More on That False Truism

How the saying “Everything happens for a reason” combines presumption with obtuseness.

Last week, I posted an entry examining and denigrating the saying “Everything happens for a reason” (“A False Truism,” March 13, 2011). I subsequently learned that, by a curious chance, an article appeared a few days later at Cracked.com under the title “Five Popular Phrases That Make You Look Like an Idiot,” in which the very same phrase appears at the head of the list (though at the end of the article). Reading another writer’s attempt to identify what makes this saying so irritating gives me occasion to reconsider my own analysis.

I was not surprised to find that the author, whose name is given as “Gladstone,” does not share my logical objections to the phrase. Perhaps no one without some years of study of philosophy will do so. Gladstone even gives the saying a pass as far as its literal meaning is concerned:

I suppose this cliché wouldn’t be intolerable if it were merely meant to be taken literally. Everything does happen for a reason. People die young because they get hit by trains or get cancer. People are maimed and disfigured in wars because of bombs. I mean, if that’s all this cliche were trying to convey then it would just be vaguely annoying. You’d assume the speaker were just some mental deficient who says things like “water is wet,” “ice cream is yummy,” or “Tosh is funny.”

I, of course, disagree. Gladstone in effect takes the phrase to be equivalent in literal meaning to the truism “For everything that happens, there is a reason why it happens.” But in my estimation he lets the phrase off too easily. Getting hit by a train or getting cancer may be the reason why someone dies young, but it is not a reason for which someone dies young. People do not die for a reason, as dying is not something that people do, or can do, intentionally. They can intentionally kill themselves or get themselves killed or let themselves die (i.e., refrain from taking action to prevent or delay their dying); but “dying” does not name a possible intentional action, nor even an action at all. Dying is something that befalls one; accordingly, it cannot intelligibly be said to be done “for a reason.” The same goes for any occurrence that is not an intentional action.

For the sake of simplicity, I will hereafter use the phrase “mere happening” for anything that happens that is not the intentional act of an agent. Thus, for instance, someone’s dying is a mere happening; someone’s killing himself is an action. 

I argued in my previous piece that the logical confusions in this saying contribute to its currency by allowing it to pass—in lazy, sloppy, or corrupt minds—for a truism. But even if that is so, perhaps logical confusion is not the most objectionable feature of the saying. It is happens to be the sort of feature that tends to attract my attention, because of my peculiar irritability toward logical confusion and the satisfaction that I find in exposing it. But the logical confusion is just the means by which the phrase conveys its pernicious half-hidden meaning. That meaning combines presumption and obtuseness, as Gladstone vividly points out:

But the annoying thing about this phrase is that the speaker believes he/she has some inside track to God or Fate or whatever mystic unseen hand controls the universe. As if there is a power and that power decided there was an actual reason to inflict a newborn baby with Trisomy 18 or have a woman get gang raped. And given the existence of this rational force—that operates only with justification and reason—who are you to question why someone ravaged your wife, or blew apart your son, or took your leg? This cliché insists that either happy endings always exist (“see, they never would have found that tumor, unless they were repairing that machete wound to your abdomen”) or if there is no happy ending for you then your suffering was part of some greater plan that benefited another (“don’t be sad that you were imprisoned for twenty years by a racist jury for a crime you didn’t commit, I mean, think about the valuable lesson you’ve taught us about bias in criminal juries!”)

To say “Everything happens for a reason” is in effect to deny that there are any of what I termed mere happenings, except perhaps by an arbitrary choice of phrasing. It is to hold that the occurrences that appear to us to be mere happenings, such as someone’s dying of cancer or the fall of a leaf, are actually made to happen by an agent—presumably an all-powerful one that works in ways beyond our powers of observation. That would be, in Gladstone’s words, “God or Fate or whatever mystic unseen hand controls the universe.”

This much is implied by the phrase; and by itself it is outrageous presumption enough. But, as Gladstone rightly observes, the person who says “Everything happens for a reason” typically claims even more than this. It would be compatible with this saying to believe that the universe is governed by a petty, jealous, unjust, vindictive, capricious bully of a deity—such as the YHWH of the Hebrew Bible, for instance (see the opening paragraph of chapter 2 of Richard Dawkins’s The God Illusion Delusion*). Even people who believe that collection of texts to be divinely revealed tend to have a more favorable conception of the invisible agent behind the world’s scenes. They tend to believe, in defiance of the text, that God is just, loving, forgiving, wise, and so forth. Certainly Scripture abounds with passages in which YHWH is described in just such terms; the fact remains that the deity’s record in other passages gives the lie to such white-washing. A father who brutally beats or kills his children for failing to honor him properly does not earn the epithets “just,” “loving,” etc., by behaving more generously on other occasions.

But Biblical exegesis is not the issue. The point is that those who say “Everything happens for a reason” mean more than that some intelligent power of unspecified character makes everything happen. They mean that this power does so only for ends that are of some earthly benefit, either to the victim of suffering or to others. That is why devotees of this saying are given to using it to offer consolation to the afflicted. But to do so merely crowns theological presumption with obtuseness toward human suffering. For whatever the human benefit might be for the sake of which God inflicts misfortune, in serious cases the victim would almost never accept the bargain if he or she had a choice in it. Moreover, if God, or whatever the great stage manager is supposed to be, makes everything happen for a reason, then it is difficult to forgive that party for effecting a good end by evil rather than by good means. If the invisible puppet master can, say, take away a couple’s child to teach them compassion (and if this does not seem a convincing example of this line of thought, some other equally puerile rubbish can be put in its place), surely he or she or it should be able to effect the same end without inflicting such tragedy upon people.

Gladstone concludes with these remarks:

I’m not saying all suffering is random and pointless, or that nothing good can ever come out of a bad situation, but the arrogance that comes from the belief that tragic events are always justified as part of a larger plan is just intolerable. I don’t know why bad things happen, but I do know that no one who throws this cliché around knows either. So to everyone keeping this miserable expression alive, please leave people to their misery and save your cliché for yourself the next time you’re walking in the woods and step into a bear trap after getting shot in the eye by a drunken hunter.

This paragraph might leave those who are given to saying “Everything happens for a reason” complacent in the opinion that they are doing no wrong as long as they refrain from offering that formula for the consolation of others. The declared subject of the article, after all, is “phrases that make you look [“look”? not “sound”?] like an idiot.” But the saying is to be despised on its own account, regardless of the social use to which it is put. It may be handy to have reasons for this summarized here.

(1) The saying is logically confused: it applies to mere happenings a form of expression that applies intelligibly only to intentional actions.

(2) By means of this logical confusion, it assumes the air of a truism, which it decidedly is not. To take it for a truism is foolish, and to offer it to others as a truism is chicanery.

(3) Its half-hidden meaning is that all mere happenings are effected by an inscrutable power for the sake of some benefit to those affected by those happenings. This is an extravagant presumption without foundation in any known facts. To assert it as fact is therefore a fatuous piece of self-conceit.

(4) It implies a theodicy according to which all suffering and misfortune is for the sake of a good that outweighs the evil. This trivializes all suffering and misfortune.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE

*Richard Dawkins, The God Illusion Delusion (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 51. (Thanks to Sarra for pointing out my error.)

The Prophets Are Silent

Self-fancied prophets, such as the Reverend Pat Robertson, have told us why God brought us the earthquake in Haiti, the volcanic eruption in Iceland, and other disasters; why have none been giving us the theological skinny on the big oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico?

The Deepwater Horizon; photo by US Coast Guard

In previous entries, I have recounted—scornfully, I admit—the claims of certain religious persons to recognize the hand of God in natural disasters: Pat Robertson on the earthquake in Haiti (“Pat Robertson, Propagandist for Atheism?” and “Second Thoughts about What Pat Robertson Said”), Rabbi Lazer Brody and Rush Limbaugh on the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, and a Muslim cleric on earthquakes in Iran (“More Insights into the Ways of God”). I take it to be obvious that these buffoons are dressing up their benighted prejudices as insights into the ways of God, and thus in effect pretending to prophecy. I also take it that, whether there is such a thing as prophecy or not, these guys haven’t got it.

Only this evening, as I watched a television news report on the attempted “top kill” on the leaking oil well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, did it strike me that I have not heard of any similar prophetic pronouncements about a mishap that promises to be one of the worst ecological disasters of all time. Perhaps this is merely because no self-fancied prophet has made any pronouncements sufficiently outrageous to be widely reported in the news, not because none has spoken of it. But I suspect that human-made disasters simply are not as strong a stimulus to such pronouncements as natural ones.

But why should that be? Do we—non-experts—really have a better understanding of why the Deepwater Horizon exploded than we have of why the earth shook in Haiti or the volcano erupted in Iceland? Surely not, though we may expect that an inquiry into the event will eventually bring to light the causes. Is the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico less significant a disaster than the Haitian earthquake or the Icelandic volcano? Well, it has certainly been less destructive of human life than the earthquake; but the effects on commerce and on animal life look to be pretty dire.

