A corrosive rot of irrelevance: Parallels in the Haredi and Secular Academies

The word ‘scholar’ is bandied about often the days, especially when an agenda-driven media trots out some partisan college professor or think tank fellow to bolster the credibility of a narrative it is pushing.

We also hear the term ‘scholar’ used when referring to the literally tens of thousands of men, mostly in Israel but with no shortage in America, who are ostensibly devoting their lives to talmudic research. Such men, known in Hebrew as avreichim can be found at scores of institutions, both large and small, that proliferate primarily, but not only, in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak and Lakewood, New Jersey.

Never before in western history have so many people continued their educations after high school.

In America it is virtually a given that a secondary school graduate should earn an undergraduate degree, at the very least an associate’s diploma.

In rigorously Orthodox Jewish circles it is no less expected for a young man to spend at least a few years – if not an entire lifetime – engaged in full time Torah learning.

The sheer quantity of young people enrolled, if not engaged, in higher learning – be it secular or religious – has never been greater. Yet, one may well question the quality of these cohorts, and whether there is any measurable, life-enhancing end product that justifies keeping millions of young people out of the work force for four or more years.

The even bigger question is what is the end product, the yield, if you will, from those at the universities who continue on to PhD and post-doc programs, especially in the liberal arts, and those thousands of men who go on to dedicate their entire lives to “sitting and learning” Torah.

Both groups, in their own ways, have a powerful impact on their societies and, depending on one’s perspective, not necessarily a salubrious one.

It’s no secret that the liberal arts are in dire straits. Fewer and fewer college students choose liberal arts majors, and the ones who do are often not the cream of the undergraduate crop.

Moving beyond the BA level, sharper liberal arts graduates often shift to law school, or shunt off to careers in business. While there are always exceptions, those who choose to pursue graduate studies and a PhD are rarely the sharpest crayons in the academic box. Often as not, it seems they have an agenda for which their ostensible field of scholarship serves merely as a Trojan Horse.

Qualitatively, today’s PhD candidates in the liberal arts bear only the faintest resemblance to the scholars of yore. But then, the quality of their professors is hardly what it once was either.

At the undergraduate level, such liberal arts as are required for a baccalaureate have been disemboweled of any gravitas. Entire chunks of civilization have been exorcised as politically incorrect and irrelevant. They have done to the literary classics what the Taliban did when they destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, and what Islamist have consistently done to ancient Christian monuments in Iraq and Syria.

New, agenda-driven and politically ‘relevant’ pseudo-subjects have been prestidigitated into not only respectability, but preeminence. Invariably, these new subjects, as well as the last holdouts of any connectivity to the classic canon, are suffixed with the term “gender studies” in order to render them ‘relevant’ and provide their professorial purveyors with a cloak of legitimacy in an academic world that has become anything but.

The question is what came first, the degradation of what passes for scholarship or the degradation of the scholars themselves i.e., a generation of very small minds achieving tenure because there is no one better to occupy the cathedra.

For a long time now the pursuit of a doctorate in the humanities has been a fool’s quest – expensive, time-consuming, and vocationally futile for all but the fewest, and not necessarily the best of a not very stellar lot.

Achieving a doctorate in literature or history or music can take up to a decade, significantly longer than earning a doctorate in medicine or a license to practice law. And, having earned that PhD one then faces the daunting life of an underpaid, unprotected academic itinerant, trudging from one junky college to another, and one academic conference to another, praying for a tenure-track position that rarely materializes at even the most remote and academically irrelevant agricultural or community colleges.

Why would anyone with a serious mind and even marginal talent subject themselves to such indignity? Is it any wonder that the best and the brightest undergraduates are picked like low-hanging fruit by the Goldman Sachs’s of this world, and turned into world class harlots, applying their enviable IQs to the hedging of stacked bets?

And yet, I would suggest that even if PhD students were paid six figure salaries and guaranteed tenure at Stanford or Harvard, the quality and caliber of the candidates would still be wanting. And here’s why.

Once upon a time western civilization had renaissance men – individuals who seemed to have mastered all the disciplines in both the arts and the sciences. Men who could pontificate with erudition on virtually any subject, and who, themselves, were brilliant innovators in architecture, engineering, literature, languages, theology, art, music, mathematics and science.

