Overlapping Traditions – A Conversation with Dr. Yair Lior

Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. I’m the Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses, and I’m joined here by Yair Lior, who is at Boston University, a professor of comparative religion, and also an expert in Jewish and Chinese religion. Normally, when we think of interfaith work, we think of Jewish and Christian – I actually was about to say “Jewish-Christian,” but no, Jewish theology and Chinese theology and Chinese religion. [He is] also the founder of Scholarium, and we’ve had Connor Wood, who is part of Scholarium, as a previous guest, trying to be able to engage PhDs in thinking about translating the work in the Ivory Tower into the wider American world. And so, Yair, I’m excited to be able to be sitting with you here this afternoon.

Yair Lior: Hi, everyone, and thanks a lot for having me. Appreciate it.

Geoff Mitelman: So, I would love to start – because beforehand we were talking about this. You are the only person that I, at least personally, know who does work on the parallels between Jewish thought and religion and philosophy and Chinese thought and religion and philosophy. So, I think – first, I’m curious as to how did you get into that relationship? How did you become curious and notice those parallels? And then, in a minute, I want to hear where you see as those connections and points of parallel.

Yair Lior: Yeah, you’re right. There’s only a handful of scholars – we all know each other – who deal with the Jewish and Chinese tradition. It’s not a very big field, to say the least. Personally, I remember that just before I started applying to my undergraduate studies in Israel, I was really trying to think about what I wanted to study. I was thinking psychology, philosophy – and then I got my hands on this book about Mao Zedong and the Communist Party, and the Great March and all these heroic stories about Chinese modern history. And I think that book right there really got me hooked on Chinese culture in general. And I started my undergraduate degree focusing on Chinese civilization – East Asian studies, with a focus on China. And I really got obsessed with the whole tradition. I was really eager to learn Chinese and learn how to write Chinese characters. A big part of my process of falling in love with Chinese culture was through art, and especially calligraphy – so I started taking classes, and it really became a kind of obsession. I was waiting for my BA to end so I could finally go to China and really improve my Chinese.

And I think, to your question, I started recognizing or seeing these resonances between the Jewish and Chinese tradition as I was living in China. I lived in China for eight years, in Beijing. I kind of went there to work on my language and get my language to a level [where I] could actually go into an MA program and do an MA program in a Chinese university in Chinese. And that’s what I – I focused on mainly on Chinese aesthetics and the relationship between Chinese aesthetics and Chinese philosophy. And I think it’s in China that the culture in general, not only learning the history,

My specific field of specialization is the Confucian tradition. A lot of people aren’t too aware of what Confucianism actually means. It’s kind of a strange bird in the family of religions, if you’d like to call it a religion. It’s many things, but it also has religious dimensions. And as I started looking into Confucianism – and really, Confucianism without people recognizing it, is all around you in China, because it’s a profoundly Confucian tradition. And that’s where I started seeing all these things that are just struck me as familiar from my upbringing and being – especially in Orthodox traditions, finding myself in an Orthodox context at Friday night Shabbat dinners, or going to – I did a little bit of field work in Tzfat, Israel, where you have this big revival of Kabbalah. I had a lot of opportunities to be with Orthodox Jews. I guess that’s where it started, being in China and kind of moving between China and Israel for close to a decade.

Geoff Mitelman: It’s almost like there’s a perception, when we say the word “religion” – it’s usually, at least within America, it’s Christianity, and particularly Protestant Christianity, and often particularly white Protestant Christianity. And that becomes a very narrow definition that then gets scaled up – like, religion is what white Protestant Christianity is. And it sounds like one of the things in both Confucian tradition and Jewish tradition is that it’s not so much a religion in its narrow definition, but more of a worldview that just sort of permeates. And you’re thinking about when you go to Israel – not you specifically, but if one goes to Israel, very often the level of practice of a secular Israeli is about the equivalent of what a Reform or Conservative Jew in America would be, but the secular Israeli would not view themselves as “religious” by definition. They would call themselves secular. So, calling it religion is too narrow. And it sounds like that’s a real point of similarity.

