Professor Paul Eidelberg
Introduction
When I made aliya from the United States in 1976, I was surprised to learn that cultural or moral relativism was quite prevalent in the supposed-to-be Jewish state. I detected signs of relativism even at the religious Bar-Ian University, whose observant faculty members surely believe that the Torah is the source of Truth and the paradigm of how man should live. Yet there too I heard the cynical remark: “Who is to say what is good and bad, right and wrong?” This vulgarism was evident even among officers of the Israel Defense Forces studying at the university!
But how could a Jewish state, surrounded by hostile Arab-Islamic regimes, survive if the educators of its political and military elites did not believe in the absolute justice of their cause? Given this mental atmosphere of cultural relativism, is it any wonder that Tel Aviv University professor of philosophy Asa Kasher, under the authority of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and with the acquiescence of then Chief of Staff Ehud Barak, erased the words “Judaism” and “Zionism” as well as “Eretz Israel” from the Soldiers Code of Ethics?! Who but minds influenced by cultural relativism would want to transform the Jewish state into a multicultural “state of its citizens”—the goal of post-Zionists such as Shimon Peres?
Israel, however, is not multicultural America, the most powerful nation on earth. There relativism can permeate every level of education without immediately endangering that democracy’s existence—not with benign Canada and feeble Mexico on its borders. But minuscule Israel, with Arab-Islamic dictatorships as neighbors, can hardly afford the morally disarming relativism of the American Council of Learned Societies, whose recent tract, “Speaking for the Humanities,” maintains that democracy cannot be justified as a system of government inherently superior to totalitarianism.[1]
Hence I was dismayed by the relativistic mentality of Hebrew University professor of political science Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former head of Israeli Military Intelligence as well as the mentor of Shimon Peres, then Israel’s Defense Minister! Harkabi’s relativism surfaced in his first book, Arab Attitudes To Israel, first published in 1967. What is most remarkable about this book is the mentality of its author. Even though the book is replete with hundreds of quotes from diverse Arab rulers, journalists, and academics, all vilifying Jews in the most lurid terms and promising the eventual annihilation of the Jewish state, not only does Harkabi dedicate the book to Jews and Arabs alike, but he concludes by saying: “The study of the [Arab-Israel] conflict reveals the relativity of the attitudes of the parties.”[2] Inasmuch as Harkabi was once the head of Israel’s “War College,” the influence of his relativism on the Israel Defense Forces can hardly be doubted. Indeed, no less than General Ehud Barak once said that had he been born an Arab, he would have been a terrorist! A pretty manifestation of cultural relativism or determinism.
Israel has imported two kinds of relativism. Many Israeli academics, beginning with the founders of the Hebrew University, were influenced by German historicism. Historicists maintain that all human thought is historical, hence unable ever to grasp anything eternal. In other words, there are no trans-historical truths. All philosophy, religion, morality, and even science belong to a particular “historical epoch” or “culture,” “civilization,” “Weltanschauung.”
Historicism was introduced into the Hebrew University by such German-educated intellectuals as Martin Buber. Buber’s book, Two Kinds of Faith, tacitly denies the possibility that Judaism is true and Christianity false; they are simply different kinds of faith. Not only did Buber reject the notion of the Jews as the Chosen People, but when confronted by the issue of the Jewish versus the Arab claim to Eretz Israel, Buber held "There is no scale of values for the [world-historical] function of peoples. One cannot be ranked above another."[3] Buber, who married a gentile, was not simply an anti-Zionist. His opposition to a Jewish state was rooted in historical or cultural relativism.
Most social scientists, however, have been influenced by the doctrine of logical positivism, which acknowledges the possibility of objective and universal truths in science, but not to religious or moral or aesthetic values. Inasmuch as historicism has been refuted by Professor Leo Strauss,[4] the remainder of this article will be devoted to a refutation of logical positivism and the relativism associated therewith. Lest this be regarded as a merely academic exercise, I shall show how positivism-cum-relativism underlies Israel’s policy of “territory for peace,” a policy that is dismembering the Jewish state.
The “Scientific” Subversion of Human Values
What distinguishes modern from pre-modern science is the mathematical understanding of nature. We pay a price for this intellectual revolution. The reduction of science to quantitative analysis renders it incapable of telling us anything about the rich, qualitative world of sense-perception and human values. Unlike classical and medieval science, modern science discards all considerations based on aesthetic and ethical principles. Distinctions between the beautiful and the obscene, the good and the bad, collapse into mere emotions or subrational forces. In other words, the discovery of mathematical laws of nature automatically implies the subjectivity and relativity of everything not susceptible to exact measurement. This obviously includes religious and moral values or ideologies. Hence, in the conflict between Jews and Moslems, there are no rational grounds for preferring one side to the other. We have entered the mental world of positivism-cum-relativism.
