Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (1997)

I can't recall exactly how I came to this book. It may have been that by familiarizing myself (a little) with Scholasticism and medieval Muslim explorations of the relationship between revelation and reason, on the one hand, and having some superficial impressions of what I understood to be a Talmudic culture of debate about Biblical interpretation, on the other, I began to wonder just what this Jewish tradition was like, and whether it, perhaps, bore some similarities to the Christian and Muslim scholasticisms. I may have been intrigued, I can't really remember, by the possibility that a tradition had developed a critical tradition on its own, largely without the "outside" impetus of Greek philosophy. I hoped Fisch's book might provide an intellectual prosopography of this tradition. In fact, it was rather different than I had expected, but nonetheless still fascinating. In the first, much shorter part, Fisch, an eminent philosopher of science in his own right, developed a kind of meta-Popperian account of rational projects, a standard independent of the projects' goals. I found this part to be quite persuasive. In the second, much longer, and for me quite challenging part, Fisch tried to show that Talmudic texts contained both traditionalist and antitraditionalist - i.e. critical in the meta-Popperian sense - strands. The persuasiveness of this part I really couldn't judge. The material was simply too dense, and I didn't have the patience to try to follow Fisch's argumentation. So I can't say how rational the rabbis were, though I want to think that Fisch is correct. I did come away struck by just how much of the Talmud dealt with "halahkik" questions, very specific issues of ritual law.

Noah Feldman, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People (2024)

I thought I knew the basics, or some of the basics, about the various Jewish denominations today. This deeply thoughtful, nuanced, and humane book taught me otherwise. Not only was I unaware of entire categories of contemporary Judaism (for example, I thought Hasidim were the entirety of ultra-orthodox Judaism [or Haredi], but there are also the Yeshivish, whom I had never heard of before; nor did I know about the Evolutionists or the....). Perhaps even more importantly, I hadn't known about the complex mutations of many of these denominations or of particular beliefs of theirs, especially about Zionism and, later, Israel. I hadn't really understood that the original secular Zionism had wanted a state for the Jews, not a Jewish state - what became Israel was to displace the Jewish religion and make Jews just another "normal" nation. I hadn't known that for Progressive Jews, at least until the last couple of decades, the Holocaust and Israel had been interpreted (un- or subconsciously) in almost christological terms: the Holocaust was the Passion of the Jews, Israel their Resurrection. I hadn't known that Religious Zionism has since the 1990s more or less displaced the original, secular one, even as Israel has become increasingly central to the identities of many Jews in the Diaspora. Or that Jabotinsky, Begin, and Netanyahu also wanted/want to occupy all of Biblical Israel, like the Religious Zionists do, but with a different justification. And I learned much else besides. Feldman expresses opinions about much of this, but he always does so after open-minded, nonjudgmental consideration of the paths different groups of Jews have taken. He unflinchingly addresses uncomfortable questions, like whether Judaism isn't a form of tribalism, or the reasons for Jews' spectacular successes in many fields in the last 150 years. He weaves in parts of his own story, revealing how various encounters shaped his beliefs and even shook them. By the end, I felt I hadn't only learned many particulars but had also gained a deep appreciation of Feldman's own, and more generally, the Jewish people's, "struggles with God together" (which is his concluding definition of what it is to be Jewish).

Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea, The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America (2024)

