Sectarianism
Margalit, Avishai
IN THE GLOOMY days after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a delegation of intellectuals from the United States came to Jerusalem. There were no visitors in Israel at the time, and they were perhaps the...
...But coercion is not compromise...
...Some sectarians, especially on the left, believe that the masses are in principle on their side, but that they cannot as yet express themselves either because they are oppressed or because they are deluded by the manipulations of their exploiters...
...Can a Social Democrat be Sectarian, and Can Sectarianism Exist within Social Democracy...
...In an adverse environment the sectarian-like amoeba tends to become a cyst, closing itself totally to the outside world in order to stay alive...
...In general, the sectarian is for purging and splitting in order to retain the integrity of that which should be kept pure...
...The sectarians takes the worst features of the two pictures and end up viewing mistakes as sins that do not call for compassion...
...The question whether the settlers are on the whole sectorialists or sectarians is of vital political importance for the future...
...Freud famously coined the expression "the narcissism of small differences," a particularly felicitous expression to describe the cast of mind of the sectarian...
...This bore very little relation to daily kibbutz life...
...One thing we do know: violent sectarians in Israel are politically relevant...
...The sector I belonged to was the labor movement...
...Their basic attitude was that compromise is always a fundamental betrayal of a principle...
...Exchange highlights the idea that everything in the market can be substituted...
...Historically, the social democratic attitude was tricky...
...Shit is the negation of the pure...
...Will the settlers opt for civil war, fighting the decision by force, or will they just protest loudly...
...The number of ritual baths in the arid compound of the Essenes near the Dead Sea is staggering...
...Politics as religion is a framework for giving meaning to people's lives, which goes far beyond maximizing utilities...
...friends of many years found that they could not live together after disagreeing on their attitude to Russia...
...For one thing, the identity of the Canadian hinges on such differences, and identity is no minor matter...
...This was 40 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 SECTARIANISM more than enough to create a split around which two artistic sects were created: Elementalism, as van Doesburg called his diagonal approach, and Neo-Plasticism, as Mondrian called his approach...
...at the end of the day this is a permanent war...
...If the differences are objectively minor there is very little room for compromise, because there is not enough difference to split the difference...
...It was Trotsky, I believe, who coined the expression rotten compromise: "A compromise is necessary, but not one that is rotten...
...At the time of the evacuation of the Gaza Strip, the sectorialists had the upper hand...
...This is the Islamic notion of fitna (internal strife) within the umma (the community of believers...
...You do not compromise for the sake of political recruitment, because political recruitment is unimportant when numbers do not count...
...Thucydides was perhaps the first to try to give an account of the conditions for a civil war...
...But in times of crisis brought about by weak and corrupt governments, sectorial movements may turn into sectarian movements...
...I am interested in what I shall call practical Manichaeism, namely, viewing the world as in fact being divided between the good "us" and the evil "them"—the axis of evil, if you like...
...In the capitalist system, more than in any other system in the past, there is a relatively clear separation between the domain of the market and the domain of politics in the narrow sense of controlling violence by making and enforcing laws and conducting wars...
...The organic picture of politics is an influential myth of the religious picture: the idea that the church is the body of Christ (Corpus Christi) is an expression of this idea...
...Besides, the Labor Party is part of the problem—not the solution...
...In a time of business as usual, the economic picture has the upper hand...
...The idea of two states has become an Israeli consensus, something that many Israelis say in public, but not enough Israelis believe in private...
...In the economic picture...
...The ark was a refuge for a large number of creatures, not just for Noah's DISSENT / Winter 2008 • 39 SECTARIANISM nuclear family...
...This, they believed, would enable the social democrats to retain their long-term commitment to radical change...
...Those were my words, or almost...
...This does not mean that sectarians are necessarily religious...
...What counts as orthodoxy and what counts as heresy, much like what counts as language and what counts as dialect, depends on who is in power, but it also depends on numbers...
...Thus, a division of labor was created between the short-term goal of improving working conditions, which called for a great many compromises, and the long-term goal of creating a socialist society, which left no room for compromise apart from the commitment to do it by democratic means...
...This is basically Hobbes's picture, according to which civil war is due to total mistrust...
...our neighborhood, our dress, indeed all our outfits were sectorial...
...But then no political entity is really organic...
...Political mistakes are not grounds for banishment, ostracism, or denunciation, and only in extreme cases are they grounds for a split...
...It is essential to religious sects to administer restrictive practices and taboos...