The philosopher of science, Hans Reichenbach, elaborates: “Ethical axioms are not necessary truths because they are not truths of any kind. Truth is a predicate of statements; but the linguistic expressions of ethics are not statements. They are directives [or imperatives]. A directive [e.g., "do not murder"] cannot be classified as true or false ...”[5] Thus, if one says “murder is bad,” he would simply be expressing an emotion not a fact. This leads to the “fact-value” dichotomy of logical positivism and its emotive theory of values.
Thus, to say “X is good” is equivalent to saying “I like X.” By translating ethical into non-ethical or psychological language, positivism devaluates all values, especially aristocratic ones. The plebeian philosopher Thomas Hobbes performed this leveling operation in the seventeenth century. He offers the most lucid definition of relativism: “Whatever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate or aversion, evil ... For these words of good [and] evil ... are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so …[6]
We have here a democratized view of human values, but therefore of human nature. Hitherto, the human intellect was deemed autonomous and superior to mere emotion; in other words, man was capable of dispassionate reason. But Hobbes contends that reason is nothing more than the cunning instrument of the passions: “the thoughts are to the desires, as scouts and spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things desired.”[7] By reducing morality to merely emotive utterances, Hobbes and his current disciples have undermined the sanity if not the survival of pluralistic societies, especially Israel, as I shall now attempt to explain.[8]
Hitherto, when people said “X is good,” they meant that X is intrinsically good—good independently of their personal likes and dislikes. Although the emotive theory of values rejects this traditional view of morality, it retains one of its common sense assumptions, namely, that a person who sincerely states that X is good does in fact like X. In other words, logical positivism assumes that the emotions of a sane person will be in accord with his moral convictions.
Now, suppose a person lives in “Tovland,” where a large majority of its inhabitants have a settled conviction that X is good—it may be capitalism—which they like profoundly. If this person says X is good and likes it, he will be regarded as normal. If he says X is good and dislikes it, a Tovland psychiatrist would have reason to regard him as insane. On the other hand, suppose our subject is a member of the minority convinced that X is bad. If he dislikes X, the psychiatrist would deem him sane, whereas if he likes X, the discordance between his moral conviction and emotion would be symptomatic of insanity. The following model represents the moral or mental climate of Tovland.
Tovland: X is Good
Majority Positive
Conviction Emotion Diagnosis
Positive Sane (Majority)
Negative Insane
Minority Negative
Negative Sane (Minority)
Positive Insane
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Now let us go to “Lotovland,” where the majority of the inhabitants believe X is bad. (One may substitute capitalism or Zionism for X.)
Lotovland: X is Bad
Majority Negative
Conviction Emotion Diagnosis
Negative Sane (Majority)
Positive Insane
Minority Positive
Positive Sane (Minority)
Negative Insane
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Suppose, now, that all the educators or opinion-makers of Tovland are logical positivists, and that, as a consequence, all the people of Tovland no longer say “X is good,” having been taught that such an utterance means nothing more than “I like X.” In other words, the Tovlanders will no longer have moral convictions. Perhaps they are the kind of people King Solomon had in mind when he said, “the heart of fools proclaims skepticism” (Proverbs 12:23). Let us therefore rename the country of such people “Pluriland,” and let us add that if any Plurilanders happen to have retained any moral convictions or still believe that X is intrinsically good, they would be classified as “reactionaries” or stupid. They may be ignored in the next model. Accordingly, the Plurilanders will be divided into a majority that likes X and a minority that dislikes X, and we shall want to bear in mind these words of the Prophet Isaiah: “I am HaShem, that makes all things … that turns wise men backwards and their knowledge foolish” (44:24, 26).
Pluriland: I Like X
Conviction Emotion Diagnosis
Majority None Positive
Minority None Negative
Bizarre consequences follow from this model. First, notice that with the absence of moral convictions in Pluriland, the distinction between sanity and insanity has been obliterated, or rendered problematic. Lest the reader doubt the possibility of such a state of affairs, let us briefly recall the anti-psychiatry movement fathered by two psychiatrists, Dr. Robert D. Lang in England, and Dr. Thomas Szasz in the United States, who denied the distinction between sanity and insanity. Indeed, such was the impact of their writings on Anglo-American universities, where positivism-cum-relativism is rampant, that a 1986 poll found that 55% of the American public did not believe there was such a thing as mental illness”![9] But what needs to be stressed is this: The inability of mainstream psychiatry to combat the anti-psychiatry movement stemmed from the fact that modern psychology is steeped in moral relativism, which readily lends itself to a denial of the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” behavior. One should not expect “normal” behavior in Pluriland, to which I return.
