Is There Really a Solution to the Broad Pagan Immorality & Terrible Tribalism of Humanity?
The Spiritual Revelations of the Last Year and a Half Have Been Deeply Unpleasant, Honestly. At Times Now I Worry That I am Wasting My Time as a Voice Crying in the Wilderness.
Click here to check out the first 30 Installments - Volume I - in this series on Antisemitism and Culture. Among the top 5 most important pieces from this first wave:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
7 Reasons This Christian Hippie Became a Zealot Against Jew Hatred
This is the twelfth installment in Volume II, intended as another 30 pieces exploring the many manifestations of Jew Hatred and the issues surrounding it in America and globally. See the previous installments in this collection below.
Martin Luther King, Jr: An American Hero and Courageous Zionist Voice
Talking to These Students Gave Me Hope in this Dark, Dark World of War and Hate
Why I Don't Expect the Palestinians Will *Ever* Make Peace with Israel and Thus Gain Statehood
The Antisemitism of Ron Paul's Far Right Anarcho-Capitalist Ideological Cult
When Holocaust Trivialization Manifests in the Wrestling World
2 Numbers Which Reveal the Overwhelming Level of Human Devastation Wrought by the Holocaust
The Deep Depths of Ideological Depravity: Comparing the Holocaust to the Covid-19 Vaccine
Unfortunately, Christian Nationalism Is the Normal, Much More Longstanding Version of Christianity
7 Great Counterculture Authors Who Inspire My Writing and Zionist Activism
Why Twitter & Social Media Are Such a Poison Brew of Antisemitism, Hate, Death, and Lies
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
I feel overly compelled with this installment to emphasize that my often intense pessimistic and cynical understanding of human nature should perhaps be taken with a few hunks of salt. While I’ll of course go out of my way to try and present the hard facts supporting my views and their moral/historical basis in scripture, on days such as today it’s hard for me to really know if the intense depressive nature often fueled by my PTSD is causing me to see the horror of the world for what it is, or distorting my perceptions, making me see things as worse than they are.
I tackled this a bit in this previous essay here as it relates to my over-consumption of social media and internet-based life professionally:
Just how “warped” have my perceptions become?
I have to admit that at times at least — according to my partner
-- that at least my own self-perceptions can be a bit askew as well. It's a fair question to ask and consider: how much of my low view of humanity and sense of hopelessness for our species' serious improvement is largely just a reflection of my own frequent low view of myself and frustration that I may never actually recover from my chronic illness?I have no answer for this paradox at this point, except to warn you of it when I’m making especially dire broad cultural pronouncements in this series and my other writings, as I intend to do so today.
In my Sunday installment of this series on Antisemitism and Culture I addressed the problem of Christian Nationalism and its inherent anti-Jewish character:
One of my favorites of our regular readers offered his response in the comments and I thought it worthwhile to highlight our exchange here and further elaborate on the foreboding points I made:
, author of the Substack posed a difficult question:Dave, you keep pumping these out; I'm still about a month behind you. I thought that you would eventually tire, and I would catch up, but it is now clear that that will not happen. I jump in here to ask: what, except for some type of organized Christianity, can lead Americans to a common moral field? Wherein they would commit freely to observing the ten commandments or the seven Noahide laws? They cannot all become mystics.
Previously in the series I had expressed my prescription that the way to overcome humanity’s tribalism and cruelty was the promotion of interfaith mysticism, especially exemplified by the esoteric Torah analysis of Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed:
But Ehud was right. While mystical Abrahamic faith seems a solution to ideological and religious wars, as well as a path to greater empathy and kindness to others in our daily lives, this is not a journey likely to be embraced by that many. The intellectual and personal work required to transcend warlike ideology and religious tribalism is not something which that many humans really want to or are capable of doing. I estimate that perhaps only 2% or 3% of humanity has much likelihood of reaching this more advanced stage of spiritual development - and that seems an overly generous, liberal estimate. It’s simply not really enough to deeply transform the world to the extent which we as a species need to evolve.
I responded:
Hi Ehud, thank you for your kind words. You've really become one of our most dear readers I most appreciate and whose feedback I take seriously. I'm doing my best to keep pumping these out to give myself a sense of meaning and purpose, as well as to try to distract myself from the PTSD symptoms, which right now are a very deep, dark depression.
So take my answer here with a bit of a grain of salt, as it may be overly characterized by my own very low emotional state. To answer you question directly: I don't think there is *anything* which can broadly lead Americans as a general population into embracing the core of Jewish values. I tend to see America as largely a modern day Babylon. This is a chiefly Pagan nation in which the worship of the self and the almighty dollar is the primary moral field. "In God We Trust" is on our currency because THAT is the false god most Americans worship to one degree or another.
Did you see this post of mine here citing the book "American Nations" by Colin Woodson?
