a national tradition concerning a national experience that would change the life of the nation. Let's call this NET [National Experiential Tradition] for short.

So I am asking for real NETs. Now you write:

It seems that what you want is something identical to Sinai in every way, 100%, all the way through. [LT]

Can you explain how your wrods are at all related to mine?

I say back:

You ask: "Can you explain how your wrods [sic] are at all related to mine?"

My answer: yes, I can. My comment is based on the idea that there are parallels to Sinai. There are aspects of Sinai that other reports of events share. My article lists some.

He then sends me this response:

Aany two things "share aspects". What is needed is events that satisfy the definition of NET. You have provided none.

I get what he wants. He wants me to say either that (a) ABC is an event that meets the conditions of NET, and it was false; or that (b) there are no known false NET events. I completely agree that I have not provided any events (false or true) that meet his full definition of NET:

I agree, but it seems the definition of NET is rigged to include only Sinai. Do you have a list of objective criteria that define any NET -- real or hypothetical?

Also, I'm a bit disappointed that you have not yet acknowledged the lack of empirical grounding for your argument, as I show by reviewing your four blue-highlighted passages.

My point here is that the NET definition we have used so far is too squishy to be really useful. In his emails, Gottlieb's working definition of NET is "national tradition concerning a national experience that would change the life of the nation." I would like to know the specifics of "national," "tradition," and "change the life." These are potentially variable terms that will affect the scope of events we may be able to include or exclude as NETs.

While I was writing my last email, Gottlieb had sent this:

Furthermore, your words are still not connected to mine: I said the parallels should be *[false] NET events. You say that I want #an event identical to the revelation. * is not identical to # [nor even closely related]. So you are not addressing my words.

Again, I get what Gottlieb is doing. His implicit case is that if Sinai is supposed to be a false NET then there should be other false NETs. In my Kuzari article, I mention the Aztec national revelation and some claims about the appearance of the post-crucifixion Jesus as potential qualifiers. Nevertheless, I think the seemingly arbitrary condition of "false" NET ought to be sidestepped. As I write to Gottlieb:

And I am not dealing with the question of falsehood. Let's try to round up some NETs and then determine which are true and which are false.

Gottlieb graciously sent me a document that looks to be an appendix to a book of his. The document purports to be "a survey of spurious beliefs." It's supposed to show that there remain no documented false NETs: no false NETs means that Sinai should be true, I guess. It does not seem to deal with the Aztec and Jesus cases I have cited, but (a) I have only skimmed at this point and (b) I am interested to see some better-defined criteria for a NET:

(1) The story must describe an event witnessed by a nation. (2) The event must be one that would have created a national tradition. (3) The story was in fact believed to be true. (4) The believers included the nation composed of the descendants of those to whom the event was supposed to have occurred. (5) The story is in fact false.

My sense is that Gottlieb is only satisfied if all five criteria are present at the same time. If not, then to him there are no "real" documented cases of false NETs.

Let me note here now that this appendix still fails to provide the empirical grounding that I was requesting earlier. All it's doing is going down a checklist and disqualifying possible candidate events from (false) NET status. Going down a checklist like this is not the same thing as providing empirical evidence in favor of the Kuzari Principle. Indeed, that evidence might consist of specific events meeting the five criteria above, except that (3) would be "The story was in fact not believed to be true." In (4), "believers" would change to "non-believers."

Since I am getting bored with the topic, let me concede one point (with rights reserved by me to take it back upon further review and/or better data): there are no "real" documented cases of false NETs. So what? And what, pray tell, are the "real" documented cases of true NETs?

I'm going to skip a few emails and go to my latest one to Gottlieb. I start off apologizing to him for suggesting that his idea of NETs seems rigged to apply only to Sinai. He said that a war or a natural disaster could just as well qualify as a NET. Thus, I say:

I see your point that NET can apply to events beyond Sinai itself. Apologies for saying it was "rigged," but what are the objective criteria of a NET? This is a very important point that continues to get glossed over.

I also think you are missing the larger criticism of Kuzari. It does not take real cases of false NETs to defeat KP because it's already a flawed principle! It's construction is fatally deficient from the get-go because it assumes the truth/falsehood of an event when the truth/falsehood of that event is what we want to know.

Take your example below, "Someone is trying to convince me that a fictitious war, or an earthquake, or something like that happened. If he is right that it (the war, earthquake, etc.) really happened, I should know about it already. I shouldn’t need him to tell me. Then the principle tells me that I will not be convinced by him. The problem of the missing evidence will prevent me from believing him." The "fictitious" in your example is a problem, just like before when you referred to "false national traditions."

Your example below can be streamlined and re-worded as "someone is trying to convince me that a war happened." See the difference made by taking out "fictitious"? We're now not assuming in advance that the war is fictitious. Without this assumption, we see that convincing the listener is going to take place at the levels of evidence and argumentation. If a war happened then there perhaps should be some evidence, but what kind and of what volume? Who is the source? Perhaps I feel comfortable believing this source alone because of his qualifications and training. The "problem of missing evidence" will not necessarily prevent one from believing him depending on (1) what kinds of evidence can be reasonably expected to exist at the time and (2) the authority of the source.

These two factors adhere as well to the second example you give. We could add a third: (3) benefit conferred by belief. If accepting the belief helps the listener become more friendly with the source, perhaps because that source is politically influential, then the listener may be more inclined to accept what the source says without further question. Or perhaps the source's statements align well with the preconceptions and ideology of the listener--it's well-documented that people will not be as skeptical when they encounter statements that match their prejudices.

