Closing of the Mind
If one lacks דעת (common sense) what does he have? If he has דעת then what does he lack? (nothing!)1
The human being—with his interconnected organs of perfection made out billions of cells with quantum-level interactions and digital information, his muscles and nervous system, his immune system, his heart and eyes, and his brain’s higher functions, all coordinated through purposeful biochemical and biophysical processes—is certainly the most amazing entity of organized complexity in all of creation.3
More than that. A human being is an extraordinary fusion of Mind and Body (מורכב של גוף ונשמה) that puzzles philosophers and neuroscientists alike. Therefore, a Jewish man—as he awakens from his slumbers in the morning—re-aligns his body to the cognition of his mind by donning Tefillin on his arm (across from his heart with its energy and passions) and Tefillin for his head (his intellect).
For, the animal has a body and animal life and will (נפש הבהמית), but not the immaterial intellect of man that understands compassion, justice, the search for truth and ultimately G-d. Our first request in our morning prayers is thus for the proper functioning of our minds:
You favour man with דַּֽעַת (common sense, perception, cognition, mind), and teach mankind understanding. Grant us דֵּעָה, understanding and intellect from You. Blessed are You, Hashem, Grantor of דַּֽעַת, mind.
What is most broken in our post-modern, post-truth era is the mind—what we call דַּֽעַת. Is there a way back? And if there is, what is it?
The Loss of Common Sense
In 1987 professor Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, a stinging indictment of American higher education. It’s much worse today, for we are now in a post-modern post-truth generation that even Bloom might not have imagined.
Robert Reilly (provacatively) argued that there was a much more dramatic “closing of the mind” that happened in the Muslim world 800 years ago that is at the heart of the modern conflict between Islam and the West. (The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis). The gist of Reilly’s argument is aptly summarized in the forward to the book by philosopher Roger Scruton:
[Reilly’s] purpose is to show that Islamic civilization, which led to the urbane princedoms of Andalusia in the West, and to the mystical laughter of the Sufis in the East, underwent a moral and intellectual crisis in the ninth to the eleventh century of our era, when it turned its back on philosophy and took refuge in dogma. Several factors are responsible for this ossification, but the principle one, in Reilly’s view, was the rise of the Asharite sect in the tenth century and the defeat of the rival sect of the Mutazalites. The Asharites found a potent voice in the Imam al-Ghazali (d. 1111), a brilliant philosopher and theologian whose tormented spirit found refuge at the last in a mystical oneness with Allah. Human reason teaches us to question things, to discover things, and to make new laws for our better governance. Hence reason was—for al-Ghazali—the enemy of Islam, which requires absolute and unquestioning submission to the will of Allah. In his celebrated treatise The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali set out to show that reason, as enshrined in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and their followers, leads to nothing save darkness and contradiction, and that the only light that shines in the mind of man is the light of revelation. Although al-Ghazali’s arguments are soundly refuted by Averroes (Ibn Rushd) in his The Incoherence of the Incoherence, Islam rushed to embrace the Asharite doctrine, which made so much better sense of the ruling idea of submission. Averroes was sent from Andalusia into exile, and the voice of reason was no more heard in the courts of Sunni Muslim princes.
Like all sweeping narratives of history, Reilly’s Closing of the Muslim Mind no doubt omits certain important exceptions and qualifications. But if the general outline of Reilly’s thesis is correct, it means that there is a lot of preparatory work to do before fruitful dialogue between Militant Islam and the West can take place. It also means that simplistic attempts to “bring democracy” to the Muslim world are ultimately doomed to failure, for that world has been separated from the intellectual culture in which democracy can take root and subsist.
Rambam in the Moreh Nevuchim was highly critical of the Asharite sect (Kalam). Many of his criticisms apply to the modern intellectual enterprise which are the rotten fruits of the “Enlightenment” (more on this later).
Closing of the Western Mind
A question. How did the Left in the West come to dominate:
- the universities;
- the teacher’s unions and primary and secondary public education;
- journalism and social media;
- the levers of government;
- the law societies, the courts, and a justice system to enforce Leftism;
- big business and big tech.
- Hollywood, sports, entertainment and music;
- and finally, the corruption and politicization of science.
No reasonable person supports defunding or abolishing the police. No reasonable person supports open borders to allow in, unchecked, gangs, drugs, and terrorists (or the 9/11 Islamic terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center). No reasonable person supports surgically sterilizing young children in the name of transgenderism.
No reasonable person celebrates the atrocities of Hamas terrorists as has happened on elite campuses and elsewhere in the west. Such policies spell disaster for any civilization. By its support of the the axis of evil (Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, China, North Korea) the west has been robbed of its moral bearings, is bereft of any sense of right and wrong, and is incapable of distinguishing good from evil.
The American Medical Association advocates that birth certificates should not report the biological sex of a newborn because its “sex” is uncertain as it might change in the future. This is how leftism has corrupted medicine and science. Biologically, sex is binary, either male (sperm gametes) or female (ova gametes); there is no third type of gamete.
At the confirmation hearing of the the Biden-Harris nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, for the Supreme Court, Sen. Marsha Blackburn asked the nominee: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” Jackson, appearing confused, responded, “I’m not a biologist.” Blackburn chided Jackson, claiming that “the fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about.” Ketanji Brown was appointed for being the first black woman to the Supreme Court! How did we get to the point that scientists and medical men can say that “men can become pregnant”?