Yair Lior: I totally agree. The Protestant distinction (or if you’d like, the Christian distinction) between religion and secular culture assumes that religion is a highly systemized and independent framework – a set of coherent and standardized beliefs. And in Judaism, just like you said, in Judaism and in the Confucian – I’ll call it Confucian civilization – there’s no real distinction between religion and culture. They’re so inextricably intertwined that any attempt to create these distinctions puts you in a real problem. It feels unnatural to make that distinction. Although, following Christianity, there are trends in the Jewish tradition that are more Protestant, so to speak, and are looking at religion as something distinct. But I totally agree that historically, the idea of religion doesn’t even exist. It’s actually a Greek, Latin Westernized Christian term that came to influence many religions, but it’s very distinct to the West.

Geoff Mitelman: I’m curious, because I don’t know enough of the history of this, but were there civilizations interacting in Jewish and Chinese cultures? I mean, I know there was a Jewish community in Shanghai in the 1940s, and since then, but you’re studying the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th century. I’m thinking of also the parallel of Arab Muslim traders and the Norse, and [how] we think, how do they ever interact? But there was actually quite a significant amount of trade going back and forth. Were there interactions in the Jewish community and the Chinese community in the Middle Ages?

Yair Lior: Yes, the answer is “absolutely.” There were early Jewish merchants that came to China and started communities all the way back to the Tang dynasty, which is between the 7th and 10th century. It’s a golden age in Chinese history, a very cosmopolitan dynasty, with Muslims and Christians and Zoroastrians and people from all over the world. Changan, the capital of the Tang, was considered to be the most cosmopolitan and advanced city in the world at that time, potentially competing with a place like Constantinople – but, a very big city. Jews started establishing communities all the way back then.

And in the dynasty that I’m studying, the Song Dynasty, which is right after the Tang dynasty, you already had a really serious community in Kaifang, which is the capital of the northern Song dynasty. I went there; I saw ancient remnants of a synagogue. There are still descendants of that community that were many times mistaken to be Muslim by Chinese. It was very hard for Chinese people to make to distinguish between Jews and Muslims. Both of them had strange dietary restrictions that were very similar, like Halal and Kosher, and both of them wore caps. And so, in the Chinese worldview, they were such a small minority that it was hard for them – they never quite made a distinction. But there’s still a community there, that some of them are trying to make their way to Israel and be recognized as Jews by the Orthodox community – which is, as you know, a challenge. And others are trying to be recognized in China as a minority, and they’re not quite getting that status. But the history goes way before post-World War II in Shanghai or Harbin.

Geoff Mitelman: Thinking, you know, as you’re mentioning the trade routes almost. Of course there would be interactions, because I’m thinking about the Silk Road from China in through the Middle East, and the Jews who were writing the Babylonian Talmud were all in that part of the world. And so there would have been interactions from the West in through Israel and through Babylonia and then back out into the east of the Chinese community, and how could there not have been interactions and cultural exchanges?

Yair Lior: Absolutely. And that was the main cultural trajectory – namely, mainly Jews under Muslim rule. So Islam really created a connection between the East and the West. They facilitated that interaction between the East and the West, that without Islam expanding all the way into northern Africa and all the way into Spain, it would probably be harder for Jews to make that route, to make that path towards China. So it was facilitated by Islam, mainly.

Geoff Mitelman: Now, you’ve also explored a little, some questions about Kabbalah, which is – for those of you who don’t know, different than Kabbalah, which is what Madonna and Britney Spears [adopted]. Kabbalah is a much more esoteric, complex mystical tradition that takes decades to really fully understand. But you’ve explored some interactions between Chinese thought and Jewish Kabbalah. So I would love to hear a little more of what that connection is.

Yair Lior: Yeah. It’s interesting that my whole interest in that, in Kabbalah and in Confucianism, started because of the modern revival of those two trends. I’m in the 20th and 21st century, and I’m in China and in Israel, and I’m noticing that there’s huge revival of Kabbalah and Kabbalah in the mainstream culture – and also among Jewish communities in Israel and also internationally in Berg Centers, Kabbalah centers, and so forth. I was wondering about this revival, and at the same time I’m living in China, I’m seeing this major, major Confucian revival – a kind of search for Chinese identity that is slowly moving away from traditional Marxism towards looking for something more indigenous, something more that belongs to the Chinese rather than a Western ideology.