But the truth is they were able to be renaissance men because the totality of information known to man was pitifully small and limited. Anyone with a superior brain could, with moderate effort, sponge up pretty much everything worth knowing.

Over the next 500 years things changed radically. The amount of new information expanded exponentially. Gradually, the sort of brain that might know it all in the 1500s could, by the 18^th century, only become expert in one or two disciplines, and of barely one by the end of the 19^th.

By the time the 20^th century rolled around, a PhD student could still produce an enviable thesis on a fairly broad aspect of his single subject; an opus that might garner an audience of readers beyond the limited crew of academics charged with bestowing the vaunted doctorate.

By now, of course, even that is no longer true. For today’s doctoral student to write something ‘new’ that has not been said before in a hundred different ways, he must ferret out a footnote to a footnote in order to earn his flightless doctoral wings. His dissertation languishes ever after in the unvisited stacks of the university at which he so thanklessly labored.

In other words, what he wrote is invariably mind-bogglingly boring, irrelevant, and useful for nothing more than getting to call himself, or herself, or themself, or itself “doctor.”

Little wonder that universities are becoming increasingly, if not already, polytechnics that, regarding their more serious students, churn out computer geeks who will find a much livelier, fiscally rewarding, and generously snack-filled career at Google or one of the lesser information or social media churnatoriums.

But the truly awful thing is not the colossal rip-off in both time and coin of all those itinerant/mendicant academic postdocs. No, the real problem is what appears to be the raison d’etre for the few who actually do make it into tenureland.

By now it should be clear to even the most willfully occluded that the academy has been hijacked by men and women (and the various other genders) whose agenda is not only to deconstruct literary classics, but to deconstruct society as a whole. They achieve this by promoting an intersectional neo-Marxist agenda of intolerance, censorship, economic disembowelment, and antisemitism.

What remains of the humanities is too often used as a bully pulpit from which to whip up fevered allegiance to the new intersectional agenda, and to fearlessly and shamelessly silence more conventional, let alone dissenting, voices and opinions. The penalties for not toeing the progressive line include grade retribution on the part of unabashedly partisan, agenda-driven faculty, social ostracism by fellow students, vandalism and even violence.

The overwhelming absence of non-progressive faculty in the arts and social sciences is no accident. It has long been understood that conservatives, even centrists, need not bother to apply. This club is as restricted as a southern country club in the 1950s, only here the prejudice goes proudly the other way and is justified by a new pseudo-social science that touts equity not equality, and historical revisionism that borders on the fictional/fantastic. Much of the new academic gobbledygook is perforce written in a new academic language — opaque and impenetrable, replete with neologisms, older words that are repurposed in ways that make no sense to the ordinary mortal, and other conventional terms that are simply banned from usage. It’s the verbal equivalent of removing a fistful of characters from the keyboard and yet claiming coherence, exclusively from peers of course. Outsiders need not bother trying to decode the emperor’s new scholarship.

The world of Torah scholarship is a study in similarities and contrasts with that of academia.

For openers never before has there been such a huge cohort of students majoring, if you will, in Torah. Torah for our discussion means Talmud, as Talmud is the subject being studied virtually to the exclusion of all else, including TaNaKh. This, of course, is absurd, since Talmud is at its very basis an exegetical exercise that seeks to derive practical Jewish law from textual allusions in Scripture.

Where admission standards to most US colleges are dismal, those for yeshivas are pretty much nonexistent. Of course there are a handful of academies, much like America’s top tier universities, that are somewhat selective. And in these, too, acceptance is based on a careful, self-serving balance between capable, capital and color. I am sure Jared Kushner’s daddy could have greased his son’s way into Brisk just as easily as he did at Harvard, and for a great deal less.

But the reality is, anyone who wishes to be enrolled in one of the many yeshivas, especially in Israel, will find a welcome somewhere.   Once past the entrance gate, it’s pretty smooth sailing. Unlike universities there are really no tests, no grades, no yardsticks or milestones. Even attendance can be spotty.

Nevertheless, in common with the academy, the yeshivas have an agenda. Here the agenda is not so much to produce alumni who go out into the world spreading their professors’ woke gospel. Rather it is to maintain an iron grip on the students, many of whom are lifers, and to impose an agenda whereby learning Torah in a Kollel (the equivalent to graduate school, only it is open-ended and perpetual) is a profession (Toratam umanutam), one that justifies an unprecedented dependence on the sweat and largesse of others.