Take a look at the 3rd and last map I include.
America always has been - and I suspect always will be - a land of major cultural conflicts. As an immigrant nation, multiple different cultural/religious groups came here for centuries. The result is that while we may be one nation, we are deeply divided by different interpretations of culture and religion. The New England "Yankees" influenced by Puritanism, are simply not going to agree with the "Deep South" influenced by slave society and their historically racist Southern Baptist church. Neither will the largely Catholic Latino population of "El Norte" or the mostly secular population of The Left Coast, or the individualist frontier/wilderness culture of the Far West.
And the various blends of these cultural traditions which occur at the edges of where they're at on the map just make things even more divided and complicated. As I wrote in the post, the Indiana that I grew up in, I regard as expressing a worst of both worlds blending of "Greater Appalachia" and "The Midlands" producing a harsh warrior individualist ethos with a "moderate" "conformist" culture which refuses to address cultural controversies and broader problems, and which detests non-conformists who fail to embrace these tendencies.
There are potentially 2 ways for America to perhaps come closer to a "common moral field" though. The one based on Jewish moral values is long-term in nature. I believe the key for more Americans embracing Jewish values/culture and rejecting antisemitism lies in introducing Jewish people/culture/religion to Americans when they're fairly young and culturally malleable and open-minded. The Jewish family friends we had while I was growing up planted the seeds for the Zionism and heavily Jewish-influenced spirituality I have today. I knew from a young age the inherent goodness which Judaism brings into the world, and saw pretty quickly how that moral value system conflicted with the Fundamentalist Evangelicalism indoctrinated into me during my teen years.
The second way to bring more Americans into a shared "common moral field" is more immediate in nature, much, much less pleasant, and won't necessarily produce the kind of Noahide/10 Commandments centered morality you're looking for. But it would certainly be greater moral improvement and cultural unity than we have now: a major war with other great power nations at a level akin to what we had with World War II, and a lesser degree the Cold War. This happened to a small degree with 9/11. For a brief time the American people had greater unity and moral clarity in being threatened by a totalitarian, clearly evil enemy. But that largely fell apart with the divisions over the controversial nature of the Iraq War.
What do you think? Am I being too cynical in my view of understanding and pessimistic in my understanding of America's divided cultural nature?
Ehud responded with another prescient question:
David, I grant you your "writing as PTSD therapy," and I deeply sympathize with your battle with depression. However, I propose to you that if you did not preface your posts with the PTSD disclaimer, no one would suspect that as the engine behind your productivity. Your writing is solid and powerful in and of itself, whether one agrees with it or not. And it is highly obvious, if not to you then to your readers, that you are not writing for yourself. You are writing out of an obvious love for life and humanity, making the hurt from betrayal and disappointment all the more poignant. Do you see your writing as documenting an inevitable decline, or are you crying out to prevent that decline? Why can it not be the latter?
And then I dropped what I regard right now as a bit of a dark rhetorical bomb, but something I am genuinely starting to believe with some sincerity:
Thank you Ehud. I unfortunately see it as more of the former than the latter. In my analysis the level of human evil is just going to get worse as the population increases, and so too the level of antisemitism as well as broad indifference to it. My mystical practice has led me to identify with the desert prophet tradition. I fear that I am just a voice crying out in the wilderness and few are noticing or caring, and that little if anything will be accomplished by my screaming.
Ecclesiastes 1:17-18
"Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."
As I wrote about on Friday -
- the numbers of people, especially the younger generations, which have not learned the historical lessons of the Holocaust is horrifying. And I anticipate that trend to only get worse the more time passes, and the more the memories of history fade away.
For many years now I’ve come to a sad conclusion and been warning my Jewish friends: beware, I think antisemitism is just going to get worse as the population increases. That can be found in two general analyses of the problem. First, as I wrote about in this installment in Volume I, I’ve come to understand antisemitism as essentially a natural problem, an expression of primitive human instincts and ideas that each generation must strive to overcome:
Second, and perhaps more clearly factual: the Jews are simply outnumbered by the high quantity of antisemites globally. Let this number from the ADL’s Global 100 Survey sink in:
But today I would add a third bit of data for why a pessimistic understanding of humanity’s tribalist nature is likely to continue to persist.
One of the most intriguing Substacks I’ve come across lately is called
and is written by an intriguing woman named who identifies herself clearly as a diagnosed psychopath and shares with her readers in her writings a frank depiction of what it's like perceiving the world as she does. As a writer now wearing my PTSD on my sleeve in my writings I feel a certain sense of solidarity with other writers who are willing to be just as open about their conditions which produce such peculiar worldviews. She had a very interesting post yesterday:Walker offers a hard truth about how many in the world seek out “meaning” in their lives through being “nice” to others and doing “good” things. She sees this in the context of brain chemistry and humans’ tribalist tendencies:
The reason most people involve themselves in helping others is because of how it makes them feel. It can be argued that the good feeling that comes from helping others is a built-in leftover from tribal living.
