The article misinterprets what the Talmud does, and the author does so in order to try to draw a parallel with Freud.
Along with the written Torah there was also an oral tradition, that oral tradition would have included the info of 2,000 amaos that the article references.
What does the Talmud do? It works under the principle that everything in the oral tradition is also hinted to in the written Torah, and then it goes looking for it.
The article incorrectly claims that the Talmud derived this number from the written Torah - this is false and backwards. The people who wrote the Talmud already knew this number, their goal was to find where it was hinted to.
They were able to do so for virtually every part of the oral Torah to the extent that they even recorded every time they were unable to do so with the term "Halacha mi Moshe be Sinai". (A law direct from Moshe on Sinai, i.e. as distinct from a law that could be derived from the written Torah.)
This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of the Talmud that it kind of fails the entire point of the article.
Freud emerged at a time in history when there was an extraordinary demand for a particular service that had been lost over the course of 300 years: auricular confession to a priest.
Since most Protestant sects since 1517 had been consistently rejecting and deprecating the practice of auricular confession, men around the world, especially in Europe, were bursting with secrets. There is a basic human need to disclose our secrets to God, and to feel cleansed and regenerated and relieved of the burdens they've become.
So Freud and his colleagues designed psychoanalysis as a comfortable, secular, drop-in replacement for auricular confession, and established a new priestly class among the Protestant laity. Now it's great to fill a void, but of course Catholics and Orthodox had never ceased the original practice, and so it was clear that psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type.
In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church, even in disestablishmentarian jurisdictions such as these United States. By medicalizing defects of mind, and applying a "disease model" of diagnosis and treatment (but never cures) even to vices such as substance addiction, the new priesthood has established religious control over the populace in unprecedented ways (okay, maybe they are definitely precedented). The most recent expansion of this religion is from "mental" to "behavioral" health; i.e. not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control.
It is interesting that recent developments have seen Roman Catholicism take an approach of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and wholly embrace psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry as their own, even going so far as to accept theories of homosexuality and "orientation" as givens and psychological facts. There are now explicitly branded Catholic practitioners of mental health, where you can go for drugs, psychoanalysis, and support groups, because two churches are better than one, I suppose.
There is no basic need to disclose secrets to God. The need to confess is carefully erected in the souls of the laity on top of the twin pillars of Catholicism, Shame and Guilt.
So by your logic, Europeans should have been gladly liberated from all that nonsense, yet they chose to reinvent and re-embrace it after only 300 years of freedom. Bizarre!
Interesting, if weird, idea. Many things to take issue with, but I will take just one: ``The most recent expansion of this religion is from "mental" to "behavioral" health; i.e. not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control.``
Behavioral health is arguably a shift _away_ from policing the internal state of the person to instead focus on specific behaviors that interfere with a patient's life. It is bizarre to suggest this places behavior under "scrutiny and control." You may have noticed that, in fact, all of our behaviors are already under personal, legal, and social scrutiny and control. The point of behavioral health is to help people cope with _that_ reality without engaging unnecessarily with psychological narratives which, as you and others have pointed out in this thread, may not be evidence based.
Also, "In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church". This may be true in some sense, but psychoanalysis and its descendant practices have nothing like the cultural and political dominance of Catholicism in its heyday. I guess its possible to think of psychoanalysis as a church if you allow "church" to mean just any collection of ideas around which people organize and in which people believe without a level of scrutiny they apply to other kinds of ideas, but that covers quite a lot of ground.
"psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type." I'm genuinely interested in whether Freud ever wrote anything that suggested that he was trying to usurp Catholic confession.
Historically, with a church established with the state, the Church was in charge of the behavioral health of their subjects. The state could make temporal laws and punish people for crimes in various ways, but the thoughts and ideas of citizens was controlled by the Church, and if citizens acted against Church teachings, this was a danger to the stability of the state. Heretics were basically traitors, in other words, and heresy needed to be dealt with, in order to preserve domestic tranquility. In the best of times, the Church held the State's best interests closely, and good churchgoers were also good citizens. Of course, this could also be a love-hate relationship.