For an avreich the sources of revenue begin with one’s father-in-law who may be expected to finance the young couple and establish them in their own new home. The expectation of a significant dowry is often a sine qua non before a young man will even consider a prospective shidduch (match).

In America this frequently means the starter home in Lakewood remains fictionally in the name of the in-laws, while the young couple ‘rents’ the domicile with Section 8 government funds.

In Israel such an all-out gift of a home is less common, but not less sought. Orthodox communities in America are besieged by a never-ending cavalcade of Haredi schnorrers from Israel in quest of contributions for a needy “kallah” (bride), typically, but unsaid, the daughter of the mendicant himself.

I was once studying with a hevruta in a Haredi shtiebel in Shaarei Chessed. We were alone in the building. A young man in full yeshivish regalia – black Boraslino, starched white shirt, fine necktie, black suit – interrupted our learning. He was seeking money to help his father who was in dire straits. Naturally we assumed there was some medical crisis, else why would a Haredi young man, exempt from the army, on government stipend, who was supposed to be in his kollel learning Torah, be out and about schnorring?

At that time neither I nor my study partner owned, or could afford to own, an apartment in Jerusalem. As it turned out the young mendicant’s daddy had been made to promise a new apartment for his daughter and her husband to be. Only he lacked the funds and had to send his son out to cadge money from others. If he didn’t come through with the flat, the shidduch would be canceled.

In both Israel and America, the wife becomes the primary breadwinner. In Israel, her income is supplemented by the government which, because of the ever-growing power of the Haredi bloc vote, is forced to fork over billions in direct aid, discounts on taxes, and free benefits to avreichim and their families.

As in the world of academia, once upon a time there were Torah scholars who knew it all. In fact, not only did they know all there was to know of Torah at that time, they were also pretty keyed into such universal disciplines as mathematics, astronomy, and medicine – which many of them practiced. However, aside from the Torah and Scriptures, and Talmud and Aggadah, the religious literature was sparse. The job of a scholar was to know what there was to know, and to be able to answer questions in Jewish law and adjudicate disputes between Jewish litigants in accordance with Jewish law.

But that was then and this is now.

With the invention of the printing press began an avalanche of available new Torah scholarship and the proliferation of fresh works in every conceivable aspect of Torah learning from novel commentaries on the Bible to handy codes of Jewish law that presumed to feature the totality of halakha and observance. One need only look something up and the answer would be there in black and white.

The earlier masters of Torah were indeed Judaism’s renaissance men, often admired for their erudition, wisdom and an acuity far beyond the limited playing field of the Bet Midrash, indeed even beyond the walls that set the Jewish communities apart in both Christian and Muslim countries. In most cases these scholars had ‘shimush’, they were out in the world themselves, engaged in commerce and agriculture and very much aware of the reality being lived by others. In other words, they actually worked for a living. Maimonides was a physician. He declared – as a matter of halakha – that it is forbidden to earn one’s keep through Torah and that those who do “end up embezzling the public”. Prescient words, if not prophetic.

Jewish communities continued to be blessed with rabbinic renaissance men – the elect few who towered head and shoulders above the laity, certainly into the 18^th century.

Back then, a thorough yeshiva education was hardly de rigeur. Those who dedicated their lives to scholarship and rabbinics were a small cohort comprising the elite. They often merited a well-insulated lifestyle thanks to advantageous marriages to the daughters of the wealthy. Apparently, the material expectations of young Torah scholars have not diminished, only their quality has.

If Jews venerated their rabbis it was because the rabbis earned that veneration through a combination of scholarship, sensitivity, and relevance. And because the community had not yet evolved to the point of producing masses of young men who were just learned enough to be dangerous. As well, communities back then would refuse to put up with a draconian rabbi who was insensitive to the Quotidian reality of the laity.

Halakhic decisors as recently as World War II and even slightly beyond, were men who were very much involved as community rabbis, who understood people and their needs, who were attuned to the reality with which the layman had to contend, and who could make halakhic decisions that were not in the abstract or hypothetical, but, rather, consistent with the idea of “derakheha darkhei noam” i.e., the ways of the Torah are pleasant rather than letter-of-the-law stringent.