...What Thucydides found so horrendous and puzzling about civil war is the bitterness with which it is fought...
...The school of thought called "Law and Economics," advocating the subjugation of violence (legal and illegal) to the logic of the market, is a clear manifestation of this tendency...
...They conveniently accepted Marx's mistaken prognosis that under capitalism the middle class was certain to disappear...
...By Hobbes's account the sovereign can be as bad as Saddam Hussein, but as long as he guarantees freedom from civil war, the greatest evil, his rule is justified...
...But outsiders can still be of instrumental value to the sect...
...According to the remnant approach, only a few will survive the cataclysmic events in store for humanity, and the future of the world always hangs on these few...
...So sectorialists and sectarians alike believe that if they convey to the rest of the country that they are ready to fight against their evacuation, the majority of Jews in Israel will refrain from confronting them...
...One way of dealing with the gap is by denying the importance of numbers...
...you are not...
...achievements come after...
...Movements like the Palestinian Hamas, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Israeli Sephardic Shas are sectorial movements rather than sectarian movements...
...If numbers don't count, then the dilution of one's cause through compromise debases the cause...
...They joined for lots of reasons, but the most compelling was that they had to compromise with the middle class because their own class base was shrinking...
...Sharing what for Hindus is the birthplace of Rama and for Muslims is the Mosque of Babur is mixing categories, much as is the case with Jews and Muslims sharing what for Jews is the Temple Mount and for Muslims the Noble Sanctuary...
...But Howe presented the perspective of a social democrat—one who is committed to democracy...
...their working-class base became too narrow to win elections...
...Why don't you join the Labor Party and change it from within...
...It says that politics is as much about sacrifice as about satisfaction...
...The sectarian believes that the heresy of today is the orthodoxy of tomorrow...
...My interest in the sectarian cast of mind is general...
...According to the economic picture of politics, one has to pay for the mistakes one commits...
...They may be coerced to share public space with others...
...But there are also pernicious effects of the idea of purity, as in the idea of racial purity...
...His latest book, with Ian Baruma, is Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies...
...It appeals not to satisfaction ("what your country can do for you") but to sacrifice ("what you can do for your country...
...Among Muslims, especially Sunni, Islamic fitna is the ultimate religious horror: it is viewed as sectarianism gone wild...
...When the chips are down, humanity can be saved by a very small number of people...
...For with alternatives, errors creep in...
...Back to Howe: we are still left with a nagging question, indeed with two nagging questions, which I shall now address...
...Purity The Dead Sea sect is paradigmatic in its obsession with ritual purity...
...It is not a literary genre...
...Most of us see both pictures of politics...
...the school I went to belonged to our sector...
...The idea of scarcity is very different from the religious idea of sacredness, for the sacred has no alternative uses...
...Both the sectarians and the sectorialists deal with the world on a wholesale basis...
...the big army advances later...
...46 n DISSENT / Winter 2008...
...How do sects account for the gap between the smallness of their numbers and the immensity of their ambitions...
...In any case, sectorial movements feel responsible for their constituency, making them all the more in need of compromises that go against their deepest instincts...
...My claim is that historically social democracy started as a sectorialist movement...
...They do not hold that one heroic creature can take the whole weight of the world on his shoulder, but they come close to this...
...Social democrats, in contrast to revolutionary socialists, believed that in the long run they were bound to win elections, and even to win overwhelmingly...
...As I write these lines, I find an article by James C. Dobson in the New York Times of October 4, 2007, entitled "The Value Test...
...The labor sector, however, was dominant...
...If an interstate war's median duration is less than three months, a civil war's median duration is about six years...
...I believe that one can develop a sectarian cast of mind in one situation, and have an open mind in another...
...He forced Menachem Begin's party and the General Zionist Party to form an election bloc—the bloc that later succeeded in bringing Begin to power...
...I replied, "Don't judge our situation by the American two-party system...
...The sectarians are always on guard...
...separate form of life, untainted by bourgeois characteristics...
...Sectarian politics is a terrible waste...
...For a while it looked that way...
...So, along with Sharon, I found myself released from active service heading from the Suez Canal back to Israel proper...
...The internal strife he had in mind as a model for all civil wars was an event in the fourth year of the Peloponnesian war (427 B.C.E...
...My short answer to the first question is, No...
...Politically correct puritans today are worried about cursing minorities...
...Irving Howe declared sectarianism a waste...
...For example, as Thomas Schelling reminds us, it is a taboo on the use of nuclear weapons that has protected us so far from their use—the taboo rather than utilitarian calculations of profit and loss...