So I got really interested in that. As I said, I did a little bit of field work in Israel. I was also interviewing people in China about their ideas about the revival of Confucianism. And I decided that if I really want to do a comparative examination of these two traditions, I really needed to go back, all the way back and study the roots, the historical roots, of how it happened. And when I got to the 11th, 12th and 13th century, which happened to be my background in Chinese culture. I found out that there was a really interesting revival back then of Jewish and Chinese thought. And I started thinking about it through these methodologies of how cultures find themselves in a situation of crisis and how, in order to overcome that crisis, they have these certain techniques or strategies of adaptation, which lead to revivals. That was my main thought.

So what you see in the Chinese case is that around the time that I’m talking about – 10th and 11th century – you see this major ascendancy of Buddhist thought. Buddhism is becoming so popular that some people in the imperial court in China – Confucians, traditional Confucians – are really worrying that China is about to become dominated by what they would call a “barbarian tradition,” right – an Indian tradition. In China, the idea that culture and civilization is in China, and everything on the periphery is kind of backwards and uncivilized, is very strong in the Chinese psyche. And these people are seen as [following a] Buddhist Indian tradition really expanding at a kind of disturbing rate. And what you have as a consequence is a reaction, a Confucian revival, that in scholarship we call Neo-Confucianism. So, Neo-Confucianism essentially is a response to the ascendancy of Buddhism. And what you do by responding to these traditions, you start co-opting and appropriating all kinds of things from the Buddhist tradition, like meditation, and new ideals of how to read text and how to interpret text and how to look at the world, and you’re Confucianizing them. You’re using indigenous, ancient terminology to appropriate those ideas.

What I saw on the Jewish side is the ascendancy during the Muslim golden age – exactly the same time, more or less. We’re talking about the 13th, 12th century. All the way from the 9th century, you could say, all the way to the 13th century, you have this explosion of Greek thought. The Muslims are starting to translate these really important texts – notably also Plato, but notably Aristotle. And Aristotle just takes over Western civilization. All three monotheistic traditions are, “Whoa. Like, this is cutting edge stuff. We cannot go on and remain relevant without integrating it into our tradition.” So you have theologians in the Muslim world like Averroes, who’s essentially saying there’s no contradiction between Aristotle and the Quran. Then you have, in the Jewish tradition, Maimonides, who’s essentially doing the same thing. He’s an Aristotelian thinker. He’s trying to show that you can synthesize Talmudic thought and biblical thought, biblical narratives, with Aristotelian metaphysics and so forth. In the Christian tradition, you obviously have people like Thomas Aquinas.

So, Greek formats – just like in the Chinese worldview, you have these Indo-European cultures, Buddhism, starting to take over – very rational traditions that are becoming very attractive to elites, especially the new elites of intellectuals, doctors, progressives. In the Jewish world, you have this new obsession with Maimonides and thought, and it creates a real, real crisis in the Jewish tradition of progressives who follow Maimonides, and conservatives who were really disturbed by Greek culture taken over the Jewish tradition.

One of the responses, from my point of view – one of the adaptations to this crisis of meaning is the emergence of the school of Kabbalah, which is a conservative reaction to Aristotelian Maimonidean thought. And it’s doing that using very similar strategies to neo-Confucianism. Namely, it’s appropriating all kinds of element from Greek formats of thought, but it’s indigenizing them in very creative and interesting ways. And as such, it creates this new theology that in a way overshadows Maimonidean philosophy to a certain extent in the Jewish world. So that process of how cultures are perturbed or destabilized and how they adapt – what I started seeing is common patterns, universal patterns, in the way that cultural organisms, cultural systems, adapt to destabilization.