When we remove the presupposition that the proposed event is false, we see more clearly that formation of beliefs involves more than simply the truth of (all/some of) the event. Kuzari is critically flawed, in my opinion, because it makes truth/falsehood part of the principle's foundation--when the listener really is not in a very good position at all to assess truth or falsehood.

In the end, what does this dialogue leave us with? Just a story. That's all we have of Sinai. No proof. No evidence. Just a story. Those who want to believe the story may find the Kuzari Principle impressive. I don't. My reasons for this have been stated before, but let me also suggest that items (3) and (4) in the NET criteria may not necessarily hold for Sinai. I am unaware of evidence that suggests the first hearers of the story, in whatever form, understood it as historically accurate and true. They may as well have understood it as partly or fully figurative--a literary exaggeration to make a point. So also do we not know the real relation of the story's first hearers and the characters in the story.

This has been a fun discussion, but unfortunately it has borne little fruit.

We Live in/and Work

I have been away from the ol' blog and ol' Whitman since the end of July. Let's see if I can pick up things again.

On page 20 of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, we conclude what I'll call the swimming hole episode of the poem. It's, well, the climax of the episode, with a lonely woman mysteriously unobserved as she swims among the young men-folk:

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies swell to the sun . . . . they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.

The poet then visits a butcher-boy and some balcksmiths:

The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market,
I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and breakdown.
Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
Each has his main-sledge . . . . they are all out . . . . there is a great heat in the fire.

From the cinder-strewed threshold I follow their movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
Overhand the hammers roll—overhand so slow—overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

That "or" at the top of the line fascinates me. Whitman's poet, the conjunction reminds us, is a conjurer or is perhaps straining to see the poetic vision. The scenes we get are not simply given. They are not just "there." The poet works as surely as the subjects in/of the poem work. As readers, our role is seemingly to follow the poet's labor as the poet follows the labor of others. Each following provides a lesson, a feature of living worth admiration and note.

The poet keeps us thinking about the work itself as well as the active bodies performing the work:

The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses . . . . the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain,
The negro that drives the huge dray of the stoneyard . . . . steady and tall he stands poised on one leg on the stringpiece,
His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hipband,
His glance is calm and commanding . . . . he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead,
The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache . . . . falls on the black of his polish'd and perfect limbs.

I behold the picturesque giant and love him . . . . and I do not stop there,
I go with the team also.

In me the caresser of life wherever moving . . . . backward as well as forward slueing,
To niches aside and junior bending.

Oxen that rattle the yoke or halt in the shade, what is that you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

The body at work is vitally expressive for Whitman. Poetry--"in me," in the poet--moves too, swerves too. Poetry is a "caresser of life," or perhaps a deity is meant here. But it is the body, the conjured body that acts, which makes value.

Come to the end of the page and we're contemplating animals. We've seen horses and oxen. Now, we see birds:

My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and daylong ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.
. . . . I believe in those winged purposes,
And acknowledge the red yellow and white playing within me,
And consider the green and violet and the tufted crown intentional;
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else,
And the mockingbird in the swamp never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

The striking line is "I believe in those winged purposes." What can be meant here? Does it relate to the "intentional" crown of the birds' heads? Is the poet talking about a designed and ordered world, a world in the guiding hands of God? Do the ellipses preceding the assertion of belief signify a gathering certainty or a moment of doubt?

By the end of this page, the poet has brought us back to a sense of grandeur and urgency. These expressions, these labors, are not just beautiful and mighty. They are terrible and serious also.

As readers, we are never allowed by the poet to get lost, although we may get immersed. We must ever recall our purposes and fulfill the roles we can. We will not "call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else," and we will not reject our role as reader because it is not another one--the role of poet, for example. In other words, we will accept our role for what it is, for what doing it allows us to express.

To Learn and Live and Yearn

Two lovely videos of learning from the ever-lucid Carl Sagan.

Get (in) the Picture

[Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Walt Whitman, 1887-8.]

Page 19 of Leaves of Grass begins by continuing the portrait of a wedding. The full section, beginning on page 18, reads as follows:

I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far-west . . . . the bride was a red girl,
Her father and his friends sat nearby crosslegged and dumbly smoking . . . . they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders;
On a bank lounged the trapper . . . . he was dressed mostly in skins . . . . his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck,
One hand rested on his rifle . . . . the other hand held firmly the wrist of the red girl,
She had long eyelashes . . . . her head was bare . . . . her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reached to her feet.

The juxtaposition of the trapper's hands on a rifle and then the bride's wrist is slightly troubling. The scene seems hard and natural in a rather brutal sense, not like the shows of ostentatious romanticism we might normally associate with American weddings. The lounging trapper recalls the loafing, leaning poet. Hair has an interesting role here, the beard of the trapper and the locks of the girl: full hair, associated with luxury and sexual appeal.

The next scene involves a runaway slave come to the door:

The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsey and weak,
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet,
And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north,
I had him sit next me at table . . . . my firelock leaned in the corner.

This fraternity in the scene, the hospitality described, contrasts with the wedding scene, where the girl's father and friends silently keep distance.That family is covered while the scene here involves openness, invitation, and intimacy--such an ironic reversal of the marriage!