...The state of mind is that of keeping your principled position uncompromised, come what may...
...Sectarian Manichaeism may, however, take a milder form...
...Authority is replaced by the relative bargaining power of the participants and the ability to enforce agreements...
...Those were the Golda Meir days...
...It consisted of mutual slaughter, of despicable acts of betrayal, of defilement of religious sanctuaries, of utter lawlessness...
...And sectorialism, which historically and conceptually was compatible with social democracy, is no longer a viable option...
...A Sectarian War Since the Second World War there have been five times more civil wars than wars between states...
...The notion of scarcity is another important element in the economic picture, for economics is about wanting things that are in limited quantity...
...This is one of the reasons why civil wars are so bitter in comparison to wars between states...
...He added an amendment to his commandment: "It is all right for you to come up with a periodical to air your views in an undiluted form...
...Politics informed by ideology is a clash of interpretations about what constitutes the collective good, in accordance with which individuals can make sense of their lives...
...the youth movement, the sports clubs, our songs and holidays were shaped by the sector...
...The sectarian behaves like a social amoeba: even when there is only one cell it manages to split...
...In order that a future majority might form around the heresy of the sectarians and make it the orthodoxy of tomorrow, the message must not be dimmed by any compromise...
...There were two brothers from Betar who deserved to be on the team but they had to substitute for one another because their sector was allocated only one player...
...My name is Michael Walzer...
...On the day I arrived home in Jerusalem, I was assigned to meet that delegation from the United States at the King David Hotel, in order to present to them the ideas of our Moked Party, as other parties presented theirs...
...Yet I sensed that Irving had said something disturbingly important...
...The sectarian views every facet of his or her position as sacred and refuses to compromise on anything...
...Then, if memory serves, Irving said to me, "I agree with a great deal of what you said...
...They turn every venal mistake into a mortal one...
...Then, the punch line came...
...The test case is what the settlers will do if there is a government decision, backed by a parliamentary majority, to evacuate the settlements—all or most of them—within the framework of an agreement with the Palestinians...
...This sect has its origin in the first Islamic civil war over who should lead the Muslim community after the death of the Prophet Muhammad...
...Irving Howe described himself as such a case...
...Is it one nature—the Monophysite Green team— or is it two natures—the Chalcedonian Blue team...
...AVISHAT MARGALIT is a founder of Peace Now, a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and currently holds the George F. Kennan chair at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J...
...The crucial battle, Armageddon, will take place only at the end of days...
...instead of bundles of goods, it provides a bundle of interpretations of the good life...
...The working class shrank in the developed countries, and social democratic parties became more and more divorced from their workingclass base as they sought support elsewhere...
...A closed society can be closed by the yoke of tradition, by the policeman's stick, by the sectarian cast of mind, or by a combination of all of these...
...There was the civil sector, which my parents called the bourgeois sector, and there were the religious sector and the ultrareligious sector...
...The split went through families...
...But the general attitude of sectarians is undemocratic on several counts: in their elitist attitude to outsiders, in their hostile attitude to compromise, and in their disregard of numbers...
...The third caliph, Uthman, was murdered, and a bitter struggle for succession took place between Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the prophet, and Muawiyah, the cousin of the murdered caliph...
...John F. Kennedy's celebrated line, "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country," expresses the religious picture of politics...
...He thought that van Doesburg, in his act of diagonal hubris, was responsible for destroying the cosmic order, knocking it off its delicate balance...
...The economic picture of politics tries to encroach into the domain of traditional politics by treating it more and more in economic terms...
...Their attitude can be more complicated than disregard...
...This commitment calls for some compromises that the sectorialist would grudgingly accept but the sectarian would reject...
...Sectorialists, unlike sectarians, care for numbers...
...They share Thucydides's view of the causes for the current fitna, namely, the Israeli external war against the Palestinians, but the internal strife is viewed by both sides as fitna, each side blaming the other for bringing about this religious sin...
...Numbers are unimportant...
...I take the story of the split between Mondrian and van Doesburg as a parable for sectarianism and its concern with minor differences...
...Thus, for example, the German SPD grew from 120,000 votes in 1875 to 4,250,000 on the eve of World War 1. By 1890, it was already the largest party in Germany.* So the belief that socialism would be established by democratic means had some basis...
...We knew almost all our voters by name...
...Everything in the market is in principle subject to bargaining...