A very important book in our current, politically unstable, moment. Before I praise the book, however, I'll allow myself a few words of complaint. Unfortunately, this important book is marred by dozens, if not hundreds, of careless errors. These range from typos, missing commas, and missing or mistaken words (e.g. riff instead of rift) to flaccid paragraphs (the authors announce two or three points about something, but then in the following text one can't distinguish the different items). In one or two cases, the poor editing means that important questions are alluded to, but not addressed (for example, how could Obama do better in rural America in 2008 than Kerry had in 2004, but then do much worse in 2012? This shift from 2008 to 2012 marks one of the biggest downward steps in support for Democrats in rural America, and the initial support for Obama and subsequent withering of it are important in light of the issue of rural America's racial attitudes.) I find it baffling that an elite university's press (Columbia) would allow so many errors to slip through its fingers. Nonetheless, the book makes a persuasive contribution to current debates about why (and even whether) our country is as divided as it appears to be. The authors start by observing that even delineating what parts of America should count as "rural" is not as easy as one might think. Many states often referred to as rural - based on state-wide population density - in fact have significant portions, even majorities, of their populations living in suburban or urban tracts. If I remember correctly, only four states have populations that are majority rural. Many media commentators (including Paul Krugman) fall victim to this basic mistake, when they write, for example, about rural states receiving far more funding from urban states than they give. A further, and even more important, contribution is based on the authors' Rural Voter Survey, which they have administered several times in the last few years. This survey provides an unprecedented look at how rural voters think about their own lives and communities, as well as politics more broadly. Anxiety about the local economy and the future of their way of life has contributed to strong loyalties to their locales and a sense of "linked fate." The rural voter really is different than people of the same demographic background (white, Christian, older, etc.) who live elsewhere. At the same time, though, the rural voter is much more complex than one would think, based on how he/she is often portrayed. For example, the authors use their survey data to tease apart different strands of racial attitudes in rural (and suburban and urban) America. The results don't exculpate the rural voter but add important nuance - to the extent that racial animus is stronger in rural America than elsewhere, it derives from the belief that poor African-Americans (and other minorities) are poor because they allegedly don't work hard. Jacobs and Shea describe how the Republican party, starting around 1980, worked to create an image of rural America as "the real America" - an effort that largely succeeded. But this success was facilitated by the Democrats' lack of interest in rural Americans, and at times outright disdain. I plan to use parts of the book in a course I'm currently teaching, How Democracies Die.

Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding (paperback edition, 2018)

Excellent. In this book, Wilentz explores the "paradox" contained in the Constitution's treatment of slavery. Namely, while some of the founding document's elements (3/5th clause, 20-year delay in the possibility of banning the importation of more slaves, fugitive slave clause) strengthened slavery and slave states, the fact that the Constitution gave no explicit sanction to slavery in national law (as opposed to state law), indeed did not even use the terms slave or slavery, would prove to be an important potential support for the antislavery movement from 1788 until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. In other words, the Constitution tolerated slavery, but did not explicitly endorse it. And this proved to be important in the run-up to the Civil War. Wilentz tracks the legal and political wrangling in extremely close detail. I was frequently reminded of Max Weber's comment that politics is the "slow drilling of hard boards." (Another book that had this effect on me, though on a very different topic, was John Judis's excellent Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origin of the Arab/Israeli Conflict.) The book explores the range of views on both the anti- and proslavery sides. I didn't realize that William Lloyd Garrison was an outlier among the abolitionists in viewing the Constitution as a "pact with evil." I think it would be salutary if high school and college students could be exposed both to the numerous shades of opinion (rather than just the racist/anti-racist dichotomy) and to the work of politics and negotiation (of course, in this case, negotiation ultimately broke down). The latter (familiarizing young Americans with the sausage making of politics) might be helpful in improving our civic education, which, as far as I can tell, is in a woeful state. Wilentz rightly acknowledges that the abolitionist movement, which started in northern states (but reached as far south as Virginia) in the 1780s, was the first anti-slavery political movement in world history. I frequently found myself asking how the New York Times could publish its 1619 Project, which so flies in the face of excellent scholarship like this book.

This blog is back

After a 14-year hiatus, I plan to begin posting again. I think the format will be short book commentaries.