Then, suddenly, we enter a scene of the twenty-eight young men and the 28-year-old woman. We engage a narrative roiling together the preceding themes of sociability, intimacy, openness, voluptuousness--and hair, skin, bareness, and touch:

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly,
Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glistened with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams passed all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also passed over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

These famous lines shocked me maybe 20 years ago. Surely, readers in 1855 must also have been surprised at the forthright vision of bodies at play, bodies in desire.

[Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole, 1884-5.]

At least one contemporary was impressed by Whitman's verbal portraits, American Painter Thomas Eakins:

Eakins’s ideas about the human body find an interesting parallel in the poetry of Walt Whitman, and indeed, they may have been acquired from Whitman, at least to a degree. This attachment to Whitman survives from the records of Eakins’s students—they called themselves “the Whitmans.” Eakins admired Walt Whitman tremendously. He painted Whitman’s portrait and developed a rapport with the poet, and Whitman appreciated Eakins extraordinary vision–calling on him to speak at a testimonial dinner and then remembering that Eakins did his speaking through a medium other than words. Eakins was particularly taken by the Song of Myself. The painting The Swimming Hole seems unmistakably inspired by the passage quoted above from it, and Eakins himself, referring to it as one of “his Whitmans,” would support this reading. It’s a remarkable example of a poem realized in oil and canvas.

Notice that Eakins, like Whitman, inserts (an avatar of) himself into the scene. I think of the poem and the painting together as examples of keen observers and communicators striving to realize both life and thinking in art.

Being There

On Page 18 Whitman continues his argument on the ubiquity of the poet, on the great scope of the poet's eye, and on the connectedness of this teeming American life...and death.

Earlier, Whitman had shown us a suicide, but now he pans across an American mob:

The blab of the pave . . . . the tires of carts and sluff of bootsoles and talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The carnival of sleighs, the clinking and shouted jokes and pelts of snowballs;
The hurrahs for popular favorites . . . . the fury of roused mobs,
The flap of the curtained litter—the sick man inside, borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd—the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd;
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
The souls moving along . . . . are they invisible while the least atom of the stones is visible?
What groans of overfed or half-starved who fall on the flags sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly, who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here . . . . what howls restrained by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the resonance of them . . . . I come again and again.

Although I used the word "pans," the visual metaphor is not quite right because Whitman draws in sounds and the feeling of vibrations also. Whitman then moves us away from the crowd and immerses us in a country scene:

The big doors of the country-barn stand open and ready
The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
The armfuls are packed to the sagging mow:
I am there . . . . I help . . . . I came stretched atop of the load,
I felt its soft jolts . . . . one leg reclined on the other,
I jump from the crossbeams, and seize the clover and timothy,
And roll head over heels, and tangle my hair full of wisps.

How easy we've made this transition! How powerful the contrast between that tension before and the reposition now.

Next, we'll ascend mountains, view the sea, and return to a sense of the social:

Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,
In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
Kindling a fire and broiling the freshkilled game,
Soundly falling asleep on the gathered leaves, my dog and gun by my side.
The Yankee clipper is under her three skysails . . . . she cuts the sparkle and scud,
My eyes settle the land . . . . I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.

The boatmen and clamdiggers arose early and stopped for me,
I tucked my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time,
You should have been with us that day round the chowder- kettle.

On this page, Whitman stresses "being there"--being amid the din of the market, being out by the country barn, being in the mountain woods as a solitary hunter, being with mates by the chowder kettle. He dips us in the environments of the page with simple impressions. He invite us, cajoles us, and intimates that not to leap in ourselves is to miss out on a "good time."

Whitman's Cosmos

Page 17 of the 1855 edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass: this is a shocking and grand page of a shocking and grand poetic statement. We had finished page 16 with perception, both sight and sound. We left there with ideas that people had reason to speak, that people spoke from out of the depth of their desire to be know and to be available to the universe.

On the new page, we enter to thoughts of the great void, the question where are those who had come before:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

Whitman's declares them well and as part of all the cosmos, part of it physically and temporally:

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Whitman moves easily from the massive to the minute and back again endlessly. His vision constantly oscillates. He returns to the theme of knowledge, of sharing knowledge.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe . . . . and am not contained between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good,
The earth good, and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself;
They do not know how immortal, but I know.

Every kind for itself and its own . . . . for me mine male and female,
For me all that have been boys and that love women,
For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
For me the sweetheart and the old maid . . . . for me mothers and the mothers of mothers,
For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
For me children and the begetters of children.

The poet here sings that he is everything and that everything is him. He speaks for it all, for all people and all experience. He champions unification, a sort of utopic or Edenic vision:

Who need be afraid of the merge?
Undrape . . . . you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless . . . . and can never be shaken away.

The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.
The youngster and the redfaced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.

But don't think that the poet is all sunshine, light and butterflies. We leave this sprawling page with a curious image

The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom.
It is so . . . . I witnessed the corpse . . . . there the pistol had fallen.

This image is connected to the little infant, the youngster, and the red-faced girl. They all participate in lucky life and death, in the goodness of death and life.

Definitively Refuting the Kuzari Principle

[A picture of the Iceland volcano eruption, 2010. The smoke and lightening are awe-inspiring.]