...Sectarians are indeed obsessed with purity, be it ritual cleanliness, innocent freedom from evil and guilt, chastity, the purity of doctrine, or even purity of language...
...Partial, because we cannot tell whether they are effective as sectarians, cut off from mainstream Israeli society, or whether they are effective as sectorialists...
...The arbitration was not meant to be about who was the legitimate caliph, but it turned out that way...
...The revolutionary party monopolizes all the values...
...I shall come to civil wars later...
...If by waste he meant that it was ineffective, he was wrong...
...The current Palestinian fitna is accompanied by a parallel fear of civil war among Jews in Israel, if a compromise with the Palestinians is reached...
...The sectarian craves life without shit...
...Everything is negotiable...
...Moral ambush is the hallmark of the sectarian, who incessantly looks for signs of deviations, of not having the correct view about everything...
...But what is sacred for different religions should also be kept apart...
...We have a stereoscopic political perception, recognizing that some aspects of politics are better covered by the first picture, while other aspects are better covered by the second...
...But in economics the idea of scarcity is closely tied to the idea that scarce resources have alternative uses...
...No compromise, no coalition...
...Again, I cannot vouch for the exact words, but this was the spirit of what he said...
...It has a strong sense of dualism—between the realm of light and goodness (us) and the realm of darkness and evil (them...
...The restrictions are meant to protect the Divine from human pollution and to protect humans from the dangerous presence of the Divine...
...Secular Jews in the eyes of most ultraorthodox sectarians have no values whatsoever...
...Freud applied the narcissism of small differences to groups and not only to individuals...
...Fraternal War The ideological Jewish settlers in the occupied territories are vacillating between two positions: sectorialism and sectarianism...
...Similarly, in an army operation the unit that reconnoiters the way is a small one...
...The religious idea of purity and taboo invades politics, sometimes to good effect...
...A healthy organism lives in harmony...
...Trotsky still believed that he knew the distinction between compromise and rotten compromise, but sectarians believe that this is a distinction without merit...
...Sectorialism stopped being an option for social democrats...
...I should qualify my hasty claim that sectarians disregard numbers...
...There is no twilight zone, no room for compromise: it is "either/or...
...No agreements or deals can hold water in a case of total mistrust, and it is rational for those situated in such a jungle to count on themselves and themselves alone...
...There was a heretical sect that prospered in the Roman part of North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Donatists...
...If I may be forgiven the anachronism, Thucydides would have found the American war in Iraq as the main cause of the civil war there...
...Social democrats joined bourgeois politics with the belief that it would be possible, in the short run, to improve the conditions of the working class by political means and, in the long run, to bring about socialism with ballots rather than bullets...
...In contrast, the religious picture of politics is a dramatic one...
...Worried that Sharon would stir things up in the army, the government ordered that anyone who was listed on a party's slate be immediately released from service for the duration of the election campaign...
...In all the years since, I have been haunted by his commandment: Thou shalt not be sectarian...
...An open society has an intrinsic relation to the idea of alternatives...
...A civil war within the community of believers is a terrible religious sin...
...I remember with horror the split in the kibbutz movement in the 1950s over the question of what should be the attitude to Soviet Russia...
...The current effort to reach an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is threatened by the Palestinian fitna, where Hamas may veto an agreement with Israel, and the Israeli fear of fraternal war, where the settlers may veto an agreement...
...Mistakes are cognitive failures, not moral failures...
...But why do you promote a party that has no chance of winning elections...
...These sectarians maintain that they are a minority, but only temporarily...
...Dobson writes, "The other approach which I find problematic is to choose a candidate according to the likelihood of electoral success or failure...
...What about the social democrat's attitude to compromise...
...Those wars are very bitter...
...The relation between the narcissism of small differences and the negative attitude to compromise is straightforward...
...the quality of the people, their holiness, is all that counts...
...Compromise is part and parcel of the shitty world...
...What is important is whether the sides to the conflict are in the grip of the religious picture of politics...
...Manichaeism The sectarian mind tends to be Manichaean...
...If Muslims view with horror the first Islamic fitna, Jews view with horror the internal war waged by their zealots while under Roman siege...
...The economics I have in mind is the market economy, otherwise known as capitalism...
...We can find a good historical example of the extreme sectarian rejection of compromise among the Khawarij ("those who go outside...
...Can a social democrat be sectorialist...
...Noah's ark is an expression of the remnant approach...
...This article is adapted and expanded from the Irving Howe Memorial Lecture delivered at the Center for the Humanities of the City University of New York in October 2007...
