… some of his thoughts about religious tolerance and the state.

Every religion is originally a ‘worldview’ or, in Rawls’s terminology, a ‘comprehensive doctrine,’ also in the sense that it claims the authority to structure a form of life in its entirety. Religion must renounce this claim to structure life in a comprehensive way that also includes the community once the life of religious groups becomes differentiated from that of the larger political community within pluralistic societies. …

For the believer who travels with heavy metaphysical baggage, the good enjoys epistemic primacy over the right. The validity of the ethos on this assumption depends on the truth of the worldview in which it is embedded. The exclusive validity claims of the underlying worldviews are accordingly bound up with different ethical existential orientations and competing forms of life. As soon as one’s conception of the good life is shaped by religious notions of salvation or metaphysical conceptions of the good, a divine perspective (or a ‘view from nowhere’) opens up from which (or where) other ways of life appear not only different but mistaken. When an alien ethos is not merely evaluated in relative terms, but is judged in terms of truth and falsity, the demand to show every citizen equal respect regardless of his ethical self-understanding and his way of life represents an imposition….

[T]he spread of religious tolerance, which we have already identified as a pacemaker for the emergence of democracies, has also become a stimulus and model for the introduction of further cultural rights within constitutional states.

Between Naturalism and Religion

… said my aunt, “became more and more preoccupied with Big Bang-type questions as he got older.  Why is there something?  What is nothing?  A colleague of his at NIH was a religious Jew, and your father respected this man, and they had long conversations about belief…”

For most of his life, I guess my father had, along with his faith in science, what Richard Rorty means by a religion of art.  My father’s two cultures were empirical clarity and aesthetic mystery.

Friedrich von Schelling calls beauty “infinity represented in a finite way.”  I suppose my father’s yearnings toward the infinite were no different from anyone else’s.  They might have been more intense than other people’s.  After all, if he were here he’d probably remind me that the realm of science contains its own soul-enthralling depths.

Given his family background, though, science would always be the great liberation for him, making it impossible for him to invest his yearnings in any creed.

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Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton’s book about religion, and he quotes Eagleton:

What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women? … [Religion’s] subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.

Like Christopher Lasch toward the end of his life, Eagleton represents a man of the left for whom one particular symbolic form — progress, liberal enlightenment — has failed in its promise to encompass human yearnings. What Fish calls “the tragedy and pain of the human condition,” and humanity’s yearning for “a transfigured future” (the phrase is Eagleton’s), is far more compelling to Eagleton at this point than political, as well as scientific, efforts to relieve our pain.

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Update, correction:

A blog is a beautiful thing. I just received an email from a reader in response to my tale of the Czech Torah. The email’s titled They Weren’t Unburied Torahs, and it includes an attachment titled Memorial Scrolls Trust, Westminster Synagogue, Kent House, Rutland Gardens, London.

… Fearful that the deserted synagogues and community buildings would be at the mercy of looters and plunderers, a group of Jews at the Jewish Museum in occupied Prague submitted a plan to the Nazis to save the Jewish ritual and cultural treasures in the vulnerable buildings by bringing them to the museum in Prague so that they could be catalogued and preserved. Why their Nazi overseers accepted the plan is not known. The result was that the Nazi controlled Prague Jewish Community sent out the orders that implemented the plan and permitted the transport companies to carry Jewish goods. With a few exceptions, the Torah Scrolls, other liturgical treasures in gold and silver and ritual textiles were sent to Prague, along with historic archives and thousands of books. The remaining Jews were deported in 1943, 1944 and 1945, and quite a number of these late deportees survived.

… [I]n 1956, the Michle Synagogue, in the suburbs of Prague, became the warehouse at which the hundreds of Torah Scrolls were consolidated from various locations. They had come from the large Prague Jewish community and from the many smaller communities that were scattered across what was left of Bohemia and Moravia, after the Sudetenland had been detached. The Scrolls in the Michle Synagogue did not include Scrolls from Slovakia, which was under a separate administration.

… Eric Estorick, an American art dealer living in London, paid many visits to Prague on business in the early 1960’s and got to know Prague artists, whose work he sold at his Grosvenor Gallery. Being a frequent visitor to Prague, he came to the attention of the authorities, and, on a visit in 1963 he expressed some interest in a catalogue of Hebraica. He was approached by officials from Artia, the state corporation responsible for trade in works of art, and asked if he would be interested in buying some Torah Scrolls.