The Kuzari Principle holds that some events cannot be invented or hoaxed because they have an unforgettable character and have occurred before a massive public. Accordingly, biblical miracles such as "manna from heaven"--a repeated occurrence--and the revelation at Sinai are too exceptional and visible to be anything but true because it would be impossible to fabricate or fake them and get people to believe. If someone tried to introduce a national unforgettable story, people would speak up and say, "that's not true!"

In this third and final installment on Kuzari (a temporary break from blogging on Walt Whitman), I will explain why the Kuzari claim ultimately fails to make a compelling case for the truth of the Torah's miracles: Kuzari addresses a simplistic and weak form of culture and myth formation, and it specially pleads for belief as an indicator of a story's truth. To be clear, I'm not "disproving" or attempting to disprove Judaism here. However, I am disputing (and, I think, refuting) the idea that Kuzari provides a sound basis for accepting the miracle claims of the Torah as true.

Here's the most cogent modern statement of Kuzari, by Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb:

in modern language the principle that the Kuzari uses is as follows. I beg you to look at it, hear it, and pay close attention to all of its details. Let E be a possible event which, had it really occurred, would have left behind enormous, easily available evidence of its occurrence. If the evidence does not exist, people will not believe that E occurred. [Emphasis in original]

Gottlieb also has a supplementary argument related to Kuzari:

Suppose A invents a story about a national unforgettable and tries to convince B that it happened. Suppose further that B and his nation do not remember the event, and A gives no explanation why the event would not be remembered. Then B will not believe the story. [Emphasis in original]

Let's use the revelation at Mount Sinai as our case in point for Kuzari. The following passage, from Chabad rabbi Tzvi Freeman, demonstrates the use of Kuzari to argue that Sinai must be true:

The evidence [for Sinai] is as follows: Universally, there is a single account of how the Jewish people received the Torah. It states that on the sixth day of the third month of the year 2448 from Creation, an entire nation full of dissidents and skeptics gathered at the foot of a mountain in the Sinai Desert and witnessed how G-d spoke with Moses. Rather overwhelmed by the experience, they asked Moses to kindly fetch all the details of what exactly G-d would like from them and report on it. Which he did, over a period of forty years wandering in the desert. Moses also charged the people to keep multiple copies of the written record, which they did, and so we have many copies of that record to this day.

Here is the proposed most likely explanation of the existence of this record: Someone made up the whole story. Someone else later wrote it down. A third individual put it together with other manuscripts, and the entire nation conspired to agree that it had actually happened. They agreed to agree on only one version of how it had happened, eradicating any trace of dissent.

Basically, a conspiracy theory. This time, involving huge numbers of people over a very long period of time.

Let's be clear about what Freeman calls the evidence: it's the Torah report (see below). So we essentially have only one account of the Sinai story. Most everything else in Freeman's argument comes from his traditional reading of that one account, from the quarrelsome nature of the people to the charge for multiple copies. So, our evidence for Sinai is this and only this: a single surviving report of an event that purportedly occurred over 4450 years ago in a desert wilderness before one people.

Freeman uses rhetorical spin to make this evidence seem more credible and stronger than it really is. Freeman also uses spin to downplay and, in my opinion, misrepresent the alternative explanation. Gottlieb's second syllogism is a version of this same misrepresentation. If I may summarize, both Freeman and Gottlieb claim that "The proposed most likely explanation of the existence of this record" is a sudden fabrication of an incredible story; that is, the Torah records a story that a person made up at some definite point in time, a story that was taken to be true then and there. But this is not the alternative position. Someone did not make up the Sinai story complete and unalterable at one time, for this is a modern sense of how stories are made and circulated. It was more like many people communally developing and interpreting back-stories for already existing rituals and practices. Gottlieb's A and B scenario above is simply inaccurate and irrelevant. The Sinai story was not a conspiracy but the ongoing evolution of culture. And it was not just the evolution of culture but the evolution of cultural texts.

This evolution is described by the Documentary Hypothesis, the modern form of which emerges from seven types of evidence: (1) the Hebrew language of different periods in the Torah, (2) the use and quantity of terms in the different sources, (3) consistent content (such as the revelation of God's name, (4) the narrative flow of each source, (5) the connection between parts of the Torah and other parts of the Bible, (6) the relationships of the sources to each other and to history, and (7) the convergence of the different lines of evidence. According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the Torah as we have it today develops from early oral and written sources that coagulated into four main sources--J, E, P, and D. Between 922 BCE and 400 BCE, the four sources were compiled and woven together to produce the Torah.

As to the Sinai story itself, well, the claim of its exceptional nature starts to diminish upon scrutiny. National revelation is not unique to the Torah or to Jews. The Aztecs have a national revelation story. Some Christians claim that the revelation of Jesus happened before the nation of Israel and thus qualifies as a national revelation just as much as Sinai. It is also untrue to say "there is a single account of how the Jewish people received the Torah." There is, after all, the Samaritan Torah, the Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Torah's unbroken chain of transmission is dubious also, as evidenced by the missing and superfluous letters in the Torah portion Vayigash (Gen. 44:18-47:27). Plus, the Bible itself tells of missing links in the chain of transmission, as in the days of King Josiah (2 Kings 22-23) and again in the days of Ezra.