In Pluriland, where relativism underlies the mentality of its inhabitants, the need for psychiatrists is problematic in theory (though not in practice). It would be pointless for a visiting psychiatrist, say a tourist from Tovland, to ask a Plurilander his reason for liking X: his likes are self-justifying. Since nothing is intrinsically good or bad, Plurilanders do not have to explain or defend their likes and dislikes. It follows that one should not expect rational public debate in Pluriland on issues involving religious or moral values. The mentality of Plurilanders has been conditioned by the “fact-value” dichotomy of social science positivism, that is, by educators who regard religious or moral values as “emotional imperatives” and not as facts susceptible to empirical verification.
Here I am reminded of Moshe Dayan’s speech to the Israel Army Staff and Command College in 1968, where he spoke of Dr. Arthur Ruppin, who in 1926 founded the Brit-Shalom movement to foster the idea of a bi-national or Arab-Jewish state in Palestine. According to Dayan, the German-educated Ruppin had hoped that “facts” on the ground, especially economic strength and an increasing Jewish population, would induce Arabs to accept Israel’s political existence. Such facts, says Dayan, have indeed come to pass, but have not altered Arab rejection of a Jewish state. Dayan than adds this revealing remark: “Perhaps Ruppin's error on this point stemmed from the fact that he thought in rational categories, whereas Arab opposition stems from emotions."[10]
Surely the exact opposite is closer to the truth. Surely it is rational for Arabs to oppose Jewish settlement on land they deem (rightly or wrongly) their own. Conversely, having conquered this land, it is irrational—a surrender to emotion—for Jews to expect Arab friendship. But what is to be singled out here is that Dayan (as well as Ruppin) simply failed to take Arab-Islamic culture seriously, precisely because in the self-effacing mentality of cultural relativism, religion has no rational foundation or is rooted in the emotions (as Freud asserts in The Future of an Illusion). We are in Pluriland!
Having been taught the emotive theory of values, the rulers of Pluriland will not be motivated by any moral or religious ideology. Their all-consuming goal will be peace, meaning comfortable self-preservation. They will not take the moral values or religious convictions of any adversarial nation like Lotovland seriously. They will regard the Lotovlanders’ ideology as devoid of cognitive validity, a myth that serves their material interests. They will think that the rulers of Lotovland can be pacified by the promise of land or of economic prosperity.
Suppose, however, that the Plurilanders have miscalculated. Suppose the moral convictions of Lotovland, even if false, are not reducible to the Lotovlanders’ emotions, but rather strengthen and sustain them. In that case, other things being equal, any protracted conflict between the two countries would end in victory of Lotovland over Pluriland. This would certainly be the outcome if the X of Pluriland is intrinsically bad, as the Lotovlanders may believe. Indeed, quite apart from its enemies, how could Pluriland survive when its people or rulers like what may in truth be bad, and dislike what may in truth be good? This leads to a fourth model.
Imagine a society, “Zedland,” where the dominant majority believes that X is bad but like it! (Longfellow’s epithet, The world loves a spice of wickedness,” would raise no eyebrows in Zedland.) If a Zedlander disapproves of X but likes it, he would be regarded as normal. For like the majority, his moral conviction and emotion would be discordant with each other. But if he disapproves of X and dislikes it, a Zedland psychiatrist would deem him insane. On the other hand, suppose our Zedlander is a member of the minority which believes that X is good. If he likes X he would be declared insane, even though, or rather, precisely because, his moral conviction and emotion are in agreement with each other. Here is a model of Zedland.
Zedland: X is Bad
Conviction Emotion Diagnosis
Negative Positive Sane (Majority)
Positive Positive Insane (Minority)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Contrast this model with that of Tovland. Notice that whereas a Tovlandian psychiatrist would have to get the moral convictions and emotions of his patients into phase with each other, sanity would require a Zedland psychiatrist to get the moral convictions and emotions of his patients out of phase with each other! The “sane” in one society would be “insane” in the other, and vice versa—a commentary on cultural relativism, but also on the fact that man’s will can oppose the rule of the emotions (as well as the rule of reason).
This said, we must now go beyond Hobbes to his master, Machiavelli, the father of modernity, whom few penetrate and whom almost no one can imitate. For this philosopher we reserve these words: “The scoundrel said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalms 14:1). To which we must add: “Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20).
In the revolutionary Chapter 15 of the Prince, Machiavelli lays down the foundation for a new kind of political sanity, involving a new way of understanding and using morality and dealing with the emotions. There Machiavelli enumerates ten pairs of virtues and vices that bring rulers praise or blame, qualities which a ruler, “if he wishes to maintain himself,” must be able to “use” and “not use” “according to necessity.” Some rulers, he declares, “are held liberal, some miserly … [and/or] rapacious; some cruel, others full of pity; the one faithless, then other faithful; the one effeminate and pusillanimous, the other fierce and spirited; the one human, the other proud; the one lascivious, the other chaste; the one open, the other cunning; the one hard, the other easy; the one grave, the other light; the one religious, the other skeptical, and the like.” (Note the inversion of the Decalogue and the omission of justice and injustice.)[11]
Machiavelli elaborates in Chapter 18 of the Prince:
It is not necessary for a prince to have in fact all of the qualities written above, but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them. I shall rather dare to say this: that having them and observing them always, they are harmful, but in appearing to have them, they are useful—so as to appear to be full of pity, faithful, human, open, religious, and to be so, but with one’s mind constructed in such a mode that when the need not to be arises, you can, and know how to, change to the contrary (italics added).
