I was in synagogue the other Saturday1 when I was struck by the peculiar nature of a compromise which our community has come to.
A bit of background for non-Jews who may read this. One of the main Jewish prayers in each service (called the Amidah) begins as follows: “Blessed are you, Lord, our God and God of our Fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob…”. It’s a formulation which appears elsewhere (or, at least, it’s built of phrases which do); it conveys a very old and central set of ideas in Judaism. Recently,2 however, feminists have quite reasonably pointed out that it’s a blatantly and undeniably patriarchal formulation—I mean, it quite literally lists the patriarchs, you can’t get more patriarchal than that. It’s all about fathers and male ancestors. So feminist Jews have proposed an alternative wording, which more liberal synagogues use, which goes like this: “Blessed are you, Lord, our God and God of our Fathers and Mothers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, God of Sarah, God of Rebecca, God of Leah, and God of Rachel…”.
The problem, of course, is that Judaism, even by the standards of religions in general, is all about tradition, including the tradition of the specific words of the prayers. Like some other religions, the specific words are held to be mandatory—in the Jewish case, at least, some would go so far as to say they were divinely dictated, that is, that God commanded Jews to say precisely these words and only these words in precisely this order. So not only Orthodox but also more conservative Conservative Jews object to adding (or changing) anything. Some Jews would refuse to go to a synagogue which added them (just as they would refuse to go to one which omitted anything).
On the other hand, feminism is one of the most important—arguably the most important—developments in the promotion of human rights and human dignity since, well, ever. And if you don’t think that those specific words are divinely mandated—if you think, say, that God commanded prayer, maybe even certain types and frequencies of prayer, but left the precise wording up to us, then omitting the words can seem frankly immoral. How can you not mention the women? And, indeed, some Jews would refuse to go to a synagogue which doesn’t add them (just as they would refuse to go to one which made women sit off to the side or in the back or on a balcony, and doesn’t let them participate in the service3).
This is a perennial issue which I have seen raised in other liturgical contexts too. But Ithaca is a small town, with only two synagogues4, and one of those is fairly new: for a long time there was just one. So Temple Beth El has tried, over its history, to be inclusive.5 How does one solve this dilemma?
The answer our synagogue came to (long before I joined) relies on the fact that during Saturday morning services the Amidah prayer is said twice.6 So they decided that the first time, they would say it the traditional, patriarchal way; and the second time they would say it the modern, feminist way.7
This seems like an ordinary compromise: no one gets everything they want; everyone gets part of what they want. No one is entirely happy, and no one is entirely disappointed. It’s mixed. That’s life.
But this Shabbat it occurred to me that in some ways the compromise is worse than either of the two extremes.
The problem is that it makes no sense on any principle. If you hold that the prayers are divinely mandated in a particular form (or even that tradition ought to rule regardless of God’s precise textual dictates), then doing it right one time doesn’t make ignoring the divine command any better. You’re still breaking God’s will. It’s not much better to do it only once rather than twice. On the other hand, if you think the prayers aren’t mandated (whether by God or tradition), then doing it correctly one time is still acting immorally the other time. Is it better to offend half the human race (plus those who care about that half) once a service rather than twice? You’re still doing the wrong thing.
The compromise, in some ways, is the worse of both worlds.
I am, of course, exaggerating to make the point. There is, in fact, a perfectly coherent set of principles which would promote what our synagogue is doing: the principle that tradition has some weight, but isn’t definitive, that woman’s inclusion is important, but must be weighed against other compelling factors, etc. This too is a principle. But it is a more complex, nuanced principle, and one that is out of touch with the Ignatian spirit of contemporary culture. It is a principle which sounds sort of like compromise.
Which is why you get people saying things (in various contexts) like they understand both extreme positions more than the compromising middle.
I don’t agree with that sentiment—I think I (perhaps ironically) vehemently disagree with it—but I do understand where it comes from, and feel, at times, a temptation to think that way.
Of course, if this were just about what words are said at a particular synagogue on Saturday mornings it would be of little account. I raise this, however, because I think that this structure of thought—this particular dynamic—appears quite often in our culture.
Take abortion. If you think it’s really murder—if you think every fertilized embryo is a full, rights-bearing human person—then voting for picayune things like a ban at 6-weeks is positively Mengelian. And to vote for a person who doesn’t oppose it with every fiber of their being is to vote for a supporter of murder, indeed an active abetter of mass slaughter. On the other hand if you think that it’s not a full person—that it has, at any rate, insufficient moral worth for the state to protect it at the cost of the lives of (born) people—then any restrictions on a woman’s autonomy is totalitarian. I heard one woman say she wouldn’t vote for a pro-choice politician because she would only vote for people who believed her to be a human being; from her own point of view she was right.
