The
following is an analysis of the psychological basis of contemporary political
currents and nationalistic movements.
The concept of mentality is defined from an historical and psychological
perspective. The concept of "tabula rasa" is shown to be
inadequate. Awareness of mentality
is posited as crucial to the resolution of interpersonal, inter-gender,
inter-generational, inter-faith, and international
conflict.
Death
of a Patriarch
Patriarchal
and Matriarchal Mentalities
To understand world conflict we need to understand world culture. In this article we analyze some of the world's cultures using a psychological model of human development.
Classification
is a permanent feature of human development, appearing even before
intelligence. As early as the
pre-thinking stage of childhood, an infant can separate the category of the
familiar from the category of the unfamiliar. At approximately eight months, infants
develop the ability to recognize a permanent feature, and to relate to it as to
a familiar category: Smiling to familiar people, suspicious and mistrustful in
the presence of new faces, projecting hostility and crying when strangers come,
relaxing only when the strangers leave.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that at this early stage, hatred
is born, or that the ability to hate begins with classification.
At a
later stage, the familiar/unfamiliar distinction requires logic to support it,
and logic demands a value system as its basis. Eventually, all of this gets crushed and
compressed into a respectable framework of ideals. It might not even be unfair to reverse
conventional assumptions and suggest that good/evil distinctions are not the
basis for human judgment, as is commonly assumed, but rather merely a tool that
serves the human need to classify.
The
need to justify these feelings, to seek out objective values, comes only at a
later stage, during adolescence. In
infancy and during childhood a person does not feel the need to justify likes
and dislikes. Egocentric survival
mechanisms determine that whoever causes me pleasure is good and whoever causes
me pain is bad. Values have no
right to an independent existence, at this stage. Most very young children measure good
and bad according to subjective emotions.
In
the later stages of childhood, as socialization occurs, from approximately age
seven to adolescence, the need to classify intensifies, and its activity widens
to the social environment beyond the family circle. The child turns into a student. He must cope with the rules of the game
called school. In many instances,
this game has rules that turn into rigid laws. The game becomes a threatening reality
based upon reward and punishment.
The good/bad classification, at this stage, is fed by the
reward/punishment distinction: Bad means whoever gets
punished. Good means whoever gets a
reward.
School
testing systems use this distinction as their power source: A good mark is a
reward, and a bad mark is a punishment.
A human being becomes a number: This student is a one hundred student,
that one is a seventy, the other is a fifty or below – meaning "better for him
that he had not been created than that he had been created", being stripped of
worth. He was not quick enough to
adjust to an inhuman method, though its inhumanness could be the secret of its
longevity, for it is wonderfully simple and direct, some educators' refuge from
the complex value judgments needed to assess individual students'
qualities.
Eight-year-old
Avi comes home from school and informs his mother that
Yossi was a bad boy today. Why? Because the teacher
punished him. What did he
get punished for? Because David threw a tangerine peel on the floor. Mother does not understand: If David
threw the tangerine peel on the floor, why is Yossi a
bad boy? Because Yossi is the one who got punished. Whoever gets punished is a bad boy,
explains Avi philosophically.
The test is in the result: Avi is demonstrating admirable biological survival
skills. He even merits the support
of sociologists, historians, and people of the Protestant faith. A person of the Protestant faith
believes that everything is managed by the Creator, Who continues to manage His
world. A successful person, who has
achieved his goals, is beloved by the Creator. His very success is proof of that, and
there is no need to investigate the moral basis of his achievements. Money has no smell, it would seem to
them. According to this perception,
an utterly corrupt person, who has achieved impressive material gains, can judge
himself utterly righteous. He can
bask in the pleasure of his success, for indeed his very success is the best
proof of his righteousness. The
obvious does not need to be proven...which is why success has so many
friends.
Yet
how success sometimes eludes one who asks too many moral
questions. How often it slips through his grasp,
and evades his piercing eyes. He
often wonders how the successful person made all his money. "Well, if God granted him wealth, surely
he deserves it. Who am I to doubt
the ways of the Creator, when all know they are supported upon justice...” It is worth keeping eight-year-old Avi in mind: If we wish to correctly evaluate this
philosophy - which we will call judging-by-the-results - we must remember its
childish basis.
The
Birth of Mentality
People
form their sense of reality through an encounter that takes place between their
own inborn traits and the conditions of their environment. For example, in a society that values
learning, an action-oriented person is constantly dealing with society's
expectations of industriousness and academic excellence, as they conflict with
his own need for activity and tangible achievement; he feels an inner need to
organize and arrange and achieve practical action-based goals. These energies do not find their
expression in the learning environment in which he finds himself. Yet they do not go away. Inborn traits and needs do not relax
their grip simply because one's environment refuses to recognize them. Instead, a conflict forms. The values and ideals of the environment
that are incompatible with inborn character fail to contribute to the building
of the self image, and difficulties arise in one's sense of identity.
One begins to feel that one does
not quite belong anywhere. One of
life's two fundamental sensations - the need to belong and the need to be free -
is missing. The need to belong is
not being fulfilled. This is a form
of deprivation, and it causes restlessness in the developing personality. Personal creativity and personal
expression are inhibited. Such
birth pangs in the attempt to develop one's own unique personality, have the
effect of creating a personality that is not compatible with the original
personality with which one was born.
Conflict then becomes intrinsic to one's inner experience.
Just as the unique, inborn
character of every individual must be recognized and legitimized, so must we
recognize and grant full legitimate rights to behavior patterns that are created
by the existential encounter of a people with their environment, response
patterns formed of environmental.
These include perceptions of morality, values, rules governing
interpersonal behavior, and attitudes toward tribal, religious, and cultural
authority. The accumulation of
these behavioral components as they encounter one another, as they penetrate and
take root in the depths of the individual personality, create an individualized
personal matrix that is called - mentality. Mentality pushes itself to the front of
the line of behavioral responses, to become one’s calling card. One's mentality is what shapes one's
first instinctive response when faced with conflict and existential distress.
For
a liberal, all human beings are 'tabula rasa', a blank slate. People are considered top-of-the-line
industrial products – often impressive, but lacking intrinsic individual
character. They all have the same
neutral mentality, and react identically to identical input. If they do not, they must pretend
to. One who is capable of meeting
these ruthlessly Draconian pre-conditions of liberal society, who can cast off
inborn uniqueness, who can give up the mentality that makes him or her
different, and puts him or her into the category of a stranger, and then he or
she may win personal attention from the liberal. For the liberal
determines which differentness is worthy of his
kindness – which differentness is to be accepted and
which differentness is to be rejected as threatening
his absolute rule over all the tabula rasas.
Differentness
that is unfortunate enough to be rejected must be educated by force, through
punishments anchored in the law, and to be turned into an equilateral square
that will abide by the dictatorial expectations of the liberal system. The individual is caught into a double
standard: Equality and individual rights abound on the surface of liberal
society, yet underneath is a despot's indifference to the mentality that grew
out of one's childhood home and one's indigenous culture. Considering individual mentality is
called a racist crime by the liberal.
It is deserving of the very worst epithet.
Patriarchal
and Matriarchal Mentalities
Truth
to tell, the liberal himself does not volunteer to place himself on the blank
slate. For the sake of his own
rights he is a zealous warrior. It
is the other that has to be accepted, as an act of loving-kindness, on the
condition that the other shall adapt himself to the dictator's character. Sometimes the dictator is called
King. Sometimes he is called The
People or The Salt of the Earth, depending upon current verbal
requirements. It is part of a
dictator's apparatus of control, to determine, according to the laws of the
"politically correct", what the stranger may or may not
utter.
The
need to separate into categories surfaces time and again. Basic morality, rooted in all those who
are created in God's image, determines the primary category: good versus
evil. But then egocentrism sets in,
and the good become, of course, us.