Another possible explanation is that the prophetically inclined have no trouble with the idea of God pushing around tectonic plates or lava veins, but they balk at attributing the actions of human beings, even their errors and collective lapses of judgment, to divine intervention. But this is not true of ultra-Orthodox Jews, for instance, many of whom attribute the Holocaust to divine wrath at the abandonment of strict religious observance among Jews.

Well, I don’t know the answer. It is an interesting psychological question.

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Previous entry: The Natural versus the Supernatural

Next entry: Tom Tomorrow on the BP Oil Disaster

More Insights into the Ways of God

The bright side of natural disasters: they always bring us prophets!

Eyjafjallajökull; photograph by Reuters from Telegraph.co.uk

Reading God’s intentions off natural events is a great game: any moron—and not only morons but even persons of intelligence, provided that they indulge in the intellectual habits of morons—can play it. The recent earthquake in China and the more recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, though disasters for millions of people, have brought forth a harvest of prophet-cretins. Here are three of them, one for each of the three Abrahamic religions:

For Judaism, Rabbi Lazer Brody, writing on his blog Lazer Beams on April 16:

Some people think they’re smart, like the British folks who run the British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The day before yesterday, the senseless stuffed-shirts declared that the Western Wall and the site of our Holy Temple in Jerusalem are not part of Israel, banning Israeli Tourist adverts that included photos of these holy sites.

The bumbling Brits didn’t realize that when you mess around with Jerusalem and the Wall, you mess around with Hashem. . . .

So what did Hashem do?

Hashem let a remote volcano in Iceland erupt, from the Icelandic mountain Eyjaffjalljokull [sic], whose ash cloud grounded all air traffic above Britain yesterday, leaving thousands of passengers stranded.

Well, at least the events that Rabbi Brody regards as cause and effect had some geographical connection: the eruption of Eyjafjalljökull (if you want to learn how to pronounce it, spend a few minutes studying this page and practicing) did indeed ground all air traffic over Britain. Of course, it grounded traffic over most of continental Europe as well, which seems a rather excessive, not to say ineffective, way of punishing a few supposed “stuffed shirts” in the British Advertising Standards  Authority; but I suppose that such grossness of aim and disregard of the innocent is nothing new in the record of God’s supposed exhibitions of wrath.

For Islam, Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, as reported on April 19 by the Associated Press:

“Many women who do not dress modestly . . . lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran's acting Friday prayer leader. . . .

“What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” Sedighi asked during a prayer sermon Friday. “There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes.”

Now I don’t want to make Sedighi appear more foolish than he actually is: as far as I know, he was speaking about earthquakes in Iran, rather than ones in far-off places like China!

Last and decidedly least, for Christianity, Rush Limbaugh (sorry, but Pat Robertson seems not to have spoken up on this occasion) on his radio show on April 16 (transcribed by me from this recording at Media Matters):

You know, a couple days after the health care bill had been signed into law, Obama ran around saying, “Hey! You know, I’m looking around here, the earth hasn’t opened up. No Armageddon out there, the birds are still chirping.” Well, I think the earth has opened up. God may have replied. This volcano in Iceland has grounded more—air space has been more affected than even after 9/11 because of this plume, because of this ash cloud, over northern and western Europe. . . . Earth has opened up. I don’t know whether it’s a rebirth or Armageddon. Hopefully, it’s a rebirth—God speaking.

In fairness to Limbaugh (not that he particularly deserves it), he does not flatly attribute the volcanic eruption to divine wrath over the passage of the health care bill, but says only that it may be God’s reply. Yes, it may be that God is a Republican and is offended by the health care bill, and that he reacts to legislation that offends his sensibilities with retribution, only a few weeks late and a few thousand miles wide of the mark. Or it may be that Rush Limbaugh has no idea of what he is talking about. The latter seems to me by far the more plausible explanation.

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The Right-Wing Evangelical Libel against Haiti

The idea that the nation of Haiti was born of a pact with the devil, far from being Pat Robertson’s invention, is a libel widely circulated among right-wing Evangelical Christians. Like many people who reject critical rationality, they mistake repetition for confirmation and plausible detail for evidence.

Bois-Caïman: painter unknown; image found here

In two previous posts (”Pat Robertson, Propagandist for Atheism?”, January 15; “Second Thoughts about What Pat Robertson Said,” January 19), I discussed Pat Robertson’s attribution of Haiti’s dire history to a pact with the devil supposedly sworn by a group of slaves in 1791. It turns out that the idea of such a pact is not a product of the brain of Pat Robertson at all: it is a libel that has been circulated among Evangelical right-wingers for years. What is most disturbing about this libel is, first, the insidious way in which it mimics the procedures of history in order to promote a religious and political agenda, and second, the success that it has had in propagating itself among the Evangelical faithful.

For purposes of this investigation, it will be useful to distinguish clearly between the following two historical claims:

(1) That in mid-August of 1791, a group of slaves planning an uprising against their French colonial masters met at Bois-Caïman to perform a Voodoo rite (the preferred spelling among scholars seems to be “Vodou,” though I have also seen it spelled “Vaudou,” “Voudou,” and “Voudon”; I will follow the popular spelling). Although there is a considerable amount of confusion and conflict in the historical sources (which I hope to discuss in a subsequent post) over the specifics of this event, such as when it took place, who led the rite, and what kind of animal was sacrificed, and although one scholar has even defended the thesis that no such event ever took place, there is no denying either that there is credible historical evidence of such an event or that it is widely believed and celebrated by Haitians as the starting point of the founding of their nation. I will refer to this event as “the meeting at Bois Caïman.”

(2) That the participants in the meeting at Bois Caïman swore a pact with the devil to serve him for 200 years. Note that this claim admits of two different interpretations. It could be taken to mean either (a) that those present at Bois Caïman went through the motions of sealing a pact with a supposed spirit, believed by them to be real, and known as the devil or Satan; or (b) that they really did enter into a pact with a perfectly real devil. Plainly, it is only on interpretation (a) that this claim can be considered within the discipline of history, for it is only on that interpretation that it admits of confirmation or disconfirmation by evidence. On interpretation (b), the thesis is beyond the reach of possible evidence and belongs to myth, or perhaps demonology, but not on any account to history. As it happens, there is no evidence that supports this thesis even under interpretation (a). I will refer to the uninterpreted and ambiguous thesis that the slaves at Bois Caïman “swore a pact with the devil” as “the Satan thesis.”

On the day on which Robertson’s inflammatory utterances were broadcast on The 700 Club (January 13, 2010), Chris Roslan of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) posted a “Statement Regarding Pat Robertson’s Remarks on Haiti.” The concluding part of the statement reads:

If you watch the entire video segment, Dr. Robertson’s compassion for the people of Haiti is clear. He called for prayer for them. His humanitarian arm has been working to help thousands of people in Haiti over the last year, and they are currently launching a major relief and recovery effort to help the victims of this disaster. They have sent a shipment of millions of dollars worth of medications that is now in Haiti, and their disaster team leaders are expected to arrive tomorrow and begin operations to ease the suffering.

So far as I can tell, this part of Roslan’s statement is entirely just. The final words of Robertson in that notorious news segment were: “Right now, we’re helping the suffering people, and the suffering is unimaginable.” The Web site Charity Navigator gives Operation Blessing International, a relief organization belonging to CBN—presumably what Roslan is referring to as “his [viz., Robertson’s] humanitarian arm”—a rating of 62.41, a rating that puts it in the highest possible rating category. For comparison, Doctors Without Borders USA gets 61.23 and Oxfam America 63.01. So I no reason to doubt that Robertson’s organization is on the up-and-up and is doing good work.

The first part of Roslan’s statement is another matter entirely:

His [viz., Robertson’s] comments were based on the widely-discussed 1791 slave rebellion led by Boukman Dutty at Bois Caiman, where the slaves allegedly made a famous pact with the devil in exchange for victory over the French. This history, combined with the horrible state of the country, has led countless scholars and religious figures over the centuries to believe the country is cursed. Dr. Robertson never stated that the earthquake was God’s wrath.

Let us work through this backward from the last sentence:

Dr. Robertson never stated that the earthquake was God’s wrath.

Indeed he did not. But he plainly implied that Haiti’s long history of suffering is due to the “famous pact with the devil” that, as Roslan delicately puts it, “allegedly” was sworn at Bois Caïman in 1791. (I won’t quote Robertson’s words again, but you can read them in my first post on the subject. About that qualifier “allegedly,” more in a moment.) On that view, there are only two possible explanations: either the afflictions of Haiti are divine retribution for the pact, or they are returns on the original bargain exacted by the devil himself. Either way, they are the fault of Haitians, whether collectively or in the persons of the leaders of the rebellion that led to the founding of the nation.

This point was clearly grasped by an anonymous defender of Robertson who on January 16 posted the following comment on Roslan’s statement in a blog titled Milennial Perspective, one of several blogs under the heading “Rightly Concerned” in the Web site of the American Family Organization:

Leave it to the liberals, and those who do not understand the difference between a curse, and the assumption that “God hates Haiti.” Point: If a person or a group of people make a deal, a pact with another person or organization, then they are each beholden to the other to uphold the terms of that pact. Any other person, outside the realm of that pact, has no standing to interfere with the pact. So, the Haitians of that day made a deal with the devil. They got what they wanted, and in return, Satan got their souls. This contract will be in effect until the Haitians, as a nation, reject that pact by confessing that sin to the Father, God. Until that happens, He has no control—or limited control—over what happens to them. So their suffering falls upon their own shoulders, not His. Neither is the blame for the disaster His fault.

