Thanks Linda. Oh, I don't know. He is the artist; the credit is his if he wants it. This piece took on a life of its own. I felt as if I was just along for the ride.
I once taught a university course on animals and religion. The connection I made between Jaws and religious violence among human beings is that both are examples of scapegoating, identified by the theologian Rene Girard as a largely unconscious phenomenon running throughout human history. It serves the function of unifying the group doing the scapegoating and venting aggression in a socially acceptable way that relieves pressure in the group. A and B feel hostility but prefer not to break the social contract with one another, so they vent their aggression on C, who is considered expendable. We see it in witch burnings, pogroms, stonings, and lynch mobs. Leftists and Islamists do it regularly; both groups like to scapegoat Jews in the name of defending Palestinians. They don't give a damn about Palestenians; that is just a pretext for scapegoating Jews.
In the movie Jaws, the animal is demonized. One could argue that it is the result of Jungian psychological projection of the Shadow archetype. As noted above, throughout human history, different groups and individuals have been demonized and scapegoated, including (obviously) Jews, culminating in Christian pogroms and the Shoah, and more recently, anti-Zionism. Animals have always also been scapegoated, and there is interesting parallel in our language, using animal names to dehumanize (e.g., rat, cockroach, shark, snake, bitch, pig, dog, wolf, etc). The reference to Jews as rats by the Nazi is a key example. Animals are already regarded as lower and possessing undesirable traits by most of humanity, so naming humans with these names is regarded as an insult.
The Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer compared Nazism to human speciesism: " "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka." This comparison is insulting to those who regard animals as lower, but perhaps the point is that we ought not to denigrate any group, including animals.
In the course, I also taught the pro-animal theologies of different traditions. Judaism has a strong tradition of animal welfare, resulting in the emergence of several rabbis advocating plant-based diets for ethical reasons, as consistent with the halachic rejection of animal cruelty (see https://jewishveg.org/rabbinic-statement/). All religious traditions have some pro-animal element in them, though they follow them inconsistently because most people prefer to be meat-eaters. Only Jainism is consistently vegetarian.
As for Jaws, it demonized sharks, who, as it happens, are the victims of a hunt for their fins (for shark-fin soup), driving them to the brink of extinction. It is more of a statement on our own psychology than a statement about any one animal species. The enemy is us, so to speak. This is apparent with the demonization and scapegoating of Jews throughout history and to the present time, especially since Oct 7th when the radical Left erupted in hatred against Jews and gave tacit support for Hamas in countless protests. These are the same useful idiots whose worldview allows the immigration of millions of Islamists and their supporters into their midst, now resulting in the UK and Western Europe being unsafe for Jews. Ironically, this is done in the name of tolerance, leading to a more intolerant society.
Thanks! I'm glad you appreciated the comment. I never know how the comparison of violence against human beings and animals will be received. It's controversial because it's often received as a denigration of human beings, though not intended as such. Someone named Marjorie Speigel wrote a book on it called The Dreaded Comparison, which people indoctrinated in race ideology hated.
I too liked your article and all your comments and articles that I've read thus far. They're thought-provoking. Here are some more thoughts on Islam below.
I also taught a course on religious violence, but was still rather naive at the time and tried to give equal time to examples of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious violence, as though they're somehow equal. The texts I used, including Mark Juergensmeyer's Terror in the Mind of God (2003), did the same, carefully avoiding any stereotyping of mainstream Islam as violent.
It's not a bad text for identifying patterns and underlying motives and drives, such as the fanatic's belief that the world is thoroughly evil and must be purged through a symbolic act of cleansing it. Suicide bombings, otherwise inexplicable, make sense if understood as symbolic acts in pursuit of a perfect world in which everyone is a devout Muslim and all the Jews are eradicated. This is not to excuse them, but rather to understand the thinking of those who do such things.
Another good insight was how jihadis gain moral support from the larger community, thus implicating that community in their crimes. The suicide bomber is not acting alone, but on behalf of a community that he sees as under attack, and he is in his mind defending them. This is why the majority is typically silent in response to the attacks, giving sanction to them. Polls confirm that many Muslims approved of the attacks.
Jew hatred is now built into both mainstream Arab and Muslim identity. The only way they will accept Jews living alongside them is as subordinates who pay them a tax. They fear powerful Jews because they believe they'll be annihilated by them, just as they would annihilate Jews if they had the power. This is what led to the Arab leaders telling the Arab populations to leave Israel in 1948: they thought that if Israel triumphed, they'd all be slaughtered, which was untrue. But they had that fear because it's what they would have done to Jews. They projected their fear.
Scholars and pundits coined the term "Islamism" or "radical Islam" to describe the violent minority as though it were separate from and somehow different from the majority. This, unfortunately, is not so. The violent minority and the more non-violent majority are linked through common core beliefs and prejudices.