In contrast to both of these, the position held by the vast majority of Americans—that some restrictions are okay but that most are not—might be a good compromise, but makes no moral sense. Take, for instance, a very popular position like banning third-trimester abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or threat to the health of the mother. I suspect that view would in fact be embraced by a solid majority. But from the viewpoint of either side it’s preposterous. If a fetus is a person, then killing it is murder however it was conceived.8 If a fetus is not a person, then having the state pick and chose reasons that a woman is allowed to get a medical procedure is an intolerable invasion of personal sovereignty. Again, there is a perfectly reasonable position that ought to be recognized as principled that would argue for the middle—I don’t think that the compromise is morally nihilistic—but it’s a more complicated, messier, and nuanced position than the others; it looks more like an unprincipled position than either of the two extremes.
And the same holds for many other issues in our culture too. For another example, consider trans rights. If trans women are not, in fact, women, but men acting out a fantasy or a delusion, then allowing them into any all-women’s spaces is a violation of women’s rights and dignity. On the other hand, if trans women are women, then denying them access anywhere is segregationist and bigoted and immoral. A position that (as far as I can tell in this complex and evolving issue) would command a public majority—that trans women are women for most purposes, and certainly shouldn’t be banned from women’s bathrooms (which would essentially ban them from public life or force them to risk serious harm), but that in some cases, like prisons or on sports teams, there are some reasonable questions to be asked—again looks unprincipled. The compromise looks worse than either extreme. At least the others are taking a principled position!9
Or take the issue of corporations suppressing some speech. Or whether covid-era mask mandates are a necessary health measure or a violation of freedom. Or whether copying copyrighted material without leave (so-called piracy) is wrong. Or anything where there seem to be principles on two sides and nothing in between.
And this means that the usual reposte to a refusal to compromise misses the point. It’s not that people aren’t willing to settle for half a loaf (or even a quarter of one). It’s not that they think that they shouldn’t have to compromise on their desires, and stomp their feet like toddlers wanting everything. Rather, they oppose compromise because they see it as compromising their principles: as doing evil. We misunderstand people’s objections to compromise if we take them to be made out of simple greed or lack of realism about how the world works. To refuse to compromise is to be uncompromising: it is to be principled. In a very real way, opposition to compromise is right.
The problem, of course, is that it is the right way to get into a whole lot more trouble and human misery than we would otherwise be in. Because, cliche though it is, it is also true that you can’t always get what you want. And that standing and dying on principle, noble as it may look in B-grade movies, is still dying— or, if you’re on the other side, killing.
A commitment to principles is uncompromising. And that is precisely what’s wrong with it.
There are two conclusions that one could draw from these reflections, and I think—appropriately enough, perhaps, for an essay about compromise—that there is some truth in each of them.
One conclusion is that this is a problem with our culture today. We value—to some extent, we only accept as real—principles which are not only strong, but which are also clear and simple and legible: principles which can be applied on sight and which require neither difficult judgments nor acknowledge complex cases. Abortion is a woman’s right (or murder); including the matriarchs along with the patriarchs is the only moral choice (or blasphemy). Don’t give me any of your in-betweens. People who believe that abortion is murder, them I can respect; but those who want some restrictions for what they consider icky are ludicrous. And so forth.
As I said, I think there is a lot of truth to this. It is obviously connected in some complex way to the polarization of our contemporary culture (presumably a dialectical relationship, in which the polarization promotes the cultural view, which in turn goes back and pushes the polarization, and so on ad litigoseam). We live in a culture that sees centrists as risible and moderates as untrustworthy. Bush Jr10 got elected by saying “you may not agree with me, but at least you know where I stand!”; Clinton was condemned for his supposed pandering. Of course we are suspicious of compromise.
And it’s a real problem! “On this issue I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation” is a superb principle in some specific historical cases; and there is a slippery slope towards embracing that principle more and more widely down which it’s all-too-easy to slide (“are you really saying this other horror isn’t that bad!?!”) But as with anything in ecology—and we must never forget that humans are animals, and that the intellectual heavens and moral realms through which we stroll are themselves ecologies, evolved and evolving—something which is part of a thriving ecosystem can multiply to where it is an enviornment-destroying menace. To deny moderation in some cases is admirable; indeed, it is probably morally obligatory; but to abjure moderation in dozens or hundreds of causes is to become one more problem to be solved. Humans must do everything on a human scale, including that which cries out for the divine.
So yes, it’s a problem in our culture. But I don’t think it is just a problem for our culture. I think it’s inherent in the idea of compromise—and of principles.
Years ago, in the naughts, I saw a discussion of an analytic philosophy essay called “Against Principle".—Or so I now remember: I have been unable to find any trace of such an essay, and my memory of some or all of the details may be entirely wrong. Sadly, at the time I did no more than skim it; and once I found that the idea kept nagging me and I wished to return to it, I could not find the article again. So what follows is a riff on something I heard once, which I may be recapitulating in every detail, or which may simply be my entirely own invention; I honestly have no idea.11 (If anyone out there knows the paper, and can send me a citation, I would be quite grateful.)