The bad are, of course, them, the strangers. This distinction consistently appears
and reappears, even at the level of the primitive jungle's rules of
survival. The jungle's "us" and
"them" corresponds to the powerful versus the weak. This is Nietzsche’s distinction: There
is the noble savage. He is a good
and powerful being. Because he is
powerful, he does not need to justify his position. Then there are the weak and base
ones. They invent the idea of
morality, of pitying the weak. They
do this in order to undermine and confuse the weak brains of their dangerous
adversaries.
Following
Nietzche's basic distinction, a division of categories
has taken place in humanity's cultural field. Patriarchal cultures correspond to the
noble savage. They are usually
derived from indigenous, tribal cultures.
Matriarchal cultures correspond to Nietzsche’s weak and clever inventors
of morals. They are usually derived
from cultures that have detached and uprooted from their origins. Religions seem to attach more to a
tribal culture, and technological societies more to a western culture, but this
last is a superficial distinction, and not constant. There are no specific features that make
one more conducive to religion than the other. The main goal, for both cultural types,
remains what it has always been: Power.
The tribal societies do not bother to hide the fact that their
goal is to acquire power by force, because they are still in touch with their
natural origins. It is the
sophisticated technological societies that invent various guises, that contrive
to conceal the power hunger that lurks behind the smooth veneer of the blank
slate.
It behooves us to
define the brute-force character of the patriarch, and of his work tactics, in
order to acquire some notion of how vastly different it is from the matriarch's
method of social enforcement.
The
Need to Address Child Development
Studying
variations in cultures and systems of government, one finds oneself forced to
classify cultures according to developmental levels, just as one classifies
groups of children of different ages according to developmental levels. This is not merely a question of
borrowing models from other disciplines.
Confirmed Piagetian though I am, I maintain
that anyone familiar with the models of child development, will be struck by the
extent to which cultural patterns correspond to and are influenced by the stages
of child development. It is quite
possible that there is a particular developmental stage that predominates in
each culture, which determines its characteristic essence. This may be the key to the locked chest
that holds the secret of cultural behavior patterns.
The description of children's
developmental stages as formulated by intelligence researcher Jean Piaget, has proven its importance in broad applications and
multi-disciplinary research contexts, among these, artificial intelligence and
brain research. There would seem to
be no reason not to apply this same rather astonishing model to the disciplines
of political science and cultural anthropology.
Mass
Culture
The
Piagetian model becomes especially important when we
consider that we are dealing with a culture of the masses. The phenomenon of mass psychology was
investigated by Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel
Prize for Literature. Canetti's description of the character of the mass is
strikingly accurate.
Canetti found that the
central feature of mass culture is the use of lowest common denominator in the
public forum: Cultural ideals are catchy and superficial, numerical quantity is
emphasized at the expense of individual quality, and the public realm devours
the uniquely individual private realm.
It is a rating culture - values are judged by their popular rating
level. Classification follows
two-dimensional categories; black or white. The present exists in a vacuum, without
a past or a future. More precisely,
time's components detach from one another; the present detaches from the past,
and from its own continuity into the future.
Mass
culture characteristics include lack of unity and cohesion, a short memory,
illogical and inconsistent thinking, and glaring contradictions that are an
insult to the intelligence. Among
other things, there are severe contradictions between stated ideals and actual
realities, between the people and their elected leaders' promises. The result of all this is a form of
government that is neither consistent in its overall idea, nor rooted in any
past - neither in the immediate electoral past nor in the distant cultural
past. Acting in contradiction to
professed ideals tends to be standard government procedure. Leaders elected in order to fulfill the
expectations of their constituency, betray those expectations: “Things look
different from here”, a charismatic leader explains without a trace of shame, as
he proceeds to do the exact opposite of what he was elected to do.
Some
Childish Features of Mass Culture
A
tendency toward narrow vision, perceptions that are not
encompassing. A child's view of things, limited to
immediate instantaneous impressions.
Aperception is the dominant feature, i.e.,
observation through pre-intelligence impressions. There is no analysis of the causes, or
roots or other component factors of a situation; there is inability to encompass
a three-dimensional perspective.
Children ignore those aspects of a situation that are not active at the
moment of interaction. Adult
members of a mass culture can tend to exhibit similarly limited cognitive
tendencies.
Inability
to withstand pressure: slackness in personal convictions, a tendency to submit
to the stronger vector, to identify with whatever power exerts more force, to
prefer that power above all other values.
Withstanding pressure is a criterion of maturity, of an adult
response. This can provide a
yardstick for measuring maturity, both in individuals and in societies. Immature people tend to more readily
reject their own basic principles and values, such as religion, tradition and
ideals, to more readily yield up their own unique character, to be light-headed,
weak of character, unstable, to ignore the values of morality and justice, and
to feel little respect for the law to the extent of ignoring it and
circumventing it whenever they can.
Such characteristics, which have a direct bearing on the wisdom of one’s
personal actions, can lower the behavioral level of the two-legged to that of
the four-legged.
A
study conducted by Piaget - in which I participated - sought to determine stages
of cognitive development in relation to the law: How a legal perspective is
developed and consolidated. Piaget
investigated this question by examining children's attitudes toward the rules of
the game of marbles. Piaget's study
found that a pre-law stage exists, which predominates until approximately the
age of six. At six, socialization
begins, i.e. a new need - the need to belong - is born. (I have found that the ability to
fulfill the need to belong, and the ability to fulfill the need to be free,
together form the basis for a healthy existence. A deficiency in either of these can
significantly limit the quality of experience.)
At the earliest stage, the
children were limited by their own egocentrism, which narrowed their scope and
limited the extent of their perceptions.
Being entirely absorbed in their own struggle for survival and entirely
ruled by their instincts, their perception of the meaning of rules of a game
reflected a purely egocentric mode.
When Piaget asked a group of children younger than six years old which of
them was the winner in the game of marbles - each child pointed to himself. No one paid the slightest attention to
any sort of convention of rules; they made up their own rules as they
played.
At age six, Piaget
encountered an entirely different phenomenon: There was an absolute respect for
the rules of the game. Six-year-olds who were asked who had invented the rules of the game,
replied, “G-d”. Children who
had had no religious education cited the government, or the king. When Piaget suggested that perhaps the
rules could be changed, the children were appalled. This sacrilegious notion was rejected
point-blank.
From
age ten, the attitude towards authority gradually relaxes. From an absolute concept, it descends to
become a phenomenon that is seen in a social context. When asked who decides the rules of the
game, the ten-year-olds will refer you to the thirteen-year-olds, for they are
the oldest in the school. The
ten-year-olds respectfully invest the thirteen-year-olds with the authority to
change the rules in any way that they deem appropriate.
At
age thirteen the authority to create rules is placed on their own
shoulders. Who invented the rules
of the game? We did, we ourselves,
children our own age. May the rules
be changed? Why not? As long as all the players agree! (We stand in trembling awe, privileged
to be present and watching as democracy is born!) This age finds the beginning of abstract
ability. There is an awareness of
rules, and an understanding of the role played by the law. Most of all, that the law is
relative.
This
is the ladder – or the mine-field – that the law must travel: From an
egocentric, pre-social stage, through a perception of the law as a reality in
itself: A supreme authority, owing
nothing to man, containing no human values or needs that it is required to
protect from unlawful violation. It
is a law in which human beings are not mutually obligated to one another. A human being must bow to the law, to
adapt themselves humbly to it, unilaterally. There is no doubt that this stage of
legal perception turns in time into an instrument of oppression, wielded by
those who choose to “take the law into their own hands,” creating gangs, Mafiosi
and miscellaneous dictators, both within and outside of democratic regimes. The birth of the law and the stages of
child development seem to parallel one another in complete correlation, to be as
closely mingled as the flame within the coal, to an extent that is astonishing
and puzzling.
Unfortunately,
it is difficult to point to a developed society that has attained the third
stage – that has developed an understanding of the relativity of the law, let
alone an understanding of the more advanced stages. For indeed, there exist more advanced
stages in healthy cognitive development.