...Our system of proportional representation, with governments based on coalitions, gives a great deal of weight to small parties...
...A small group can indeed, like Atlas, keep the sky from falling...
...The administration of the holy is very much on the religious sectarian mind...
...The point was made by Seymour Martin Lipset that certain differences viewed as minor from the perspective of the United States are not regarded as minor by Canadians...
...But mistakes are not transgressions of higher commands (of God or history...
...They objected to accepting the authority of priests who, during a time of persecution, handed over holy books to the Roman authorities, who burned them...
...It is always caught in a war between light and darkness—not mere war...
...In the event, we got one seat in the Knesset, out of 120...
...But such an alliance is tentative and is opposed within the party by its more sectarian members, who are strictly Manichaean—like those leftists, for example, those who believed that there was no real difference between the Social Democrats of the Weimar Republic and the Nazis...
...We are not permitted to use their light but only to look at them in order to express thanks and praise your great name...
...Thucydides's main observation is that civil war usually takes place in the context of an external war, like the Peloponnesian war...
...The sectorialists will protest but not fight...
...It is obvious that the ideal type of a social democrat (say a composed picture of Hjalmar Branting of Sweden, Jean Jaures of France, and Hugh Gaitskell of Britain) is a negation of the sectarian mind in all its features: the elitist disregard of numbers, the Manichaean vision of the world, the narcissism of minor differences— and I shall add here one more distinctive feature: the attitude toward mistakes...
...Thus, ideologically informed politics is under the sway of the religious picture...
...Pre-state Israel was sectorial through and through, and so was Israel in its 42 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 SECTARIANISM early days...
...This concept vitiates the economic idea that politics is merely about the satisfaction of wants...
...We call a war sectarian if and only if there is a religious di'See James D. Fearon and David Laitin, Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War, 2002...
...Manichaeism in all its forms was taken as a heretical view, undermining the idea of God as the creator of all there is...
...Ariel Sharon, the commander of my unit in that war, was at the time the great unifier of the right...
...There is no safety in numbers...
...At their peak, social democratic parties moved on a fast sectorial track...
...Seventeenth-century Puritans were worried about cursing God...
...The creed of the sect is heresy...
...until then war is continuous...
...This slogan tells it all...
...It is a war of all against all and only an external sovereign can free the protagonists from the horrors of civil war...
...They are constantly spying on their sectarian comrades to see who is going to betray the cause and join the children of darkness...
...Sectarianism is the tendency to inflate a minor disagreement over beliefs or practices into the impossibility of living together...
...nothing is valued intrinsically but only relative to other exchangeable products...
...Sectarianism is a disposition to view any compromise as a rotten compromise...
...Against all army regulations, Sharon started campaigning for this bloc while still in uniform...
...Viewing differences as minor is not a symmetrical relation...
...The sectarian claims a monopoly on all values...
...Polls don't measure right or wrong: voting according to the possibility of winning and losing can lead directly to the compromise of one's principles...
...Its main stress is on the production of goods and services that can be bought and sold...
...The categories most in need of being kept apart are the sacred and the profane...
...I was on the slate of a leftist party called Moked...
...The economic picture of politics is a mundane one, very down to earth...
...It makes the cause not worth fighting for...
...The creed of the church, of the establishment in general, is orthodoxy...
...Sectorial society is based first and foremost on belonging...
...The religious picture is not the only picture for civil wars...
...Indeed, the Manichaean worldview does not divide the world simply between light and darkness but rather between blazing light and pitch darkness...
...All this changed utterly when social democratic parties joined bourgeois governments, either as the junior or the leading partner...
...They needed, and need, allies among the middle class, which means the end of the sectorialist option...
...To outsiders the difference between horizontal Mondrians and diagonal van Doesburgs looks minor...
...The idea of the sacred—at least in monotheistic religions—describes what is indivisible and hence not subject to compromise...
...But the West Bank is not Gaza, and among the young ideological settlers the sectarian zealots seem to be gaining momentum...
...The ice has melted since then...
...The names rang a huge bell...
...They and the unions would create within the bourgeois state a *See Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Democracy, 1986...
...Every sectarian war is a civil war, but not every civil war is a sectarian war...
...Purity is based not so much on the idea of putting things in their proper place as on the fear of mixing categories...
...In their heyday, social democratic parties, expanded phenomenally...
...This brings us to a related feature of the Manichaean worldview, the obsession with purity...
...Sects can be internally democratic, their members strongly believing in equality among the initiated...