But as far as I recall12 the argument of the Philosopher (I am making them a character while knowing nothing about them, hence the capitalization) is that principles were a bad thing.
Put that way, it sounds like a ludicrous bit of intellectual trolling, what we used, back in the late-neolithic era when the internet was still young, to call a “slatepitch”. But the point was13 this. People make principles out of things, and then become morally inflexible. Actual morality is incredibly complex, a balancing of different moral value systems (deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, what Cavell calls Emersonian perfectionism, and many others arising from other intellectual and moral traditions). What we desire, what we ought to desire, is to do good: but to do that we must keep that end in mind. If we instead establish principles, separate, formalized Principles, then those can become our ends and not the good that they were (originally, purportedly) coined to serve. Nothing can bring us peace but the abeyance of principles.14
Now there is (of course) a counter-case to be made. Steering generally towards the good can lead us, as long as the connection subsists between our reason and our self-love, to fool ourselves, to persuade ourselves that what we want anyway is, in fact, the good. Principles serve as anchors against the strong winds of moral erosion, drift, suborning, fads, illusions, and the many other gales that toss us upon the complex seas of ethical life. If you don’t have principles, you have nowhere solid to anchor, and will simply be led where the winds will.
I think we have all learned enough to feel the latter point strongly, and think that principles are good—in general, for the most part. But I think we should take a lesson from the Philosopher and see that they can do harm as well. After all, if moral erosion and drift can affect the nebulous quest for the good, they can affect the principles we commit to no less, along with other problems such as a failure to take into account changing circumstances, a blindness to complexity, and so forth. Principles can be a barrier to the good as well as an aide to it.
And nowhere do they do more harm than in our aversion to compromise.
Compromise, after all, is not the random windy walk of moral erosion or fads; it is a specific thing done to reconcile two different moral positions. This does not mean, of course, that every situation is amenable to compromise, nor that every compromise is a good one. (Don’t give him three-quarters of the cake.) But it does mean that we ought to be more willing to set aside our principles for a greater good. We ought to be suspicious of those who hold to principles when those principles are razor wire cutting into human flesh.
I am not endorsing all compromises. But I am making a plea for compromise in general. We—as English-speakers living in the early 21st century in a seething global culture of self-righteousness and unquestioning certainty—are too apt to reject it; and, if I’m right, we as human beings are too apt to reject it too.
I don’t mean to say that this is easy or obvious. On the contrary, it is a large part of the point of this essay to deny that: to say that compromising is hard for better reasons than we are wont to see: that our refusal to compromise is often not born of selfishness or lack of realism but is rather precisely a sign of our morality. It is just that—sometimes, in some cases, not always but far more often than we have a tendency to believe (for at least some scope of “we”)—it is counterproductive. It is, in fact, wrong.
So the next time you are asked to compromise, and you feel the bristles on your back rise as we do when asked to act wrongly, please pause and think. I’m not saying you should automatically go along with it; often you shouldn’t! All I am saying is that the claim that it goes against your principles, while quite possibly true, is not necessarily the dispositive claim that you might be inclined to think it.
Which doesn’t mean I have changed my religious views, incidentally.
By which I mean over the past few decades. In a religion with over 3,000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax, that counts as recent.
Non-Jews reading this should know that this is not a joke; that’s the standard requirements of Orthdox Judaism.
And, yes, minyanim on Cornell’s campus, too.
Or tried to try. It has failed at times, which is how there came to be two synagogues in our small town.
The reason is that Saturday morning prayers are actually two services: the Shabbat morning service (one of three prayers that a religious do is supposed to do daily), and the extra (fourth) service that is added in honor of the Sabbath. For reasons of convenience the two are run together and (to many) feel like one service.
I don’t know for a fact, but I imagine that the fact that more traditional people are more likely to be punctual, and thus catch the first version (which is said early in the service), and that more liberal people are more likely to catch only the second, might have played a role in determining which version was done in which repetition
Threat to the life of the mother is of course more defensible in this case, since then it’s two lives in balance. And yes, I know about Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous argument; suffice to say that this is not an essay about abortion, so I won’t go deeper into it.
As before, of course, there is in fact a principled route to the compromise position, just a more complex one.
Everyone now forgets how terrible he was because Trump seems worse, but he was really terrible, and it is important to remember this. — Is there a contradiction here between my praise of compromise and my condemnation for one side? No: for I am not saying that both sides are good, nor that we should always be in the middle. I am saying that, pragmatically, compromise is a good thing to do. We can compromise an still call a spade a goddamn shovel.
If I say that the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, you’ll get the joke, right?
Please assume that that idea is apended to every subsequent mention of the essay (bearing in mind the fuzziness of my memory on this point), since I don’t want to keep repeating it. Humans must do everything on a human scale.
Op. cit. note 12.