As in the secular academy, the proliferation of Torah publications, and the concomitant disappearance of the Torah renaissance man, well predates the post War era. Yet it wasn’t until after the Shoah that a new so-called “Torah Judaism” emerged that changed everything and, bizarrely, claimed to revert to a pre-war European authenticity that had never really existed. The new Judaism is identified by the black hat – something that was unknown in the yeshiva world before the early 1970s.

This new yiddishkeit declared that full-time Torah study was for every man. That learning the laws of damages and torts – the erstwhile domain of sages, scholars and rabbinic court judges – should be the primer prose of any boy born into a frum household. Indeed, there was no reason to bar any boy from spending years, if not his entire lifetime, sitting and learning. Where at one time a few hundred exceptional young men engaged – for a number of years – in full-time Torah study, now it was fashionable for anyone, however meager his gift, to turn Torah into his craft, ostensibly hovering over a pile of Talmudic tomes from morning to night.

This is very much akin to open admissions, or virtual open admissions, that make higher education available to anyone. The flip side, of course is that what passes for higher education becomes invariably and increasingly diminished.

Imagine if it were determined that every boy born within a mile of Lincoln Center should become a violinist regardless of their talent. Absurd? Of course. There would hordes of useless violinists scratching away. Compared to serious Talmud study, violin is child’s play.

The yeshiva and the academy have something even more significant in common. Both succeed in imposing their ideas and values on a larger society by people who actually have no meaningful connection to real life, secular or sacred. They are utterly lacking in the ‘shimush’ that might temper and leaven their thinking with a measure of reality, compassion, empathy and plain old common sense.

The yeshiva replaced the synagogue as the anchor of all Orthodox Jewish life, and the rosh yeshiva replaced the reality-anchored community rabbi as the address for all halakhic decision-making. The world of halakhic abstraction, in which only the letter of the law mattered, replaced the one of halakhic relevance in which the spirit took pride of place over minutiae, indeed of minutiae that would never have been noticed or cared about in earlier times.

The boring footnote of the PhD student has become the blaring, if hardly more noteworthy and interesting, headline in latter day Orthodoxy.

I have my opinions regarding who benefits from tens of thousands of unemployed men learning Torah. In fact, I often wonder what exactly are they learning, and what is the collective oeuvre – the summum bonum – of all that Torah scholarship, assuming even that all those men are actually engaged in serious study, and not merely grinding air and water when not busy wandering about with their cellphones and cigarettes evading the army and avoiding plain old-fashioned work, the kind we are told to do six days a week in, yes, the Torah, the Ten Commandments to be precise.

One might reasonably expect – at least here and there – for something wonderful to emerge, something inspiring, elevating, indeed life-altering. Unless, of course, there really is little or nothing new to be said. After all, the Torah is inalterable. Talmud was (unfortunately) canonized in the 6^th century, frozen onto paper and no longer the open-ended, organic, ever-evolving conversation that was never meant to become ossified. Halakha was codified in the Shulhan Arukh by Josef Karo in 1565. And the relevant, heartfelt, sensitive responsa of generations of wonderful, community-anchored sages have long been an accessible legacy thanks to a man named Gutenberg.

And yet … and yet … surely there must be something new to be said, some novel interpretation, some advance in our understanding of Torah. After all, if previous generations with far fewer tools at their fingertips, and vastly fewer men dedicated to Torah scholarship, could produce such works of genius, surely – SURELY – tens of thousands of men in Lakewood and Jerusalem and Bnei Brak should yield a harvest of at least … SOMETHING?

As a 7 year old, I was intrigued by a book from the public library about a town which had a single factory with an amazing machine that worked magnificently and which employed the entire populace. All the men and women labored diligently to make sure the contraption didn’t falter. This machine was truly something to behold except that it produced absolutely NOTHING!

Could today’s world of yeshivas be the Torah equivalent of that community? For here we have, ostensibly, thousands of minds engaged in the study of Talmud and willfully disengaged from every normative activity, eschewing in principle any worldly knowledge including mathematics and astronomy (without which the Jewish calendar and the timing of ritual observances would be impossible) – let alone any science that might yield an actual doctor and not merely a patient who knows how to track down the best doctors when he is in need of medical help.

And yet, and yet, one is hard put to detect any Torah harvest that benefits the community and enriches our spiritual life.