Although we have no information available to help us corroborate and understand the driving reality of the specific events of the Torah account, we know that religions can emerge gradually and do not necessarily need individual founders or foundational events. This point is made by looking at Hinduism. Shintoism, Asatru, Druidism, and the ancient religions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. We actually do have, therefore, some knowledge of surrounding cultures in the same approximate time periods. Furthermore, we have some knowledge about how the Bible was assembled. Whether one agrees with the Documentary Hypothesis or not, one must acknowledge that is provides an empirically-based explanation for the history and relationship of different elements in the Bible. The person who prefers Kuzari thus chooses a weak and indirect logical argument over an argument developed using empirical data. We also have scientific knowledge of the real workings of the natural and social world – and this knowledge leads us to see the truth as being ever less likely as portrayed in ancient religions.

What about the logical proofs offered by Gottlieb to explain Kuzari? These also wither under scrutiny. Let's look at Gottlieb's main syllogism:

(1) Let E be a possible event: Why are we assuming that an event--any event--actually happened? Whether the event really happened is what we are trying to figure out! We also need to clarify the parameters of "possible," as I don't grant automatically that a god appearing to the multitude is itself a possible event. Finally, notice how we begin here with an event, something empirical, but then move in #2 to something that could be empirical or subjective, and end up in #3 with a purely subjective belief. With every step, the reasoning takes us away from the empirical.

(2) had it really occurred, would have left behind enormous, easily available evidence of its occurrence: What is meant by evidence? If I tell you something and you tell your brother, is your tale considered "evidence"? What's meant by "enormous" and "easily available"? I am not engaging in sophistry by asking that the vital terms of an important argument be made with the utmost clarity and specificity. I have little problem with the phrasing of the principle on its own, but when we apply the principle to Sinai, we need to have the key terms mapped unambiguously to details of the story. When we're talking about Sinai, the fact is that we don't have good evidence and we don't have enormous and easily available evidence. We basically now have only the Torah. If the only evidence is testimony and/or social memory, then the evidence is poor: it doesn't bring us to the truth of what the event might actually have been.

(3) If the evidence does not exist, people will not believe that E occurred: This is ultimately the money statement of Kuzari, the assertion that people won't believe just anything. Some claims are so extraordinary that people will demand to see the evidence, the assertion says. In this way, Jewish belief is supposed to be proof of Jewish belief--hence, we go around in a circle. But the big flaw in much Kuzari-based reasoning on Sinai is the assumption that the story appears suddenly, as if the story itself were specially created by a god and placed in a culture that also was largely static. Claims evolve and societies evolve--both are dynamic.

The evolutionary nature of both stories and societies thus undermines Kuzari's premises. This evolutionary development is extremely plausible and very well attested. I am not here proposing that a band of actual pre-Jews were stupefied before a real volcano (for instance), and that this event was the true and singular origin of the Torah's revelation story. Indeed, if Kuzari were right, then the Torah would the one and only instance in human history of a cultural text emerging fully formed and never, ever changing across the centuries. I am instead proposing that the existence of the Torah report and that the traditional Jewish interpretation are not and never were necessarily credible as evidence. And, crucially, I am proposing that that people don't necessarily need evidence--good or otherwise--to believe the truth (factual or literary) of a story. See, for example, a recent article on how facts can backfire:

Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

The final sentences of the above quote speak eloquently to why people champion Kuzari despite its mismatch with reality and history. For many, accepting Kuzari's limitations would admit doubts in their personal beliefs. Accepting Kuzari's shortcomings would upset the ordered and imposed world of Jewish theology. They defend Kuzari because it's intuitively understandable, rather like "great man" thinking applied to miraculous events. Kuzari supports an illusion people can afford to have and often feel like they cannot afford to live without.

Finally, to close Sinai and Kuzari together, we should examine the relevant Torah passage, where the direct interaction of God occurs unambiguously only with Moses, and perhaps also with Aaron:

Chapter 19: 17-25
17. Moses brought the people out toward God from the camp, and they stood at the bottom of the mountain. 18. And the entire Mount Sinai smoked because the Lord had descended upon it in fire, and its smoke ascended like the smoke of the kiln, and the entire mountain quaked violently. 19. The sound of the shofar grew increasingly stronger; Moses would speak and God would answer him with a voice. 20. The Lord descended upon Mount Sinai, to the peak of the mountain, and the Lord summoned Moses to the peak of the mountain, and Moses ascended. 21. The Lord said to Moses, "Go down, warn the people lest they break [their formation to go nearer] to the Lord, and many of them will fall. 22. And also, the priests who go near to the Lord shall prepare themselves, lest the Lord wreak destruction upon them." 23. And Moses said to the Lord, "The people cannot ascend to Mount Sinai, for You warned us saying, Set boundaries for the mountain and sanctify it." 24. But the Lord said to him, "Go, descend, and [then] you shall ascend, and Aaron with you, but the priests and the populace shall not break [their formation] to ascend to the Lord, lest He wreak destruction upon them." 25. So Moses went down to the people and said [this] to them.