Geoff Mitelman: When you’re talking – it’s reminding me, when you were saying “revival,” I’m thinking of the periodization of history, of that in the Axial Age. It’s the rise of almost every religion roughly around the same time. And then, the first century, a rise all across the world of different religious traditions – and in the 18th century, of the rise of the great awakening and Hasidism in Judaism. And this revival that’s happening now – and also we’re talking about in the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries of Kabbalah and Confucianism. It seems to be either we’re reading it in a little bit too much of like – well, it just happens to be this is this particular time. And it may be coincidence, for sure. But it also seems that there are cultural ideas that either go across the world, they may be because of environmental changes, they may be just shared thoughts, shared ideas, that there may be a commonality at that time.

Yair Lior: Yeah. In academic circles, it’s pretty dangerous to take that path of this kind of synchrony, historical synchrony, among different traditions. It’s usually frowned upon, I think, unjustifiably, because I think that there’s no mystical element here. It’s just that traditions tend to progress and develop and complexify at certain rates that can lead to certain commonalities and parallels in the way that they kind of adapt and become more complex. So, in the Axial Age, a lot of traditions were reacting to this new level of prosperity that was taking place both in China, in the Indus Valley civilization in India, in Greece and Mesopotamia, the area where the prophets were working in modern day Israel, Palestine, and so forth. And they’re reacting to the emergence of large empires that are starting to emerge – like the Persian Empire – for the first time, empires that are beyond specific cultural orbit. They’re cross-cultural, so that those winds of universalism are starting to bias human thought towards more universal ideas of what religion is, universal ideas of transcendent gods, rather than specific gods in temples that need to be sacrificed to. So, there’s no mystical, strange thing happening here. It’s just that the rate of complexification of traditions can be fairly similar, and they might be responding to very similar environmental conditions. So that happened in the Axial Age.

I think that today, we’re seeing that many places in the world, nation-states, practically every cultural arrangement or political arrangement, are responding to similar circumstances, and therefore going through very similar experiences and adaptations. So, as for the neo-Confucian and Jewish case, I try not to go there with my argument, in order not to try to become apologetic about history moving in these mysterious ways, as if there’s some kind of “invisible hand.” So, I try not to go there, but instead, I try to use more scientific methodologies to explain why resonances and parallels might have happened.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, I know that one of the things that you focus on also is complexity theory, and complex systems. And it sounds like that also helps inform a little bit of the work that you’re doing. And I’m curious as to where complexity intersects with religion. And I think religion sometimes can make things simpler. There’s a little bit of cognitive offloading that it allows you to be able to do, but would love to know a little bit more – for those people, including me, who don’t know all the details of what complexity theory is and systems theory – what exactly that is, and how that relates to some of the arguments that you’re making here.

Yair Lior: Yeah. I have bad experience of trying to explain these very convoluted methods really succinctly shortly, and in a way that makes sense, but I’ll try. Essentially, systems theory sees the world and reality as composed of systems. So, a system can be something really simple, like an atom, which has interacting components to it – like, the nucleus that would have protons and neutrons. And then you’d have electrons circulating around that nucleus. And there are certain forces, like electromagnetism, that mediate those relationships. So, systems can be inanimate, like atoms, and then they can become more complex, like cells, that have a membrane that makes it distinct from its environment and has internal processes as well.

What systems theorists that apply systems theory to culture claim is that culture is no different. Culture is essentially a very large, but nevertheless – and religion, by the way, nevertheless – a coherent system that has certain patterns of operation and processes that we can study – how it maintains stability, how it adapts to change.

And most importantly, a subset of systems is complex adaptive systems, namely complex – they’re very complex. A lot of interacting units, like millions of people, very complex institutions, technologies. They’re adaptive – namely, they have mechanisms for adaptation. And that’s a subset of living systems. So an atom isn’t a complex adaptive system, but a cell, the first unit of living systems ,is already a complex adaptive system because – living systems have an interesting relationship with information. They’re able to extract information from their environment, to process it and to respond to it. And that becomes all the more efficient as you get things like brains showing up, and as you get things like cultures with external writing systems and hard drives and text and so forth.

