The Yale Political Union debate last night on the special relationship between the United States and Israel has already garnered a fair bit of press attention, both on and off-campus. I'll concur with Philip Weiss' description of the debate as "historic-ish moment", but I take issue with his summary of my speech:
"...the moment when the bearded Wilson, in a 1776 tie, whipped out his passport to read the fine print and decry the idea of dual loyalty."The phrase "dual loyalty" is dreadfully ambiguous -- in fact it's ambiguous enough to send shivers up my spine. Let's not forget that Adolph Hitler used the phrase "dual loyalty" when explaining to the German people why it was that the Jews were a threat to German national security. Since I'm not a neo-Nazi and don't particularly like being mistaken for one, let me lay out the neon, flashing line between the kind of dual loyalty I was talking about last night and the kind that Hitler was talking about.
Hitler's conception of dual loyalty was a typically totalitarian one. Like all the great dictators, he couldn't bear the idea of his subjects owing loyalty to any institution besides the state or having any identity besides "subject of the state". This is why, for instance, in addition to the Jews, the Nazis also murdered countless trade-unionists.
In stark contrast, I see the existence of irrational, unchosen religious, ethnic and social loyalties as one of the last bulwarks standing between us and Fabian socialism. My identity as a Christian and as "a Wilson" are souces of strength which I can draw on when my government commands me to perform an immoral act. Furthermore, our unchosen attachments provide us with an instinctual revulsion at the forces of standardization and homogenization which would otherwise sweep the field. I can't speak to it myself, but I have no doubt that for many the identity of "being a Jew" serves much the same purpose.
The sort of dual loyalty that worries me is specifically loyalty to two different nation-states*. While our identities as Christians, Jews, Elks, Redskins fans, etc. are complementary with our identities as citizens because they help us keep our government just; nation-states operate at the same level of abstraction and thus their interests are bound to come into conflict more-or-less all of the time. My contention is that unlike the first type of dual-loyalty, which Hitler despised but which I think is helpful, the second type of dual-loyalty presents an insurmountable problem. Indeed, the crux of my speech last night turned on the line that "being a good Jew and being a good Israeli mean different things."
I'm no expert on Jewish theology, but even I can see that the whole matter is complicated tremendously both by the founding purpose of Israel and by the Jewish religion's emphasis on place. My good friend JK once opined that "the creation of the Jewish State was one of the worst things that happened to the Jewish people." It is clearly not my place to respond to this contention, but it seems to me that it gets at something important. Joseph de Maistre aside, the deliberate conflation of ethnic/religious sentiments and an instantiated nation-state has never done much good for either.
This is not to say, of course, that the first kind of dual loyalty doesn't present any problems. Anybody claiming to have a fool-proof answer to the Antigone question is either selling you snake-oil or a monster. Either this gal or this gal once told me something to the effect of: "I am a conservative because life is a tragedy defined by conflicting loyalties."The point is that the US vs. Israel kind of dual loyalty is "essentially conflicted" due to the very nature of nation states, while the US vs. My Family kind of dual loyalty is only "contingently conflicted" because the world is fallen. In other words, I can imagine that there must be a solution to contingently conflicted dual-loyalties, even though I can't point it out. This does not hold for the essentially conflicted ones.
Astute readers of this blog will notice that I've contradicted myself. In the past, I've made a great deal of the fact that I'm a neo-constructivist who uses intuitionist logic and rejects non-constructive existence proofs. At the same time, in asserting that "a solution to the problem of contingentaly conflicted loyalties exists even though nobody will ever show you one", I've essentially made a non-constructive statement. The way that I rationalize this seeming-contradiction is as follows:
1) As a pretty hard-line believer in objective reality, I think constructive proofs preserve soundness (though not necessarily completeness) better than non-constructive proofs.
2) In a non-fallen world, constructive methods would also have completeness (translation: "all things which are True could be proven via constructive methods").
3) The Fall of Man was, in the words of William Rogel, a radical epistemological event with ethical consequences.
4) While our ability to comprehend mathematics was damaged by the fall, the abstract, external reality which comprises mathematics was not, itself, affected.
5) Therefore, there should not in principle exist True statements in the world of mathematics which can't be proven constructively because that is their nature, as opposed to our just not being smart enough to do it yet.
6) Meanwhile, in the real world, there exist True statements which cannot be proven constructively due to the Fall of Man.
Now, why do I believe that "there existed a solution to the problem of contingently conflicted loyalties in the pre-fall universe" is one of those statements? Call it my faith in a just God.
*As I'm sure most of you know, I'm no raving statist. In fact, I'm probably closer to being an anarchist or a radical federalist than anything else. That said, I'm also a conservative. This means that I do see a point to working within existing institutions. The liberal nation-state system is pretty dreadful, but while it's what we have, we should try to make it work.
4 comments:
I'm sorry, but your conflation of the fallen nature of man with mathematical proof just smacks of bullshit. As Carnap said, logic has no morals. Do you wish to imply that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem's proof would magically become valid if we considered a world in which some silly naked couple in an antiquated creation myth decided that a talking animal's idea to eat a piece of fruit was a bad idea?
To me, this is another piece of evidence that even the most logical religious people have a section of their thought where coherence is not allowed to enter.
Please note that I was not attempting to offer a logical proof for:
A) The Fall of Man
B) The statement "there exists a solution to the problem of contingently conflicting loyalties."
What I was offering was a justification for why I apply different epistemological standards to beliefs about mathematics and beliefs about the world. From what I know of Carnap, I think he would agree.
Aren't you just being overly harsh on yourself? Constructivist proofs are definitely a good thing to have if you can, but rejecting "non-constructive existence proofs" outright seems just a bit too, y'know, epistemologically modest.
While everything you've mentioned in your reply to my comment is valid, you've still said some things which simply must be rejected outright. For example:
2) In a non-fallen world, constructive methods would also have completeness (translation: "all things which are True could be proven via constructive methods").
Since logic is a collection of tautologies and thus non-empirical, I don't think you can argue that there are possible worlds in which, say, the axioms of peano arithmetic would be complete. Isn't your statement necessarily false?
Your statement 3) that the Fall of Man is an event with epistemological connotations must also be false if you think epistemology is anything more than an empirical study relating to this specific possible world (which I would guess a platonist like you would accept).
As you yourself state, all this comes down to your faith in a just God. For any proposition p which is not analytically false, does there not exist some type of faith in God you could have which would demonstrate p to be true? I am forced to conclude that your entire philosophy of mathematics argument here is thus based on a premise which can prove whatever you want it to prove, and thus, as I said before, this smacks of bullshit. And also, given that you place God above logic here, I again restate that you are another example of a religious person who does not allow logic into certain branches of your thought. This nihilistic atheist does not approve.
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