Chapter 20: 1-18
1. God spoke all these words, to respond: 2. "I am the Lord, your God, Who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. 3. You shall not have the gods of others in My presence. 4. You shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness which is in the heavens above, which is on the earth below, or which is in the water beneath the earth. 5. You shall neither prostrate yourself before them nor worship them, for I, the Lord, your God, am a zealous God, Who visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons, upon the third and the fourth generation of those who hate Me, 6. and [I] perform loving kindness to thousands [of generations], to those who love Me and to those who keep My commandments. 7. You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain, for the Lord will not hold blameless anyone who takes His name in vain. 8. Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it. 9. Six days may you work and perform all your labor, 10. but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord, your God; you shall perform no labor, neither you, your son, your daughter, your manservant, your maidservant, your beast, nor your stranger who is in your cities. 11. For [in] six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it. 12. Honor your father and your mother, in order that your days be lengthened on the land that the Lord, your God, is giving you. 13. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 14. You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his donkey, or whatever belongs to your neighbor." 15. And all the people saw the voices and the torches, the sound of the shofar, and the smoking mountain, and the people saw and trembled; so they stood from afar. 16. They said to Moses, "You speak with us, and we will hear, but let God not speak with us lest we die." 17. But Moses said to the people, "Fear not, for God has come in order to exalt you, and in order that His awe shall be upon your faces, so that you shall not sin." 18. The people remained far off, but Moses drew near to the opaque darkness, where God was.

When we look at the biblical passage above, and we must remember that we read it in translation, we see that the nature of the interaction between God and Israel is hardly so remarkable as Kuzari might otherwise lead us to believe. With Moses and then Aaron seemingly as the sole exceptions, all Israel keeps its distance from Sinai and remains “far off.” The people see smoke and feel shaking, as if they are before a volcano. What did Israel hear? Certainly, they heard the shofar. What of God did they hear? Only sound. Moses later reminds Israel that when they encountered God at Sinai, “You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice” (Deuteronomy 4:12).

While Jewish tradition has maintained that God spoke the first two commandments directly to Israel (but see Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, II.33), this seems to be an interpretation that is not explicit in the text itself. In abject fear and standing from afar, Israel pleads to Moses, "You speak with us, and we will hear, but let God not speak with us lest we die." We might suppose that the Israelites actually hear nothing directly from God, if we accept the speaking Moses as being literal:

The Lord spoke with you face to face at the mountain, out of the midst of the fire, while I stood between the Lord and you at that time to declare to you the word of the Lord; for you were afraid because of the fire, and you did not go up into the mountain. He said, "I am the Lord your God . . ." (Deuteronomy 5:4-6; emphasis added)

In this regard, the biblical claim of God's direct interaction with Israel is like later miracle accounts, such as the risen Jesus appearing to a few followers. The singularity of Sinai, in other words, may be highly exaggerated.

The Sinai event also has analogues and precursors in the theme of establishing a social and ethical contract between ruler and ruled. In the ancient Near East, we have the law codes of Ur-Namma of Ur (ruled 2112 to 2095 BCE), Lipit-Ishtar (1930 BCE), Eshnunna (1770 BCE), Hammurabi (1750 BCE), and other kings. Of course, the biblical claim appears unique in having God authorize the laws, but in practical terms Moses actually is the one who issues the laws. God is identified as their source and authority, but Moses is the vehicle for their presentation to Israel. And their presentation is that of a suzerain treaty (or vassal treaty), whose form pre-dates the Decalogue:

(a) Self-identification of the speaker.

(b) Historical prologue.

(c) Treaty stipulations.

(d) Provisions for making the provisions of the treaty public.

(e) Mention of the gods.

(f) Blessings and curses.

Thus, neither the Sinai event nor the laws purported to have been given at that time seem to represent anything of radical uniqueness or difference. This is, of course, assuming there was some such event. I remain unconvinced that there was. As a modern and skeptical reader, I hear in the Exodus passages above a rhetorical ploy to justify the need for rabbis and priests. The passages appear to me as a politicized re-telling of a pre-existing story or stories. I realize that this hypothesis leaves open the questions of what earlier versions of the story might have been and what real events may possibly have been captured in any of the story’s versions. Nevertheless, the Kuzari claim of the Sinai legend’s unique, uniform, and unified voice--this claim is shattered.

In the end, Kuzari fails to prove Sinai, Torah, and Judaism because it misunderstands reality and history. It is a projection of itself onto the human cultural landscape. It specially pleads that IT succeeds where every other miracle claim fails, just as every apologist today claims that HER or HIS RELIGION is not the like the religion criticized by the New Atheists.

What Is the Grass?

Since I only have time today for a quick post, I'll let Walt do most of the talking/singing:

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? . . . . I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child . . . . the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

Thought leads to thought leads to thought.

The Company of Your Voice

I hope people like this journey through Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I think it's refreshing to hear Whitman's voice, to accept the prompts of his poetry, and thereby to think these thoughts.

We pick up on page 15:

As God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night and close on the peep of the day,
And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels bulging the house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is ahead?

These are difficult lines. Whitman has us exploring ideas of intimacy and bounty. He has us thinking through a rather weighty decision: do we look down the road and out in the open or do we instead focus on counting beans and creating inventories?

Of course, we decide to not to postpone the "acceptation and realization." We take up the charge to see and to search for "the Me myself":

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.

Whitman here seems to distinguish the working Me--the laboring We--from what I guess we can call the poetic Me. The word "poetic" is full of meaning, as I think Whitman wants us to understand this reflective, descriptive, and beautiful Me as both the object and subject of these pages. But Whitman is remarkable for never succumbing to exclusion. The laborer and the poet are intimate and mutually reinforcing:

I believe in you my soul . . . . the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

I take "the other I am" to refer to the working Me, and I think the soul must be the seat of poetry. Perhaps it's the working Me, another name and a symbol for the reader, that the poet then addresses directly:

Loafe with me on the grass . . . . loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want . . . . not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

There's humility here and simplicity. The poet asks only for company and for the sound of a voice. And yet even this sound is momentous. Even the sound gives and teaches. In Whitman's world, everything images everything else:

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers . . . . and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love;
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.