Studies conducted by Lawrence Kohlberg in California examined
children’s cognitive development as it continues into adolescence. (Piaget’s research stopped at the
beginning of adolescence. I asked
Piaget about the later continuation of cognitive development, about the
qualitative intelligence that develops during later adolescence, and continues
indefinitely. He was clearly taken
aback. He had never considered the
possibility of an intelligence that was not technically ordered, that did not
obey a technical system of organization.).
Kohlberg investigated the process of cognitive development of legal
perception and discovered that a yet more advanced stage is eventually attained
in cognitively developed adolescents.
At
this higher stage, the law is perceived to be valid only if it serves human
interests, and even this is not enough.
The law must also serve and address ultimate values, universal moral
values, religious values, and national values. It is only when one reaches this higher
stage of cognitive development that one becomes capable of grasping the meaning
of such sophisticated legal concepts as “a clearly unreasonable law”. This legal category continues to this
day to be controversial. Kohlberg
found that only five percent of the student population he examined - and only
from among the most academically outstanding - had attained this stage of
understanding - that the value of the law is relative
to higher values. How are we to
explain the infrequency of this stage of legal maturity? Why is legal development among the
majority of the population arrested at a much earlier
stage?
A
case of arrested development at an early stage can perhaps be explained by the
fact that many adolescents find it difficult to progress from the stage of
quantitative skills, and mechanical/technical cognition to the stage of
qualitative perceptions. Based on
Kohlberg's findings and our own research, it appears that qualitative perception
is the next stage on the developmental continuum, appearing in mid-adolescence
approximately, after the quantitative and mechanical/technical cognitive skills
have been mostly acquired.
Qualitative thinking includes intuition, creative imagination and
most importantly, the ability to express human intelligence. Human intelligence is the stage of
encounter: Human sensitivity meets rational, reality-based thought.
Only those who are fastidious
about forming their opinions ever reach this stage. It is not the lot of the masses. What is absorbed at the mass level is
the lowest common human denominator.
The best the mass culture can reach is the childish intermediate stage,
which features all the characteristics described above, including a superficial,
two-dimensional, and short-term point of view. The mass conception rejects anything
original, is hostile towards the unconventional, and measures things according
to a general consensus that is determined by public opinion polls and
ratings.
The
outcome of a mass culture is that an unbridgeable gap is created between the
patriarchal mentality and the matriarchal mentality. Both of these mentalities are controlled
by a juvenile thought process, which creates an existential gap between one's
"doing" and one's "being". Let us
examine these terms, and the way that they pertain to the process of human
development.
The
"patriarch" is created by the attraction to power, which tends to absorb all
other values. This means that in a
patriarchal culture, one who is strong is also handsome, and just, and
good. One who is weak has no moral
right to exist. The law is not a
reality in itself. The strong one
is also the legal authority – he himself embodies the law, his word is the
law.
The
fervent desire of the weak in a patriarchal culture is to be taken under the
sheltering protection of the strong.
Finding favor in the eyes of the powerful grants one everything one could
possibly desire: protection, personal security and even the ability to exploit
one’s own power as a protected weak person, against those who are truly weak and
unprotected – whose status in a patriarchal society is that of abandoned slaves
whom no master protects.
Anyone
who views those holding protected slave status as poor unfortunates who have
been robbed of their freedom, is very far from a correct understanding of the
patriarchal mentality. A person
with a slave mentality has as his goal the replacement of a less strong master
with a more strong and more generous master. To assume that a person with a slave
mentality secretly cherishes dreams of rebellion and feels the brooding
frustration of a caged wild animal, is to overlook the bizarre phenomenon of the
kidnapped girl who falls in love with her robber-kidnapper, to the point that
she refuses to be freed.
This lesson is taught in the Torah’s law of eved nirtsa, the
slave who is punished by having his ear pierced. What was his crime? He refused to be set free, on the
grounds that “I love my master.”
This is a choice that arises from an undeveloped and childish
perception. Its symptoms are
choosing dependency and fearing liberation. Pure belonging - no
freedom. The Torah accepts
this choice, but very reluctantly; it teaches that to buy one's security at the
cost of one's freedom is to pay too high a price. Nevertheless, the Torah acknowledges the
fact that there are some people who wish for this.
The values that
accompany the “I love my master” stage consist mainly of admiration for the
strong man, as mentioned. He
represents authority. Authority is
not a value in itself, but rather an expression of the strong man's personal
power. Law is no more than the
direct expression of a ruling tyrant's arbitrary will. The highest value is honor, which arises
out of and mingles with cruelty, and absence of pity for the weak. Revenge is highly valued, in that it
expresses the restoration of offended honor. The greater the revenge, the harsher the
cruelty, the more one's offended honor is restored – and the brighter shines the cruel avenger’s reputation. Feelings of pity are interpreted as
weakness, in that they express a yielding of one's position, an admission that
one's rival’s claim is just. An
objective perspective on justice is unheard of. Attitudes are polarized: One either
belongs (to a stronger master) or one enjoys a unilateral freedom that expresses
itself in wanton moral abandon that knows no inhibitions. In a patriarchal society there is no room
for personal intentions, or feelings, or any human dimension whatsoever. The test is in the results: the ability
to consolidate power and impose rule, to vanquish the weak, and to maintain an
oppressive regime that will hold the conquered enemy in check.
We might say that a negative
correlation exists between "doing" and "being": "Doing" is ignoring "being". In a patriarchal society, one does
objective actions at the expense of subjective human beings. Only objects have value, because an
object is the concluding link in a chain of events, where each link is the
objective result of the previous link.
Therefore the object is all that matters. It is a mechanical, power-based system,
in which the bigger gear activates the smaller gear. Mechanical systems do not contain
personal intentions, personal needs, personal goals or personal will. A mechanical system is blind. It activates and exerts control over
others, and others also activate and exert control over it. It is not an existence that contains
qualities or values.
For
its own reasons, and not by coincidence, the matriarchal culture also adopted a
mechanical system. Indeed, the
matriarchal cultures has become the leading exponent of technical/mechanical
expression, which seems odd when we consider how the matriarchal culture
expounds the values of "being", and prefers it by far to the values of
"doing". "Being" is supposedly the
value upon which the matriarchal culture is based. Supposedly?
Indeed, because a contradiction exists. The matriarchal culture has engraved
love, mercy, and understanding for others upon its banner. Tolerance, feelings, and personal
meanings are chief among its concerns.
If so, how did it get stuck onto a mechanical/technical course? How has it turned into a supremely
technocratic culture, starring business, bureaucracy, and the dry letter of the
law? Clearly this bears
investigating.
It
seems to me that such indications - when we find objects being granted full
citizenship in a culture that is supposedly suffused with subjective meanings
and qualities - first appeared in the matriarchal culture only as post facto
necessities, as appendices attached to the footnotes. However, through a process of forced
encroachment, the objects gradually found themselves occupying center
stage.
What forced the
process? How did it occur? Apparently, the quest for justice cannot
suffice with good intentions alone.
To attain a compatible, complementary relationship between two
contradictory elements, such as between a subject and an object, or between
subjective intentions and objective results, one needs a third element that will
reconcile their contradiction.
The above statement is based upon a
Talmudic dictum: “Two scriptures contradict one another, until the third
scripture comes and resolve them.”
This mysterious key - the third scripture - apparently cannot be found
hidden behind the curtains of the Theater of the Absurd known as existential
reality. It is not found in the
ancient East nor is it found in the progressive sophisticated West. Both are beset by difficulties on the
rocky road toward the coveted ideal of justice. Left with no choice, both cultures heave
themselves up on the life raft called brute force.
The patriarch seized power that
was clothed in the image of man. He
created an idol, a graven masked image of power. Its form was human but it had been
emptied of its humanness. The matriarchal
culture, religion of love and mercy, arising from the ruins of the defeated
patriarchal culture, seems rather like a child fleeing an angry father who has
cast him off.