So, my idea of applying complexity theory and systems theory to religion – others have done it before, I have a certain specific way to look at it – is that it helps us look at the evolution of religion from its co-evolution with us becoming Homo sapiens – namely in the Paleolithic, with very simple hunter-gatherer societies and things like shamanism – all the way to the Agricultural Revolution, where suddenly it’s a really great example of seeing how complex adaptive systems cultures complexify. Suddenly, from hunter gatherer societies of like 30 to 150 people, you get these massive civilizations like the Babylonian empire, the Syrians, Egypt, Ancient Greece, Shang Dynasty China, the Indus Valley civilization, Mayan civilization, Aztec civilization. How does that happen? Why does it happen? Systems theory gives us really good tools to try and understand these processes of complexification.

And after that, you have the Axial Age – and lo and behold, you have a new subset of religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism – that completely dislodged those ancient traditions. No one’s really worshiping Thor or Zeus today, or Enlil. A new subset of traditions took over. They’re more complex; they belong in more complex civilizations. And what I mean by “complex,” I mean in terms of the interacting units, technologies, institutional complexity. And they completely dominated our religious landscapes for the past 2,000, some would argue 3,000, years.

And what’s happening today is absolutely interesting, because a lot of people are pointing to a new Axial Age, a kind of second Axial Age, with new forms of belief, new formats of religion, new forms of cyber-institutions that are showing up. So, we’re living in interesting times. But the bottom line is that using a complex-adaptive-systems approach really illuminates a lot of these processes.

Geoff Mitelman: And when you were talking about this, it’s reminding me of a great course I’d done through the Great Courses, about “big history” – a guy named David Christian, who talked about [how] the story from the origins of the universe to today – that is a story of increasing complexity. And he talks about the flow of information and the flow of energy. It’s something that I’ve thought about – and not even just physical energy, but I’m thinking about a synagogue or any religious institution. What’s the energy? And it’s the energy of what’s the financial resources? What’s the energy from the lay leadership? What’s the energy that maintains that system?

And a synagogue or a church or any religious institution has a certain amount of energy and information that it needs to be able to maintain itself. And if it becomes though too complex, then it can’t sustain itself. And so, how do you find almost that Goldilocks element, of where there’s the right amount of information and energy so that it can stay and grow, without either starving itself or running out of its own resources?

Yair Lior: Yeah. I think the point that you’re raising about David Christian and big history is exactly what I’m talking about here. One of the exciting things about the systems approach is that it is inherently multidisciplinary. It is applicable to anything from the Big Bang all the way to this moment right now and the future. And it really manages to integrate things like the humanities, the social sciences – but in a very interesting way, biology, and even more interesting to me, physics and things like thermodynamics and information flows, like you said. It’s really fascinating.

So, if you’re looking at a synagogue as a type of possible complex adaptive system, then if that synagogue wants to grow, if it wants to become more complex, to open new – I don’t know, new synagogues in other places, or facilitate or support new congregations in new areas, it won’t happen unless there’s some kind of injection of energy into the system. That can be donors, that could be [that] you have a really great and charismatic rabbi where people who listen to him are absolutely captivated and they say, “I think I’m going to join this, this is great.” That’s energy, too. So one thing that we know: There are laws of physics that are indisputable, that lie at the foundation of cultural processes. And that means that without an injection of energy, you’re not going to get greater complexity. And if you try to become more complex and you try to diversify without that, you’re going to find yourself stretching yourself too thin – you’re going to find yourself in a situation.

So, back to the agricultural revolution, you get the domestication of plants and of animals as well. David Christian famously calls that an “energy bonanza.” For the first time, you don’t need to go around and hunt and gather. You’re staying in one place, and you have this new technique to get these almost endless flows of energy. And what happens? Societies start growing, becoming more complex. At one point, you reach a point that societies are so big and so complex that there are new pressures to create new energy- and information-processing mechanisms.