Unknown to him, the Israelis had been approached previously with a similar offer, but the negotiations had come to nothing. Estorick was taken to the Michle Synagogue were he was faced with wooden racks holding about 1800 Scrolls, in seriously damp conditions. He was asked if he wanted to make an offer. He replied that he knew certain parties in London who might be interested.

On his return to London, he contacted a fellow American, Rabbi Harold Reinhart, of the Westminster Synagogue, one of whose congregants, Ralph Yablon, offered to put up the money to buy the Scrolls. First, Chimen Abramsky, who was to become Professor of Hebrew Studies at the University of London, was asked to go to Prague for twelve days in November 1963 to examine the Scrolls and to report on their authenticity and condition. On his return to London, it was decided that Estorick should go to Prague and negotiate a deal, which he did. Two trucks laden with 1564 Scrolls arrived at the Westminster Synagogue in February and March 1964.

After months of sorting, examining and cataloguing each Scroll, the task of distributing them began, with the aim of getting the Scrolls back into the life of Jewish congregations across the world. The Memorial Scrolls Trust was established to carry out this task.

UD‘s enormously grateful to her reader for this information.

… that today’s the fiftieth anniversity of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures essay, she thinks first about her father.

An immunologist at the National Institutes of Health, a first-generation American embarrassed by the peasant religion his Jewish father brought from Minsk, Herbert Rapp was a belligerent empiricist.

While UD‘s mother – herself the daughter of secular Jews in the same generationally rebellious mode as UD‘s father – retained enough faith to send her children to a Reform temple in Bethesda for a few years, UD‘s father was much the stronger influence on UD.

This was in part because of his clear, principled world view, in contrast to his wife’s vague sentimentalism, but it also had to do with the soullessness of that particular temple, a hip epicenter of social justice. (I called my mother’s sister and asked her about it. “That place? The rabbi didn’t believe in God.”)

Once, my mother and my aunt, in memory of their father, decided to buy a Torah for the synagogue. The rabbi told them about some recently unearthed Czech Torahs that had been buried for safekeeping during the war.

“Your mother,” said my aunt, “went to the airport to pick it up when it came in. The next day we took it to the rabbi. He said ‘You didn’t have to bring it in so fast. You could have kept it in your home for awhile.’ Your mother said, ‘No. I didn’t like the ghosts.’ The rabbi looked at both of us and said ‘You’re pagans.'”

I have a memory – who knows if the memory is real – of my father, with great reluctance, attending the installation ceremony at the temple. As the new Torah was carried joyously through the congregation, the person holding it stopped in front of my father, assuming he in particular — after all, his family bought it — would want to kiss it. My father stood stolid and unmoving. (“I don’t remember the ceremony,” says my aunt.)

Yet he didn’t have the materialist disposition you’d think might accompany all this. He was mad for the Romantic poets, and he liked to recite T.S. Eliot. My mother says she fell in love with him because of the classical music she heard pouring out of his frat room at Johns Hopkins. He was a serious and emotional pianist who spent much of his time playing and replaying the Sonata Pathétique.  He loved nature intensely — in particular, the Chesapeake Bay, where he had a house and a boat.

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End of first half.  Must walk dog.  It’s high noon, and even though it’s dreary out there, I guess this is as light and warm as it’s going to get.  Ne quittez pas.

From “The Rage of the Privileged Class,” in New York magazine.

I asked [a Goldman Sachs veteran] what will happen if Congress succeeds in regulating compensation. “These guys will not work on Wall Street,” he says flatly. “People go to Wall Street out of greed. When I was interviewing for jobs, frequently some form of the question came up: How much do you want to make money? If my answer was something like—and it wasn’t—but if my answer was, ‘I’m here for intellectual betterment,’ their response might have been, ‘University is a great place for you.’ They want people who think ‘I’m greedy, I want to be a billionaire.’ That was viewed as a really good thing.”

A researcher who has written a book about the grant and fellowship review process describes how various disciplines fared on the panels she observed. Here’s English.