Overwhelmed by existential distress, the child clings to his mother’s
apron. It is
not insignificant that the Christian counter reaction appeared as the sun was
setting and twilight falling on the Roman Empire, that had attained power's peak
only to be crushed by primitive vandals. The patriarch had disappointed. It had showed
powers other face - defeat: From the top, one can only come down. The loss of faith
in (patriarchal) power triggered the flight to the mother's warm and loving
bosom.
Thus, both sides are characterized
by immaturity.
Eight-year-old Avi's
acceptance of the notion that Yossi was a bad boy today solely because Yossi was punished - though Avi is aware of the fact that it was
David who did wrong, is a
phenomenon of the childish stage. As the child advances into adolescence, this
same phenomenon develops into a tendency to transfer guilt from the one who
perpetrated the crime to the one who intended to perpetrate the crime. The former
emphasizes the object (objective results) while the latter emphasizes the
subject (subjective intentions) completely detached from the object.
Christianity won the field abandoned by Rome - Mankind, the
child, became Mankind, the adolescent - until it too wandered down the dead-end
road of cultural atrophy, and helplessness in the face of vandalism, this time
perpetrated by man-beasts that rise up out of the Arabian Desert. Primitive guerilla
warfare takes pot shots at advanced western technology, turning victory into
rout. At this
point the discussion ceases to be theoretical, having become a feverish search
for the roots of the problem. The question has become simply this: To be or
not to be...
If childish behavior is a central feature of western
culture, what went wrong?
Obstacles began to pile up on the matriarchal culture’s
path. Though
it had been born and raised in the mysteries of subjective experience, and was
supposedly well-versed in all of a human beings subjective needs, its path
toward realizing the ideal subjective experience nevertheless grew muddled, and
of course, never reached objective experience. Subjective religions began to proliferate in
the matriarchal culture, masquerading as meaningful spiritual visions,
persuading the matriarchal culture to feel hostile toward objective experience,
and eventually to divorce itself entirely from physical reality. Reality was blamed
for limiting spirituality's possibilities; why, it could cause one altogether to
lose the dimension of height and godliness.
The phenomena of Gnosticism soon seized control over the
territory of the dimension of height - the dimension of spirituality - and did
not allow it to connect to objective reality. It was the fear of actualizing spirituality
through tangible means, the fear that this would make spirituality limited and
prosaic that consistently prevented the matriarchal culture from attaining the
union of subject and object. Subjective inner intentions were thus
severely limited, being denied the opportunity of actualization - of being made
tangibly present in objective real-world practical action. Only through this
union, where subjective experience is actualized in objective experience, can
one attain access to the dimension of height and to the dimension of depth.
We find then that both approaches,
matriarchal and patriarchal, remained in a two-dimensional reality, detached
from the freedom afforded by height and from the rootedness afforded by depth. They were left with
religions that lacked the vertical structure. They did not have Yaakov's "ladder standing solidly on the ground",
based and rooted in earthly laws,
while "its top reached to the heavens".
Reciprocity
A gap
yawns between heaven and earth that can only be bridged by reciprocity - a
principle that Judaism introduced into the world. How did Judaism's monotheistic daughters come
to lose what their mother-mentor had given them? Mentality forms religion, and religion forms
mentality, in a circular motion. Islam was devoured by physical reality, to
become a tool in the hands of brute force, and Christianity lost its hold upon
reality, abandoning reality to the control of technocratic systems. In these religions,
no reciprocity developed between the physical and the spiritual.
The unique role that is played by
religion differs from one religion to another. The religions that existed before Judaism
appeared and gave the world monotheism, were an expression of paganism, and were
derived from the survival instincts. Paganism expresses the human terror at
confronting the titanic forces of nature,
that threaten to obliterate human existence. The pagan gods were
representative figures, to which human beings attributed their own intimate and
familiar traits, and wishes, and even weaknesses. These figures served to bring the forces of
nature closer to human understanding, of wrenching them away from the
unknown.
Fear of the unknown created the territory of mystery and
mysticism, for in this territory, the unknown is allegedly accounted for. We might say that
one of the main functions of religion is to reduce the dimensions of
mystery. The
mysterious unknown is charted and mapped out, it is assigned to a functional
system of rules and regulations
and laws of the game, that compensate the obedient, that are circumvented by the
clever, that teach the believer how to adopt an attitude of ingratiating
submissiveness toward the threatening powers-that-be.
Monotheism?
This accounts for much of the
meaningful content of religion. It explains the anthropomorphist tendencies
of religions, even within those religions that are called monotheistic, but that
actually split apart from the monotheistic ideal to become either one or the
other of the two basic forces of human nature: Christianity chose to express the
matriarchal force of human nature, and Islam – the patriarchal force. Each expressed its
force unilaterally, and ignored whatever tended in the opposite direction. (The progress from
the primitive pagan stage to a higher stage can perhaps be detected in the fact
that the “monotheistic” religions chose to express human forces rather than
physical forces.
Nevertheless, due to their one-sided emphasis, they were not a real
expression of monotheism, which must be all-inclusive.) It was a limping,
one-legged monotheism that grew further and further away from the balance
envisioned by the Jewish ideal of harmony.
And now, a story:
During the eighties of the previous century, the Truman
Institute of Jerusalem's Hebrew University hosted an international symposium on
the subject of the family. Among other issues discussed was the attitude
of religion to the family. The Kadi (Islamic judge) of Acre was asked to describe
the family according to the principles of Islam. Father Pierre Du Bois, head of the Franciscan Order, at the time
also head of the Philosophy Department at the Hebrew University, was asked to
describe the family according to Christian principles. The Jewish
perception was entrusted to yours truly...
The Kadi is
on my right, and the Catholic priest is on my left. The Kadi rises, and speaks glowingly in
praise of the value of honor, as the supreme value that serves as the foundation
upon which the family rests. Honor is represented by the father. He is the highest
authority; his word is the law of the home. All obey the father, including the mother and
the progeny.
Corporal punishment for disobedience is acceptable and proven
effective. The
Kadi continues to speak in
increasingly superlative terms, describing the ultimate family ideal, while the
priest whispers in my ear of the cruelty and lovelessness that permeate the
atmosphere in the Moslem family. I nod my head, indicating agreement.
Father Pierre Du Bois rises next, and describes the love, the
feelings of compassion and empathy that imbue the Christian family, in which the
mother takes the central role, lavishing encouragement and support upon her
progeny. As he
speaks, the Kadi whispers in my
ear about the lack of discipline, the laxness and the lawlessness that debilitate the
Christian family, which is not founded on honor and authority. I nod my head in
agreement, obviously.
When I spoke, I described the family cell as a microcosm
structured along the same lines as the macrocosm of the universe. The macrocosm of
the universe is divided between patriarchal and matriarchal elements, and in the microcosm of the family as
well, with the father representing the patriarchal element, and the mother
representing the matriarchal element.
Although the patriarchal element ruled the culture of
humanity until the decline of the Roman Empire, which embodied the height of the
power culture, and which controlled the large part of the civilized world,
history nevertheless saw its collapse. The Roman Empire fell to the Vandals,
barbaric tribes under savage rule. These decided the fate of civilization's
great empire, with its formal systems of government, with its organized power
hierarchy, with its clumsy bureaucracy for enforcing the strong arm of its laws
over its slave nations. It was not the power of revolt against
oppression, but rather the simple phenomenon of disorder undoing order.
This is entropy's perpetual and
predictable victory.
It is a law of physics, which determines that all things must move from a
state of integration to a state of disintegration. The law of entropy
applies to all physical cycles, be they organic or inorganic, vegetable, animal,
or human. This
rule, fixed permanently into the Torah, “not on bread [physical advantage] alone
can a human being live” has proven its truth time and again.
In the Bible's first chapter, in
Genesis, the name of God is called Elokim, which expresses judgment. In the second
chapter, the two names of the Creator appear joined: Ado-nai, Elokim. Ado-nai is the name of the measure of compassion, and
appears side by side with Elokim, the name of the measure of judgment. As is its sacred
custom, the Oral Torah interprets the meaning of the Written Torah: Rashi quotes
the Talmud: "The Holy Blessed One saw that the world could not stand up to the
measure of judgment.
