SPEAKING TO YOUNG LEADERS at a seminar in Chicago on October 29, 2019, Barack Obama launched an unusually fierce attack on the political culture that has developed in the West in recent years, particularly the use of social media as a political weapon. He criticized its use by people to show how “woke” they are—how ultrasensitive to social justice issues—by condemning others online.
“This idea of purity, and that you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically woke—you should get over that quickly,” he said, and continued: “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.”1 In other words, social and political issues are complex and multifaceted. Not every issue is a clash between right and wrong. Sometimes it is between right and right, between two strong but incompatible ideals. Something similar applies to people, too. Even the good have failings; even the bad have saving graces.
Obama said,
I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media—there is this sense sometimes of the way of me making changes is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.
If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself. Did you see how woke I was, I called you out.… That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.
Obama was speaking here from experience. Genuine political activity demands direct personal involvement. His own earliest political engagement was as a community organizer in Chicago.
The reaction to these remarks was significant. Inevitably some approved, some didn’t. What was interesting was that the divide did not coincide with political orientation. It had to do with age. By and large the boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) tended to agree with the former president, while Millennials (born between 1981 and 1994) and Generation Z (born from 1995 onward) did not. For the younger age-group, social media is a natural forum of politics and a genuine mode of engagement. As one writer in the New York Times put it, “Old, powerful people often seem to be more upset by online criticism than they are by injustice.”2 For young people, social media represent “the only platform many of us have, to talk about the causes we care about.”
As for Barack Obama himself, he is clearly sympathetic to many of the causes taken up by those who see themselves as “woke”: the plight of the poor, the unemployed, ethnic minorities, and LGBT communities. What he was saying, though, is that you cannot bring about change in a free society by indignation, condemnation, character assassination, and self-righteousness, all communicated by social media. You change the world by changing people, and you change people by engaging with them, recognizing that they, too, are people with values and ideals of their own.
That is what the change agents themselves say. Simon Fanshawe, founder of Stonewall, stated that same-sex marriage was achieved “by talking to people who don’t agree with us.”3 Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, wrote in How We Fight White Supremacy, “People don’t understand that organizing isn’t going online and cussing people out or going to a protest and calling something out.” It is a matter of grassroots engagement.4
Loretta Ross, an African American academic and activist on women’s issues, racism, and human rights, has also argued against the call-out culture of shaming by social media. There is, she says, a much more effective way to build social justice movements: “they happen in person, in real life.” She cites the example of the work she did to deprogram incarcerated rapists in the 1970s. By talking about her own experience of being raped, she created an environment in which the men were able to open up about their own experiences of assaulting or being assaulted. They went on to create Prisoners Against Rape, America’s first anti–sexual assault program led by men.5
Janice Turner, writing in The Times, argued that “lurid threats, fear-mongering, the bloody debris of ravaged reputations, only shuts mouths—it doesn’t change minds.” It creates an environment of fear and intimidation not unlike those that have existed under totalitarian regimes. To be sure, your liberty is not at stake, but your name, your standing, and your job may be. It can be thrilling, she says, to start a “Twitter pile-on.” You begin a movement to denounce X or delegitimize Y and soon thousands join. “It resembles solidarity and a mass movement: all those people agree with me! Yet each is sitting alone, atomised, pressing a ‘like’ button. In a moment, this two-minute hate will be forgotten as another target hoves into view.”6
David Brooks, in the New York Times, has argued that the politics of wokeness is almost guaranteed not to bring about change. It encourages people to see injustice in maximalist terms, as something drastic, overwhelming. It leaves no room for nuance, subtlety, mitigating factors, other points of view. It is expressive but not practical. “It doesn’t inspire action; it freezes it. To be woke is first and foremost to put yourself on display. To make a problem seem massively intractable is to inspire separation—building a wall between you and the problem—not a solution.”7
What ultimately is at stake between those who agreed and those who disagreed with Barack Obama? It is about more than whether social media can bring about political change. It is about whether politics has space for ambiguity and complexity. Do I owe anything by way of respect to those who disagree with me? Can we acknowledge that our allies have faults and our opponents have virtues? Is politics about I–Thou relationships, or is it only about power? Are we all, left and right, progressive and conservative, part of a single overarching moral community? Do we acknowledge the things that unite us, or do we focus only on what divides us? How, in any complex society, do we structure disagreement?
