There’s a great quote from the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre:
Hell is other people.
If you are an antisocial introvert like me, you would interpret that the way Wally does:
And it would be understandable if Moshe felt the same way. פרשת בהעלותך is the beginning of the פורענות that will plague בני ישראל for the next 39 years:
יא:א ויהי העם כמתאננים רע באזני ה׳; וישמע ה׳ ויחר אפו ותבער בם אש ה׳ ותאכל בקצה המחנה׃
…יא:ד והאספסף אשר בקרבו התאוו תאוה; וישבו ויבכו גם בני ישראל ויאמרו מי יאכלנו בשר׃
…יא:יא ויאמר משה אל ה׳ למה הרעת לעבדך ולמה לא מצתי חן בעיניך; לשום את משא כל העם הזה עלי׃…יא:יד לא אוכל אנכי לבדי לשאת את כל העם הזה; כי כבד ממני׃ יא:טו ואם ככה את עשה לי הרגני נא הרג אם מצאתי חן בעיניך; ואל אראה ברעתי׃
…יא:כא ויאמר משה שש מאות אלף רגלי העם אשר אנכי בקרבו; ואתה אמרת בשר אתן להם ואכלו חדש ימים׃ יא:כב הצאן ובקר ישחט להם ומצא להם; אם את כל דגי הים יאסף להם ומצא להם׃
יא:כג ויאמר ה׳ אל משה היד ה׳ תקצר; עתה תראה היקרך דברי אם לא׃
…יא:כז וירץ הנער ויגד למשה ויאמר; אלדד ומידד מתנבאים במחנה׃ יא:כח ויען יהושע בן נון משרת משה מבחריו ויאמר; אדני משה כלאם׃
…יא:לג הבשר עודנו בין שניהם טרם יכרת; ואף ה׳ חרה בעם ויך ה׳ בעם מכה רבה מאד׃
…יב:א ותדבר מרים ואהרן במשה על אדות האשה הכשית אשר לקח; כי אשה כשית לקח׃ יב:ב ויאמרו הרק אך במשה דבר ה׳ הלא גם בנו דבר; וישמע ה׳׃
…יב:ט ויחר אף ה׳ בם וילך׃ יב:י והענן סר מעל האהל והנה מרים מצרעת כשלג; ויפן אהרן אל מרים והנה מצרעת׃…
יב:טו ותסגר מרים מחוץ למחנה שבעת ימים; והעם לא נסע עד האסף מרים׃
Of all those פורענות, which is the worst? The Torah says that we have to remember only one of them:
ח השמר בנגע הצרעת לשמר מאד ולעשות; ככל אשר יורו אתכם הכהנים הלוים כאשר צויתם תשמרו לעשות׃ ט זכור את אשר עשה ה׳ אלקיך למרים בדרך בצאתכם ממצרים׃
למרים: הנה ראיה על דרש אל תקרי מצורע אלא מוציא שם רע.
Miriam spoke לשון הרע, was punished with צרעת, and that is the sole lesson that we are supposed to learn from this week’s parsha. Why is gossip so bad?
This was inspired by an anonymous book review on Scott Alexander’s blog, Astral Codex Ten, of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The book talks about the origin of what we call civilization (from an academic, scientific epistemic perspective; we’ll look at this from a Torah point of view later). The question is, why did it take so long for human beings, who existed for hundreds of thousands of years, to develop civilization (and good things like indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and cat videos)?
[Note: the reviewer was later revealed to be neuroscientist Erik Hoel]
It’s really only in the Upper Paleolithic (12,000-5,000 BC) that there is any good evidence for what we would call civilization, with its associated lavish burials and monumental centers of ritual congregation and pilgrimage and trade networks and specialization of tribes toward certain industries, and it is only at this point that complex representation in art becomes essentially universal.
What was happening before then? Isn’t that the question we’re most interested in? The primal state of human nature? The vast majority of the Davids’ evidence throughout The Dawn of Everything comes from post-10,000 BC societies. And this is a problem, since even the Davids admit in the book that humans have been around for between 100,000 to 200,000 years.
The state of nature, in moral and political philosophy, religion, social contract theories and international law, is the hypothetical life of people before societies came into existence. Philosophers of the state of nature theory deduce that there must have been a time before organized societies existed, and this presumption thus raises questions such as: “What was life like before civil society?”
The classical answer is that of Thomas Hobbes: human beings were spending all their time killing each other, so progress was impossible.
Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war is of every man against every man…and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Only after (somehow) government is invented can things move forward:
Hobbes’s answer to the State of Nature is the immediate establishment of a Leviathan: a single sovereign with absolute political authority. The Leviathan is executive, legislature and judiciary, all rolled into one: he is where the buck stops. Hobbes supports dictatorship because he believes there is no viable alternative. Anything short of absolutism is prone to disintegrate back into anarchy: if the buck doesn’t stop somewhere, the branches of the state that claim a share of sovereignty are doomed to fight for overall control. And anything is better than an “earth… filled with violence”: even tyranny.