He stood up and mixed the measure of compassion with the measure of
judgment.” It
was not a case of one measure overcoming the other, but rather of one drawing
near the other, of their joining side by side in a complementary
relationship.
So it is in the
creation, and so it is in the family. No balance can prevail between the measure of
compassion and the measure of judgment if the father is the sole ruler and
decision maker, if he does not accept a partnership of rule with the mother, who
can activate the measure of compassion, and bestow - out of her feelings of love
- the understanding, compassion and patience that her tender progeny need. It is too difficult
for children to identify with a father’s principles when they are conveyed
through force and through disciplinary pressure. Mother acts as a digestive system. She enables the
children to internalize the law that is handed down by Father. Father represents
authority, principles and
values. He
must preserve the foundations and the framework, serving as the vessel that
preserves the uniqueness that characterizes his family. This uniqueness is
what separates the qualitative private space from the quantitative public
space.
Mother's role is to create human connections and personal relationships,
to activate the human interpersonal aspect of emotions. The children absorb
their father's abstract principles through emotional identification with their
mother.
While balance cannot exist if the measure of judgment
refuses to respect the measure of compassion, it also cannot exist when the
measure of compassion refuses to receive and to digest the measure of
judgment.
Juvenile delinquency is not only the lot of the economically
distressed. It
divides equally between the patriarchal populations of the economically
distressed, and the matriarchal populations, whose pampered children are
lavished with everything their hearts could possibly desire. The former because
the law of the strong arm was their daily fare, and the latter because a life of
overindulged egoism taught them to take it for granted that all their desires
must automatically be granted. The moment a wish is denied, they resort to
force, for they have never been taught to consider another. What with this and
that, both cultures have managed to contribute a criminal population, though it
is amazing how each criminal population derives from an opposite cause.
It would appear that both sides
are in need of one supreme authority, in order to arbitrate their conflict,
according to the Talmudic principle: "There are two scriptures that contradict
one another until the third scripture shall come and resolve them.” The flowering of
Christianity, the matriarchal religion, followed close upon the heels of the
patriarchal culture's collapse. It had been an exploiting culture, which
reveled in the pleasures of wealth produced by millions of slave laborers. It was supremely
confident, for it had attained the height of power - a place from which one can
only step down.
When it lost the protection of power, it fled, to seek protection under
Mother's apron.
The matriarchal religion embraced its children (who had lost their faith
in their own power) freed them from feelings of guilt and responsibility for
their own free choices, and offered them protection at no cost and no
effort. One
could properly interpret this offering of protection as a mother's weapon, which
she exploits in order to gain power over her child, to capitalize on a moment of
weakness.
On hearing these words, the Catholic priest rose
courageously before the entire gathering, which included representatives from
every part of the world, to admit that Christianity had lost the truth – that
had just been heard – as a result of its disconnecting and distancing from
Judaism.
Both monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, share
a common denominator, despite their polar distance and their adversarial
postures.
Religion, and this means any religion that is the work of human hands,
will always be the secret place where power struggles hide, where weakness is
exploited, where figures of religious authority capitalize on the distresses of
existence and the fears that paralyze human beings, as they stand helplessly
facing the titanic forces of nature.
The attempt to illuminate the mysteries of existence by
shedding the light of knowledge upon them has managed to light the darkness in
only a few isolated corners. Although science has assisted somewhat in
reducing the dimensions of mystery, somehow mystery still looms, as dark and
frightening as ever.
Human beings' attempts to alleviate their fears result in the practice of
confronting fear through the instrument of religion. Thus, religions are
born, from the outer fringes of the barrier that blocks the human effort toward
knowledge.
One religion takes
the mysteries of power, and the other takes the mysteries of motherhood. The latter espouses
the mysteries of love, of limitless compassion that ignores and denies the
existence of brute force, that
pretends there is no evil. All alike are deserving of love if not
pity. This is
an attitude that ignores individual differences and individual uniqueness, that
expresses contempt for and rejects the individual's right to be different. In this way,
Christianity dominated the individual, compelling the individual to disappear
into the great melting pot, the great religious meat grinder. The mysterious
ever-looming threat of an imminent Judgment Day was proven effective time and
again.
Brandishing the whip of reward and retribution, the framework of free
choice was canceled, human control over the human fate was canceled, and human
beings were forced to give up their free will.
A power mechanism was thus born, of a magnitude never
before matched: It was called - the mob, the blind flock. At the head of the
flock, a dictator would take his stand, devoid of conscience, ruthless and
cruel, who would wield the tool of
reward and punishment according to his capricious wish, and do with the mob as
he pleased.
Matriarchal Christianity thus amassed power by adopting the weapons of
the patriarchal societies, yet concealing these brutal weapons beneath a veil of
love, pity, and charity.
If we can separate the various subtleties of difference
that divide Christianity from Islam, we may be able to offer an explanation for
the sophisticated veil of hypocrisy that masks Christianity's power struggle, as
opposed to the rude wild-beast vulgarity of Islam's power struggle.
Mentality Enters the Arena
The
difference that creates the deep divide that separates Islam from Christianity
lies in cultural mentality. First and foremost, and commanding center
stage, is the difference in the attitude towards women. It is a difference
that spans from one extreme to the other, from one culture to another.
Researchers' attempts to point to
the growth of science as the decisive factor dividing the two cultures, fails to
explain the scientific flourishing that took place in Islamic culture during the
Middle Ages, at a time when Christian culture was experiencing a dark age of
scientific ignorance.
It would appear to be specifically the attitude toward women that
accounts for the difference, for we require an element more profound that simply
the scientific difference, and one that would more broadly account for the
flourishing of western culture. Although only a partial flourishing, it
contrasted starkly with Islamic culture’s decline. We must broaden our
scope to cover eastern culture as a whole, to find factors whose roots go deeper
than religion.
Let us join Bernard
Lewis, as he distinguishes between Islamic culture and Arab mentality. In The Crisis of Islam (Holy War and Unholy Terror) Lewis
asks: How is it that there are great nations in Islam who live peacefully, while
other Islamic nations are perpetually steeped in war, conflict, internal and
external assassinations, and "live by the sword" whether they need to or
not. Consider
too that Islam is a religion that is so dominant as to push national factors
aside, whereas Christianity has tended to remain on the outskirts of national
life. Thus
Christianity has been able to be a religion common to many nations of Europe,
without causing a blurring of national characteristics. Belgium, France,
parts of Germany, Poland and others maintain their national uniqueness, despite
their being believing members of
the same faith.
The reason seems clear in relation to Islam: There is an
Arabic Islam and a non-Arabic Islam. Millions of Indians and Indonesians are
members of the Islamic faith, yet are by no means members of the Arab
nation. The
Moslems of the Far East are devoid of aggressiveness, in spite of constant
attempts by outsiders to light their fanatic fire.
This distinction between mentality and religion seems to
show that mentality goes deeper than religion, and is not influenced by it. The Arab mentality,
steeped in patriarchal essence, delights in embracing Islam’s lack of spiritual
values, and enthusiastically adopts Islam’s fanatic patriarchal attitude,
whereas these two components of Islam have failed to penetrate the quiet
mentality of the Far East.
Relationship of East to West
East is close to nature. Eastern wisdom focuses on efficient
exploitation of the laws of nature. An eastern person would never attempt to
ignore or alienate the laws of nature. A Bedouin would not try to flatten a hump in
the ground, to smooth a change in level or dig a hole in order to change a
topographical situation. He would seek other means by which to live
peaceably with rather than against the powers of nature. "If they tell you
there is wisdom [in the east], believe it. If they tell you there is [technology in the
east], do not believe it.” Technological sophistication belongs
specifically to the matriarchal west.