I want in this chapter to make a fundamental distinction between two kinds of argument, and to suggest what it is to live graciously with those with whom we disagree. The case I make here comes from a Jewish perspective, but I am confident that other faiths and traditions will have their own way of arriving at a similar conclusion.
JUDAISM IS UNUSUAL in that virtually all its canonical texts are woven through with arguments. In the Bible, Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, and Job all argue extensively with God. In Midrash, rabbis argue with one another on the basis of the principle that there are seventy “faces,” or interpretations, of every text. In the Mishnah the rabbis argue about Jewish law, and in the Gemara they argue about the arguments of the Mishnah.
Every later text comes with its commentaries and counter-commentaries. In the twelfth century, Moses Maimonides did the most daring thing of all: he wrote a code of law with all the arguments removed. This generated more arguments than any other text for the next eight hundred years until today. Other people have conversations. Jews have arguments.
Inevitably, though, the rabbis reflected on the nature of argument itself. Were all arguments good? Were all equally valid? Were there some arguments that were destructive and dangerous? In clarifying their thoughts, they came up with a major distinction, between what they called an argument for the sake of heaven and one that they held not to have been for the sake of heaven.
Their classic example of an argument for the sake of heaven was the relationship between the two rabbinic schools, those of Hillel and Shammai, in the first century BCE. Hillel in particular embodied the sages’ ideal of a scholar. This is how they characterized the disputes between the two schools:
For three years there was a dispute between the schools of Shammai and Hillel. The former claimed, “The law is in agreement with our views,” and the latter insisted, “The law is in agreement with our views.” Then a voice from heaven (bat kol) announced, “These and those are the words of the living God, but the law is in accordance with the school of Hillel.”
Since both “these and those are the words of the living God,” why was the school of Hillel entitled to have the law determined in accordance with their rulings? Because they were kindly and modest, they studied their own rulings and those of the school of Shammai, and were even so humble as to mention the teachings of the school of Shammai before their own.8
The concept of “argument for the sake of heaven” allowed the sages to reframe disagreement as a unifying, not just divisive, force. That is implicit in the radical idea that each of two opposing opinions can represent “the words of the living God.”
This suggests an alternative to the principle of Aristotelian logic, the “law of contradiction” that states, “Either p or not-p”: either an assertion is true or false. Not necessarily so, say the sages. Two contrary propositions may both be true, from different perspectives, or at different times, or under different circumstances. That both are true follows from the fact that they are both interpretations of a biblical verse. Both therefore represent “the words of the living God.” And because God grants his people the authority to interpret his word, both views are mandated, though only one can actually become law. God gives his blessing to a multiplicity of perspectives and thus creates the possibility of non-zero-sum disagreement. Several views may be true, even if only one is authoritative as law.
The yet deeper point is that the greatest minds know that theirs is not the only truth. The school of Hillel knew that more than one interpretation can be given. That is why they studied the views of their opponents alongside, and even before, their own. They were “kindly and modest” because they realized that truth is not an all-or-nothing affair. It is a conversation, scored for a multiplicity of voices. The intellectual arrogance of knowing that you are right, your opponents wrong, is ruled out from the beginning. In the search to know what God wants of us, here, now, every voice is part of the argument, and the argument itself is as important as its outcome.
This therefore was the paradigm of an argument for the sake of heaven. What was the opposite, an argument not for the sake of heaven? Here the sages looked at the biblical episode in which Korach challenges Moses’s and Aaron’s leadership of the people. Here is the text from the book of Numbers:
Korah son of Izhar, the son of Kohath, the son of Levi, and certain Reubenites—Dathan and Abiram, sons of Eliab, and On son of Peleth—took men and rose up against Moses.… They came as a group to oppose Moses and Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far! The whole community is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is with them. Why then do you set yourselves above the Lord’s assembly?” (Num. 16:1–3)
Korach was a populist, one of the first in recorded history, and populism has reemerged in the West, as it did in the 1930s, posing great danger to the future of freedom. What links populism on the one hand, and the phenomenon of “wokeness” discussed by Barack Obama on the other, is that they are both binary, both extreme. Both divide the world into good and evil, black and white, with no shades of gray. Both see themselves as the oppressed and their opponents as the oppressors. They see no saving grace on the other side.
Populism is the politics of anger.9 It makes its appearance when there is widespread discontent with political leaders, when people feel that heads of institutions are working in their own interest rather than that of the general public, when there is a widespread loss of trust and a breakdown of the sense of the common good.