...And what are these beads...
...there is little room for compassion toward the mistaken ones, but there is also little inclination to view them as transgressors of the higher law...
...The working class would swell numerically, while capitalist numbers would shrink to insignificance...
...I was surprised and impressed...
...With the picture of politics as religion comes the view that a mistake in politics is a sin and not just a cognitive failure...
...There is more to the sectarian cast of mind than just a negative attitude to compromise, but I believe that the refusal to compromise is its main feature...
...I have in mind Paulicianism in Armenia and Anatolia between the seventh and ninth centuries, Bogomilism in Bulgaria from the tenth century until much later, and Catharism in the Languedoc region of France between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries...
...Many Palestinians regard the current split in the Palestinian community between Hamas and Fatah as a case of tragic fitna...
...when the Blues and the Greens were not just two competing teams but two package deals...
...The ideal of social democracy is an open society, where alternative forms of life are not DISSENT / Winter 2008 n 4 5 SECTARIANISM only tolerated but appreciated, even when they are regarded as partially mistaken...
...This refusal to compromise is the string on which the beads of sectarianism are strung...
...Although the religious picture holds that politics is not conducted in the spirit of compromise, nevertheless it does not preclude compromise on things that are not sacred...
...In democracy numbers count and are counted...
...Each candidate should pledge to respect the sanctity of human life, in other words, take a firm anti-abortion stand...
...One picture is politics as economics...
...How does it compare to sectarian hostility...
...Both sides to the polemics agreed that Noah's ark was an apt allegory of the church under siege...
...The sectarian takes from the religious picture the idea of sinful error but he is not attuned to an idea that goes with it, namely, human vulnerability...
...One powerful idea associated with the notion of the holy is that of being subject to restrictions...
...The sectarians are not worshipers of Atlas...
...The first Islamic civil war that brought about the split between Shia and Sunna counts as the first and the great fitna...
...The quality of the supporters was never in doubt—it was the party of the left intelligentsia— but the numbers were very much in doubt...
...A closed society is a society in which there is no room for alternatives: be it forms of life, ideological views, or practical policies...
...When Jews pray over the Hanukkah candles they say, "These candles are holy...
...But they turned against him after the Battle of Siffin (657 C.E...
...and so were the theater, the cinema, and the restaurant...
...Attitude to Numbers Sects are usually small, their ambitions big, if not downright megalomaniac...
...They want nothing short of salvation of the world...
...There is no good value outside the sect...
...I was relatively young and absolutely angry, so I guess I gave the speech of an angry young man, believing then, as I do now, that it was Meir's government that brought upon us that horrendous war...
...It means, however, that the sides of the conflict identify themselves by the use of religious labels...
...The progressives are instrumentally valuable for their potential willingness to front for the party...
...An external war may put so much pressure on organic political units as to break them apart...
...The newspapers we read at home belonged to our sector...
...All the functions normally provided by a welfare state, such as health and education, were provided by sectors...
...Caring for numbers makes one susceptible to compromise...
...The political protagonists look more like gray-suited accountants than red-robed heroes or whitegowned saints...
...in Corcyra...
...Ceremony is reduced to advertising, something that is basically manipulative and wasteful...
...Sectarians do not feel the force of the need to compromise for the sake of keeping some form of shared life with those who disagree with them...
...From this perspective there are two questions to be addressed: Can a social democrat be sectarian...
...But it was sectorialist through and through...
...There were some stylistic variations within sectors due to their subdivisions, but these were all-encompassing forms of life...
...Nuclear weapons are taken as the ultimate polluter, and so they should be...
...He viewed civil war with the horror it deserves...
...Sectarianism in politics is an extreme case of viewing politics with one eye—the eye of politics as religion...
...Competing Pictures of Politics Our view of politics is shaped by two pictures, which are in tension...
...So are their manuals of purity...
...One of the Dead Sea scrolls is about the apocalyptic war "between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness...
...There is a redeeming feature in religious thought and sensibility about sinful error...
...The sectarian mind has a DISSENT / Winter 2008 • 41 SECTARIANISM siege mentality...
...But this transformation will happen by massive conversion, not by messy compromise...
...The Donatists, however, stressed the fact that Noah's ark held only eight human beings...
...On occasion the party forms a front with so-called "progressive elements" to gain power...
...But you should not form a party...
...Compromise is negotiating with those who are stained and thus it involves mixing categories...
...From my experience, the one thing you should avoid at all costs is becoming a sect...