How very opposite was the picture during the Middle Ages,
in which Islam was the great conqueror and the great scientific achiever. Suddenly it
retreated, leaving a vacuum in its wake, that was quickly filled by the west,
which surpassed Islam, and left its achievements far behind. The west was clever
enough to build an advanced fleet of ships whereas Islam arrested its own
progress by sticking to outdated sailing ships that were very limited in speed
and mass.
Technology's victory was clear-cut and absolute. Why did Islam fail
in the sphere of technology?
Apparently as long as technology was linked to
its human dimensions, the patriarch's power, arrogance and ambition assisted him in his progress
in scientific spheres as well. When technology diverged from human
dimensions and rose into the abstract dimension, eastern wisdom lost its control
over it.
Mega-organization and abstraction took over science, growing
increasingly, on a scale and at a rate and in quantities that made control over
them pass from human ability and beyond, into the realm of abstract laws and
formulas. The
abstract realm is well-suited to the western mentality, because the matriarch
does not connect to a concrete power struggle.
It was precisely because the west detached
theory from earthly practice, precisely because it emphasized the spiritual at
the expense of the material, precisely because it reasoned that the earthly was
too limited.
It was exactly this mentality that introduced extreme dualism and the
total conflict between spirit and matter, that sent the west soaring into the
wide open spaces of abstract thinking - even as the east sank further into
stagnation, and into a mysticism that contained no objective definitions or
tangible boundaries.
The victory of rational
mind over mysticism brought great benefit and progress to science, but brought
harm to human beings.
Traveling the technological route detached man from himself and from his
own natural dimensions, leaving him far behind, hobbling desperately to keep up,
bowing and kneeling before the
technological imperative.
The technological imperative is empty of human values or
ideals.
Dualism had raised the level of hypocrisy to monstrous dimensions, and
brought the phenomenon of hatred up to the levels we all recognize from the not
so distant past.
Sophisticated moral and political theories promise sophisticated
solutions to the problems of existence: Liberalism, and bodies of law whose
alleged goal is true justice, brotherly love and equal rights for all those who
are and who are not created in God's image - are lies, if sophisticated
ones. They
have shown themselves to be mere demagoguery, empty words whose aim is to
deceive the naive.
All this was
the result of a process of abstraction that grew further and further distant
from the natural human condition, and grew increasingly involved with a virtual
reality, with laws that were remote from human feelings and human senses. The patriarchal
mentality felt threatened and offended. In its frustration and rage it created a
natural weapon with which to attack the technological weapon.
War versus
Terror
The abstract west,
being so sophisticated as to ignore nature, eliminates any natural obstacles
that it encounters.
It does this simply and without undue waste of time, using explosives
that have grown to monstrous proportions. An engineer with a pacifist spirit returned
from reserve duty, and poured his frustration out to me: I sit in an
air-conditioned room.
In front of me is a panel full of complex electronic instruments that
don't look any different from the ones in my civilian laboratory. In both situations
I use a computer.
I am cool and collected as I press all the right buttons. I am disturbed by
the thought that by pressing a button while on reserve duty, I am sending a
missile of immense destructive power to a remote target, removed from the field
of sight and sound, which will penetrate a multi-story building and eliminate it
from the face of the earth.
Easterners are very far from being able to confront an
adversary in such a way. For this reason they have had to invent other
methods that are compatible with their mentality. Therefore they exploit field conditions, they use cunning,
flexibility, and the famous imperturbable patience of the east: The east makes
its peace with the limitations of space and time - by circumventing them. They have created
guerilla tactics, attacking the tail of the clumsy enemy from behind, bringing
him to his knees by the ingenious use of time and space as a psychological
weapon.
The west, confident of its own power, deliberately ignores
and expresses contempt for the psychological weapon. Nevertheless, this
weapon shrewdly exploits the enemy's own weapons/weaknesses against itself. The easterners
exploit the great bureaucratic western mechanism for his own ends: He demands
democracy and civil rights, he cites all the blindly dogmatic theories, all the
lofty ideals that are so characteristic of western culture, that ignore and are
utterly detached from prosaic realities. The easterner plays them against the west for
all they are worth.
True to character, the west invites the enemy in, allowing him to penetrate through the cracks it
has created with its own hands, to be used against itself. (Consider the
leftist phenomenon, for example.)
The tyrannical
racism of the west, whose sin was in ignoring and harboring contempt for the
eastern mentality, has boomeranged. Humiliating retreat has been the outcome in
most confrontations between the west and guerilla warfare. So it was in
Algeria, so in Afghanistan and Iraq, and so the mighty Israeli Defense Force
against the Hezbollah in Lebanon: Short-range victory and long-range
defeat. As
they say, he who laughs last,
laughs best.
It behooves us to
recognize the patriarchal adversary, and his guerilla tactics. We must never take
him lightly, nor may we despise his style. We must study his tactical methods and learn
his strategies and his tricks. The guerilla is not overly
sophisticated.
The truth of the matter is that his strength lies in his simplicity.
The guiding principle in guerilla warfare is: Exploit the
given, the conditions here and now, and most of all, exploit the conditions of
the enemy. Use
behind the scenes activity, use the surprise factor, control the immediate
conditions, plus harbor an absolute contempt for limitations such as ideology,
morality, rules of play, past agreements, international treaties and all those
other laws that only obligate the weak, to an eastern mind.
The place: The entire world - there are no boundaries. The time:
Forever. Time,
too, has no boundaries. (The infinite patience of the desert dweller
is foreign to a child of western culture.) Grab all you can, and take as much advantage
of the rules of the enemy's game as you can. (Rules of the game are perceived as weakness
by a child of the patriarchal culture. After all, the mighty one is not obligated to
obey any rule that does not express his own direct will. After all, he
himself is the embodiment of the law.) Victory does not go to the one who has the
most effective weapon, but to the one who knows how to exploit it and how to
steal it.
Now we may understand how the legal system, the
communications media, and the public's right to know have become the undoing of
the west. The
guerilla fighter's weapon is mystery, deceit, and exploitation of the secrecy
that the enemy does not maintain. The enemy's secrecy is undermined because the
enemy believes that the public has the right to know, especially since the
leader of the matriarch is dependent upon the opinion of the public. They are the source
of his power, and they have the right to know everything, and he must always
look nice in public.
The
attitude toward the rules of the game applies to the rules of morality and
religion as well.
Guerilla leaders, and the most dangerous guerilla fighters, are priests
of religion.
Since religion is the cynical exploitation of faith for one single goal -
to increase power and to win, to be mighty and to wipe out the enemy - this
mission is turned into a goal sanctified by religion, a sacred method of
worship.
So Leave the Masses Alone: Target the Leaders.
The weak point in the guerilla
mentality is the mindless mob. Aware of nothing, they are a blind flock led
by a bloodthirsty leader who is drunk on the sensation of his own unlimited
power, and drugged on an ego trip that only gathers momentum. The mass has a
slave mentality.
It does not discern the nature of the goal. The leader is the
sole determiner of the goal. If you would like to subjugate a patriarchal
culture, eliminate its leaders, put in a puppet leader who is under your
protection, and you have conquered your goal, but take care never to appear weak
or lenient.
The heavier the weight of rule upon your citizens, the more loyal they
will be to you.
This cynical perspective, which will be rejected out of hand as illiberal
and short-ranged and not even serious, by any child of western mentality, is the
only one capable of rehabilitating a patriarchal society and bringing it to
tranquility, whether it is African or Middle Eastern. It would be wise to
accept this as the realpolitik that will bring lasting calm to the region. "Peace" can be
postponed to the era of the Messiah.
The transition from one mentality to another is a prolonged
process that spans four generations, according to Jewish sources - "the fourth
generation shall return here" - and according to the conclusions of
anthropological research. Arbitrarily attempting to speed the process
can complicate more than it can save. Ignoring mentality, as the liberal approach dreams to do,
can bring catastrophe.
