When we see one incident after another of people driven by hate, racism and religious extremism killing other people just because they are of a different religion, Spinoza comes to mind. It not just race but religious fundamentalisms/extremism that drives this violence. And I believe our president does nothing to help it when he uses such rhetorics to rile up his "base." 

 On Saturday April 27, 2019, six months to the day after the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, came the shooting at Poway’s Chabad synagogue, by a 19-year old angry teenager (his early photos make him look like such a nice boy, which is frightening, since is shows you can't always pick out a hater from a picture). This seemlingly nice young man who calls Jews "squalid and parasitic", as if they are filthy, sucking the life from a host and one of the more vile anti-semitic tropes, goes into the synagogue with a big assault rifle on the last day of Passover, when Jews say Yitzkor (the memorial service for those who have died, including those slain in the Holocaust, and throughout history). He kills a beautiful woman who was just starting to say the mourner’s kaddish, which now others must say for her. He shoots others, including Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who had one index finger shot off, the other badly injured. The only reason the carnage wasn't worse was because of two heroic congregants who rushed the shooter and of the brave rabbi who continued to speak to keep people calm during all the chaos. Fortunatley, the the gun also malfunctioned, an act of God, the rabbi later said.

  What kind of world are we living in?  And where is God? I find it so hard to have faith at times like these. But as Rabbi Isaac Neumann (of Blessed Memory), who had been in Auschwitz as a young teenager, told me when I lived in Illinois, there is no good alternative if one is going to continue living. It is the narrow bridge we walk on.

You might wonder what relevance Spinoza, who lived in the seventeenth century, has to do with what is happening now in our world, including the attack in Poway. Well, a lot. “I have often wondered,” Spinoza wrote, “that men who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, which is a religion of love, joy, peace, temperance and honest dealing with all men, should . . . display the bitterest hatred.”  Not just the Christian religion, I would add, but other ones too.

I teach Spinoza in an Enlightenment course to Barnard English majors, in which I have chosen to focus on tolerance and intolerance. I asked to teach the “Enlightenment Colloquium” because I wanted to read Spinoza, one of the earliest Enlightenment thinkers and a proponent of toleration.  Spinoza’s Ethics are taught in philosophy courses, but I didn’t know anyone teaching his Theological-Political Treatise. I was curious about what he had to say about religion and politics, figuring he might have something to say to us in the here and now. I knew he was considered a heretic, but didn’t know why.

Benedick (Baruch) Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632, to Portuguese-Jewish parents who were able to openly practice Judaism in Amsterdam, which welcomed Jewsd and was uniquely tolerant of religious differences at the time.  Spinoza, as a brilliant young man, had been given a traditional Jewish education, but by his early twenties had doubts about religion and the Bible. In 1656, at just age 24, Spinoza was excommunicated by the Rabbis in Amsterdam in the most severe manner and an excommunication that has never been withdrawn.  Jews were to have no contact with him. We have no record of what his unforgiveable “heresies“ were, but we can guess from his Theological-Political Treatise, which he published fourteen years later in 1670. It was banned by the Dutch Republic in 1674. It was also published in England.  In his lifetime, Spinoza was accused by Jews of being Christian, and by Christians of being an Atheist. 

Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise denied the existence of miracles, arguing that the Bible is an imperfect (that is, human) document that we need to approach with reason.  All of that would have been anathema both to the traditional Jewish community and to the Christian Dutch Calvinist republic. Both Protestants and Jews thought of their respective Bibles as the word of God, which Spinoza questioned. He especially attacked a literal, fundamentalist approach to the Bible. But I think two things bothered people then that are especially relevant to issues we still face today, perhaps more than ever, since the end of World War II.

 First, he denied that there is such a thing as a chosen nation or a chosen people in chapter 3 (on “The Vocation of the Hebrews”). Starting with the assumption that “Everyone’s true happiness and blessedness consists solely in the enjoyment of good, not in priding himself that he alone is enjoying that good to the exclusion of others,” Spinoza asserted that the Bible shows “The Hebrew nation was chosen by God before all others by reason of its social organization and the good fortune whereby it achieved supremacy and retained it for so many years.”  In redefining chosenness, he defied the idea of exceptionalism. For Spinoza continued, “In other respects they were no different from other nations, and God was equally gracious to al.” In other words. a God whose love and blessings are potentially unlimited.

It wasn’t just the Jewish establishment that was offended (most modern Jews have abandoned, or redefined and spiritualized the idea of being a “chosen people”). So was the Dutch Republic, which imagined itself as God’s elect nation, and invoked comparisons with Biblical Israel.  England too tended to think of itself as God’s chosen nation. The early settlers of America brought this idea with them as well and it has been enshrined in American exceptionalism, the idea that America is “a light to the nations.”

So Spinoza insisted that God gives blessings to all nations, and that any special distinction is limited to a specific time, and only meant in a specific (not universal) sense.  So much for any people claiming that only they enjoy love and privileges from God.

Spinoza feared that the idea of an exclusive chosenness leads to competition, hatred and war. What if God’s teaching was reduced to the core? Examining the entire Bible (a Jew reading the New Testament was itself heretical), using his reason to get to faith, Spinoza concluded that the core of both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is justice and charity. If all people lived by justice and charity (loving others as one loves oneself; doing to others as you would like done to you)—then they would be obeying God, and God would be happy.  So would humanity, as living in this way would get rid of hatred and violence, so much of which has been done in the name of religion over the long course of history.  