People come to feel that the distribution of rewards is unfair: a few gain disproportionately and the many stay as they are or lose out. There is also a feeling that the country they once knew has been taken away from them, which might be because of the undermining of traditional values, or because of large-scale immigration.
Discontent takes the form of rejection of the current political and cultural elites. Populist politicians claim that they, and they alone, are the true voice of the people. The existing leaders are sharing out the rewards among themselves, indifferent to the suffering of the masses. Populists stir up resentment against the establishment. They are deliberately divisive and confrontational. They promise strong leadership that will give the people back what has been taken from them.
In 2017, support for populist parties throughout Europe was running at around 35 percent, the highest level since the late 1930s. Parties of the far right gained power in Poland and Hungary and made a strong showing in Austria, France, and Holland. In Southern Europe, in countries like Spain and Greece, populism tends to be of the left. Regardless of what form it takes, when populism is on the rise, tyranny is around the corner.10 Human rights are dispensed with. The public grants the strong leader exceptional powers: so it was in the 1930s with Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini. People are willing to sacrifice their freedom for the promised utopia, and to tolerate great evils against whichever scapegoat the leader chooses to blame for the nation’s problems.
The Korach rebellion was a populist movement, and Korach himself an archetypal populist leader. Listen carefully to what he said about Moses and Aaron: “You have gone too far! The whole community is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?” (Num. 16:3).
These are classic populist claims. First, implies Korach, the establishment, represented by Moses and Aaron, is corrupt. Moses has been guilty of nepotism in appointing his own brother as High Priest. He has kept the leadership roles within his immediate family instead of sharing them out more widely. Second, Korach presents himself as the people’s champion. The whole community, he says, is holy. There is nothing special about you, Moses and Aaron. We have all seen God’s miracles and heard his voice. We all helped build his Sanctuary. Korach is posing as the democrat—so that he can become the autocrat.
Next, he and his fellow rebels mount an impressive campaign of fake news—anticipating events of our own time. We have to infer this indirectly. When Moses says to God, “I have not taken so much as a donkey from them, nor have I wronged any of them” (Num. 16:15), it is clear that he has been accused of just that: exploiting his office for personal gain. When he says, “This is how you will know that the Lord has sent me to do all these things and that it was not my own idea” (Num. 16:28), it is equally clear that he has been accused of representing his own decisions as the will and word of God.
Most blatant is the post-truth-style claim of Datham and Aviram: “Isn’t it enough that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the wilderness? And now you want to lord it over us!” (Num. 16:13). This is the most tendentious speech in the Torah. It combines false nostalgia for Egypt as a “land flowing with milk and honey,” replacing their slavery there with the image of God’s promised plenty for them in the Holy Land, blaming Moses for the report of the spies, and accusing him of holding on to leadership for his own personal prestige—all three outrageous lies.
Nahmanides was undoubtedly correct11 when he says that such a challenge to Moses’s leadership would have been impossible at any earlier point. Only in the aftermath of the episode of the spies, when the people realized that they would not see the Promised Land in their lifetime, could discontent be stirred by Korach and his assorted fellow travelers. They felt they had nothing to lose. Populism is the politics of disappointment, resentment, and fear.
For once in his life, Moses acted autocratically, putting God, as it were, to the test:
This is how you shall know that the Lord has sent me to do all these works; it has not been of my own accord: If these people die a natural death, or if a natural fate comes on them, then the Lord has not sent me. But if the Lord creates something new, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up, with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, then you shall know that these men have despised the Lord. (Num. 16:28–30)
This dramatic effort at conflict resolution by the use of force (in this case, a miracle) failed completely in its aim of quelling discontent. The ground did indeed open up and swallow Korach and his fellow rebels, but the people, despite their terror, were unimpressed. “On the next day, however, the whole congregation of the Israelites rebelled against Moses and against Aaron, saying, “You have killed the people of the Lord” (Num. 17:6). God may have fulfilled Moses’s plea, but in the eyes of the people, the plea itself was autocratic and wrong.