In the massive immigrations that took place during the
early years of the Jewish State, it occurred to Ben Gurion - who had a dictator's mentality - to create
a "melting pot" of immigration, and to house the immigrants in mixtures:
Immigrants from the east together with immigrants from the west. Within a short time
these mixed settlements fell apart with a great crash and serious conflicts
between ethnic groups. During the period of the first settlements
following the Six Day War, I was asked to assist with similar difficulties that
had arisen, and were now threatening to undo the newly formed settlements of
Judea and Samaria.
Here too the tensions had been caused due to differences in mentality
between the new immigrants and the native Israelis. Tensions were
aggravated considerably by the leaders of both sides, who had different
mentalities.
Distancing the leaders of one of the sides restored peace. This artificial
attempt to speed integration too had missed its target.
Negative Integration
In a patriarchal culture, the individual is placed in a
framework of tradition that is joined to rules of reward and punishment and to
the opinion of the public and the ruler and these do not recognize the
individual's right to privacy. The framework is of a tribal character. Everything
transpires within an extended family, including business and entertainment -
everything takes place in company. When an individual is outside of a framework,
he feels that he lacks "belonging". He loses his self-confidence and his capacity
for self-expression and creativity.
When an individual from a tribal society loses the
conditions necessary to relate to a framework, he finds it difficult to fill
this vacuum.
He finds it hard to internalize the general rules of the game of life,
and the autonomous laws by which everyone must abide, one's social situation
notwithstanding, as the western individual is taught to do. He does not feel
that he has a duty and a responsibility toward himself, as does the individual
who belongs to a matriarchal society. (See above for definition of the mother's
role in enabling the child to digest and internalize values, to accept the rules
of forbidden and permissible within the public space. The mother custom-fits autonomous laws to her child's
ability to identify with them.) Matriarchal society educates the individual
to personal responsibility, personal accountability, and personal conscience.
A society that educates toward
self-control and views self-control as an educational goal may allow itself -
indeed it is even obligated - to create an atmosphere of personal liberty and
free choice.
The relationship between "freedom" and "belonging" is a relationship of
content and container. Only in such a relationship are these two
conflicting elements reconciled. When they do not enjoy such a relationship,
when one is severed from the other, the ensuing conflict destroys both. In a patriarchal
society, the duty of "belonging" takes over the right to freedom. The individual does
not develop self-control and free will as long as compulsion and coercion crouch
over him from the outside environment. For this reason, the child of a patriarchal
culture who emigrates to a matriarchal culture experiences the worst of both
worlds: He loses on every count.
He interprets the atmosphere of liberty that pervades his
new society as an indication of wanton lawless abandon, as being allowed to grab
all you can, as a competitive challenge. There is no need to consider any laws,
because all the laws of the matriarchal society are vague and ethereal. They have no
substance, meaning they do not have the figure of a ruler standing behind
them. Such an
individual fears the policeman, not the traffic signal. It is a familiar
syndrome: The complete lack of consideration for the other driver, the use of
driving as a weapon, as an expression of power rather than as a mere means of
transportation.
During Israel's
period of returning to nature, of youth movements and youth rebellions, the
child of patriarchal immigrants found himself freed of the duty to honor his
father and mother and to honor their values. It seemed that the boundaries had burst open
in every direction.
The fine line separating sanity from insanity had never had a place in
his inner world.
The subtle border that defines the litmus test of sanity does not exist
in a patriarchal culture, where the litmus test is confined to honoring the will
of the ruler and submitting to him. In a patriarchal culture, there is no room
for psychology.
Hence the lack of effectiveness of psychological treatment as long as one
fails to relate to an individual's inner cultural world. Indeed, the inner
world of the child of a patriarchal culture is empty of self-rule or
self-defined authority as a determiner of behavior.
Instead of sensitivity, there is emotionalism. Sensitivity
expresses the quality of an emotion, whereas emotionalism expresses the power of
the emotion.
Without making this distinction, one never gets to a genuine
understanding of the inner world of the children of patriarchal societies. The "hippy"
phenomenon, which chose a lifestyle that was close to nature in an attempt to free
itself from social rules that it despised, must be clearly distinguished as
reflective of the children of a matriarchal culture. Their merging into
this new life style in no way deviated from their cultural process. It was an organic
continuation of their previous development. For the child of the matriarchal culture,
change and expressions of rebellion do not extract the price of needless
destructiveness.
In contrast, for a child of the patriarchal culture, to rebel in this way
is to burst the barriers of good taste and in most cases to cross the border
where human decency breaks down, to deteriorate to a savagery that approaches
animalism.
Since self-rein is not a component of this type of personality, when
external reins are slackened, it can deviate beyond the boundaries of human
decency.
Behavior that deviates
from the moral principles of the matriarchal society triggers a chain reaction
of self-defense on the part of the matriarchal society, and a reaction of
indignation on the part of the child of the patriarchal immigrants, who then
claims socio-economic deprivation, these claims being simultaneously accompanied
by rebellious behavior and aggression. The desired response at this point would be a
tolerant, long-range educational approach whose goal is mutual rapprochement,
understanding, and respect, a matter that may require a few generations. This phenomenon
must be recognized and understood before it can be solved.
A society such as Israel that is
composed of multiple cultures brings about encounters that result in conflicts
that could supply an entire literature. Responses to these conflicts range from the
imaginative to the unpredictable, and defy all attempts to create clearly
definable norms.
Viewing this phenomenon from a perspective of mentality may provide the
key to its analysis.
One God, One Husband
Women's status in a patriarchal culture is interpreted as
clearly inferior by a member of the matriarchal culture. Strange as it may
seem, a woman in a patriarchal society does not feel inferior in the least. The reverse is
true. She
feels withering contempt for a husband who does not treat her as his private
property. A
husband who grants her the right to decide, who is lenient with her, allowing
her to neglect her duties - as the servant who must carry out his orders - will
lose his masculine status in her eyes, and his attractiveness to her as a
woman. Very
soon, this husband will find his wife behaving in ways designed to aggravate
him, not at all in keeping with his gentle attitude to her. She will attempt to
provoke him, to arouse his aggressiveness, which to her means fascinating, tough
masculinity.
The infrastructure of male-female relationships in a patriarchal society
is based upon service in exchange for protection, rather than on mutual feeling
as in a matriarchal society. Service/protection relations are measured by
activity rather than by involvement of an inner-personal nature. What informs a
woman's mentality in a patriarchal society is a framework of normative behavior
that is determined by her duties/privileges.
The concept of "one God, one husband” is drawn from a
Catholic view of the male-female relationship, in which the absolute authority
of the Divine has a representative or deputy on this earth. In the microcosmic
cycle, the husband fulfills this role. Just as it is inconceivable to contravene the
authority of the Divine, so is it inconceivable to release a woman from her
husband's authority.
For this reason, Catholicism finds the concept of divorce difficult to
digest.
Strange as it might seem, this never-sever attitude obtains as well in
Jewish families that have lived in Catholic countries. Not as a result of
attachment to Catholicism obviously, but as a socio-cultural factor that has
created a mentality of absolute faithfulness and devotion between both sides of
the pair. It
seems that the more a Jewish cultural group is originally and uniquely Jewish,
meaning the more it has focused on the study of Torah as its primary pursuit,
the more that group is able to free itself from the influences of its host
culture, to mold an independent Jewish mentality for itself. Of this, more later.
A radically matriarchal Jewish mentality developed in
Eastern Europe, despite the fact that the Eastern European Jews were immersed
among believers of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths. This was because
they were utterly rooted in their Jewish culture, in which the study of Torah
and the observance of mitsvot comprised the main part. Their posture of
non-involvement toward the host culture was extreme: They ignored it
entirely. Most
of them did not speak the local language, though they had lived in the same
place for generations. Anti-Semitic laws of a wickedly pervasive,
Draconian nature restricted Jews from working in the professions or from owning
property.
These laws severely reduced occupational options for the men, and
compelled the women to bear the burden of earning a livelihood. "Money talks", and
when the burden of income falls on the wife's shoulders, it is only natural that
she should also take up the reins of government. A talented husband found self-expression
through Torah study.