Tribes function better when people are cooperative, so the brain gives you a dopamine hit when you do something that assists someone else. It helps with tribal function. As this was the mode of living for humans for thousands of years, it makes sense that it still hangs around and fires when you do good things. If the internal motivation for doing good things is that they make you feel good, that means that your motivation is inherently selfish.
Does that make it a bad thing? No. It makes the world better as a whole. You getting a little dopamine fix for being nice makes other people do the same thing, which is better than living in a world where everyone is at each other’s throats. Social cohesion is a good thing in many ways. It is better to live in a community than a warzone.
Psychopaths won’t seek out purpose. To us, purpose is life itself. Living in the moment and enjoying it. There isn’t a need for self-fulfillment and we cannot relate to the existential fear that many people apparently live with. There isn’t a drive to leave a mark in the world, to be remembered, to have people think of us fondly outside of their fondness making them more inclined to be amicable to what we would like. None of these things matter to us.
Read the whole thing, of course. I’ll leave aside at the moment her description of how the psychopath differs from more “neurotypical” members of humanity. I suspect that psychopaths often play a deeply negative role in humanity at large, particularly when they become the heads of states and corporations. That motherfucker Mark Zuckerberg who I condemned so loudly in my last post for providing a forum for dumb Americans to spread Covid misinformation that led to people’s deaths is perhaps some variety of psychopath or at least “neuroatypical,” but as I explained in this post here in the series, we really shouldn’t be trying to diagnose celebrities from afar just based on what we read about them in the media:
No, what interests me is Walker’s point about how through the brain chemical of dopamine, in her view, humans are sort of addicted to simply being nice, as a holdover of our longtime tribalist nature. She writes that being nice “helps with tribal function. As this was the mode of living for humans for thousands of years, it makes sense that it still hangs around and fires when you do good things.”
I think Walker is sort of half-right here, but she’s not really going all the way with the implications of her point or really being accurate with humans’ tribalist nature. I suspect that she’s very much correct that doing nice things can provide a sense of pleasure, but what she’s not emphasizing is that, well, that generally only applies to other members of people which one perceives as part of one’s own tribe. And alternatively, if we embrace the thesis that helping the tribe produces a dopamine hit, then it stands to reason that helping the tribe by doing harm to a rival tribe would produce the same thing.
Just as it may make one feel good to compliment or retweet someone on social media one regarded as a member of the same ideological/political tribe, it produces the same or perhaps an even greater bit of pleasure to be attacking someone of the opposing tribe. Hence why today the primary force and issue driving one’s identification with the Democrats or the Republicans is the concept of “negative partisanship.” Most people who are Democrats or Republicans don’t embrace that party because they’re genuinely enthusiastic about or in love with the policies each party allegedly represents. Rather, they simply hate the other party much, much more. In America, “vote for the lesser of two evils” is now the dominant justification most people who participate in our political system seem to embrace.
When it comes to finding meaning, in a war, does not the soldier on the battlefield firing bullets and rockets at the enemy not find a comparable degree of meaning in what they are doing as the nurse treating those injured in combat? Being mean or outright murderous to the other tribe is just as physically addictive - if not more so - than being kind and loving to members of one’s own tribe.
If Walker was correct that being nice to everyone produced dopamine effects across the board then this would be a far more peaceful world than it is.
Thus
, to return to your last questions - "Do you see your writing as documenting an inevitable decline, or are you crying out to prevent that decline? Why can it not be the latter?"While I certainly hope that some people can find meaning, enlightenment, and sometimes joy in the writing, editing, publishing, and activist career which I have chosen, while I hope that some people can embrace multi-faith mysticism and thus live a kind, more loving life, I am really not at all optimistic that Americans or any other large group of people can be led “to a common moral field,” especially not one inspired by the Torah. For the reasons laid out above, I suspect the 21st century is likely to be one just as blood-soaked and cruelty-filled as he previous 50-or so centuries in which humans living in “civilizations” have walked.
While perhaps some aspects of some cultures may show some improvement and advancement - I noted in my post in this series on Martin Luther King, Jr. that acceptance of interracial marriage has massively increased over the last 70 years - for the most part we all should simply prepare ourselves for humanity as a whole to remain in a state of tribal war and violence directed at one another.
I’m sorry - I really hope that I’m wrong and that this is just the PTSD warping my worldview. But I fear it’s not. I’m not just making this up out of whole cloth or following my feelings - this is merely just what the contemporary data, an analysis of history, and the insights of studying the deeply dark views of the biblical prophets has led me to perceive.
What am I missing?