(The quoted phrase “God hates Haiti” is presumably an allusion to a piece by Lisa Miller that appeared in Newsweek on January 15 under that title.) The same position is taken by Bryan Fischer in an entry in his blog Focal Point, another blog in “Rightly Concerned,” in an entry titled “In Defense of Pat Robertson” (January 15):

Robertson did not say that the earthquake was a result of this curse, or was God’s fault. Instead, Robertson attributed Haiti’s grinding poverty to this compact with Satan. Jesus himself said that the thief comes only to “steal and kill and destroy.”

But surely there is a theological problem here. I do not know how well the idea that God has “no control, or limited control” over what befalls the Haitians squares with the views of Robertson or of his followers, but the idea that the Almighty can have his hands tied where Satanic pacts are concerned sounds highly unorthodox to me. Such a view is squarely rejected by the Reverend Dr. Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, who, in a piece titled “1.7 Billion Reasons to Defend Pat Robertson” (January 14), writes the following sobering words:

The modern cynic chaffs [sic] at any suggestion that there may be a connection between historical realities and unseen spiritual influences, or as the Bible calls it God’s “blessing or cursing.” Although most people are very comfortable with the notion that God blesses people, we are not at all comforted with the terrifying prospect that Almighty God might also curse.

The overwhelming majority of Americans believe in God and /or moral causality. Eastern religions call it Karma, but Christians call it God’s Providence. I wonder if the reason that so many hate Pat is because he expressed what many Americans don’t want to face—the moral and spiritual dimension of our lives. . . .

Agree or disagree with what Pat said, it was well within the bounds of historic Christian theology. Maybe that’s the real problem after all.

The last quoted paragraph is in agreement with the position of atheist Ronald Lindsay, who, in a blog post that I discussed in my first post on this subject, cited Robertson’s remarks as an exhibition of the irrationality of religious belief. I argued in my own post that Lindsay’s conclusion was overstated, as there are varieties of religious belief that do not presume that it is possible for human beings to discern the effects of divine providence. When I offered this criticism in a comment on Lindsay’s post (comment no. 6, under the name “Kritikos”), he generously granted the point, and restated his position as follows (comment no. 8):

Kritikos is quite correct: my statement should have been explicitly qualified. Robertson’s comments highlight the irrationality of belief in a personal deity who can cause storms and earthquakes, intervenes continually in human affairs, and responds to petitionary prayer, that is, the type of deity that appears to be accepted by most believers.

To get back to the main point, though: whether Robertson thinks that the earthquake was God’s doing or the devil’s, he plainly implied that it is a consequence of the actions of Haiti’s founders, and therefore ultimately their fault.

This history, combined with the horrible state of the country, has led countless scholars and religious figures over the centuries to believe the country is cursed.

The phrase “this history” here refers to the pact with the devil supposedly sworn by Haiti’s original liberators. But who has concluded that the country is cursed? Some religious figures? Undoubtedly. “Countless” ones? Perhaps; if rank-and-file believers are included, then certainly so. But “scholars”? What sort of “scholar” interprets historical facts, let alone tales of the supernatural presented as facts, as evidence of a “curse”? What sort of person takes writers who so interpret history as “scholars”? I believe that the answer is to be found under “religious figures,” or more precisely among adherents of Pat Robertson’s variety of Evangelical Protestantism. It is not clear if this particular statement is an argument from authority or an attempt to diffuse the responsibility for Robertson’s outrageous claims among other, unnamed sources. Either way, it gives no credibility to the idea that Haiti is under a curse.

(As a resident of greater Boston, whose baseball team was held for 86 years to be under a “curse” that only ended in 2004 when the Red Sox finally won the World Series, I must add at this point that Robertson and company are not using the word “curse” in any kind of playful or ironic spirit. I do not doubt that there are Red Sox fans who believe just as solemnly and sincerely in the reality of the Curse of the Bambino as Robertson and his allies do in the reality of the Haitian pact with the devil. I merely wish to caution those who use the word less seriously, as an ironic way of describing a persistent pattern of misfortune, that that is not what is at issue here.)

His comments were based on the widely-discussed 1791 slave rebellion led by Boukman Dutty at Bois Caiman, where the slaves allegedly made a famous pact with the devil in exchange for victory over the French.

“Allegedly,” says Roslan; but alleged by whom? “Famous,” says Roslan; but famous among whom? Among Haitians what is famous, and much celebrated, is the story of how, in August 1791, a group of slaves met to plan an uprising against their French colonial masters, an occasion that culminated in a Voodoo rite in which a pig was sacrificed. As I indicated earlier, there are divergent accounts of who took part in this affair and where and when it took place. What is clear is that none of the historical sources make any mention of a pact with the devil. Who or what, then, is the source of Roslan’s tale?

I cannot identify an ultimate source, but Roslan or whoever prepared the page on which his statement appears offers a proximate one. Next to his statement are several links under the heading “Related Information,” one of which reads “Haiti: Boukman, Aristide, Voodoo and the Church.” It leads to a piece under that title written by Elizabeth Kendal and dated 2004, on a page in the Web site of the John Mark Ministries, an Evangelical Christian organization in Australia. This appears to be the same Elizabeth Kendal who is identified by the Christian Monitor as Principal Researcher and Writer for the World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission. Her version of the history of the founding of Haiti includes this passage:

On 14 August 1791, a black slave and witch doctor named Boukman led the slaves in a voodoo ritual. They sacrificed a pig and drank its blood to form a pact with the devil, whereby they agreed to serve the spirits of the island for 200 years in exchange for freedom from the French. The slave rebellion commenced on 22 August 1791, and after 13 years of conflict, the slaves won their independence. On 1 January 1804 they declared Haiti the world’s first independent black republic. An iron statue of a pig stands in Port-au-Prince to commemorate the “Boukman Contract”.

I have found the contents of Kendal’s piece credulously reproduced on numerous Web pages, including one in Polish, all posted since January 13. The transformation of Dutty Boukman or Boukman Dutty (I have seen his name given both ways) from a priest of the Voodoo religion into a “witch doctor” does not raise confidence in Kendal’s competence as a historian, though it does give the measure of what Chris Roslan had in mind when he invoked unnamed “scholars.”

But there is that bit at the end about the statue of a pig. A detail of such specificity, concerning a present, or at least recent, state of affairs, lends an air of verisimilitude to the whole story. Bryan Fischer, in the piece cited previously, adds another such detail:

It is a matter of historical record that Haiti’s independence from France is, in fact, rooted in a pact with the devil made on August 14, 1791 by a group of voodoo priests led by a former slave named Boukman. The pact was made at a place called Bois-Caiman, and the tree under which a black pig was sacrificed in this ceremony is still a shrine in Haiti. Annual voodoo ceremonies are conducted every August 14 on this very site, essentially renewing the covenant with darkness each summer.

So not only is there, according to these sources, a statue of a pig in Port-au-Prince that commemorates the Boukman contract with the devil but the tree under which the original pig was sacrificed at Bois-Caïman is a shrine at which Voodoo ceremonies are performed every August 14. One can imagine the effect of such details on Evangelical readers of these materials: they would no doubt see them as decisive proof of the truth of the story.

But any person examining these matters skeptically would have to wonder, first, whether the details are actual facts, and second, whether they constitute any sort of confirmation of the story of the pact with the devil. Take the pig first. Is there such a statue? On a message board for Haitian Americans, two participants in a thread on this question recollect seeing an iron statue of a pig at a certain location in Port-au-Prince (one locates it at la Place de l’Italie au Bicentenaire, . . . across from the old legislative palace,” the other “near the post office”; I do not know if these refer to the same location), but neither of them knows of any indication that the statue is connected in any way with Boukman. Remember that the question is not whether Haitians celebrate the memory of the meeting at Bois Caïman: there is no doubt that many do so. What is at issue is whether there was any pact with the devil at that meeting. The existence of an iron statue of a pig is no confirmation of this. The same applies to the supposed annual commemorative gatherings. Such details provide concreteness, and thus may have the psychological effect of enhancing the verisimilitude of the Satan thesis; but they constitute no evidence for it whatever.

[Added after posting, 23 January 2010, 15.40 EST:  It has occurred to me that the pig statue, if it exists, could have been installed as a punning salute to the city itself: the first word of “Port-au-Prince” (the “t” is silent) is homophonous with “porc,” the French word for “pig.”]

The only other bit of evidence that anyone in this crazy circuit, to my knowledge, has ever presented to support the Satan thesis is Bryan Fischer’s assertion that “on national TV, Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S. openly admitted, while criticizing Robertson, that Haiti did in fact enter in to this pact with the devil.” He is referring to the following remarks made by Ambassador Raymond Joseph on the Rachel Maddow Show on January 13:

I would like the whole world to know, America especially, that the independence of Haiti, when the slave rose up against the French and defeated the French army, powerful army, the U.S was able to gain the Louisiana Territory for $15 million. That’s 3 cents an acre. That’s thirteen states west of the Mississippi that the Haitian slaves’ revolt in Haiti provided America. . . . So what pact the Haitian made with the devil has helped the United States become what it is.