Due to widespread distestablishmentarianism, the States are still in charge of crime and punishment and they have prisons for criminals, but they were somewhat unable to deal with heretics and wrongthink. People of mental defect, lunatics, and the criminally insane are also dangerous to domestic tranquility, and so, having lost the relationship to its Behavioral Health provider, the State has established a new religion to supplant it.
When psychiatric drugs were new, they were heralded and celebrated as a release from chains: they are indeed a method of restraint that is viewed as "more humane" because they are invisible and chemical. But this is all they are: a newfound method of restraint and control. They are not intended to cure or treat diseases, just make the people's behavior more manageable.
The Church of Psychiatry is authorized to imprison those whose behavior is not manageable. So, outward actions that are not... illegal... or subject to criminal prosecution, are still subject to scrutiny and control by the psychiatric priesthood. The power of the State is vested in them to drug, imprison, sterilize, and euthanize, just as it was in the before times.
Could the general success of Jewish people as an ethnic group be partly attributable to the Talmud and general tenets of Jewish culture helping adapt the mind to difficult circumstances and wrestling with complexity?
Ashkenazi Jews have a higher IQ by a whole stddev over the general population, regardless of religiosity or socioeconomic factors [0]. It's possible the Talmud played a role in selective reproductive pressures toward this outcome, sure: learned men in Jewish culture tended to be desirable mates. But there are other historical factors at play too.
> although a recent review concludes that the
advantage is slightly less, only half a standard deviation Lynn (2004).
From the paper you linked. Most of the studies cited were pretty flawed in implementation iirc. The paper you linked also fails to mention the most probable reason for Jewish success, which imo is the community itself. More specifically, the n-word, nepotism. I have a very Jewish name, and I've experienced preference for it. I think this also presents unique opportunities for access to early, high value education, regardless of socioeconomic status, which definitely skews the IQ results.
I think the accepted view is that persecution and diaspora pushed Jews into industries like finance that lead to wealth accumulation.
However, I personally don't think that the persecution would be as severe if Jews did not have such an insular culture, organized around the Torah and tradition.
Also, literacy and scholarship is promoted in Jewish culture due to the promotion of reading and debating the Torah and Talmud. This could have helped direct the results of their persecution. Compare the Jewish people to other persecuted peoples such as the gypsies.
I am no sociologist, but I think at the very least we can agree that outcomes result from very complex interactions of culture, geography, history, language, religion, etc.
Readit News
Basically, if a decision has full agreement, jumping to the conclusion is wrong as it can mean some details were not properly investigated.
https://www.jewishaz.com/religiouslife/the-importance-of-dis...
Along with the written Torah there was also an oral tradition, that oral tradition would have included the info of 2,000 amaos that the article references.
What does the Talmud do? It works under the principle that everything in the oral tradition is also hinted to in the written Torah, and then it goes looking for it.
The article incorrectly claims that the Talmud derived this number from the written Torah - this is false and backwards. The people who wrote the Talmud already knew this number, their goal was to find where it was hinted to.
They were able to do so for virtually every part of the oral Torah to the extent that they even recorded every time they were unable to do so with the term "Halacha mi Moshe be Sinai". (A law direct from Moshe on Sinai, i.e. as distinct from a law that could be derived from the written Torah.)
This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of the Talmud that it kind of fails the entire point of the article.
Since most Protestant sects since 1517 had been consistently rejecting and deprecating the practice of auricular confession, men around the world, especially in Europe, were bursting with secrets. There is a basic human need to disclose our secrets to God, and to feel cleansed and regenerated and relieved of the burdens they've become.
So Freud and his colleagues designed psychoanalysis as a comfortable, secular, drop-in replacement for auricular confession, and established a new priestly class among the Protestant laity. Now it's great to fill a void, but of course Catholics and Orthodox had never ceased the original practice, and so it was clear that psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type.