Of course, there are problems in Spinoza’s political thinking, including his idea that religious difference is the problem. Do we really want everyone to be the same? Do we really want to get rid of religion, ban it as the Soviet Union did? That didn’t work.  Spinoza didn’t have all the answers, but his call almost 350 years ago for justice and charity--the message of the Hebrew prophets as well as Jesus—could not be more timely.

In our twenty-first century world, injustice and intolerance (enabled by the words and actions of political leaders) are rampant, tied to the rising ethno-nationalism and religious extremism that are currently intertwined throughout America, Europe, the Middle East, India and elsewhere. In this pandemic, Spinoza’s words feel like a healing balm to me, even though he offered no solution to the problem: how can we both embrace our particular identities and feel part of an inclusive humanity when there are dangerous people who will never play the game of life by these rules?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the decline of the history major and the broader indifference to history in general at a time when it feels so important to have an historical perspective during these strange and dangerous times.

On January 12, 2019, The New York Times ran an article, entitled “Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University Without a History Major?’.” Some young people want to study history, but rural universities are making that nearly impossible. The article cited as an example the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point,  where the administration wants to drop history from its curriculum, not just as a cost-saving move, but to reshape the university “…for the future.” Instead, they want “career-focused programs.”

And then there’s Peter Herman’s excellent opinion piece in the Times of San Diego denouncing a recent “executive order” by the Chancellor’s Office at the California State University system that arbitrarily (and without proper faculty input) decreased the general education requirement system-wide in a way that specifically curtails the “world history program” and the history of “American Institutions.” From now on, a student will be able to graduate from the California State University system without ever taking a history course. And it’s not like this is a small matter. The California State University system prides itself on being the largest comprehensive higher education system in America, with 23 unique campuses, over 437,000 students, and a diverse student population.

But the problem is larger. A recent Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation poll found that approximately two-thirds of Ameicans probably would not pass the exam for American citizenship!  A test that requires only a score of 60 to pass. I wonder how many of our "nativists" would fail? And some of these same people want to bar immigrants who they believe will contaminate America and its culture?

In the push for more career-oriented programs of study, liberal arts colleges like my own Barnard College have been creating and expanding STEM programs. Those programs are valuable, and necessary in our world. Students want them. But the displacement and disparagement of history, even among the humanities, alarms me. The Chronicle of Higher Education asked (Nov. 26, 2018), ”Why are Students Ditching the History Major,” and cited a study that shows history has declined more than any other humanities major. Fewer students are interested in majoring in history. Some university administrations find history departments expendable as colleges have turned corporate. History departments themselves sometimes devalue the study of earlier periods.  The history department at the University of Illinois, where I taught for years before coming to Barnard, decided not to replace their well-known historian of seventeenth-century England when she retired. Many English departments have “modernized,” feeling the need to no longer require majors to take courses in earlier periods. It is not just a matter of declining majors, changing demographics and the reshaping of departments. A recent article in the New Yorker (February 4, 2019) quite correctly called it “The Decline of Historical Thinking,” noting that the decline in history majors is evident in all ethnic and racial groups. Only the Ivy League institutions have remained immune to this decline. 

I must confess something. When I was young, history seemed just a matter of memorizing events and dates. How boring. Of course there was more to history than that, though I didn’t think so at the time. But I also avoided history for other reasons.  Having grown up with a father who was obsessed with the topic and thought the end times were upon us, I really didn’t want to think about it.  Instead, I chose Literature, especially of the past, which seemed a safe distance. I never took a history course as an undergraduate or in graduate school. It wasn’t required, and I didn’t seek it out.

It took some years for me to realize that historical thinking wasn’t a matter of memorizing dates.  I came to realize that historical thinking meant understanding the past, seeing a relationship between our present times and what has come before. And so I have become a literary critic who is also an historian. Gradually I’ve been stretching myself, wanting to glimpse the bigger picture and my students seem to like that.  So in the larger world, as in our personal lives, the past is never fully behind us. It’s not just that tragedies can repeat themselves, especially if we are not vigilant, but that the past leaves its imprint on later generations, much as our genetic ancestors remain in our DNA, our childhood traumas leave their mark.

In my opinion, we need historical thinking more than ever. Just to cite one example: Did President Trump know the history of the slogan “America First” when he started using it in his election campaign?  If not, he was ignorant of the fascist roots of the phrase in the U.S. during the 1930s among Hitler sympathizers, such as Charles Lindberg.  Would Trump have used it if he had known its history? If he knew it and would have repeatedly used it anyway, that would be a terrifying thing. But if a person is willfully ignorant of the phrase’s history, or if he refuses to accept that knowledge (or sees it as “alternative facts”), then isn’t that just as troubling? As if knowing your own country’s recent history doesn’t matter, let alone world history.  

I’m left wondering if there isn’t a close relationship between dismissing the importance of history and historical thinking, along with a cavalier attitude towards “truth,” as if we can make it up as we go, believeing there are no consequences to such ignorance.

 But we know there are.