Panama!

I still love this song!

Lacking Nothing

The next page (page 14) of Whitman's poetry starts with the poet not declaiming but questioning. The poet addresses the reader, challenges the reader, prods the reader, puzzles the reader.

Your thousand acres are pretty good, the poet's reasoning seems to be, and the Earth is pretty good, too. You may have felt pride in your ruminations over other poems...but now you are here with me in this poem. With me and herein, you the reader will not get at the meaning of poem but you will actually get the source of them all!

I have mentioned before my admiration for Whitman's audacity. His claims for what his poem is, what his ends are--these are audacious if anything is. And his style is no less confident and muscular. Look at all of the anaphora (Have you, You shall, Always), the repetition, and the ellipses. Notice the range: we began the page with acres and Earth; we leave it with organs, particles, and inches.

A final note must be made to acknowledge the great openness that Whitman champions: "Clear and sweet is my soul....and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul." He accepts all and rejects nothing. He embraces it all; it's all his subject and it's all essential: "Lack one lacks both."

Our Song

Many years ago--I am going to guess 1989--I first encountered these lines:

I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

When as a younger man I first read this bold opening, I knew the poem as "Song of Myself." This title is not found here; it would be a later addition. But here in our fresh reading of a fresh poet newly reaching out, the audacious three lines have the poet yanking the reader into Whitman's way of seeing. In what you read, Whitman seems to say, you will understand as I do and you will therefore recognize your own understanding too.

I hope I can convey how outrageous Whitman truly is in this opening. He gives the reader not just words or ideas to ponder but rather claims that the reader will become connected or re-connected to an overarching good that joins poet and reader alike. Whitman thus gives both a new way of seeing and a new metaphysics supporting the vision. It's heady stuff, stated with simplicity and poise.

I can hardly fathom the line "what I assume you shall assume" because of the strange verb "to assume." The verbs seems to have both the intellectual sense--as in taking something to be true--and the active sense--as in taking control of or adopting. Poet and reader get locked into a shared sight and a shared mind. I wonder if perhaps Whitman's intent is to teach the reader about self-celebration and self-realization, to show them the American-ness of their sight and their being. Whitman's song is our song, one of the person, the individual, and the American. 

Over the course of the page, Whitman's words then begin to weave a reverie. First it seems we are by a house, standing and leaning casually, and watching the grass in the summer--yet it's a single blade of grass. The individuality of it is striking. Whitman really is concerned with atoms, with the atom level.

Whitman contrasts the perfumed air of the house with the odorless atmosphere. By this quick, impassioned contrast, Whitman declares allegiance to natural, to himself as a natural being with a nature to be explored and appreciated.

We conclude the page with health and song. This is an awakening.

Walt Whitman's America

[Walt Whitman, 1848]

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass begins with....

Hmm. Let's think about it. What is this beginning?

AMERICA does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions . . . . accepts the lesson with calmness . . . is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms . . . perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house . . . perceives that it waits a little while in the door . . . that it was fittest for its days . . . that its action has descended to the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches . . . and that he shall be fittest for his days.

Is this poetry or prose?

No matter if it's one or the other, or both. Whitman opens with America, with this vision of America standing wide armed in a green field. Whitman bursts his vision of America in language, and it's a language of newness, life, ranging perception, fitness (as health, as toughness), and days.

The poet and the soul, too, are main concerns. They feed one another for Whitman. They cloak America's grandeur:

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

......................................................

Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves. Here the performance disdaining the trivial unapproached in the tremendous audacity of its crowds and groupings and the push of its perspective spreads with crampless and flowing breadth and showers its prolific and splendid extravagance. One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground or the orchards drop apples or the bays contain fish or men beget children upon women.

Whitman's long beginning, which I will not labor over here and now, lays out the new poem he has devised. It explains, justifies, and theorizes his poem and his vision of American poetry.

I love the bigness of this beginning and of Leaves of Grass generally. I love the audacity. Yet Whitman recalls humility and wisdom just as well:

The poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away. The coward will surely pass away. The expectation of the vital and great can only be satisfied by the demeanor of the vital and great. The swarms of the polished deprecating and reflectors and the polite float off and leave no remembrance. America prepares with composure and goodwill for the visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their warrant and welcome. The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the statesman, the erudite . . they are not unappreciated . . they fall in their place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. No disguise can conceal from it . . no disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none, it permits all. Only toward as good as itself and toward the like of itself will it advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of its poets. The signs are effectual. There is no fear of mistake. If the one is true the other is true. The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Whitman is an unwavering poet of courage and of work, and this is why I read him and honor him. I will try, unafraid, to meet him where he stands and to talk openly about the work before us.

Goodbye Atheism, Hello Walt Whitman

[The image in the lower right corner is one of my favorites. The others are from an 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.]

For some time, I've been thinking about a change of direction in my blogging. Now I'm still as interested as ever in understanding what Atheism and religion "mean." I have many questions remaining about how and why people affirm (and proclaim and "sell") intimate knowledge that there is, and is only, one supreme being of the universe. I have not stopped my considerations on reasoning, and I will not refrain from criticizing ideas I think are poorly conceived or otherwise flawed.