Stalin

Late last summer I was in a brief Russian phase, and so I picked up Simon Sebag Montefiore’s two-volume biography of Stalin (Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar).
This is thick description at its finest; Montefiore doesn’t provide a systematic overview of Bolshevism or Communist Russia, but that’s not what he’s aiming for. Rather, he has produced a fascinating, intimate picture of Stalin and his nearest (in his case, one can only rarely speak of his dearest).
A few things that stick with me a few months later:
- the “wild east” of the Caucasus, which produced the Georgian Joseph Djugashvili, who went by the names Soso, Koba, and eventually Stalin. The Caucasus region was barely under the Tsar’s control, and the lawlessness and violence there (in Stalin’s hometown of Gori, organized brawls between all of the town’s inhabitants was a regular pastime) undoubtedly shaped young Stalin.
- Montefiore provides the most compelling explanation I’ve found for Stalin’s terrible paranoia that culminated in the Great Terror of the late 1930s (indeed, informed his entire life and rule). In addition to Stalin’s personal insecurities and need to dominate, it was the Tsarist regime itself which fostered this paranoia. The regime’s ochrana secret service, established after Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by radicals, was everywhere and had penetrated the radical circles in which Stalin grew up – but the ochrana itself had been penetrated by radical agents. Some of these agents for both sides were, in fact, double and even triple agents. No one could ever fully be trusted. Stalin’s paranoia grew out of these real conditions at the end of the Tsarist regime. Of course, the scale of paranoid violence under the two regimes was orders of magnitude different: the ochrana was responsible for four to five thousand deaths, Stalin for something like 20 million.
- the author shows convincingly that Stalin’s power derived not just from the terror he exerted, but also from his charm. He could be an attractive man – witty, exuberant, on occasion showing sincere concern for at least some of his circle. This side of Stalin makes his inhumanity, which hardly gets short shrift here, all the scarier.
- one strand throughout are the parallels between the Bolsheviks and religious movements. Montefiore decribes them as a “military order of knights.”
- since the focus is on Stalin and his “court,” the millions of deaths of ordinary Russians, Ukrainians, and others only appear on the margins. Nonetheless, the focused study of this smaller circle still provides plenty of chilling moments. Though not as dramatic as the period of the show trials in the 1930s, for me perhaps the most vivid, visceral illustration of the terror Stalin inspired occurred in the last years of his life. The dictator had begun to focus his suspicions on an alleged Jewish plot against him. “Shrewd people began to divorce their Jewish spouses,” Montefiore notes laconically(SCRT, 498). This single, short sentence conveys the terror of the dictator’s moods rippling out in expanding circles.
- there’s a terrible, tragic irony in the Bolsheviks’ motivation, given their avowed philosophy. Marxism had preached, of course, that the oppressed would overthrow the elite. The Russian situation ended up being nearly the opposite. Lenin (a nobleman) and many of the other top Bolsheviks were elites who expressed hatred of their own, backward countrymen. In other cases, like Stalin’s, the pattern was at least somewhat closer to what Marx had predicted: they came from minority groups (Caucasians, Jews) who hated the dominant Russians. Once the Bolsheviks came to power, they made war on their own country, and the main victims would end up being Russian and Ukrainian peasants, hardly the elite.
- finally, Montefiore’s prose is enjoyable to read. Frequently, there are real gems, especially when it comes to colorful put-downs. When Stalin’s paladins regularly break into song at their late night banquets, they form a “murderous boy band.” The same group, on an especially inebriated night, resemble a “Neanderthal stag party.” Khrushchev is a “meteoric bumpkin.”