But there is a yield nevertheless. A yield of micro minutiae, especially pertaining to the ‘shalt-nots’ of Shabbat. It can seem as if the net product of this entire system is an ever-growing crop of new halakhic evidence that out parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents and all the wonderful rabbis who guided them were all TO A MAN/WOMAN unwitting ‘mekosheshei eitzim’ hewers of wood, violating the laws of Shabbat, and therefor inadvertently guilty of performing labors that – if performed knowingly – would qualify one for being stoned to death at the nearest Beth Din.

Allow me to provide three examples by way of actual stories with which I am personally familiar. I will preface by saying, that in principle, it is permissible to open food or beverage packaging on Shabbat in order to gain access to comestibles that will be consumed on the Sabbath.

1.The Tuna Fish Can

My (at the time) teenage daughter spent Shabbat at the home of a nice yeshivish family. The father was a yeshiva rebbe and rabbi of a frum congregation. His six sons were at various stages in their evolution as future Lakewood men.

It was during the seudah shleesheet (aka shaleshudess) the third meal of the Sabbath, when the call came from the men and boys for a fresh can of tuna fish.

Good girl that she was, my daughter immediately emerged from the kitchen having opened the can of tuna fish as her father would have done, and her sainted and scholarly grandfather, and his father, and every family progenitor going back to the invention of the vacuum can would have done. She had taken a simple can opener and yes, cranked open the can.

The reaction when she placed the open can on the shaleshudess table could not have been more shocked had she delivered a platter of shrimp. A chorus of horrified male voices; “OY OY NO NO THAT’S NOT HOW YOU OPEN TUNAFISH ON SHABBES!!!”.

Clearly my embarrassed, red-faced, totally mortified daughter was not au courant on the very latest in Shabbes no-no’s. Because somebody very diligent, somewhere in the bowels of the yeshiva world, had come to the conclusion that while opening a can of tuna is, in theory, permitted on Shabbes, the act of opening the can the normal way is IN EFFECT creating a new cup.

Apparently, the removal of the lid is what’s called makkeh b’patish (lit. a hammer’s blow) i.e. the final step in creating, voila, a new vessel. And creating a new cup (if you ever heard of even the most extreme environmentalist repurposing a tunafish can as a cup) is a prime violation of the laws of Shabbes. Hence, in order to avoid this capital offense while still accessing the tuna fish, one must FIRST puncture the bottom of the can with an awl or screwdriver, thereby obviating any possibility of said can enjoying resurrection as a cup. And even then, to only PARTIALLY open the top of the now oozing tuna can, and painstakingly pick out the fish with toothpicks or a fork or whatever utensil might be handy. Fortunately, there are women at hand to do this. One wouldn’t want one’s French cuffs or Italian necktie ruined by oozing canola oil.

In this instance, the can-opening was indeed the makkeh b’patish for my daughter’s Shabbat observance, the final blow to her connection to keeping Shabbat halakhically. Ever since, she has never again subjected herself to the possibility of such humiliation. But those cutting-edge (no pun intended) young halakhists certainly made their point. And, no doubt the quality of Sabbath observance among the Orthodox is immeasurably enriched thereby.

2. The Orange Juice Container 

Similar story, different outcome. I was whiling an enjoyable Shabbat afternoon at the home of friends in Riverdale, NY when one of the guests, a newly minted baalat teshuvah (returnee to Orthodoxy), quite fresh from the kosher koolaid kiddush, gushed about a halakha class for women given by a local, and highly regarded rabbi noted for his emphasis on, and expertise in, halakha.

This woman regaled us with breakthrough information as to how popping the screw cap on a container of orange juice on Shabbes is a transgression on a par with opening a can of tuna fish k’darko, the normal way.

Apparently, she informed us, the juice does not enter the carton through the aperture from which it is poured. Rather, the fresh fluid is poured in from the top which is then crimped shut. Hence the initial opening of the screwcap and pop tab creates a pitcher. Yes, the unscrewing of the cap and popping the tab is the makkeh b’patish that turns a garden-variety OJ container into a decanter. Who woulda thunk?

However, in this case our interlocutress was in awe over how Torah law is so particular that no detail escapes the eagle eyes of a Torah scholar who is really, truly dedicated to elevating our collective spirituality, and making religious Jewish life more appealing to the uninitiated.