For instance, in hunter-gatherer band of 50 people, you can use oral communication. If I have a new idea, I can communicate it to my cousins, to everyone around me. But if you’re in a city like Babylon with 40, 50,000 people, there are strong pressures to come up with some kind of writing system – a new system of information processing that goes beyond your brains and starts immortalizing information on durable media. And now, you can start distributing that information and processing it much more efficiently outside of human brains.

So, the whole complexity and systems theory approach as it integrates energy and information dynamics is absolutely fascinating for me, and I think it’s one of the most important developments in multidisciplinary work in academia today.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, that leads nicely to another area I want to explore, which is Scholarium, which I know you co-founded, and some of the challenges facing PhDs. I think so much of the knowledge and information that we are getting out into the world comes from people who have doctorates. Many of us, hopefully, trust experts on different topics. And yet, the life of a PhD student is not an easy life. And there are political elements of that – of where it is skewed so far left that what actually happens in the Ivory Tower, and then what happens when it is just solely in the Ivory Tower and doesn’t get communicated to the wider American population, the world population. And I think there’s also [the issue of] PhDs, being able to eat and have shelter and be able to have an actual life, because I know that for a lot of PhDs, it’s a very challenging, day-to-day existence. What do you try to do through Scholarium to try to ensure that the information flow happens the way that it should, so that it’s helping individuals and societies thrive?

Yair Lior: Yeah, good point. Well, Scholarium is a non-profit initiative where we’re trying to deal with a really problematic and large-scale crisis in academia today. And I would say beyond academia – it’s a social crisis, a real social crisis, that I don’t think we are confronting in the type of seriousness that it deserves. First of all, you have a decline in interest in the humanities, and to a certain extent, the social sciences. I mean, the numbers are pretty disturbing. While in the 1960s, at the end of the 1960s and early 70s, about 20% of bachelor-degree holders came from the humanities, today it’s down – in 2004 (that’s actually close to 20 years ago), it was already down to 8%. And it’s been declining ever since. That’s really troubling statistics about where are we going with this over-focus on STEM and on more pragmatic things like high-tech companies – which are all really important, and I fully support – they’re absolutely crucial. But if we lose touch with the humanities and the social sciences, we really are losing something very fundamental about what it is to be human.

And Scholarium tries to a) deal with that, namely help PhDs. So, there’s this overproduction of PhDs – all over the world, by the way, but especially in the West, in the United States, which, according to Peter Turchin, “one historian is a real danger to society,” because you have this influx of PhDs that can’t be absorbed into the academic institution anymore. Far too many experts out there, but there’s no way to integrate them into academia or for them to get tenure-track positions. And at the same time, they lack the tools to know how to effectively pivot and find a different way to use their expertise.

So, we’re trying to facilitate some kind of different ways to help PhD-holders newly coming out of different departments in the humanities and social sciences to teach in the public sphere – for instance, to mentor high school students or undergraduate students, to tutor, to do all kinds of things.

But as you said, one big part of it is it’s really important to educate the public about these really crucial things that are so central to the humanities. So, if you take my field, for instance – comparative religion and religious studies – a lot of the conflicts that we see today in the world – political, religious, geographic – are based on very basic misunderstandings of what Muslims are, of what Christians are, “What do Jews believe?” and “What’s Confucianism anyway?”

One way to use that expertise that’s coming out, with very skillful and specialized people who are coming out with PhDs, is to use them in order to educate the public and to improve religious literacy. And that can happen in congregations, which we do, and it can happen in corporate America, to enrich employees in high-tech companies and corporate America in the humanities. So, there’s a major crisis out there, and Scholarium comes to kind of deal with that. And one of the things that we also try to do is: One way to save the humanities is to reach out to other disciplines, and to create multidisciplinary research where our knowledge is actually absolutely crucial for kind of completing the grand picture of what this whole thing is that we call human reality or culture.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think that, for a lot of universities and academies, their goal is to self-perpetuate their own system – which I think has a lot of challenges in terms of diversity, of being able to recruit minorities, to recruit women, to recruit people who come from a more economically disadvantaged background. There are all these barriers to actually be part of that system that I think it does become structural. And so how do we, I think, reach on the lower level, of being able to get people in high school and college and to be able to get more thoughtful people from different backgrounds, because if the humanities is white, Protestant males, then that’s not humanity, right? That’s a very small percentage of what humanity actually is. And we need more diverse voices here.