Health care and two kinds of collective action problem

There appears to be a paradox in the great health care debate. Central arguments of each side, while on the surface quite different and pointing to different solutions, in fact resemble each other at a more abstract level: they both revolve around collective action problems. Both arguments, as far as I can tell, are valid and important. To my knowledge (and I can only claim to know a tiny fraction of the contributions to the debate), no reform proposal addresses both points in the same reform proposal.
The Democrats point to what Paul Krugman recently dubbed the “insurance death spiral” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/opinion/19krugman.html). The basic problem revolves around the collective action problem known as adverse selection. If generally healthy people – using their “insider knowledge” of their own conditions, hence the term adverse selection - can opt out of insurance schemes including less healthy people (or out of insurance altogether), this will leave the less healthy to sustain the insurance pool. Because they are less healthy, their healthcare costs will go up compared to earlier, which will, in turn, drive out even more relatively healthy people. And so on. (It’s sort of like a Gresham’s law of insurance: bad risks drive out good.) Conversely (but with a similar outcome), an insurance company may “cherry pick” only the healthy people, leaving the unhealthy to somebody else, either an unfortunate pool of unhealthy people or the government. In both cases, adverse selection leads to overly narrow insurance pools, in which the unhealthy have been segregated, driving their costs through the roof. Thus, Krugman and others point to the need to mandate universal coverage (i.e. every individual must be insured) and to prevent insurance companies from “cherry-picking.” Otherwise, this insurance death spiral will lead to the system of insurance unraveling.
It’s worth considering how the health insurance system – as it’s now practiced (see below) – differs from other kinds of insurance. In the case of auto insurance, coverage is mandated for individuals; companies, however, can deny coverage (I think) and can charge differential rates based on the person’s track record and characteristics (sex, age, etc.). Would there be the potential for more adverse selection in the case of auto insurance than health insurance – i.e. could good drivers know they are more secure relative to bad drivers than generally healthy people can relative to unhealthy people, and thus opt out of insurance? Is remaining safe on the road more in drivers’ own hands than remaining healthy is? Probably not. Hence, even if good drivers could choose to forego insurance, fewer would do so than Krugman and the Democrats rightly fear happens with health insurance. And even so, we still mandate coverage. This suggests that mandating universal coverage in health care makes sense.
Here’s where the other side of the equation comes in. We need to look at what health insurance, as it’s currently set up, actually covers. The comparison with auto insurance is revealing. It shows that our current health insurance system doesn’t really deserve the name insurance. This is where the Republicans’ arguments have traction.
As argued in a brilliant piece by David Goldhill in the September 2009 issue of the Atlantic Monthly (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care), we’ve gotten used to health insurance covering nearly all our medical costs (perhaps five sixths), not just catastrophic, unforeseeable ones. We go to the doctor for a cold or for a pregnancy – insurance picks up major portions of the expense. This is completely different than the way auto insurance works. It would be as if auto insurance covered not just collisions, but five sixths of our expenses for gas and oil changes as well. Under such circumstances, when we don’t pay for most of our own expenses, the results are all too predictable: people consume far more than they would if they had to pay out of pocket. Feel a small cold coming on, see the doctor and pay the $10 co-pay. If you had to personally fork over $200, how many of you would choose to suffer through it? What we have in the health field is not insurance; it’s a kind of cost-socializing scheme. The collective action term here is moral hazard – people behave differently when they know they won’t have to bear the full costs.
Goldhill and others therefore recommend restoring a true system of health insurance. I.e. insurance should only cover truly catastrophic occurrences. For other illnesses, people should pay out of pocket or rely on subsidized health savings accounts (I refer people to Goldhill’s article for the details of how this would – or might - work).
So the one side points to the collective action problem of adverse selection (insurance death spiral), while the other focuses on the collective action problem of moral hazard (socialized payments).
It’s striking that two such similarly structured arguments just pass each other in the night, seemingly oblivious of the other. How can this be? Surely, Goldhill and the Republicans must be aware of adverse selection? And Krugman and the Democrats must know about moral hazard? If so, I haven’t seen anybody from either side address the other’s valid arguments. Why not?
I suspect rather different explanations in each case. My hunch is that the Republicans would say that if one created a genuine insurance system, adverse selection problems would largely disappear. After all, much of the responsibility would have been placed back on individuals. Where insurance kicks in, in catastrophic cases, they might argue, there’s less danger of adverse selection, since catastrophes occur more randomly than do smaller-scale health problems (this might not in fact be the case) – and so everybody would have an interest in being insured and nobody, or at least fewer people, would seek to segregate themselves in more favorable risk pools. Regardless, Goldhill and the others advocate mandating insurance coverage (i.e. real insurance). Adverse selection problem solved. But questions remain: technical ones about how the health savings accounts and subsidies would work, ethical ones about rationing care (for sub-catastrophic problems) based on wealth, and – perhaps most vexing of all – political ones about how to get there from here. It seems to me that the interests invested in the current cost-socializing system will be mighty hard to dislodge and overcome.
In the case of the Democrats, the blindness vis-à-vis the moral hazard problem seems rooted in an ethical commitment and wishful thinking. The commitment is to universal and equal access to all kinds of medical care (not just catastrophic). The wishful thinking seems to involve (I say seems to because I’ve never seen the Democrats address the moral hazard problem head on) the assumption that by broadening the risk pool and making it healthier on average, costs can be contained. But I see no reason to think that moral hazard will somehow make a detour around a broad risk pool. Healthcare costs will continue to escalate much faster than the economy grows.
So, we seem to be caught between one proposal that is politically unachievable, and perhaps uncharitable, but financially workable, and another that is achievable in the short term, and ethically broad-minded, but unsustainable in the long run.