In my studies, I've discovered that critics of Islam, such as Robert Spencer, are right: it is by far the most violent religion of the world's religious traditions, because its founder was a warlord who gave religious sanction to the murder and abuse of non-Muslims, and he codified this as a religious duty. Yes, other religions have had violent histories, but not nearly to the extent of Islam. Violence is built into it from the start, and it thus resists all attempts at non-violent reformation and modernization by murdering the reformers.
Jihad is an uncontrollable force in the Islamic world that not even the most powerful leader can resist. Most of them go along with it to stay in power, demonizing Israel and keeping alive the rhetoric that could lead to a second major genocide of Jews. And Leftists help them, as documented in the excellent book United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror by Jamie Glazov.
Anyway, I taught the course in a "balanced" way as though Islam was just one more religious tradition that at some point in its history demonstrated violence, no different from Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism. I erred in doing so. Incidentally, Eastern traditions have had violent episodes, and still do, though not to the extent of Abrahamic faiths.
If I were to teach it again, I would focus more on Islamic violence, which is by far the vast majority of religious violence, exceeding all other traditions. If you were to do a pie chart, Islam would be 99% of it, and the rest of the traditions would be slivers in that 1%. If I had taught it that way, I would have likely been censured after a complaint by students for "Islamophobia." But fear of violent Islam is healthy, so that's a stupid label.
Many teachers instinctively know where the lines are that they are not supposed to cross, leading to self-censorship in the classroom, and the veering of education towards a Leftist worldview.
I think I would also have focused more on the tradition of "just war" or defensive war, such as demonstrated by the state of Israel. I would have spent the majority of the class on that conflict, in retrospect, and I would have sided with Israel, and this would have resulted in complaints. I am very pro-Israel now. I wish I could contact the students again and tell them what I know now. Some might agree with me.
In academia, we are often afraid to state truths that contradict the Leftist narrative. I'm glad to be no longer teaching for that reason, but also a bit sad for the students today who do not get the education they deserve. They get bad information, leading them to join the pro-Hamas protests; it's tragic not only for Jews and Israel but also for the students whose minds are going to waste as they unwittingly support Islamic terrorism.
Seriously? You think he did this consciously? Wow. Up and including the tuba? A real chiddush to me. Wonderful writing, as usual.
Thanks Linda. Oh, I don't know. He is the artist; the credit is his if he wants it. This piece took on a life of its own. I felt as if I was just along for the ride.
A ride on the muse. Musing while writing? Often amusing. Nun - factoid of note.
I once taught a university course on animals and religion. The connection I made between Jaws and religious violence among human beings is that both are examples of scapegoating, identified by the theologian Rene Girard as a largely unconscious phenomenon running throughout human history. It serves the function of unifying the group doing the scapegoating and venting aggression in a socially acceptable way that relieves pressure in the group. A and B feel hostility but prefer not to break the social contract with one another, so they vent their aggression on C, who is considered expendable. We see it in witch burnings, pogroms, stonings, and lynch mobs. Leftists and Islamists do it regularly; both groups like to scapegoat Jews in the name of defending Palestinians. They don't give a damn about Palestenians; that is just a pretext for scapegoating Jews.
In the movie Jaws, the animal is demonized. One could argue that it is the result of Jungian psychological projection of the Shadow archetype. As noted above, throughout human history, different groups and individuals have been demonized and scapegoated, including (obviously) Jews, culminating in Christian pogroms and the Shoah, and more recently, anti-Zionism. Animals have always also been scapegoated, and there is interesting parallel in our language, using animal names to dehumanize (e.g., rat, cockroach, shark, snake, bitch, pig, dog, wolf, etc). The reference to Jews as rats by the Nazi is a key example. Animals are already regarded as lower and possessing undesirable traits by most of humanity, so naming humans with these names is regarded as an insult.
The Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer compared Nazism to human speciesism: " "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka." This comparison is insulting to those who regard animals as lower, but perhaps the point is that we ought not to denigrate any group, including animals.
In the course, I also taught the pro-animal theologies of different traditions. Judaism has a strong tradition of animal welfare, resulting in the emergence of several rabbis advocating plant-based diets for ethical reasons, as consistent with the halachic rejection of animal cruelty (see https://jewishveg.org/rabbinic-statement/). All religious traditions have some pro-animal element in them, though they follow them inconsistently because most people prefer to be meat-eaters. Only Jainism is consistently vegetarian.