What is even more striking is the way the sages framed the conflict. Instead of seeing it as a black-and-white contrast between rebellion and obedience, they insisted on the validity of argument in the public domain. They said that what was wrong with Korach and his fellows was not that they argued with Moses and Aaron, but that they did so “not for the sake of heaven.” The schools of Hillel and Shammai, however, argued for the sake of heaven, and thus their argument had enduring value.12
What matters in Judaism is why the argument was undertaken and how it was conducted. What is the fundamental difference between an argument for the sake of heaven and one that is not? Following Meiri and other medieval commentators, the sages were distinguishing between an argument for the sake of truth and one for the sake of victory. Hillel and Shammai were arguing for the sake of truth, the determination of God’s will. Korach, who challenged Moses and Aaron for leadership, was arguing for the sake of victory: he wanted to be a leader, too.
In argument for the sake of truth, if you win, you win, but if you lose, you also win, because being defeated by the truth is the only defeat that is also a victory. We are enlarged thereby. As Rabbi Shimon ha-Amsoni said: “Just as I received reward for the exposition, so I will receive reward for the retraction.”13 In an argument for the sake of victory, if you lose, you lose, but if you win, you also lose, for by diminishing your opponents, you diminish yourself. Moses won the argument against Korach, but only at the cost of invoking a miracle in which the earth opened up and swallowed his opponents. Yet this did not end the argument. In this kind of confrontation, there is no benign outcome. You can only aim at minimizing the tragedy.
The entire thrust of postmodernism, inspired by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, is to develop a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which there is no truth, only victory. Every argument is a (concealed) exercise of power, an attempt to establish a “hegemonic discourse.” Judaism rejects this idea, not because it is never true—in the case of an argument not for the sake of heaven, it is—but because we can tell when it is and when it isn’t. There is such a thing as truth, and collaborative argument in pursuit of it. That is the basis of trust on which all genuine communication depends.
In his excellent short book What Is Populism?, Jan-Werner Muller argues that the best indicator of populist politics is its delegitimization of other voices. Populists claim that “they and they alone represent the people.” Anyone who disagrees with them is “essentially illegitimate.” Once in power, they silence dissent. Wokeness has the same argumentative structure. Those who hold attitudes or make remarks or use terminology outside the received woke norms are to be denounced, shamed, “called out,” or “cancelled.” That is why the silencing of unpopular views on university campuses today, in the form of “safe space,” “trigger warnings,” and “micro-aggressions,” is so dangerous. When academic freedom dies, the death of other freedoms follows.
The divisiveness of modern politics and modern culture flows directly from the fact that we seem to have lost the sense of moral community that allowed people to feel that though their political views might be opposed, nonetheless they were part of the same nation, heirs to its history, sharing its fate, responsible for one another, engaged collectively in pursuit of the common good. This did not stop politics being abrasive, sometimes brutal. But it did mean that people recognized the humanity of their opponents, listened to them, and recognized that other viewpoints had integrity.
It was that appeal to moral community, and ultimately to a common humanity, that made Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Yitzhak Rabin the great leaders they were. They sought not power but truth; not victory but healing. They recognized that argument is not a zero-sum game. It is not a matter of winners and losers but of collectively moving forward in our recognition of the injustices, hardships, and prejudices that still exist, and of the humanity of those who suffer from them. It is not necessary to delegitimize, call out, or cancel your opponents. It is better, simply, to persuade them.
Hence the power of Judaism’s insistence on the legitimacy of “argument for the sake of heaven.” Judaism does not silence dissent: on the contrary, it dignifies it. This was institutionalized in the biblical era, in the form of the prophets who spoke truth to power. In the rabbinic era it lived in the culture of argument evident on every page of the Mishnah, Gemara, and their commentaries. In the contemporary State of Israel, argumentativeness is part of the very texture of its democratic freedom, in the strongest possible contrast to much of the rest of the Middle East.
A free society depends on the dignity of dissent. Judaism itself is predicated on this principle. That is what is happening in the biblical dialogues between heaven and earth, and the rabbinic dialogues between Hillel and Shammai and their descendants. Dismiss a contrary view and you impoverish the entire culture. The book of Job is not about whether Job is right or wrong in his complaint about the injustice he feels has been done to him. Its purpose is to show that he has the right to speak, to challenge God, to be heard and (in some sense) to be answered. William Safire, a political journalist, perceptively called his book on Job The First Dissident.
A healthy culture protects places that welcome argument and respect dissenting views. Enter them and you will grow, others will grow, and you will do great things together. But resist with all your heart and soul any attempt to substitute power for truth. And stay far from people, movements, and parties that demonize their opponents. As Barack Obama said: “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”