Now, had the lady in question received this revelation by way of being embarrassed and lambasted at a shaleshudess table surrounded by black Borsalinos, her reaction might have been more mortification than edification. But no matter. If you have forgotten to pop the tab on your half gallon of Tropicana prior to lighting Shabbes candles, you may use a hacksaw to decapitate the entire container, or punch a hole in the bottom and let the contents run, hopefully into an existing pitcher. But, don’t EVER convert the container into a pitcher on Shabbes. You have now been warned.

3. The fly in the toilet

This third panel of my contemporary halakhic triptych is only tangentially related to food consumption or, rather, a byproduct thereof, if you will.

There exists a Haredi news site on the internet which provides three kinds of information. First, it lists who is sitting shiva and until when. It does not include any obituaries, merely the shiva goods; who is sitting, for whom they are sitting, until when they are sitting, and where they are sitting. Second, it ‘borrows’ relevant news items from mainstream media to help a Haredi audience be less ignorant than it would otherwise be. Third, it features a halakha-focused column by the most important rabbi you never heard of; always a bombastic showcase of his vast wealth of knowledge and sources. These essays are crafted in a flawless Yeshivish – a patois neither English nor Yiddish that renders his wisdom – like the lingo of contemporary academics – impenetrable to anyone who has not been blessed with at least 12 years of yeshiva education.

In one pre-Summer issue, the good rabbi graced the rasters with a powerful message alerting frum families about a terrible TERRIBLE sakanah (peril) in which they were about to find themselves,

He was focusing on the imminent decamping of religious families to the summer bungalow colonies in the Catskills where, unlike their homes in Boro Park, Flatbush and Lawrence, there would be no central air conditioning. Each room would have its own AC of course but … BUT … the bathroom invariably would not. And SINCE the window in the bathroom would be closed in with a screen, and SINCE any flies in said bungalow would gravitate to the more agreeable climate of the bathroom, there existed the very real possibility that upon finishing one’s business in the lavatory there might be a fly buzzing about in the bowl. And THIS is a real problem, one which makes the challenges of tuna fish and OJ seem positively quaint.

Because it is forbidden to kill anything on Shabbes, and quite possibly, by flushing the toilet the poor bug might meet its maker as a consequence.

Now our scholar in internet residence made it clear that killing a bug on Shabbes is only a rabbinic prohibition. The much graver Torah prohibition of killing on Shabbes applies only when said slaughter is of material or nutritional benefit to the one doing the killing. And he further divulged that in a case where not dispatching the winged nuisance would result in a situation that would disgust others, the coincidental murder of the fly by flushing the toilet might indeed be permissible.

But here is the conundrum: Who can make the halakhic determination as to whether leaving the toilet unflushed would in fact disgust any subsequent visitors to the loo? Hence in his Solomonic wisdom the resident sage of the website declared that IF there is another toilet in the house, the problematic facilities should undergo lockdown until Shabbes is over. And if there is NO other toilet in the house then one must go to the nearest Rov and have him pasken (rule) whether or not the lever may be depressed.

Only there is one problem; any contemporary Rov would be loath to pasken on his own. He would first have to call his Rosh Yeshiva. And it’s pretty much a given what the rosh yeshiva would say, “NO”.

Today’s academic scholars have an agenda, a neo-Marxist agenda. The goal – and they are succeeding – is to create a a woke, intersectional generation that rejects everything achieved and respected in the past. They desire a new world order which can be achieved through brainwashing and browbeating undergraduates over the course of four years.

Genuine scholarship is of little or no interest except as a means toward a socially-engineered ends. The formula for success includes the bowdlerizing of hallowed literature, the censorship of thought, the canceling of culture, embarrassing and punishing recalcitrant students, and, of course, deploying an impenetrable, gobbledygook language that is intended to intimidate rather than illuminate.

Yeshiva scholars are likewise in the business of mind control, but they are less interested in the minds of outsiders, and more concerned with shoring up their own human assets. This is achieved by churning out an endless flow of new humrot (stringencies) that keep outsiders out and insiders under the thumb of their rosh yeshivas; by pushing a birthrate designed to double their numbers in the foreseeable future; and by shaking down the tax-paying public for financial support by way of politicians who are forever eager to claim the ever-expanding bloc vote of hundreds of thousands of people who do exactly as they are told.

What is absent from both pictures is anything remotely resembling academic enlightenment, creative or spiritual expansiveness, or a quest for any kind of higher truth.