Yair Lior: Absolutely. I think that’s a really important process, and a reckoning that academia needs to go through, and it is. It is tackling this issue. There’s a strong push towards employing more diverse people. And you see that in departments, and you see that in employment trends. So that’s actually a really good thing that’s happening, and you get a much more nuanced understanding of cultures, rather than a certain civilization kind of superimposing Western ideas and Western categories on other civilizations. You really want to bring Native Americans, Black people, more women, into the mix, in order to get that kind of diverse palette of views. And I think that’s something that is being tackled, and that’s a very good trend in academia today.

Geoff Mitelman: There was a question that came up, of the challenge of term limits on politicians versus term limits for academics. Politicians have always got to get re-elected. For academics, I don’t know enough about tenure and tenure-track and the politics there, but I know from what I understand, that’s a process that I think needs to be totally overhauled, from what I’m hearing from people in the academic world.

Where do you see the challenges and the opportunities of tenured professors and tenure-track positions? Because you probably don’t want academics having to find a new job every couple of years, and you also don’t want to have somebody who’s been entrenched 40 years, and not have to be finding out new ideas and new populations that that person’s teaching.

Yair Lior: Yeah, and there have been some disturbing statistics about that – that the number of academic tenure-track faculty over the age of 70 is growing exponentially. People, especially in uncertain times, are very reluctant to retire, and there are no limits on retirement at this point because of federal law. And you do find this type of ossification that’s really dangerous in a place where creativity and innovation and thinking outside of the box is really important.

I think that a lot of the structures and institutions in academia are lagging behind. Something needs to be done with the tenure-track position – not to completely relinquish or get rid of it, but something needs to happen in order to create more space for younger people to enter these institutions. In academia, what you have now is fairly explicit exploitation of lower-tier faculty like adjuncts and lecturers, who are underpaid, they don’t have guarantees for future employment, they live under great stress, and they have a really challenging lifestyle. And many of them, at one point, are so exhausted that they just leave.

And one of the things that we want is to keep them publishing and doing what they’re good at and doing what they’ve been trained, for sometimes 15 years, to do. And that training is taxpayers’ money. This is a social issue. So, yeah, I totally agree. Something about academic institutions and structures is lagging behind, and there needs to be some serious overhaul and reckoning if we want academia to still be a productive field. There are new elites showing up – Silicon Valley and other centers of power – that I feel are slowly overshadowing academia in terms of who’s producing knowledge.

Geoff Mitelman: You know, the analogy that I’m thinking about – as somebody who’s a big baseball fan – [is] of the major leagues versus the minor leagues. And when we think about major-league players, we think of the handful of superstars who are making eight figures. That’s a handful. But the vast majority of baseball players are minor-leaguers. And there was actually an article where they’re going to pay for now for housing and food – or at least housing – for minor-league players, because there are so many minor-leaguers who are living basically hand-to-mouth, hoping to be able to make it in. It’s almost like it’s an analogy in academia, right – where there’s a handful of superstars and everybody’s fighting for the scraps.

There was a humor website, McSweeney‘s, which had – there’s always a little bit of truth in humor. And they said, “Is this a postdoc position or the Squid Game?” Which is accurate. And there were too many parallels between being a postdoc and Squid Game. And you don’t want people fighting over the scraps. It’s also been the questions of economic incentives, right? Like, where do we incentivize the best people, and how do we find the best people that we may have been overlooking for decades, or for centuries, and to be able to bring these people into the fold and explore the conversations?

Yair Lior: Absolutely. You know, one international relations professor from Tufts University talked about the employment situation in academia as an “elite cartel.” What he was trying to say [is] that today, when you have an open position, there’s such an overproduction of PhDs that sometimes you have 700 people running for a position. Now, if you’re the one who needs to choose, you’re probably going to start eliminating by the hundreds on your desk – just eliminating people out, and you’re going to mainly focus on the people who come from Ivy League universities. And what’s happening is that people who are getting tenure-track jobs come from a tiny minority of schools.