But while Joseph speaks slowly and deliberately, and appears to have a good command of English, the crucial last sentence is very unclear. As it stands (and I have transcribed his utterances verbatim), it is simply ungrammatical: the phrase “what pact” does not make sense in that context. It is possible that by “what pact” Joseph meant simply “the pact,” in which case he would indeed be making the admission that Fischer attributes to him. But while the ambassador’s English is imperfect, it does not seem to be as crude as that. It is far more likely that by “what pact” he meant “whatever pact.” On that assumption, he is most likely merely saying that, whether there was a pact with the devil or not, the actions of Haiti’s original liberators have benefited the United States.

Of course, it is possible that Ambassador Joseph does believe the Satan thesis. That would be at best exceedingly feeble evidence of its truth, but it would certainly be evidence that the thesis has gained acceptance among Haitians. This finding was reported by Jean Gelin, a Haitian-American agricultural scientist and Christian minister, in a three-part article titled “God, Satan, and the Birth of Haiti,” published on the Web site Black and Christian in 2005. In the first part, Gelin writes as follows:

Have you ever heard how some preachers or theologians try to explain the unspeakable misery that is crippling most of Haiti’s population of 8 million? Everywhere you go, from your television screen to the Internet, what you are most likely to find is a reference to a spiritual pact that the fathers of the nation supposedly made with the devil to help them win their freedom from France. As a result of that satanic alliance, as they put it, God has placed a curse on the country some time around its birth, and that divine burden has made it virtually impossible for the vast majority of Haitians to live in peace and prosperity in their land. . . .

The worst part of the whole picture is that the story is believed by many sincere Christians in America and around the world; and not only do they believe it, they also spread it as fact. The tragedy of our age is that repeated lies are often mistaken for the truth, especially when repeated long enough.

But did the idea of a pact with the devil originate abroad or in Haiti itself? Gelin does not take a firm position on that question:

It’s hard to know where the idea of a divine curse on Haiti following the purported satanic pact actually originated, whether from foreign missionaries or from local church leaders. In his book Ripe Now: A Haitian Congregation Responds to the Great Commission, Haitian pastor Frantz Lacombe identified a ‘dependence mentality’ in the leadership of the Haitian church, which resulted from the way the Christian faith was brought to the country, historically and through various denominations. Apparently, this unfortunate manner of thinking, which tends to emulate the worldview and culture of North American and European Christian missionaries, has permeated the general philosophy of the Haitian church on many levels, including church planting, church management, music and even missionary activities.

In that context, I would not be surprised if the satanic pact idea (followed by the divine curse message) was put together first by foreign missionaries and later on picked up by local leaders. On the other hand, it is equally possible that some Haitian church leaders developed the idea on their own using a theological framework borrowed from those same missionaries who subsequently propagated the message around the world.

Wherever the idea originated, it is now being spread over the world by Evangelical Christians. Though imposed on the story of the Bois Caïman meeting, a story which itself has a basis in historical evidence, the crucial element of Satanism is a fabrication. I suspect that many Evangelicals are unable to grasp this point because for them the identification of Voodoo with Satanism seems self-evident. This can be seen, for instance, in a passage written by photographer Shawna Herring in a blog entry dated January 15, 2009 concerning a visit to Haiti that she had recently made (ellipsis in original):

To clear up any superstitious idea here I want to just say that Voodoo is REAL. It’s not just some little revengeful idea with dolls and pins . . . it’s a real partnership that was made with the devil himself. 203 years ago [sic] when Haiti was under French rule, they were enslaved by them and in an effort to gain their freedom, Voodoo priests from all over came together and literally signed a written contract and made a deal with the Prince of darkness that stated that if he could grant their freedom, they would serve him for 200 years. He did and they have. It’s no joke.

Note the movement here from saying that Voodoo is real (which it is, in the sense that it is a religion really practiced by many Haitians) to saying that the “partnership with the devil” established more than 200 years ago is real. For this writer, as for others of her religious outlook, the two are the same. The detail of a “written contract,” which I have not seen anywhere else, is also a nice touch. I suspect that it is merely the product of misrecollection or faulty transmission, but it may be worth checking up later to see if other members of the crazy circuit are citing Ms. Herring’s statement as further proof of the Satan thesis.

By the way, if you are wondering how Evangelicals can believe that Haiti is still suffering the consequences of a pact with the devil forged more than 200 years ago for a period of 200 years, the answer is, first, that the term of 200 years is supposed to have begun not with the forging of the pact in 1791 but with the liberation of Haiti, which was effected on January 1, 1804; and second, that when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, on April 8, 2003, gave official recognition to Voodoo as a religion in Haiti, he thereby, as Bryan Fischer puts it in the post cited earlier, “extended the pact.” Fischer does not state the duration of the extension or the reason for which Aristide would do such a thing.

Of course, it is easy to see this detail as an instance of facts being interpreted, not to say rewritten, to suit a rigid belief. No doubt, it is that, but to ascribe it to that principle alone is to miss the point that for Evangelicals like Fischer, it is axiomatic that Voodoo is Satanism. I have little doubt that even if it were possible to look into the past as we look at old television shows and to watch the meeting at Bois-Caïman unfold, Fischer, Kendal, Robertson, and all of their like would find the proceedings to be a complete and thorough confirmation of their beliefs.

That rigidly held religious beliefs yield unsound anthropology—as they do unsound history, science, ethics, politics, and so on—is hardly news. The interesting thing about the Evangelical libel against Haiti is the way in which its proponents not only offer it as a “true story” (Robertson) and “a matter of historical record” (Fischer), but support it with historical and factual details that, however little value they have as evidence, are well calculated to persuade the unwary.

One final reflection. As noted at the beginning of this piece, Pat Robertson’s humanitarian organization Operation Blessing International has been contributing to the relief effort in Haiti. I have no doubt that his followers and other people who propagate the libel of Haiti’s founding pact with Satan have been making generous contributions, in money and labor, to that effort. Nor do I doubt the sincerity of those who receive and repeat this falsehood. But it is a falsehood, and not an innocent one. It is blameworthy for the disregard of evidence and fact that engender it, the superstitious attitude that it sustains (it is almost amusing to see people who attribute literally earth-shaking powers to the devil trying to pin the charge of Satanism on others), and the damage that it does. This damage consists in defaming the Haitian people and the founders of their nation as Satanists; putting the blame on them for misfortunes that are no fault of theirs; shifting attention from the real causes, past and present, of Haiti’s afflictions, and thereby diminishing the chance of improving conditions there.

Further documentation of the use of the Satanism libel against Haiti may be found in a recent piece by Rachel Tabachnik: “Pat Robertson Not Alone in Demonizing Haiti” (Talk to Action, January 14, 2010).

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Second Thoughts about What Pat Robertson Said

What is wrong with what Robertson said is what is wrong with a great deal of religious thinking. Explaining wherein the fault lies is not easy.

William Blake, Job

I have some emendations to make to my previous entry, on Pat Robertson’s theological explanation of the sorrows of Haiti.

(1) In that entry, I observed that, for all the outcry against Robertson’s remarks, there has been almost no discussion of what exactly makes them so outrageous. Subsequently, I discovered a piece by Lisa Miller, published in Newsweek on line under the sardonic title “Why God Hates Haiti,” that addresses the question that I had thought neglected. After a brief account of Haiti’s history of misfortune, Miller comments as follows on Robertson’s remarks:

In his narrow, malicious way, Robertson is making a First Commandment argument: when the God of Israel thunders from his mountaintop that “you shall have no other gods before me,” he means it. This God rains down disaster—floods and so forth—on those who disobey.

But Robertson’s is a fundamentalist view. It’s so unkind and self-righteous—and deaf, dumb, and blind to centuries of theological discourse on suffering by thinkers from Augustine to Elie Wiesel—that one might easily call it backward. Every Western religious tradition teaches that mortals have no way of counting or weighing another’s sin.

I was heartened to read this piece, for two reasons. First, it goes beyond a mere emotional reaction to Robertson’s remarks to address issues of the nature and consequences of religious belief, as I think that one must do to bring to light what it is about those remarks that makes them deserving of condemnation. Second, it reminds us that Robertson’s remarks are deplorable even in a religious perspective—perhaps especially so. Not just any old religious outlook will lead one to the conclusion that Haiti’s afflictions are the consequences of Haitians’ having done things displeasing to God, not even if you throw in Robertson’s ignorant and bigoted identification of the Creole religion of (some) Haitians with a Satanic cult. No; it takes, in Miller’s apt word, a particularly backward theology to do that. (Ignorant, bigoted, backward, arrogant, callous, inhumane, smug, fatuous—one thing for which you have to give Pat Robertson credit is that he provides work for lots of adjectives!)