… Panelists who are in English literature perceive that their discipline has a “legitimization crisis.” Perhaps because of the influence of poststructuralism in the discipline, literary scholars are particularly aware that the standards of evaluation are intersubjective, resulting from the interaction of panelists. They’re ambivalent about how successful a peer-review panel can be. Asked whether “the cream rises to the top,” they emphasize that doesn’t necessarily happen. Some are unsure whether “quality” exists.

Even if you didn’t have such relativistic views of excellence, the question of how to evaluate literary studies remains open. At one point, there was agreement on mastery of close reading, how language works. But three trends have undermined that consensus: critique of canonization and of privileging the written text; a widening of interest to include history, anthropology and the social context in which a text is written; and challenges — whether from Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism — to the whole idea of “representation.”

One result is that literature proposals don’t do as well in multidisciplinary panels. One panelist told me, “At some point, somebody said, ‘Gosh, we’re giving all the awards to historians.’ And I remember thinking, ‘That’s not surprising.’…

UD wants to pause on that well-known, much-used phrase, intellectual snob. A columnist at the Jewish Telegraph Agency uses it in this instance, but everyone uses it — here’s the Google page for intellectual snob. It goes on and on.

Intellectual snob is a subset of snob. Rather than express a sense of superiority to other people based on wealth or family, the intellectual snob condescends to others based upon her appraisal of herself as having started off genetically smarter, and having then been better educated, than you.

UD doesn’t have anything earth-shattering to contribute to the rich literature on snobbery in general, and intellectual snobbery in particular. (She’s very fond of Judith Shklar’s chapter on snobbery in her book Ordinary Vices. Peter Berkowitz praises Shklar’s “delightful exploration of the psychology of the snob,” correctly noting, as does she, that snobbery is one of the great illiberal vices, a sign that one’s civic instincts are out of order, since, as Berkowitz writes, “the disposition to recognize the equality of your fellow human beings and treat them accordingly” is central to liberal democracy.)

But UD will say three things about intellectual snobbery — things she’s learned from being around a lot of professors and a lot of intellectuals.

1.) Her experience certainly confirms what the literature says about snobbery and its intellectual form: Intellectual snobs among her acquaintance are strikingly insecure — about everything, but particularly about their intellect. They regard virtually all human encounters – in classrooms, at conferences, at the supermarket – as the debate club’s televised finals, in which all eyes rivet to them for their ability to undercut the claims or belittle the ignorance of anyone who happens to address them.

Hair-trigger tempers, narcissistic irritabilities, and theatrical umbrages are the hallmarks of intellectual snobs.

2.) Intellectual snobs are extreme pedants. They know a lot about specific narrow fields, and they use this hyperspecialized knowledge in order constantly to denounce errors in other people.

Intellectual snobs are particularly fond of history and linguistics, for these fields allow error-spotting infinite scope. You can get dates wrong, battles wrong, treaties wrong, the language of treaties wrong. You can fail to list all of the salient theories about the onset of the American Civil War. You can fail to take into sufficient account the Hitler/Stalin Pact.

Language use is even better for snob purposes, because our deployment of language is so personal, goes so deep… Which brings me to

3.) For the intellectual snob, the purpose of drawing your attention to your errors is to make you feel very, very bad. When the snob witnesses just how bad — how abashed and off-balance — she has made you feel, she tingles with a sense of her exceptionality.

This sensation reassures her (but not for long; she has to keep provoking it) that despite her various failures in life, she’s still the smartest kid in the room.

The unassuming development economist [Esther Duflo], recently named as one of the 100 most influential thinkers in the world, this week became the youngest woman ever to lecture at one of France’s most prestigious institutions when she addressed the Collège de France – a 500-year old open university on the Left Bank in Paris.

The lecture – which sparked a fervour rarely seen since the days of Jean-Paul Sartre – was packed, with one former prime minister failing to secure a seat.

… She is a world expert on understanding why despite throwing billions at development programmes in poor countries, many fail, and why others succeed. A pioneer in this field, which has only existed for ten years, she has devised a technique to test the effectiveness of anti-poverty programmes through “random testing”, much like pharmaceutical companies test drugs.

Rather than pontificate on abstract, lofty thoughts, her work is about homing in on precise details, such as raising pupil and teacher attendance in schools in poor countries by offering free meals…

Some details on her ideas and methods here.