Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest…. I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to “justify” and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. RALPH ELLISON, INVISIBLE MAN One Friday afternoon, in a carpeted alcove off the main sanctuary of my school, a Jewish school in the suburbs of Philadelphia, my class collected in a circle as we did every week. A young, liberally perfumed Israeli woman in a tight turtleneck sweater read to us from a textbook about the exodus from Egypt. I asked her why our ancestors had been enslaved to begin with, and then wondered aloud whether it was because only former slaves can appreciate freedom. I remember the feeling of the idea forming in my very young mind, and the struggle to articulate it. Clumsily, with a child’s vocabulary, I suggested to my teacher that Jewish political life began with emancipation, and that this origin ensured that gratitude to God would be the foundation of our national identity. Could that have been God’s motivation? I don’t remember her answer, only her mild bemusement, and my impression that she did not have the philosophical tools or the inclination to engage with the question. I was left to wonder on my own about the nature of slavery, the distant memories that undergird identity, and God’s will; without a teacher, without a framework. I was by myself with these questions.  Of course, we were not gathered in that schoolchildren’s circle to study philosophy. We were studying the Biblical tale not in order to theorize about the nature of slavery and freedom, or to acquire a larger sense of Jewish history, but because it was expected of us, and every other grade in the school, this and every week since the school’s founding, to study the weekly portion of the Torah, because that is what Jewish students in a Jewish school of that denomination do. I had mistaken a social activity for an intellectual one. The norms of a community demanded this conversation of us, because otherwise the community would be suspect. People would whisper that graduates of our school lacked the capacity for full belonging within their particular Jewish group, because we had failed to receive the proper training in membership. The overarching objective of our education was initiation. The prayers that we were taught to say before and after eating, and upon waking up in the morning, and going to the bathroom, and seeing a rainbow, and on myriad other quotidian occasions, served the same purpose. These were not theological practices; we were not taught to consider the might and creative power of the God whom we were thanking — the meanings of what we recited, the ideas that lay beneath the words. We uttered all those sanctifying words because it was what our school’s permutation of the Jewish tradition taught Jews to do. We were performing, not pondering.  Divine commandments were the sources and accoutrements of our liturgies and rituals. But we lingered much longer over the choreography than over the divinity. The substance of our identity was rules, which included the recitation of certain formulas for certain concepts and customs. And our knowledge of the rules, how or whether we obeyed them, would signal what sort of Jews we were. The primary purpose of this system was to provide talismans that we could use to signal membership. In the context of my religious education, the meaning of the symbols was less important than how I presented them. Badges were more central than beliefs. The content of the badges — the symbols and all the concomitant intellectual complications — was left alone. Marinating within that culture inculcated in me an almost mystical reverence for my religion and for its God because it placed them in a realm outside of reason. I could not interrogate them: holiness is incommensurate with reason. Without the indelible experience of that schooling in anti-intellectualism, the beauties and intoxicants of tradition would be inaccessible to me. Even now, when I witness expressions of fine religious faith, I am capable of recognizing and honoring them because of that early training. The anti-intellectualism had another unwitting effect: the indifference of my community to the cerebral and non-communal dimensions of the way we lived meant that I could develop my own relationship with them.  Since they were unconcerned with the aspects of religious life to which I most kindled, I was free to discover them independently. They didn’t care what I thought, so I set out to think. In this manner I began to acquaint myself with fundamental human questions, to feel my way around and develop the rudiments of ideas about morality, slavery, love, and forgiveness. My academic syllabi were rife with references to these themes, but they were rarely discussed directly. They were like so many paintings on the wall: we would walk by them a hundred times a day and never stop and look. As children we became comfortable in their presence, but we did not exactly study them together, so I studied them alone, without the commentaries that would harden them into a catechism.   In a certain ironic sense, I was lucky. When someone is taught to think about fundamental human questions within a group, her conception of those themes will be shaped by the group. The goal of that sort of group study, perhaps not overtly articulated but always at work, would be to initiate her into a particular system of particular people, to provide her with a ready-made attitude and a handy worldview, to train her to think and speak in the jargon of that worldview, and to signal membership within the company of those who espouse it. If language is a condition