However, concerning religion I have reached an end point ( that's "an" end point, not "the" end point) in my thinking about it. That end is expressed by R. Joseph Hoffmann far better than I could ever hope to:

When it comes to religion, words speak louder than actions. All forms of biblical and Quranic literalism are invitations to moral terror not because the precept you happen to be reading at the moment is “wrong” but because the one you read next might violate both conscience and commonsense. Violent because you cannot know what verses stir the mind and heart of your friendly local mullah, priest or rabbi. Picking and choosing what the experts believe the laity need to hear–the way most preachers have practiced their faith in public over the millennia–may be a tribute to the power of discernment, but it teaches the congregation—the occasional Catholic, the wavering Muslim—some very bad habits.

It can lead to a constricting of moral vision, the abuse of little children, butchering or disfiguring wives and daughters, the killing of the tribe of Abraham by the children of Abraham. Words do this because they have the power to be misunderstood. And because taken as a bundle, the texts of the sacred traditions are a muddle of contradictory and sometimes terrifying ideas that commend everything from peace on earth to extermination of the unbeliever in their several parts.

It is the kind of tangle that attracts knot-tiers and exploiters and anyone who needs the money of the poor to be rich. Most of the methods developed to study and examine the narratives of the world’s religions “scientifically” in the last two centuries have helped to provide contexts for texts, have shone light on the community within which texts developed—ranging from Syria to Medina—reminding us above all that the ancient words are no different in provenance than modern words: that is, they are human words and need human interpretation. The words are not above us, they should not be considered immune from our assessment and judgment. Any doctrine of inspiration that teaches otherwise is potentially if not actually malignant and insidious.

And this is why I feel it's time for me to move decisively to other human words needing interpretation, to other texts--and their contexts, communities, and worlds. It's time for me to do something else, something that carries me to other places where I can contribute. I wrote recently that when I decided to self-identify as an Atheist, it was because I felt a responsibility to do something:

This is why am I an Atheist. Because the world needs voices to speak for reason and for reasoning. Because the world needs people to show that they are opposed to social governance by doctrine and dogma. Because the world needs people who want to learn, to think, and to teach about the issues developing before us. Because the world needs leaders who consider opinions rather than dictating them.

This is why am I an Atheist. Because the world needs people like me to do something.

This change of direction for the blog is me doing something. It's me doing something for myself and for the world I want around me.

I have interests in addition to Atheism that deserve fuller and more sustained expression by me. I want to explore other aspects of this wonderful world, such as the poetry of its people, the conflicts of its nations and civilizations, and the endeavors of its animal inhabitants. I have no new insights into how awful the imaginary God is, how lifeless the fictionalized Son is, or how hateful their holiest adherents are. And I wish to avoid having one more discussion about how it's possible that I as an Atheist could live by meaningful morals.

Therefore, my intent is to refrain from blogging on Atheism and/or religion for a time. Instead, I intend to pursue a recent interest in American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). For the time being I hope to make the greater part of my blogging a journey through the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass.

If I recall correctly, I first read Whitman back in college. I still have my Norton edition of Leaves of Grass, probably intending to come back to it at some time. As a medievalist, reading works outside of the Middle Ages can be something of a luxury. I think now is as good a time as any to re-visit Whitman and get to know Leaves of Grass.

Independence Day is upon us in the U.S., and Whitman often wrote eloquently about America. His "Long, Too Long America" aptly describes a malaise afflicting the world at this very moment in history:



Long, too long America,
Traveling roads all even and peaceful, you learn’d from joys and prosperity only,
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate, and recoiling not,
And now to conceive and show to the world, what your children en-masse really are,
(For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse really are?)

10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy

A 2008 article by by Jen Angel lists 10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy. The ten are:

(1) Savor Everyday Moments
(2) Avoid Comparisons
(3) Devalue Money
(4) Have Meaningful Goals
(5) Take Initiative at Work
(6) Make Friends and Treasure Family
(7) Smile
(8) Say Thank You
(9) Exercise
(10) Give Away

No surprises here, really--at least with what appears. I say "at least with what appears" because I think there are some curious omissions. I suppose meditation can fit under the "Savor the Everyday" category, but I noticed it was missing. Prayer is kind of like meditation; it can also be a vehicle for expressing thankfulness. So, like meditation, it can fit above, but is not explicitly mentioned. A big omission is music, either listening or playing. I wouldn't have been surprised if there was mention that people were happier when they liked music, but again maybe this is because music can fall under another category, such as "Savor the Everyday."

Many of the behaviors listed are the explicit focus of reflection in weekly religious gatherings and sermons. Indeed, the very exercise of a Shabbat service or a Sunday worship covers several of the behaviors at one time. Many religious services focus directly on savoring the everyday, on emphasizing self-fulfillment and avoiding comparisons, on devaluing money and so on.

No wonder people become so attached to their synagogues and churches! No wonder people believe so strongly that their religion is good and that it works. These people must be puzzled at Atheism, as if it rejects these ten behaviors.

But the truth is that Atheists support all of those behaviors. We too need to perform them, and we need to be reminded to do them because we too sometimes forget. The truth is that the ten behaviors are universal: there is nothing specifically religious about them.This list above, as I read it, itemizes ways to live a morally significant life. I think that anyone who regularly performs the ten behaviors will have the experience of living meaningfully and purposefully.

And yet we can agree on these ten, can't we? We can agree on wanting to be happy and on seeing these as ten ways to do it.

Surely, this is a start.