But there is little evidence (as Dawn points out) for the constant “war is of every man against every man”. There is no archeological evidence for constant murder. People lived long lives, died of old age. So the author of the review proposes another model, that gets back to what Sartre actually meant. Sartre was an existentialist, which meant that true human existence is more than the biological fact that we are alive, but that we need to create our own authentic identity for ourselves. But we don’t. Our identity is determined by what others think of us. We feel that we are in hell, says Sartre, because the judgment of other people keeps us from being our authentic selves.
The No Exit play by Sartre perfectly illustrates…the fact that others—and their gaze—is what alienates and locks me in a particular kind of being, which in turn deprives me of my freedom.
Anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (though not in these terms) points out that this is not hell at all. This is heaven. We are biologically driven to seek the approval of others. We get a dopamine rush every time someone likes our posts or retweets our memes. Dunbar says that we are fundamentally social primates, and that our social interactions consist in talking about others. We know our position in society because we know who likes us and who doesn’t. Other primates determine status by who grooms who. He claims language evolved so that we could gossip about each other, spreading the “who grooms who” status over larger groups. He talks about a limit to how many people you can have a relationship with—the Dunbar number, about 150—beyond which your brain can’t handle it and all this gossip-driven status breaks down.
So what does that have to do with the lack of civilization? The anonymous reviewer has a hypothesis: “The Gossip Trap”:
But perhaps small groups of humans less than the Dunbar number were organized by none of these [formal structures], since they didn’t need to be—instead, they could be organized via raw social power. That is, you don’t need a formal chief, nor an official council, nor laws or judges. You just need popular people and unpopular people.
After [all], who sits with who is something that comes incredibly naturally to humans—it is our point of greatest anxiety and subject to our constant management. This is extremely similar to the grooming hierarchies of primates, and, presumably, our hominid ancestors. So 50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else.
…A “Gossip Trap” is when…to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is Mean Girls (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years. Being in the Gossip Trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering. Again, much like high school.
The state of nature wasn’t constant violence and murder. It was constant bickering, gossiping—positive and negative—and human society was just another bunch of ape groups.
So how is that relevant to a Torah perspective? We have talked about the contrast between the two pictures of society that bookend פרשת נח: דור המבול and דור הפלגה.
דור הפלגה, the generation of the Tower of Babel, is the generation of Hobbes’s Leviathan.
ח וכוש ילד את נמרד; הוא החל להיות גבר בארץ׃ ט הוא היה גבר ציד לפני ה׳; על כן יאמר כנמרד גבור ציד לפני ה׳׃ י ותהי ראשית ממלכתו בבל וארך ואכד וכלנה בארץ שנער׃
ויהי כל הארץ שפה אחת ודברים אחדים׃
Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
Society could not improve because any dissention was punished by the state.
I would argue that the society of דור המבול was the anarchy of “the state of nature”, and it could not improve either. Any dissention was punished by society as a whole. The Gossip Trap meant that even a איש צדיק תמים…בדרתיו would have no influence on his generation.
הנפלים היו בארץ בימים ההם וגם אחרי כן אשר יבאו בני האלהים אל בנות האדם וילדו להם; המה הגברים אשר מעולם אנשי השם׃
Read אנשי השם as “the cool kids”.
The only way out of the Gossip Trap was to reset the entire world. And on a smaller scale, that is what we do to the מצורע/מוציא שם רע:
ותסגר מרים מחוץ למחנה שבעת ימים; והעם לא נסע עד האסף מרים׃
בבעא מיניה רבי שמואל בר נדב…מה נשתנה מצורע שאמרה תורה (ויקרא יג:מו) בָּדָד יֵשֵׁב מִחוּץ לַמַּחֲנֶה מוֹשָׁבוֹ? הוא הבדיל בין איש לאשתו בין איש לרעהו לפיכך אמרה תורה בדד ישב.
The review then turns to a frightening possibility:
After all, if we lived in a Gossip Trap for the majority of our existence as humans, then what would it be, mentally, to atavistically return to the gossip trap?
Well, it sure would look a lot like Twitter.
I’m serious. It would look a lot like Twitter. For it’s on social media that gossip and social hierarchies are unbounded, infinitely transmittable. An environment of raw social power, which, despite its endless reign of terror, actually feels kind of good? Wouldn’t we want to go back to forced instances of fission between human groups, exiling those we don’t like? Wouldn’t we punish crimes not with legal proceedings, but via massive social shamings?
The difference between the horror of crabs in a bucket and a human tribe or group living in a Gossip Trap is actually that the humans are generally quite happy down there in the bucket. It’s our natural environment. Most people like the trap. Oh, it’s terrible for the accused, the exiled, the uncool. But the gossip trap is comfortable. Homey. Of course we like it—it’s our innate evolved form of government.
Murder destroys an individual. Gossip destroys a civilization. That is why it is so important to זכור את אשר עשה ה׳ אלקיך למרים.