The Wind and the Sun
A few weeks ago, The Economist ran an article referring to Sir Isaiah Berlin.
Jeremy Rosen
He was an outstanding Jewish Oxford intellectual who my father knew and admired. The article was about whether or not Britain should allow for what is called assisted dying. It’s a subject that had been before parliament for generations. Subsequently, parliament decided to approve the act. In the article, columnist Bagehot quoted Isaiah Berlin’s brilliant theory of two concepts of liberty which differentiate negative liberty from positive liberty. To be free from as opposed to positive liberty to be freedom to. We are living in a world where too many people are only concerned with freedom from. And not enough give thought to freedom to.
The two are getting in the way of each other. We are so concerned with removing constraints, limitations, and unfairness and replacing what we have found to be lacking. Yet, we are not focused enough on exactly what it is we want to achieve. Whether personally or nationally. We are drifting in a world of contradictions and conflict.
This week, I started reading Nexus by Yuval Harari with some trepidation. As with all of his popular and successful books, it has much in it that I agree with, and much of it that I don’t. He is very selective. I love the journey but not the conclusions. and I could not but notice he has no trouble demystifying Christianity and Judaism but is obviously too scared to do the same for Islam!
His main theme is the challenge of Artificial Intelligence. But on the way, he challenges the notion of truth and its relation to information as something that accurately represents every aspect of reality. The idea many have is that truth means there can exists one universal reality. And this is simply not true.
He starts off with a very valid point, that humans need stories. Stories bring people together and also drive them apart. Christianity is based on the myth of who Jesus was. Objectively, he might have been an itinerant preacher and healer in Judea during the Roman occupation. His followers and succeeding generations turned him into the messianic figure that billions worship today. They adhere to it because it gives them a common connection and cause.
Christianity started with the goal of achieving peace on earth, kindness to others, turning the other cheek, standing for non-violence and martyrdom. Early Christians suffered very badly as a result. But then Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire with its culture of discipline, and authority. In the Council of Nicaea in 325 it laid down what Christians had to believe, the Creed. But then they immediately started fighting each other about what the Credo should be. Was Jesus a man or Divine or a bit of both? From fighting with each other they moved on to forced conversions imposing their ideas on others and using violence to achieve their aims.
Islam, too, has its foundational myths of Mohammad. Who has now been transformed from an Arabian warrior into superhuman icon. The resulting religion modified a popular form of Judaism into conquering imperialism. It, too, idealises peace, charity and humanity, and many Muslims adhere to the rules as well as the myths. But it has spawned the most horrific cruelty and violence.
You could say the same about Judaism that started off as a national religious movement with its story of Moses, the Exodus and the invasion of Canaan. But it too changed as it lost control over its own national destiny. It focused more on the development of a system of study, rules and laws designed to encourage loyalty to a tradition both for the Land of Israel and elsewhere, in contrast to a people rooted in only one place. And now after all that suffering and years later, it has returned to the notion of peoplehood with or without religion, and this is what divides Jews and Israeli society today.
Harari’s book is predicated on the distinction between what he calls the naive view of information, which assumes that the antidote to most problems we encounter is simply gathering and processing information. And yet we see that the academies that ought to be the model of intellectual objectivity can be doctrinaire and corrupted. Many of them are now the perfect example of how knowledge can be misused and how over-specialization or reliance on only one narrative can have such a disastrous effect.
Harari’s thesis is that the Naive view of information is that it leads to truth and truth leads to wisdom and power. The Historical view of information is that information can lead to truth and may lead to wisdom but may also lead to power, abuse and corruption. Having a lot of information doesn’t in itself guarantee either truth or order. As information increases, more and more people begin to fear that it’s an elite that is taking control at the expense of the people. The challenge is not information itself, but how we use it. And whether it could help us resolve the conflict in our society or increase it, as we see in the West today. But doctrinaire views will not help.
The alternative to Capitalism, Marxism, believes that everything boils down to class and the oppressor versus the oppressed. It wants to exclude any other possibility or nuance. That if we have information this is going to lead us to truth and out of truth will come wisdom and power and control. But since the rise of Marxism control has failed and autocracy triumphed. Yet that is what many academics and their credulous fools now seek. It is assumed that information is enough to lead to power. I am not suggesting that Capitalism is a perfect system by any means and a fusion is a possibility. Neither can religions by themselves solve the problems, because they have their own issues.
The one thing that almost everyone at some stage has shared, is a hatred of Jews. Left and right, Christianity and Islam. And as the rabbis have said , says two things distort the balance of the mind, love and hatred. And we are subject to this dichotomy too. Violence inspires violence. But now we see how ideas increase hatred.
Today every side has its own narrative that it believes absolutely as an article of faith. But instead of trying to resolve it peacefully, the different sides, both right and left, religious and secular, fight each other militarily or intellectually. Harnessing knowledge to their own causes. The Israel versus Palestine conflict, or Jihadi Islam, is not going to be solved by each side having its own narrative or truth or myth or information. It can only come from humans sitting down together.
I was reminded, therefore, of the very famous Aesop’s fable. The story of the “Traveller, the Wind, and the Sun.” The wind and the sun argue about who is stronger. They decided to test their power by seeing who could make a traveller remove his cloak. The wind blows harder and stronger to try to blow it off, but the traveller simply wraps it tighter and tighter. Then the Sun gently shines, causing the traveller to eventually remove his cloak because of the heat, proving that gentleness is more effective than force.
If only both sides could use the sun instead of using the wind.
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.