As for Jaws, it demonized sharks, who, as it happens, are the victims of a hunt for their fins (for shark-fin soup), driving them to the brink of extinction. It is more of a statement on our own psychology than a statement about any one animal species. The enemy is us, so to speak. This is apparent with the demonization and scapegoating of Jews throughout history and to the present time, especially since Oct 7th when the radical Left erupted in hatred against Jews and gave tacit support for Hamas in countless protests. These are the same useful idiots whose worldview allows the immigration of millions of Islamists and their supporters into their midst, now resulting in the UK and Western Europe being unsafe for Jews. Ironically, this is done in the name of tolerance, leading to a more intolerant society.
Just great. A comment more interesting than the article commented upon. The story of my life on Substack.
Thanks! I'm glad you appreciated the comment. I never know how the comparison of violence against human beings and animals will be received. It's controversial because it's often received as a denigration of human beings, though not intended as such. Someone named Marjorie Speigel wrote a book on it called The Dreaded Comparison, which people indoctrinated in race ideology hated.
I too liked your article and all your comments and articles that I've read thus far. They're thought-provoking. Here are some more thoughts on Islam below.
I also taught a course on religious violence, but was still rather naive at the time and tried to give equal time to examples of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious violence, as though they're somehow equal. The texts I used, including Mark Juergensmeyer's Terror in the Mind of God (2003), did the same, carefully avoiding any stereotyping of mainstream Islam as violent.
It's not a bad text for identifying patterns and underlying motives and drives, such as the fanatic's belief that the world is thoroughly evil and must be purged through a symbolic act of cleansing it. Suicide bombings, otherwise inexplicable, make sense if understood as symbolic acts in pursuit of a perfect world in which everyone is a devout Muslim and all the Jews are eradicated. This is not to excuse them, but rather to understand the thinking of those who do such things.
Another good insight was how jihadis gain moral support from the larger community, thus implicating that community in their crimes. The suicide bomber is not acting alone, but on behalf of a community that he sees as under attack, and he is in his mind defending them. This is why the majority is typically silent in response to the attacks, giving sanction to them. Polls confirm that many Muslims approved of the attacks.
Jew hatred is now built into both mainstream Arab and Muslim identity. The only way they will accept Jews living alongside them is as subordinates who pay them a tax. They fear powerful Jews because they believe they'll be annihilated by them, just as they would annihilate Jews if they had the power. This is what led to the Arab leaders telling the Arab populations to leave Israel in 1948: they thought that if Israel triumphed, they'd all be slaughtered, which was untrue. But they had that fear because it's what they would have done to Jews. They projected their fear.
Scholars and pundits coined the term "Islamism" or "radical Islam" to describe the violent minority as though it were separate from and somehow different from the majority. This, unfortunately, is not so. The violent minority and the more non-violent majority are linked through common core beliefs and prejudices.
In my studies, I've discovered that critics of Islam, such as Robert Spencer, are right: it is by far the most violent religion of the world's religious traditions, because its founder was a warlord who gave religious sanction to the murder and abuse of non-Muslims, and he codified this as a religious duty. Yes, other religions have had violent histories, but not nearly to the extent of Islam. Violence is built into it from the start, and it thus resists all attempts at non-violent reformation and modernization by murdering the reformers.
Jihad is an uncontrollable force in the Islamic world that not even the most powerful leader can resist. Most of them go along with it to stay in power, demonizing Israel and keeping alive the rhetoric that could lead to a second major genocide of Jews. And Leftists help them, as documented in the excellent book United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror by Jamie Glazov.
Anyway, I taught the course in a "balanced" way as though Islam was just one more religious tradition that at some point in its history demonstrated violence, no different from Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism. I erred in doing so. Incidentally, Eastern traditions have had violent episodes, and still do, though not to the extent of Abrahamic faiths.
If I were to teach it again, I would focus more on Islamic violence, which is by far the vast majority of religious violence, exceeding all other traditions. If you were to do a pie chart, Islam would be 99% of it, and the rest of the traditions would be slivers in that 1%. If I had taught it that way, I would have likely been censured after a complaint by students for "Islamophobia." But fear of violent Islam is healthy, so that's a stupid label.
Many teachers instinctively know where the lines are that they are not supposed to cross, leading to self-censorship in the classroom, and the veering of education towards a Leftist worldview.
I think I would also have focused more on the tradition of "just war" or defensive war, such as demonstrated by the state of Israel. I would have spent the majority of the class on that conflict, in retrospect, and I would have sided with Israel, and this would have resulted in complaints. I am very pro-Israel now. I wish I could contact the students again and tell them what I know now. Some might agree with me.
In academia, we are often afraid to state truths that contradict the Leftist narrative. I'm glad to be no longer teaching for that reason, but also a bit sad for the students today who do not get the education they deserve. They get bad information, leading them to join the pro-Hamas protests; it's tragic not only for Jews and Israel but also for the students whose minds are going to waste as they unwittingly support Islamic terrorism.
That was good. So was the other Dreyfuss Affair.