(2) It was rash of me to dismiss Robertson’s purported “true story” about a pact with the devil as “just more of the sort of lurid fantasy habitually extruded by the brains of right-wing religious fanatics like [him].” It is surely something more baneful than that. I offered the surmise that “in [Robertson’s] view any religious practice much different from the Evangelical Protestantism with which he is comfortable is Satanic worship.” That may be so, but it does not take account of the fact that the Haitians are of largely black African origin, as is the Vodou religion whose rites Robertson equates with Satanism. It is possible that Robertson’s bigotry is purely religious and not racial in nature, but, I think, not likely. The suggestion of an underlying racial bias adds to the ugliness of his remarks.

(3) I think that I was a bit glib about the relation between believing in God and the habit of attributing specific events to divine designs. I took for granted that the latter is separable from the former—that it is possible to believe in God while forswearing all judgments about divine intentions behind worldly events. Certainly the two are separable in principle. But the fact (assuming it to be a fact, as I think it is) that the vast majority of religious believers make such judgments is an indication of how difficult it is to have the one without the other. To believe that everything that happens does so in accordance with divine providence while making no judgments about how specific events bear a providential meaning would surely greatly reduce the comforts of religious life for most believers. On this point as on many others, the more that religious belief is purged of irrational elements, the less emotional appeal it can hold for most people.

(4) In my attempt to account for what was outrageous in Robertson’s remarks, I think I conflated two questions that require separate answers: (a) what principle led Robertson to such conclusions? and (b) what makes his conclusions so obnoxious? I would still say that his remarks rest on a presumption on his part of being able to identify God’s designs in worldly affairs. That presumption, combined with his bigoted assessment of Haitian history (see point (2) above), led Robertson to the conclusion that Haiti’s misfortunes are the return on a Satanic bargain, whether they are effected by Satan himself as part of the deal or by God in retribution for the original pact. The same presumption plainly underlies Robertson’s grandiose, politically opportunistic explanations of the September 11 attacks, the flooding of New Orleans, the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, and the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon by a stroke (all explained in the previous entry).

But what makes such conclusions obnoxious is something more. It is, as Lisa Miller points out in the passage that I quoted earlier (see (1) above), the presumption of being able to identify and weigh the sins of others—always, of course, with favor to oneself and disfavor to the others. Robertson embraces a religious doctrine according to which believers of said doctrine are deserving of God’s favor and non-believers deserving of divine retribution. To say that such a view is baseless, superstitious, or implausible (all of which I say it is) fails to touch on what is most deplorable about it, namely its self-serving arrogance and presumption. Robertson’s conclusions are certainly generated by faults of reasoning and judgment, but what is most objectionable in them is a matter of the human posture that emerges from his faulty reasonings and judgments. (I acknowledge that what I have written is not entirely clear; it seems to me that the question that I have been trying to answer—what is so outrageous about Robertson’s remarks?—does not yield to the familiar terms of either ethics or logic as commonly practiced.)

(5) A further point to be made about the evil done by Robertson and those who share his fondness for imputing earthly disasters to divine causes is that they reinforce a lack of interest in the demonstrable natural causes of such disasters and thereby reduce the likelihood of remedy. Elizabeth McAlister sums the matter up well in a piece for CNN titled “Why Does Haiti Suffer So Much?” (January 18, 2010):

For social scientists, there is nothing metaphysical about the question “Why Haiti?” Longstanding structural reasons have produced a dysfunctional system long in crisis. Beginning as a French slave society, the nation was founded at a severe disadvantage. France demanded enormous payment for abandoned property after the revolution, starting a cycle of debt that was never broken.

Deep and abiding racism prevented the U.S. and Europe from recognizing Haiti for 60 years. Trade was never established on even terms. The military ruled the state, culminating in the brutal Duvalier dictatorship, which the U.S. supported.

No robust civil society developed—there’s no vigorous tradition of PTAs and town planning boards. A brain drain evacuated top talent from the country, while the U.S.-subsidized farm industry sent surplus crops to Haiti, undercutting local prices there. Farmers abandoned their lands, flocked to the capital, and built the shanty towns that have now collapsed into rubble, burying the innocent and vulnerable, strong and powerful alike.

The suffering Haitians are enduring is a natural disaster worsened by human-made conditions.

Robertson cited the disparity between the comparatively good fortunes of the Dominican Republic, on the eastern half of the island of Hispaniola, and the terrible ill fortunes of the Republic of Haiti, on the western half of the same island, as evidence of the supernatural causation of Haiti’s misfortunes—as if no natural explanation were possible. The more that people embrace this kind of superstitious thinking, the less likely it is that anything will ever be done about the actual causes of suffering. (Chances are bad enough; that is no excuse for making them worse.) An earthquake is an uncontrollable natural event; the substandard building construction that makes an earthquake fatal to tens of thousands of people is not. Heavy rains are an uncontrollable natural event; the deforestation that makes such rains result in deadly landslides is not. And so on.

(6) Finally, no discussion of religious responses to the disaster in Haiti can be complete without some consideration of the Book of Job. Lisa Miller’s piece opens with the sentence: “Haiti is surely a Job among nations.” Subsequently, she quotes Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Anchor Books, 1981), which is among other things a meditation on the Book of Job. (What Kushner is quoted as saying, by the way, is: “I think that it’s supreme hubris to think you can read God's mind.” I was struck by the fact that the rabbi chose the Greek “hubris” rather than the Hebrew “chutzpah.” But on reflection, I saw the justice of the choice: only the Greek word denotes a transgression upon divine prerogatives, the Heberew word signifying only a transgression upon human ones.) Plainly, if Haiti is a Job, then Robertson is a Job’s comforter of the worst sort. Kushner in his book provides a useful schema for understanding what that means:

To try to understand the book [viz., Job] and its answer, let us take note of three statements which everyone in the book, and most of the readers, would like to be able to believe:

A. God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the world. Nothing happens without His willing it.

B. God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they deserve, so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.

C. Job is a good person.

As long as Job is health and wealthy, we can believe all three of those statements at the same time with no difficulty. When Job suffers, when he loses his possessions, his family, and his health, we have a problem. We can no longer make sense of all three propositions together. We can now affirm any two only by denying the third. . . .

Job’s friends are prepared to stop believing (C), the assertion that Job is a good person. (42–43)

A characteristic of the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People that impresses the reader from the beginning is his humanity—a characteristic not universal among bearers of clerical titles, as recent events remind us. In the first chapter of the book, titled “Why Do the Righteous Suffer?”, Kushner disposes of the familiar attempts to reconcile the sufferings of the innocent and the just with belief in God—“They did something to deserve it,” “It’s for their own good,” “It’s for the best in the long run,” “God will make it up to them in the next life,” and so on—not so much for being unconvincing answers to a theoretical conundrum (though he does find them to be that) as for failing to offer the afflicted a possibility for reconciliation with God. His alternative solution is that God does not cause or allow all of our suffering: some things really do just happen, for no divinely providential reason at all. In terms of the schema above, Kushner gives up statement (A). In theological terms, he gives up the doctrines of divine omnipotence and providence: “God can’t do everything,” he says in the title of his seventh chapter (although, he adds, “he can do some important things”).

As strongly as Kushner’s ethos appeals to me, and as humane as I find his theological view, his attempt to derive the latter from the Book of Job seems to me to have little textual foundation. To me, the view implied by the Book of Job is just the view that Kushner attributes to Job himself:

Job sees God as being above notions of fairness, being so powerful that no moral rules apply to Him. God is seen as resembling an Oriental potentate, with unchallenged power over the life and property of his subjects. And in fact, the old fable of Job [i.e., the folk tale posited by biblical scholars as the antecedent of the scriptural text] does picture God in just that way, as a deity who afflicts Job without any moral qualms in order to test his loyalty, and who feels that He has “made it up” to Job afterward by rewarding him lavishly. (46–47)

This is, in fact, the only view of God that I find in the text. To me it seems that God figuratively picks Job up by the scruff of the neck and thunders at him, “Can you compare your powers to mine? No, you can’t! So shut up!” (38:1–40:2 and 40:6–41:26); to which Job meekly replies, “Yes, Sir; I will, Sir” (40:3–5 and 42:1–6). The theological lesson taught by God’s answer to Job, so far as I can tell, is either that divine might makes right or that God’s power is so far beyond our comprehension that it is senseless for us to apply our notions of justice to God. If any of the three propositions in Kushner’s scheme is to be given up, it must proposition (B), that God is just—not because it is false, but because when we attribute justice to God, we really have no idea of what we are talking about. Kushner takes the passage about Leviathan (40:25–41:26) to mean, literally, that God is only able with great effort to subdue the giant sea serpent, and thus to mean, figuratively, that “even God has a hard time keeping chaos in check and limiting the damage that evil can do” (49–50). Rabbi, you’re a mentsh for trying to find such a humane view in scripture, but I just don’t see it there.

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Carl Sagan on Science and Skepticism

Carl Sagan’s work is a great reminder of the ethical aspect of skepticism: without the ability to distinguish between prejudice and “postjudice,” or between what is true and what feels good, we may “slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.”

