Concluding Thoughts

The concluding chapter briefly revisits some of the main points of the book and makes the closing argument for a new addiction treatment system.

Rhetorical Subterfuge

This article focuses on a Talmudic lecture Levinas delivered in 1965. Its long central section is an extended reading of most of that lecture’s images and ideas. Its frame, however, treats what does and does not change in Levinas’s conception of the State of Israel between the early ’60s and the early ’80s. At issue here are two other texts: a short but important paragraph from the 1961 lecture published as “Messianic Texts,” and the interview with Malka and Finkielkraut that took place in 1982, shortly after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. The gist of my closing argument is that while the structure of the understanding of Israel he outlined in 1961 does not change, it is developed very differently in the 1965 lecture and the 1982 interview. I try finally to account for this difference. In the meantime, the long analysis of 1965’s “Promised Land or Permitted Land” offers a novel account of Levinas’s hermeneutic, an account that might perhaps be applied to other Talmudic lectures.

Science and Dissent

Reading C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture, ‘Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ in 2017, I was struck by the ways in which the essay, written over half a century ago, addresses issues that I’ve been engaged with for most of my life. Snow defined a world of cultures split between: ‘Literary intellectuals at one pole, at the other scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension, sometimes hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.’ I’ve encountered this lack of understanding in my own profession and in public life. But it was Snow’s closing argument that really grabbed my attention: he proposed to his Cambridge audience that they had ‘better look at education with a fresh eye’ and that there was a ‘good deal to learn from the Russians’. Not really. If, as Snow proposed, ‘Scientists have the future in their bones’, we’d all do better to respond to the cool reason of dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Anatol Sharansky and to recognize the ultimate power of free speech, which only exists in a free society.