...The mere mention of a Palestinian state was a heresy that guaranteed its adherents a place in the frozen lake of Dante's ninth circle...
...The sectarian mind, obsessed with purity, regards compromise as an act of pollution...
...Readiness to compromise is the first, the unfailing, sign of betrayal...
...Augustine, in contrast, stressed the idea that in the ark there were beasts too...
...It is hard to know the answer...
...But they may have instrumental value if their tax money is channeled to the ultraorthodox community...
...On the sectarian account, a mistaken sinner is not a fallen mortal but a fallen angel—a demon...
...In competing for the hearts and minds of the middle class, social democrats started speaking for "the nation" rather than for workers...
...When Irving Howe warned me against sectarianism, he was referring to the secular sects of the left, such as the Trotskyite sects he remembered from Alcove One at City College, rather than to those like the Dead Sea sect...
...They are committed to an overarching principle of living together, and they will shy away from using live ammunition in a confrontation with the majority...
...In short, every aspect of life was covered by the sector...
...This view varies, of course, from sect to sect...
...There is the politics as economics picture of civil war...
...Although the Dead Sea sect is a clear case of a sect, and its writings a clear case of heterodoxy, yet, Edna UllmannMargalit is right in arguing in her book Out of the Cave: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Dead Sea Scrolls Research that there is no clear church and no clear orthodoxy that the sect and its writings can be contrasted with...
...They believe that most Israelis who might support an agreement with the Palestinians will refrain from support if the price is internal strife...
...If no candidate among the Republicans meets the test, the evangelical groups will threaten to form a third party with a candidate who will make the pledge...
...It is not necessary to be religious in order to be sectarian— but it helps...
...Unfortunately, these short answers are distinctly unhelpful...
...Some of the outstanding sects were perhaps Manichaean in the literal sense: namely, those under the influence of the dualistic religion originated by the prophet Mani in the third century...
...This does not mean that a sectarian war is necessarily about religion...
...Let me tell you...
...It was based on some vague but strong sense of Jewish solidarity but, for most sectors, also on the unifying theme of Zionism: the creation of a national homeland for all Jews...
...On the other hand, he wouldn't have regarded Iraq as an "organic" political entity...
...Van Doesburg converted to Mondrian's way of doing art, becoming his friend and disciple...
...When there was a need to form a national soccer squad, the labor teams sent five Hapoel players, the civil sector sent five Maccabi players, and the ultranationalists sent one Betar player...
...Narcissism of Minor Differences Once upon a time there were two good friends, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg...
...Sectarianism is utterly incompatible with social democracy: for social democrats, sectarianism is not just "a waste" but the opposite of what they stand for...
...Sectorialists and sectarians alike want everyone to believe that they are ready for civil war so that the Israeli center will not hold...
...Mondrian, the elder of the two, took the lead...
...It is about a threshold test that evangelical groups, Dobson argues, should impose on candidates in the 2008 presidential election...
...No alternative use is allowed...
...They believe that the majority of Jews prefer that Jews fight Arabs rather than that Jews fight Jews...
...It was a tiny party...
...But there are people who lack stereoscopic vision—the 38 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 SECTARIANISM perception of depth that comes from the use of both eyes—and they look at the political world with one eye, and one eye only...
...In short, the holy "sanctity of life" is nonnegotiable, no matter what the numbers of voters tell us...
...So here is my conclusion...
...To Mondrian it looked like all the difference in the world...
...the Jewish settlers are a partial proof of that...
...The sectarians' disregard for numbers makes them unwilling to compromise...
...Sectarianism and Sectorialism I was raised in what Gadi Yatziv has called a sectorial society, a society divided into different sectors...
...The sectarian tends to regard the mistakes of his enemy as mortal sin...
...The package consisted of their views on, among other things, the nature of the Godhead...
...What is divisible can be subject to compromise...
...This is the war that the sectarians long to join...
...For the sectarian, compromise is a sellout, a capitulation, a betrayal of the cause...
...No one in the movement was allowed to say it out loud, because the working class regarded itself as a universal class standing for the liberation of humanity at large...
...According to the avant-garde approach, finding a new way in an unexplored terrain calls for a small vanguard of skilled and dedicated people who will show the way to the advancing masses of the future...
...It was Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Labor Party in Israel, who coined the slogan "from class to the nation...
...The reason for the split is still debated among art historians, but by one account, which I find too good to be false, van Doesburg did the heretical thing: he started painting in diagonal lines rather than in the strict horizontal lines of Mondrian...