In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church, even in disestablishmentarian jurisdictions such as these United States. By medicalizing defects of mind, and applying a "disease model" of diagnosis and treatment (but never cures) even to vices such as substance addiction, the new priesthood has established religious control over the populace in unprecedented ways (okay, maybe they are definitely precedented). The most recent expansion of this religion is from "mental" to "behavioral" health; i.e. not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control.
It is interesting that recent developments have seen Roman Catholicism take an approach of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and wholly embrace psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry as their own, even going so far as to accept theories of homosexuality and "orientation" as givens and psychological facts. There are now explicitly branded Catholic practitioners of mental health, where you can go for drugs, psychoanalysis, and support groups, because two churches are better than one, I suppose.
Behavioral health is arguably a shift _away_ from policing the internal state of the person to instead focus on specific behaviors that interfere with a patient's life. It is bizarre to suggest this places behavior under "scrutiny and control." You may have noticed that, in fact, all of our behaviors are already under personal, legal, and social scrutiny and control. The point of behavioral health is to help people cope with _that_ reality without engaging unnecessarily with psychological narratives which, as you and others have pointed out in this thread, may not be evidence based.
Also, "In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church". This may be true in some sense, but psychoanalysis and its descendant practices have nothing like the cultural and political dominance of Catholicism in its heyday. I guess its possible to think of psychoanalysis as a church if you allow "church" to mean just any collection of ideas around which people organize and in which people believe without a level of scrutiny they apply to other kinds of ideas, but that covers quite a lot of ground.
"psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type." I'm genuinely interested in whether Freud ever wrote anything that suggested that he was trying to usurp Catholic confession.
Uhh... your outward actions have always been under scrutiny? What are you getting at?
Historically, with a church established with the state, the Church was in charge of the behavioral health of their subjects. The state could make temporal laws and punish people for crimes in various ways, but the thoughts and ideas of citizens was controlled by the Church, and if citizens acted against Church teachings, this was a danger to the stability of the state. Heretics were basically traitors, in other words, and heresy needed to be dealt with, in order to preserve domestic tranquility. In the best of times, the Church held the State's best interests closely, and good churchgoers were also good citizens. Of course, this could also be a love-hate relationship.
Due to widespread distestablishmentarianism, the States are still in charge of crime and punishment and they have prisons for criminals, but they were somewhat unable to deal with heretics and wrongthink. People of mental defect, lunatics, and the criminally insane are also dangerous to domestic tranquility, and so, having lost the relationship to its Behavioral Health provider, the State has established a new religion to supplant it.
When psychiatric drugs were new, they were heralded and celebrated as a release from chains: they are indeed a method of restraint that is viewed as "more humane" because they are invisible and chemical. But this is all they are: a newfound method of restraint and control. They are not intended to cure or treat diseases, just make the people's behavior more manageable.
The Church of Psychiatry is authorized to imprison those whose behavior is not manageable. So, outward actions that are not... illegal... or subject to criminal prosecution, are still subject to scrutiny and control by the psychiatric priesthood. The power of the State is vested in them to drug, imprison, sterilize, and euthanize, just as it was in the before times.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
[0] https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jb...
From the paper you linked. Most of the studies cited were pretty flawed in implementation iirc. The paper you linked also fails to mention the most probable reason for Jewish success, which imo is the community itself. More specifically, the n-word, nepotism. I have a very Jewish name, and I've experienced preference for it. I think this also presents unique opportunities for access to early, high value education, regardless of socioeconomic status, which definitely skews the IQ results.
However, I personally don't think that the persecution would be as severe if Jews did not have such an insular culture, organized around the Torah and tradition.
Also, literacy and scholarship is promoted in Jewish culture due to the promotion of reading and debating the Torah and Talmud. This could have helped direct the results of their persecution. Compare the Jewish people to other persecuted peoples such as the gypsies.
I am no sociologist, but I think at the very least we can agree that outcomes result from very complex interactions of culture, geography, history, language, religion, etc.
Dead Comment