Now, that’s a huge problem, because when you apply to a PhD, you’re not looking for a top school, necessarily. What you’re looking is for a professor who’s doing stuff that is of interest to you. So, you could be a really good thinker, a very prolific academic, that made a responsible decision to go to a fairly unknown university, but to study under a really, really important mentor. And then when you find yourself seven years later in the job market, you’re not being employed, just because of the reputation of your university. So, he called it an “elite cartel,” where there’s a monopolization of tenure-track positions by the Yales and Harvards of the world.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, that’s not an inaccurate statement.  There’s one more question that I want to ask that came up, which is also interesting: “Is it immediate perception, or is it true, that on most college campuses, academics seem to be left-leaning, or, as we might say, ‘woke’? Why is there not more diversity of thought?”

I know there’s the Heterodox Academy that looks at these kinds of questions as well. There are elements, where it comes to Israel and Zionism and the BDS movement, which I think is going to take us a little too far afield. But is your experience that the academic world is much farther left than where most of America is?

Yair Lior: Yes, absolutely. I think that academia is kind of a bastion, a stronghold of relatively radical liberal views, that’s for sure. And that could be a problem in terms of our search for objective truth. We have reached a situation in not all institutions, but many academic institutions, where ideology trumps facts. So, there are certain facts that, in spite of the fact that they’re facts, they don’t align very well with liberal ideals, and therefore, “Let’s not talk about them, let’s not publish about them.” That’s a real problem if you want to remain relevant in an ever-changing world.

And I think there’s something to say – you know, The Heterodox Academy is one response to that. I appreciate initiatives like that. I think that it’s important, but I think it’s also incumbent on academics in departments, in the universities, to try and counter that trend of silencing, of cancel culture and things like that. It just doesn’t align very well with an institution that is supposed to look at objective truth dispassionately.

So, I would like to depoliticize academia as much as possible. There are always going to be politics – I’m talking as a liberal, but as someone that feels that I’m not on the very radical side of the spectrum there. I think that there should be a push towards a diversification of opinions, and people should feel comfortable airing their ideas without worrying about suffering consequences, especially if you’re not tenured. That’s a huge, huge problem.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. There’s a big systemic issue that touches on so many different challenges, and we didn’t solve them, but we got to highlight some of them. So, Yair, thank you so much for taking the time with us this afternoon. If people want to follow you or Scholarium, where should they go – online or on Twitter? What websites or Twitter handles or Facebook should people go to?

Yair Lior: Yeah. So first of all, do I have an option to put something in the chat box here?

Geoff Mitelman Why don’t you share it orally? Because we’ll include this for people to be able to follow it afterwards.

Yair Lior: Yeah, we have Twitter, we have a Facebook group, we have a website. You can contact us through any one of those channels. And we’re excited to have more people come in and become part of this initiative. So that would be great. Thanks for helping out with that.

Geoff Mitelman Of course. It’s scholarium.org, correct? That’s the URL.

Yair Lior: Actually, it’s www.thecholarium.com. “Scholarium” wasn’t available and Someone wants $20,000 for that URL. So we just took thescholarium.com.

Geoff Mitelman: So you added thescholarium.com. Thank you for taking the time with us this afternoon.

Next week, we will be talking with Joelle Novey, who works at Interfaith Power and Light in the DC-Northern Virginia-Maryland region. And I got to know her a couple of months ago. So, we’ll be talking about the role that faith communities can play in combating climate change. You can follow us on Twitter – I’m @RabbiMitelman – or you can follow us on Twitter at @SinaiSynapses. You can follow us at sinaiandsynapses.org or these conversations, or we have all of our conversations archived at Jewishlive.org/SacredScence. We have this conversation every Tuesday at 02:00 p.m. Eastern, so I hope you’ll join us next week. And thank you all for taking some time with us this afternoon.

Yair Lior: And thanks a lot for having me. This was a lot of fun. Thanks a lot.