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Jewish Democracy and Its Incommensurables

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avatar by Benjamin Kerstein / JNS.org

Opinion

Sheets of newly printed ballots seen at Palphot printing house in Karnei Shomron, in preparation for Israel’s upcoming general elections, Feb. 12, 2020. Photo: Flash90.

JNS.org – An excellent recent column by Zionist activist Blake Flayton on how to explain and defend Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” recently caught my eye. Flayton defends Israel as a democracy on several counts, especially its guarantee of equal rights for minorities of all kinds, and defends it as a Jewish state on the ground of the Jewish people’s absolute right to self-determination in their homeland. His thesis is eloquent and convincing, but it also made me think — in particular, about incommensurables.

“Incommensurable” is an intimidating word but describes a very simple thing. It is a philosophical concept that holds there are ideas and principles that exist in contradiction to each other, especially in a political entity, but cannot cancel each other out. This is because, by definition, they cannot be measured according to a universal metric.

The most famous of these are the principles of “liberty” and “equality,” to which all modern democracies have dedicated themselves. The contradiction between the two is self-evident: the more liberty exists, the more unequal a society becomes; while the more equal people are made to be, the less liberty they enjoy. But one cannot reach any conclusion via a universal metric that one is better than the other or supersedes the other. They exist each on their own terms, representing variant but equally legitimate concepts of what is good and just.

The British philosopher John Gray has posited in his work that the contention between these principles and numerous other incommensurables can never be resolved. As a result, all societies are essentially jury-rigged structures of various incommensurable principles and values, and the contention between them is constantly shifting and often conflicted.

Today, one can see this at work in the United States, which often seems little more than a web of incommensurables that can barely coexist. Republicans tend to passionately believe that liberty is the superior principle, while Democrats tend to pursue equality with a similar passion. On a smaller scale, communities and voting blocs are often representative of wholly incommensurable principles. For evangelical Christians, the supreme principle is to live a life that glorifies Christ. For secular progressives, the supreme principle is liberation from all forms of imposed oppression — religious, sexual, racial or economic. Despite the fact that these groups believe they are correct according to a universal standard, they clearly are not. Their principles are legitimate in and of themselves, according to their own lights, and the means of assessing them are completely different and cannot be reconciled.

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