A mind so “constructed” must be virtually devoid of all emotion,
save the desire for power. To harbor emotions is to be susceptible to habits,
and it is precisely habits that prevent a ruler from being a Machiavellian,
which is to say, a perfect opportunist. To be a perfect opportunist, a ruler
must change his “nature” with the times and circumstances, which
means he must have no emotional predispositions (other than the desire to maintain
and increase his power). This would be possible only if man is nothing more
than a creature of habits—habits which can be conquered by men of the
caliber of Machiavelli. (Long before Rousseau and twentieth-century behaviorists,
Machiavelli let it be known that human nature—if man can be said to have
a nature—is plastic or malleable.) Whereas Hobbes makes reason an instrument
of the emotions, Machiavelli makes reason an instrument of the will. And whereas
Hobbes reduces morality to likes and dislikes, Machiavelli uses morality to
facilitate the will to power. Which means that Machiavelli would regard rulers
as stupid if they allow moral considerations to hinder their quest for power.
We are now prepared to construct a model for a nation ruled by genuine, and not, as in Pluriland, by half-hearted, atheists. Let us call this nation “Rashaland.” The rulers of Rashaland, being disciples of Machivaelli, regard virtue and vice as mere instruments of power; they stand beyond good and evil. For such men, the only sin is stupidity. As for the great majority of the people, suffice to say they have the kind of government they deserve. Of the minority, let us pass over them in silence.
Rashaland
Conviction Emotion Diagnosis
(Rulers) None None Cunning
Majority NR NR Stupid
NR = Not Relevant
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Although the rulers of Rashaland would call the leaders of Pluriland stupid, the rulers of the two countries have this much in common: they lack moral convictions. The lack of moral convictions among Pluriland leaders multiplies their people’s desires, and renders them incapable of subordinating their desires to some overriding goal or passion, unless it be the desire for peace or comfortable self-preservation. This is not the case in Rashaland, where the absence of convictions is accompanied by an absence of emotions, in consequence of which its rulers are able to subordinate everything to the supreme desire for power. In Pluriland (consistent with Hobbes), thought is as fragmented as the desires. In Rashaland (consistent with Machivaelli), all thought is geared to one paramount objective: dominion.
To the extent that Israel’s rulers are comparable to those of Pluriland, they can no more compete with the rulers of Rashaland than those of Lotovland. But what needs to be borne in mind is the invisible cause of Israel’s inferiority, namely, the influence of relativism via historicism and positivism on the mentality of its intellectual and political elites. It follows that Israel’s survival will ultimately depend on a revolution in the country’s mentality, and therefore a revolution in its educational institutions.
[1] See Paul Eidelberg, Judaic Man: Toward a Reconstruction of Western Civilization (Middletown, NJ: Caslon, 1996), p. x.
[2] Y. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1972), p. 465. Harkabi’s relativism will also be found in his Israel’s Fateful Hour (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), p.179.
[3] Israel and the World p. 223.
[4] See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), ch 1.
[5] Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), p. 280. Having decreed what constitutes a "statement," Reichenbach shifts from the grounds of logical positivism to those of historicism or historical determinism: “The attempts of philosophers to fashion ethics as a system of knowledge have broken down. The moral systems thus constructed were nothing but reproductions of the ethics of certain sociological groups; of Greek bourgeois society, of the Catholic Church, of the Middle Class of the preindustrial age, of the age of industry and the proletarian. We know why these systems had to fail: because knowledge cannot supply directives.... Science tells us what is, but not what should be.” Ibid., p, 287.
[6] Leviathan, p. 32
[7] Ibid., p. 46.
[8] The follow discussion is adapted from my Jerusalem vs. Athens: In Quest of a General Theory of Existence (New York: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 246-254.
[9] Cited in ibid., p. 62.
[10] Alex Bein (ed.), Arthur Ruppin: Memoirs, Diaries, Letters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1971), Afterword by Moshe Dayan, pp. 315-323, K. Gershon, trans. For an extensive analysis, see Paul Eidelberg, Demophrenia: Israel and the Malaise of Democracy (Lafayette, LA: Prescott Press, 1994), pp. 143-146.
[11] For an analysis of the peculiar order of these virtue and vices, see Paul Eidelberg, Beyond the Secular Mind: A Judaic Response to the Problems of Modernity (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), pp. 8-9.