The wife, whose husband's achievements in a cultural sphere that was
difficult and challenging were a source of pride to her, gladly took the
struggle for existence upon herself, but also the reins of government. Thus was born a
husband-wife relationship built upon a role division that shared no common
denominator.
It was spirit versus matter.
It should be noted that this relationship is soundly
anchored in the root culture of Judaism, in which "Yisachar-Zevulun" relations
hold a legitimate and highly respected position. The substance of this relationship is based
on a business contract drawn up between wealth and scholarship: The wealthy one
commits to supplying the material needs of the one who is preoccupied with Torah
learning. The
latter renounces half of the reward he merits for the mitsva of his Torah
learning in favor of the wealthy one, who is preoccupied with amassing a fortune
for both of them.
The one who is receiving support does not feel humiliated, and the one
who is providing support does not feel that he is providing support. A mutual and
reciprocal relationship is born based upon values. It involves two
antithetical elements that lack any common denominator. Spirit versus
matter are merged into a perfect
whole, expressing the Jewish ideal in its true splendor.
Indeed, this is the original character of the Jewish
mentality, when it has not been influenced by the habits of nature, by weakness
of character, and by outside influences that are never put to the test of values
or personal needs.
An authentic Jewish mentality is created out of a center core of values
and ideals, the source of which are Torah and mitsvot. The influence of
values and ideals counteracts the instinctive tendency towards imitation,
towards being swept up by the influences of the environment. To the extent that
values and ideals are lacking, mentality is shaped by natural elements, such as
environmental influence, which neutralizes the uniqueness of the individual
personality.
In such cases, a husband who is not successful at Torah scholarship, and
ineffectual at earning a living, becomes a punching bag for his overworked
wife. These
types of relationships, which were not so rare in Jewish society, created the
mentality of an aggressive and domineering wife harassing a husband whose
position in the family framework is marginal.
While such a controlling woman would obviously feel no need
to join a feminist movement, the amazing fact is that the women's liberation
movement did actually grow out of precisely this context, within a society of
just this mentality.
Perhaps appetite increases with eating, or perhaps liberty has its own
momentum. In
any case, it would be worthwhile - in a society that contains such a varied
immigrant population - to create an organization aimed at protecting battered
wives and husbands, to take the place of feminism. Imagine the scene
(and the tears of laughter that will ensue): A typical Israeli apartment
building. One
door faces another.
Behind the first door live a matriarchal couple, and behind the second
door live a patriarchal couple. Suddenly a wounded husband is kicked
violently out of one door, a battered wife out of the other. We will leave their
meeting on the stairs to the reader's imagination. The entire outcome
is predictable, except for one question: Will they - can they rise above their
mentality? Can
they put aside internalized traditions, habits, and response tendencies that
have accumulated over generations?
Corrected Mentality
It is only in the third generation, and especially
in the fourth generation, that we find a new and corrected mentality, in which
all that is good and beautiful in one adversary encounters all that is good and
beautiful in the other. Pessimistic mentalities (Yes, pessimism and
optimism seem to be a function of mentality as well. There is no
evidence of a genetic basis for these tendencies.) will warn of a second possibility: All that is
negative and undesirable in one adversary will encounter all that is negative
and undesirable in the other. As of today, the pessimist will have an easy
time of it, drawing up great fistfuls of evidence, mainly from Israeli
drivers. The
optimist will be happy to support his view from the positive behaviors of
Israeli couples, who are either third or fourth generation native Israelis. He will have
difficulty proving his point with second generation couples, because in their
case, failure in the inter-gender minefield haunts the marriage idyll,
shortening its life and speeding its demise.
In the Political Sphere
Once we have understood the dynamics of mentality,
we are better equipped to understand the deeply complex nature of the political
sphere. We can
understand that an attempt to arbitrarily force our own political solutions on
another culture is fraught with risk, and its chance for success fragile
indeed. Grab a
patriarchal might-is-right society by the hair and throw it into the melting pot
of the matriarchal bosom, and you set the stage for bloodshed, sponsored by
enlightened liberalism. Behead the patriarchal snake, however, and
you have can bring calm and contentment to the masses within the matriarch's
authoritative bosom.
If you can wait patiently for a few generations, your chances increase
for livable results:
In the span of time, the hard shell of patriarchal
mentality softens to become more permeable. Certain messages emanating from the
matriarchal bosom, such as guilt feelings, gradually penetrate, plus a handful
of human emotions - pity, love - and they are not met with contempt or viewed as
a sign of weakness by the grim patriarch. It is only at this stage that a mutual
relationship becomes possible, only at this stage that we may begin to use
reciprocity as a formula to create a balanced relationship between both
sides. The
attempt to speed the process - to force a formula of reciprocity upon
conflicting parties when one side does not even recognize the phenomenon of
reciprocity - ignores the organic processes of cultural evolution.
This attempt has crashed in the smoke of battle, with much
reciprocity in spilled blood. In the wake of the tragic crash, no
constructive formula for reciprocity resulted. Logic did not play the decisive role, as
might be expected.
We are left in the present political moment with a precarious balance of
dread, which may collapse at any excuse, at the first sign of weakness on either
side. Calm it
certainly is not.
Calm and tranquility grow out of a process, that is built by time and
devoted to instilling the value of reciprocity, and mostly, trying to
understand, rather than only to respect, what is different.
The Effect of Religion on
Mentality
Morality and
religion stroll arm in arm only in the Jewish religion. The declared goal
of Judaism is not to make life easy. "Oy, my creature urges...and oy, my Creator urges...", remarks the Talmud, coming to teach
us that a human being must occupy two realities simultaneously, and deal with
two confrontations at one and the same moment: The self versus its Creator, and
the self versus the realities of existence. Judaism embraces both realities and imprints
its stamp upon both.
Confronting the realities of existence presents a moral challenge. Confronting the
reality of the Divine presents a spiritual goal: Connecting to God - dvaikut. How is it done? “Let all your
[confrontations with reality] "be for the sake of heaven".
Yet the religious way of relating
does not push the moral imperative aside in Judaism. "Love your friend
as yourself", the "great rule" of the Torah, combines both the moral and the
religious imperative.
To support this claim -
when the "great rule" seems moral and interpersonal, and not religious at all -
we must examine some basic premises of Judaism:
Reality is the tangible reflection of God's will. However, this
reflection does not move from God to reality in a direct line. It is intercepted
by human beings, who serve as mediators, who create the connection between the
higher worlds and the lower worlds. How a human being relates to this task
determines the direction the created universe will take - for better or for
worse. This is
a rather profound subject, and the Talmud in Brachot 61:1 devotes considerable
discussion to it.
Morality gets
a new face when is embraced by religion and given a place of honor. The effort to split
morality from religion, to delete the element of Divine authority from the moral
imperative, to force morality to stand on its own (an effort in which various
liberal theories have invested) has never been successful. Existential reality
confronts human beings with severe moral challenges. These challenges,
when there is no umbrella of supreme authority, compel human beings to regress,
to fall back on the egotistical attitudes dictated by their survival
instincts.
Morality is slain on this battlefield, where the survival instincts and
the moral imperative meet. Morality’s
tendency to disintegrate at a moment of crisis brought the religions to banish
the moral imperative from their midst, and to replace it with the religious
imperative.
A religious
imperative is a compulsory imperative, based on force, arbitrarily exerted by an
almighty power.
The challenge of free choice is entirely absent. One must simply
obey the religious imperative. One's ability to exercise judgment in areas
requiring human insight and human sensitivity is never put to the test. Yet the subtle
realm of interpersonal interaction is the most critical area. It calls upon the
finest qualities a human being has to offer.
In Judaism, the religious imperative, "the great rule of
the Torah" compels you to relate to the other as to "yourself". This means that
your relationship to the other must be based upon reciprocity. I.e., God commands
you to be as sensitive to the other as you are to yourself. This imperative
raises human beings above their ego, making them capable of balanced judgment in
the dense moral thicket of conflicting interests that separate the self from the
other.
In the absence of this higher perspective, in the