...In a time of war and crisis, the religious picture may have the upper hand in making sense of politics...
...We can split the difference...
...Ask Iraqis to choose between Saddam Hussein's rule and the current civil war and you may find many of them siding with Hobbes...
...There are avant-garde sectarians, and there are remnant sectarians...
...If there was ever a sect that manifested the sectarian mind to perfection, it was the Dead Sea sect (otherwise known as the Qumran sect or the Essenes...
...Jews call such internal strife milkhemet ahkeim, namely, fraternal war...
...As for compromise, it breathes life into democracy: democracy calls for constantly forming coalitions...
...It was Ali's acceptance of arbitration that turned the Khawarij against him and ultimately they assassinated him...
...Sectarianism can be politically effective...
...There are two views of small numbers among sectarians...
...The capitalists would, of course, resist any structural changes in capitalism, but they would be swept away by the fated majority...
...They believed that the administration of sacraments such as baptism should be done only by priests who are holy...
...It is based on the observation that the state, in times of war, asks its citizens to be ready to sacrifice their lives...
...Party means politics...
...it isn't limited to the strictly metaphysical view of good and evil...
...I can easily imagine that the reality I depict is not too different from the reality of the chariot races in Byzantium (circa 532 C.E...
...They recruit new members and shape them in the mold of their sector...
...Ordinary believers may accept the mixing, but for the sectarians of Vishwa Hindu Parishad or for the Loyalists of the Temple Mount, the thought of compromise, let alone negotiation, is anathema...
...My short answer to the second is, It depends...
...Augustine, representing the church, campaigned bitterly against the Donatists...
...DISSENT / Winter 2008 • 43 SECTARIANISM mension to the warring groups...
...Sectarianism is a mode of operation and a state of mind...
...I feel that you are in danger of becoming sectarians, as I was in my youth...
...And, indeed, we established a magazine, which was brilDISSENT / Winter 2008 n 3 7 SECTARIANISM liantly edited by Irving's friend Menachem Brinker...
...This is the idea of the frailty of human beings...
...The sectarians are determined to resist evacuation by all means, and are ready to 44 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 SECTARIANISM risk an internal war...
...It is the numbers of future generations that count...
...Because he viewed civil war as something that takes place in what is supposed to be an organic political unit, he regarded it in medical terms, as a disease...
...Yet the sectorialist, unlike the sectarian, has an overriding commitment to keeping a shared framework...
...Then, in the year the two were together in Paris (1924) they split...
...To believe that in this situation compromise is within reach calls for a great leap of faith...
...The idea of the holy is the idea of that which is nonnegotiable...
...My claim is that what is important for understanding civil wars is not so much whether a conflict is about religion...
...There were no visitors in Israel at the time, and they were perhaps the first to arrive...
...Social democracy works by trial and error rather than by a doctrinal blueprint...
...Commodities are divisible either physically or in terms of the duration of their use...
...Since that first meeting, I have thought and written much about sectarianism...
...The sectarian drives the religious picture to its limit...
...No side had the upper hand in the battle, and when it was over the two sides grudgingly agreed to arbitration...
...The party advocated a twostate solution: Israel and Palestine...
...The operation is that of splitting the party rather than splitting the difference...
...There was a deep commitment to living together...
...The total number killed in civil wars is about five times higher than in interstate wars.' Some civil wars are sectarian wars: the paradigmatic cases include the civil war between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, and between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq...
...The settlers themselves don't know...
...There was, however, one thing that prevented the sectorial society of my youth from deteriorating into a sectarian society engaged in sectarian violence...
...When it was all over, two people approached me: "My name is Irving Howe...
...The Khawarij first supported Ali as the legitimate caliph...
...Their views and practices form a package: take it or leave it...
...the other is politics as religion...
...This is in contrast to the economic picture of politics where we deal with the world on a retail basis: there are many deals to be made and we don't just take it or leave it...
...As it turned out, hope turned into disappointment...
...Sharon is doing politics...
...It was after the war and just before the elections...
...They will surely let you people be active among them...
...Numbers don't count...
...All upheld the dualism of the autonomous realms of good and evil...
...Irving was an active supporter of this magazine, called Emda...
...So error is viewed as an essential by-product of political activity, and social democrats are committed to the toleration of error...
...The economic picture has very little room for authority and ceremony...
...If a fetus's life is sacred, then no splitting of pregnancy into trimesters is allowed...
Vol. 55 • January 2008 • No. 1