Why does the Smithsonian Museum have a display that states that reason and the “work ethic” is white supremacy? Why is the Left waging a war on free-will (criminals are guiltless), on the sanctity of marriage (LGBTQ+), on the classical belief that there are objective moral values? Why the rush to slaughter the unborn (abortion) and the elderly (euthanasia) which is murder.
Such absurdities can only happen in the woke dominated West. So how did all this come to be?
In Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s Marxist China and in Castro’s Cuba, the Left used censorship, coercion, force and murder (at a cost of tens of millions of lives) in pursuit of its goal of disrupting civilization.
The Left also came to understand that there is a more effective way: the indoctrination of the youth—by stealth—with the promise of a compassionate and just society (that is especially attractive to the Jewish soul).
The modern university is the engine of leftism that began percolating throughout the modern university a generation ago. One can see this leftist trajectory of the academy in the career of Richard Rorty (1931–2007), an influential American philosopher educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University. Rorty’s academic career included appointments at Princeton and Stanford University.
Rorty: This is the concept … which was used by American school teachers who had read Dewey and were concerned to get students to think ‘scientifically’ and ‘rationally’ about such matters as the origin of the species and sexual behaviour (that is, to get them to read Darwin and Freud without disgust and incredulity). It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own [i.e. like postmodern Marxists of the Left].
The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students … will protest that these books are being jammed down their children’s throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like “There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.” [Rorty and His Critics, Blackwell, 2000, Universality and Truth, Pages 20–1]
A defining feature of the Left is that the professoriate will not use reason to enter into a dialogue with students coming from religious homes. Rather, professors will demonize and make fun of the beliefs of these “naïve” students under their care, so that their views will seem so silly as to not even be worthy of discussion.
Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) was a “community organizer” in Chicago and guru of the Sixties radicals. He proposed direct confrontation and ridicule as effective tactics to pursue power. In his widely cited Rules for Radicals (1971) he proposed confrontation in the struggle for “social justice” (which is entirely at odds with justice without the “social” adjective). Alinsky urged his followers to pursue power to radically change America. Here are some of Arlinsky’s rules for radicals.
Rule 5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating.
Rule 13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
Make it personal. Ridicule your opponent, don’t debate him. By its nature, ridicule is a form of mockery aimed at discrediting or humiliating someone rather than engaging with their ideas. It targets the person through sarcasm and shifts focus away from the merits of the argument itself. A reasoned debate relies on presenting evidence, logical arguments, and engaging directly with the ideas of your opponent. Rule 5 and Rule 13 engage in tactics designed to manipulate emotions, destroy an opponent’s credibility, and incite polarization.
Early in his career, Barack Hussein Obama was hired by the Alinsky team to organize residents on the South Side of Chicago. As Obama put it on the eve of his election in 2008: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
“Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to ‘change the United States of America’, the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country. Jeremiah Wright said it with words: “G-d d*mn America!” Bill Ayers said it with the bombs that he planted. Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people. Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, or who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.”
“Obama is a “man whose only qualifications to be President of the United States at a dangerous time in the history of the world were rhetoric, style and symbolism - and whose animus against the values and institutions of America had been demonstrated repeatedly over a period of decades beforehand- speaks volumes about the inadequacies of our educational system and the degeneration of our culture.”
[Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America, Basic Books, 2010].
Ground Zero
One cannot reason with a dogmatist or a skeptic. One cannot reason with a skeptic who holds an attitude of radical doubt, believing that any knowledge or truth is unattainable (which is inherently self-defeating for what then is the basis of skepticism?). Evidence and reason are pointless since they doubt the possibility of arriving at any truth. One cannot reason with a dogmatist who believes they already possess the truth and therefore are not open to evidence or reason of any kind. This rigidity makes genuine reasoning impossible because they aren’t seeking understanding or truth through discourse; they’re committed to defending their existing position at all costs.
What we need to discover is the ground zero of reason. What is that neutral ground that is neither skeptical nor dogmatic but is properly basic as the foundation on which reason can rest? The Rambam has an answer to that question (more on this later).
The rejection of:
- the G-d of the Hebrew Bible (and the truths of His Torah), and
- the use of reason to pursue truth,
has left mankind adrift in confusion and moral decay that threatens to destroy him from within.
One way that a man can develop justice and compassion is when he studies and attempts to live by the Torah. He develops the notion that he is responsible for his actions (by virtue of his G-d given free-will) and he has objective moral values to ground him. A young child is given his name at the Bris Milah ceremony on his 8th day. The father recites the blessing, “Blessed are You, Lord our G-d, King of the universe, Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to enter him into the Covenant of Abraham our father.” Those present joyously respond, “Just as he has entered into the Covenant, so may he enter into Torah, into marriage, and into good deeds.” That is the hope of his parents and his community as he matures—the study and practice of Torah, the sanctity of marriage and family, and good deeds.
There is one other avenue of hope–using logic and reason in the pursuit of truth. We hope to outline a few aspects of this path.
The loss of דעת is profound. If one lacks דעת (common sense) what does he have? If he has דעת then what does he lack? (nothing!)
Footnotes
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ויקרא רבה פרשה א סימן ו פרשת ויקרא. ↩
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ehistory, Ohio State University, https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/burning-library-alexandria, accessed September 13, 2024. ↩
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The human brains weights approximately 3 pounds, with about 86 billion brain cells and 100+ trillion connections between them, yet only uses as much energy as a light bulb. ChatGPT (built by humans) occupies thousands of servers across many large server buildings and consumes as much energy as hundreds of lightbulbs just to answer single questions, is the computer-based challenger, ChatGPT. It is only a faint reflection of its maker. ↩