I recently learned from a blog entry by D. J. Grothe of the availability of some writings of Carl Sagan (1934–1996) on the site of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Grothe comments:

One thing that stands out in them is how skepticism was for Carl Sagan a deeply ethical enterprise, not just a debunking hobby, or a way to show how smart we are compared to the numbskulls who believe nonsense. For Sagan, as for so many other leaders in skepticism—though it is not often framed like this—his skepticism came out of a kind of deep moral imperative. Because undue credulity causes so much measurable harm, it follows that there is an ethical obligation to work to mitigate it through speaking out and educating our neighbors. Whether you believe that space aliens are coming to Earth to solve all our problems so we don’t have to do any work to fix them ourselves, or you believe that going to a faith healer or New Age huckster rather than relying on medical science to heal you is the right course of medical care, believing in things uncritically can be bad for you and bad for society. Sagan felt that it was the right thing—the morally conscientious thing—to work against those trends.

That ethical concern seems to me well expressed in this passage from Sagan’s essay “The Burden of Skepticism” (1987):

Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven’t ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and then rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can’t be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.

It is salutary to remember such things when one is accused of being “closed-minded” (or “close-minded,” in the cretinous mangling of the phrase that seems to be coming into favor on the Web) for disparaging claims of events that run contrary to common experience and well-founded scientific conclusions. Being “open-minded” or unprejudiced does not mean refusing to draw conclusions. If Charlie Brown is a perfect skeptic, he must acknowledge that it is possible that, if he runs to kick the football this time, Lucy will let him do so. But, given that she has snatched the football away at the last moment on all previous occasions, he has good reason to believe that she will do the same thing to him this time. That is not a prejudice. That is a warranted conclusion from experience.

And here is a notable passage from “Wonder and Skepticism” (1994):

There’s another reason I think popularizing science is important, why I try to do it. It’s a foreboding I have—maybe ill-placed—of an America in my children’s generation, or my grandchildren’s generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when we’re a service and information-processing economy; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest even grasps the issues; when the people (by “the people” I mean the broad population in a democracy) have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas; when there is no practice in questioning those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.

In a previous entry, I raised the question whether there is really any such thing as a “harmless superstition,” and suggested that there is no such thing, but only a distinction between less and more harmful superstitions. Sagan’s reflections seem to me in agreement with this thought.

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Superstition and Jewish Observance

Whether a religious practice is superstitious depends on what its practitioners think that they are doing: one and the same practice may be sustained by different beliefs, some superstitious and some not. Some superstitions are more harmful than others, but superstition is in itself a harm to the mind.

Don’t envy me my fine car! (Found at Flickr.com)

Recently I was searching the Web for the source of a passage from the Reform Jewish liturgy, engraved in my memory by repetition long ago, that had recently been returning to my mind. Through Google Books I found it in the old Union Prayer Book:

May the time not be distant, O God, when Thy name shall be worshiped in all the earth, when unbelief shall disappear and error be no more. Fervently we pray that the day may come when all men shall invoke Thy name, when corruption and evil shall give way to purity and goodness, when superstition shall no longer enslave the mind, nor idolatry blind the eye, when all who dwell on earth shall know that to Thee alone every knee must bend and every tongue give homage. O may all, created in Thine image, recognize that they are brethren, so that, one in spirit and one in fellowship, they may be forever united before Thee. Then shall Thy kingdom be established on earth and the word of Thine ancient seer be fulfilled: The Lord will reign forever and ever. (Union Prayer Book for Jewish Worship (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1940), 71–72)

To me this passage is sublime music. Not only do its iterations, its balanced phrases, and its elevated diction seduce my ear, but I am touched—deeply—by the faith and hope that it expresses. Yet I do not share that faith and hope. Nothing could be more welcome to me than a day “when superstition shall no longer enslave the mind nor idolatry blind the eye”; but I have no expectation that such a day will ever come. Nor do I see any reason why the alternative to superstition and idolatry should be worship of the supposed one true God, rather than simply the absence of worship. If belief in a creator and ruler of the universe is not itself a superstition, I have yet to understand how it differs from one.

Evidently I am not the only one on whom this passage has made a lasting impression. In searching the Web for it, I had the good fortune to happen on the text of a sermon given in 1997 by Rabbi Barry Block of Temple Beth-El in San Antonio, the title of which is adapted from the quoted passage: “Does Superstition Enslave Our Minds?” I have found much in this sermon to think about, as well as much that leaves me dissatisfied.

Rabbi Block begins by drawing a distinction between harmful superstitions and harmless ones. He offers as an example of a harmless superstition the saying among Yiddish-speaking Jews of the generation of his grandparents, “Tu, tu, kayn aynahora” (the “tu,” I take it, is not a Romance pronoun but a representation of spitting). They said this, according to Block, “to ward off ‘ayin ha-ra,’ the evil eye,” that is, “to prevent ill fortune from befalling us as a result of our having said something too good or too bad.”

(I can’t resist digressing at this point to mention that an equivalent expression existed among the Spanish-speaking Jews of the Ottoman Empire, to which my maternal grandparents and their siblings and cousins belonged. Among them the formula was “Mashalah!”, an expression derived from the Arabic “Mā šāʾ Allāh” and used in many parts of southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. As I am told, it means “God has willed it” or “Whatever God wills,” and is uttered to ward off the evil eye when notice has been taken of one’s good fortune. My Sephardic great-aunts used it, for example, as congratulation to a mother on her child—not that I appreciated its meaning when I was that child: to me, the word was merely the accompaniment to the dreaded and painful indignity of being firmly pinched on the cheek.)

So that is Block’s example of a harmless superstition: the practice of uttering a formula to ward off the evil eye or its effects. He provides the following anecdote as an example of a harmful superstition:

Some years ago, in Israel, an entire bus full of school children from one town were killed in a terrible accident. In the days following that horrible tragedy, the chief rabbi of the town announced that the accident had occurred because too many of the mezuzzot in town were not kosher. His pronouncement was based on the superstitious notion that the mezuzzah is a mere amulet, a magic spell meant to ward off evil.

In this case, as Block understands it, the superstition is the belief that mezuzot, provided that they are produced and maintained according to halakhic requirements, have the power to keep evil away. Anyone convinced of this, like the rabbi in the story, is likely to conclude that if you fail to maintain your mezuzot properly and misfortune befalls you or members of your household—if, for instance, your children are killed in a bus crash—then you are partly to blame. This superstition is harmful, Block says, first, “because it suggests that victims have brought on their own misfortunes,” and second, because “this kind of superstition can drive Jews away from Judaism. A sophisticated person, hearing that the mezuzzah wards off evil, may well assume that all of Judaism’s teachings are equally silly, and therefore unworthy of our attention.”

Block argues, however, that the fault lies not in the practice of keeping mezuzot but in the meaning that some Jews attribute to that practice. He notes that, while the founders of the Reform movement abandoned the practice as superstitious, it has returned in more recent times, and he proposes that the reasons for the return to the practice be understood in such terms as these:

Each time we enter our home, the mezuzzah reminds us that God should be present there, that we should treat the members of our families, and all who enter our doors, with the love and respect required of us by the words of Torah. When we leave home, and we see our mezuzzah once again, we should be reminded to practice our Judaism along our way, being ethical at work, loving our neighbors as ourselves. If we are so inspired by the mezuzzah, then perhaps it will act like an amulet, after all, even if the scroll inside it isn’t kosher. It won’t prevent bus wrecks, but our lives will be better. We will find blessing in our homes and on our way.

One might raise questions about whether this interpretation of the practice of keeping mezuzot is indeed free of superstition. The business about their reminding us to conduct ourselves ethically and making our lives better through such effects is all very well, but what of the idea of God’s presence and the idea of the Torah as a work of divine origin? For the moment, I want to set such thorny questions aside. Block’s most general point, which I accept, is just that not all superstitions are harmful, and not all ritual practices with which superstitious beliefs have been associated are necessarily superstitious themselves.

What bothers me is that, even with respect to this very general idea, Block’s examples do not seem to me as clear as he apparently would like them to be. Let me start with his discussion of the “evil eye.” Two meanings of this expression (or of “ayin ha-ra”) need to be distinguished. One is the underlying meaning of an envious gaze, or ill will toward another on account of that person’s good fortune. According to Rabbi Louis Jacobs, this is the sense that the expression bears in the Mishnah, in which “the ‘evil eye’ simply denoted that its possessor could not bear with equanimity the good fortune of others.” Taken in this sense, the evil eye is a mere natural phenomenon, an undeniable feature of human psychology. Human beings do, as a matter of plain fact, sometimes bear ill will toward others on account of their good fortune.

Quite distinct from this, though derived from it, is the use of the same expression to signify a supposed power of envious persons to bring actual misfortune upon others by their mere gaze. This sense, Jacobs notes, comes into play in the Babylonian Talmud, from which it passes into later Jewish traditions. (Besides the locus cited by Jacobs, other occurrences in the Talmud are noted by the anonymous purportedly rabbinical author of this piece.) So understood, the expression signifies not a natural phenomenon but something supernatural: a power to make bad things happen to another according to one’s wish by wish alone. Now this surely is superstitious (though for now I defer the question of what makes it so). It is in this sense that Rabbi Block interprets his elders’ utterances of “Kayn aynahora” as gestures to ward off the evil eye. But the interpretation of Rabbi Jacobs, like his Yiddish, is somewhat different:

Even today some people, when praising others, will add: “let it be without the evil eye” (in the Yiddish form, kenenhora), meaning I do not intend my praise to suggest that I am enviously casting a malevolent glance.

On this interpretation, the utterance is not meant to ward off the evil eye, in the supernatural sense, but to disavow the evil eye, in the natural sense. I cannot tell which meaning the users of the Yiddish expression in Block’s recollections had in mind. Indeed, there is no reason to assume that they all understood it the same way, or even that they could have explained what they meant by it, beyond the surface meaning of the words. It is enough that Jacobs’s interpretation shows that we cannot presume, as Block seems to do, that the use of the phrase was a manifestation of superstition. It might have been and it might not have been. In any case, the superstition, if there was any, lies not in the phrase itself or in the use of it, but in the understanding with which it was used.

In saying this, I am, in effect, playing one of Block’s own cards against him: for the distinction between a ritual practice and the superstition associated with it is just the point that he makes about the practice of keeping mezuzot. The trouble I see is that this distinction threatens to undercut the other distinction that he wishes to draw, that between harmless superstitions and harmful ones.

Supposedly, it is harmless to believe that saying “Kayn aynahora” keeps evil away, but harmful to believe that installing and maintaining a mezuzah keeps evil away. The latter point is supposed to be shown by the example of the Israeli rabbi who attributed the accidental death of children to the failure of their parents to maintain their mezuzot properly. But it is easy enough to invent scenarios in which something equally noxious might be said on the basis of the other belief. For instance, suppose that a young couple die in an accident shortly after they are married, and one of the in-laws is blamed for neglecting to say “Kayn aynahora.” The most that can be said to contrast the two examples is that the belief that saying “Kayn aynahora” wards off the evil eye (in the supernatural sense) did not, so far as Block knows—not that it cannot—cause harm, while the belief that keeping a mezuzah wards off misfortune, in the case that he cites, did cause harm.

One way to to link the harm more closely to the belief is to take the line that superstitious beliefs are intrinsically harmful, regardless of their consequences. Superstition, one could argue—and indeed I would argue—is the enslavement of the mind, and to undergo it is a harm whether one knows it or not. (A mind enslaved is impaired by that very bondage from recognizing its condition.) The distinction to be drawn is then not between harmless superstitions and harmful ones, but only between less and more serious forms of mental bondage; perhaps also between ones that do not have harmful effects beyond themselves and ones that do.

So what are we to make of Block’s examples? The practice of saying “Kayn aynahora” and the practice of keeping mezuzot on one’s doorposts alike may be based on a superstitious belief in some instances, and may not be so in other instances; that belief, though harmful in itself qua superstition, may do harm in some instances, or it may not. Does this hold for all Jewish ritual practices? I don’t know. I am, however, pretty sure that under any plausible interpretation, at least some such practices necessarily depend on a belief in their divine origin. It is difficult to conceive of a non-theistic rationale for keeping strict halakha, where that includes behavior that no one knows about but you (as against observance dictated by social pressures within an Orthodox community). So that leads me to the really difficult question: Is belief in God, or more specifically in a God who reveals himself through Torah, itself a superstition?

For the moment, I will only say, as I said at the beginning: if there is a difference between the two, I have never been able to see it. Whether that is because there is no difference or because I have not looked far enough, I am in no position to say. I do hope, however, to say more about this question, as well as about the question of what superstition is, in a subsequent post.

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Why Are There So Few Non-Orthodox Jewish Blogs?

Why are there so few bloggers writing about Judaism and Jewishness from a perspective comparable to mine? Is it because too few non-Orthodox Jews care enough about Judaism to write about the topic, or is it because too few of them know enough about Judaism to do so?

(I couldn’t find a good photo of a guy in a kippa at a computer)

Rogueregime, a blogger on Jewish concerns from a Reform perspective, asks in a recent post, “Is anyone else like me out there?”

I have found lots of great frum (i.e., religious) and off-the derech (i.e., by former "observant" Jews) blogs out there, and I have even come across some right-wing sites that at the very least are giving me some food for thought. [. . .]

But I'm not finding other blogs written by people like me:  Liberal, Reform Jews searching for a meaningful, authentic connection with the nitty-gritty of our faith.

Now I do not know how specifically Rogueregime intended the words “Liberal” and “Reform.” (Did he mean “Liberal” with a capital L or a small one? If the latter, did he mean liberal in religion or in politics?) Speaking for myself, I would be satisfied to find some blogs in which Jews who are not presently or formerly Orthodox—understood to include the whole range from Modern Orthodox to Ultra-Orthodox—address Jewish concerns. I don’t care whether they are Reform or Conservative or Reconstructionist or Liberal or Renewal or “other” (which would include “unaffiliated”). I would just like to be able to read some thoughtful blog writing about what it means to be Jewish from perspectives that are like mine to the extent of being completely outside of Orthodoxy. I have found Rogueregime’s blog and now the two that he cites in his post (The Reform Shuckle and Mah Rabu). There may be others out there, but, given how hard they have been to find, they cannot exist in the same profusion as Orthodox blogs. Why is that?

The first explanation that came to my mind when I asked myself this question was that there are not many non-Orthodox Jews who find being Jewish to be a topic of sufficient interest for a blog. But I think that a more plausible answer—and it is in some ways an even sadder one—is that there is simply not enough knowledge of Judaism among the non-Orthodox for many of them to blog about Jewish concerns, at least in any very interesting way. I may be overgeneralizing from a narrow experience, but it seems to me that the great majority of non-Orthodox Jews—Jews like me—have at best a smattering of second- and third-hand knowledge of the historical sources of Jewish law and doctrine. Many have not even that. Since most of us do not know Hebrew, let alone Aramaic (which I only recently learned to be the primary language of the Talmud: how ignorant is that? I also ask my non-Orthodox Jewish reader: did you know that?), we don't even have a vocabulary in which to express the pertinent concepts. At least, that is the impression that I get from reading Orthodox blogs, in which Hebrew words and phrases that I never knew are scattered like slang in the conversation of teenagers. (I have recently learned that this mode of expression is called Yeshivish.)

Now it is, of course, a celebrated fact about Jewish tradition that if you want to know what “the Jewish view” on X is, where X is a non-trivial topic, you are asking an essentially unanswerable question. There is no single Jewish view on any topic of significance: what there is is two thousand years of rabbinical disputation. What you have to learn is not what “the Jewish view” is, but how the argument has gone. The trouble is that if you grow up outside of strict Jewish observance, then that tradition is not likely to seem of anything but academic interest to you.

In writing even this much, I have run the risk of talking beyond my knowledge; so I am reluctant to take the topic much further. (Whatever shame there is in knowing that one is ignorant, it is less than the shame of learning that one has talked ignorantly, i.e., made statements with a presumption of knowledge when in fact one did not know what one was talking about.) From this point, I will try only to relate it to my own particular predicament.

I am willing to grant that there may be a form of belief in God that is not superstition. What I cannot conceive to be other than superstition is the attribution of particular events in history to God’s will, particular texts to his authorship (or “inspiration”—a bit of verbal evasion that either means essentially the same thing as authorship or means essentially nothing), or particular laws and observances to his authority. (For two thousand years our rabbis have inveighed against superstition: but it seems to me that in practice what they mean is just superstitions other than their own.)

Now from this point of view, it is difficult to conceive of a rationale for observing halakhah or bringing up one’s children within it. And among Jews who grow up and live without such observance, few are likely to feel much incentive to study the tradition of rabbinical literature and thought. But without study of that tradition, Jews really do not know what Judaism is. In my view, that means that they do not really know what they are. If they do not care about their ignorance, and either abandon Judaism or fail to pass it on to the next generation, they may be throwing away something of immeasurable value. I cannot say that I know that there is something of immeasurable value in Judaism; but I also do not know that there is not. For this reason, I am not willing to throw Judaism away.

So the sum of the matter is this: On the one hand, I cannot understand Judaism otherwise than as being founded on certain beliefs that I find to be inherently superstitious. On the other hand, there may be something of immeasurable value in Judaism. I cannot be in favor of throwing out something that, for all I know, may be of immeasurable value. I also cannot be in favor of superstition. I don’t know where to stand. My only consoling thought is that the Jews of the world—secular or religious, liberal or strict, skeptical or superstitious (but I don’t mean these three pairs of terms as equivalents!)—will go their various ways regardless of what I think or say.

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Hocus-Pocus about “Magical Thinking”

Unquestionably, human beings have a deep and inescapable predisposition to magical thinking; but to identify all instances in which we attribute to things a meaning that goes beyond what we can observe in them as “magical thinking” simply muddies the waters. Ritual actions can have a power that owes nothing to magical beliefs.

In view of how little power we mortals have over what happens in our lives, it is not surprising that we are suckers for magical thinking. Some people manifest this tendency in obvious ways: traditional superstitions about broken mirrors, black cats, saying the name of “the Scottish play” inside a theater, and the like; “lucky” charms and tokens; ritual repetitions of acts that were once accidentally connected with a good outcome; and so on. But magical thinking also has its subtler forms. It is in play when we give vent to chagrin by exclaiming “Just my luck!” To the extent that such an utterance is meant seriously, it implies that a tutelary spirit or individual “luck” orders events for one’s particular disadvantage, or that the events of one’s life are shaped by an invisible power that makes things come out worse for oneself than for others. Of course, no one with a modicum of intellectual self-respect and the capacity for critical reflection seriously affirms such an idea. But the fact remains that, when uncontrollable and unforeseeable events have turned out against us, there is some consolation in entertaining such cosmically self-centered ideas. As I have heard some people say: “I’m not superstitious—just stitious.”

An article by Matthew Hutson, published in Psychology Today in March of 2008, purports to explore this very subject: the persistence of magical thinking even in people who are not aware of engaging in it. (The article is, at the moment of writing, the second hit on Google for “magical thinking,” right after the corresponding entry in Wikipedia.) After presenting an anecdote about a piano formerly owned by John Lennon (about which more in a moment), Hutson says:

Maybe you’re not a Beatles fan. Maybe you even hate peace and love. But you are wired to find meaning in the world, a predisposition that leaves you with less control over your beliefs than you may think. Even if you’re a hard-core atheist who walks under ladders and pronounces “new age” like “sewage,” you believe in magic.

Hutson’s first positive assertion—that we are all “wired to find meaning in the world”—is, I take it, indisputable and unobjectionable (apart perhaps from the ugliness of the computer-geek metaphor of describing human beings as being “wired” somehow). His second assertion, that this predisposition “leaves you with less control over your beliefs than you may think,” and that, even if you are of a skeptical bent, you believe in magic, is rather disturbing, at least to a skeptically minded person like me. Reading that claim makes me keen to know what evidence he has for such a bold assertion. Here is a sample of what Hutson offers:

Often we don’t even register our wacky beliefs. Seeing causality in coincidence can happen even before we have a chance to think about it; the misfiring is sometimes perceptual rather than rational. “Consider what happens when you honk your horn, and just at that moment a streetlight goes out,” observes Brian Scholl, director of Yale’s Perception and Cognition Laboratory. “You may never for a moment believe that your honk caused the light to go out, but you will irresistibly perceive that causal relation. The fact remains that our visual systems refuse to believe in coincidences.” Our overeager eyes, in effect, lay the groundwork for more detailed superstitious ideation. And it turns out that no matter how rational people consider themselves, if they place a high value on hunches they are hard-pressed to hit a baby’s photo on a dartboard. On some level they’re equating image with reality. Even our aim falls prey to intuition.

The first observation is that if a streetlight goes out just when you honk your horn, you “irresistibly perceive” a causal connection in virtue of the nature of your “visual system,” no matter how well aware you are that there is none. This is supposed to show that your “visual system” “believes” in a causal connection. The second observation is that if you throw darts at a photo of a baby on a dart board, your aim will be bad: this is supposed to show that “on some level” you are equating the photo of a baby with a baby.

Both arguments are utter rubbish. They turn on the strategic use of conceptual slippage. Of course, two events occurring at the same time may strike me as if they were causally connected; I might say that they look to me as if they were causally connected. But this is not tantamount to my believing that the events are causally connected.

In fact, Scholl (the psychologist quoted within the passage) seems to be aware of this point; he tries to avoid absurdity by saying that my visual system “believes” in a connection, even when I do not. But it makes no sense to attribute beliefs to a mere part of a human being. Whatever it means to say that my “visual system” “believes” something (if it means anything coherent at all), that does not mean that I believe it. The argument therefore gives no evidence of the occurrence of magical thinking. Similarly, in the case of the dart board, all that has been shown is that the photo has an effect on people that is similar to the effect of an actual baby: no evidence whatever has been provided to support the unverifiable and obscurantistic claim that “on some level” people believe that the photo is a baby.

Hutson’s entire argument rests on equivocations of this nature. His most villainous equivocation is perpetrated with the very term that forms the title of the article, “magical thinking”; for he uses it to cover both belief in unobservable causal connections and the attribution to things of a meaning that is not grounded in observable causal connections. By means of this conflation, he illegitimately counts instances of the latter (invested meaning) as instances of the former (magical thinking properly so called). Consider the anecdote with which the article opens, concerning a tour made by John Lennon’s piano years after the musician’s death.

“It gives off his spirit, and what he believed in, and what he preached for many years,” says Caroline True, the tour director and a colleague of the Steinway’s current owner, singer George Michael. Free of velvet ropes, it could be touched or played by anyone. According to Libra LaGrone, whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, “It was like sleeping in your grandpa’s sweatshirt at night. Familiar, beautiful, and personal.”

“I never went anywhere saying this is a magic piano and it’s going to cure your ills,” True says. But she consistently saw even the most skeptical hearts warm to the experience—even in Virginia, where the piano landed just a month after the massacre [at Virginia Tech]. “I had no idea an inanimate object could give people so much.”

Where exactly is magical thinking supposed to be evident in this account? Hutson never says, though he presents the story as an illustration. He seems to think the presence of magical thinking too obvious to require explanation. Perhaps he reasons that, since the piano is not John Lennon himself, or an image or a recording of him, but is merely a piano that was once owned and used by him, anybody who regards it as anything other than an old piano must believe that Lennon is somehow actually present in it.

Any anthropologist who made such a leap in interpreting human behavior would be derided as incompetent. So I suggest a more charitable interpretation: Hutson has conflated the common human practice of endowing objects with a significance that goes beyond what can be observed in them with magical thinking properly so called. I find this interpretation confirmed by what he says further on in the article:

To some, John Lennon’s piano is sacred. Most married people consider their wedding rings sacred. Kids with no notion of sanctity will bust a lung wailing over their lost blanky. Personal investment in inanimate objects might delicately be called sentimentality, but what else is it if not magical thinking? There’s some invisible meaning attached to these things: an essence. A wedding ring or a childhood blanket could be replaced by identical or near-identical ones, but those impostors just wouldn’t be the same.

Hutson’s rhetorical question “What else is it if not magical thinking?” is either disingenuous or obtuse. The question of the nature of our attachment to particular possessions, when that attachment is grounded in the history of the items rather than in their observable characteristics, deserves to be posed seriously, not used as a mere rhetorical device for counting all instances of such attachment without examination as “magical thinking.” No doubt, some people do engage in magical thinking with regard to such things: some may believe that the items in question bring them luck, or that getting rid of them would bring disaster, or that they allow them to communicate with the spirit of the former owner, or things of that nature. But not everyone who cherishes a possession in this way holds such beliefs. I doubt that even most such people do.

A simple instance: A friend of mine once gave me a small stuffed toy as a kind of joke gift. For a long time, I kept it atop a dresser, where it would gather dust, because I had no particular use for it and it simply did not fit in with anything else that I own. After a few years, when I was cleaning the clutter out of my apartment, I included it with the items to be given away. Now for all that I knew, my friend might have forgotten that she ever gave me such a gift, or might not care the least whether I kept it or dumped it; I certainly hoped that, if she knew of my discarding the toy, she would not blame me for it. But I could not help feeling, as I think anyone in such a position would feel, that the act of getting rid of the toy had about it something of a desecration. Why? Because the toy was given to me by a friend and was a palpable token of our friendship.

I don’t think that anyone will have any difficulty understanding this fact. But to attribute my feelings about the toy to “magical thinking,” a term that properly designates a belief in supernatural agencies and occult causal connections, is groundless. Hutson’s leaps from observations on how people endow physical tokens with meaning to the conclusion that they are indulging in magical thinking is as groundless and irrational as (genuine) magical thinking itself.

One thing that particularly annoys me about people who reason in the way that Hutson does is that, while they claim to be uncovering the depths of irrationality in human beings, the arguments that they use actually presuppose an implausibly and dogmatically rationalistic way of regarding human behavior. They see people behave in ways that don’t make sense if you try to explain them as attempts to secure particular ends by means of observable causal connections. You might think that the logical conclusion to draw is that the behavior in question simply is not an attempt to secure any end beyond itself. But instead of drawing that conclusion, they conclude that the behavior must be an attempt to secure an end based on belief in an unobservable causal connection. I don’t deny that some people do things of this nature; but to interpret all ritualistic behavior by human beings in this way is a mere rationalistic prejudice. Hutson’s thinking not only makes magical thinking seem much more pervasive than it is, but gives too little credit to the inherent power and significance of ritual practices.

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Bibliographical note

Readers of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” (available in the volume Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, edited by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 115–55) will recognize its influence on my critique of Hutson. For instance: “Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one’s beloved. That is obviously not based on the belief that it will have some specific effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at satisfaction and achieves it. Or rather: it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied” (123). Or this remark, which, whether or not it is fair to Frazer, is the best analysis I have seen of a certain kind of scientistic obtuseness: “His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves” (131). My observations on the senselessness of imputing beliefs to visual systems is also indebted to the work of Wittgenstein, by way of the work of his disciple Peter Hacker. See M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), ch. 3, “The Mereological Fallacy in Neuroscience.”

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