Incest (Haaretz Supplement – 2000)

Beyond describing the phenomena associated with incest—those it causes and those that lead to it—Gadi Taub proposes (and promises to continue doing so in the second part of the article) an explanation for why human society regards this as such a grave sin. According to him, the reason for the prohibition is the injury to the child’s ability to form a sense of self and to integrate properly into society.

This is an example of the prevalent tendency in our circles to reduce values to psychology. In my opinion, such a reduction is impossible, and it is dangerous as well. I do not mean to claim that Taub’s descriptions are incorrect, only that they cannot serve as the reason for the prohibition, since value-based prohibitions have no reasons.

A value, as Leibowitz writes, is a postulate that cannot derive its meaning from anything but itself. A value can serve as a justification for decisions, or for certain modes of human action, but it itself is not susceptible to justification. It is what constitutes the basis, the axiom, of all value-based reasoning.

Rationalization of values, of any kind, immediately leads to their undermining. Just as the rationalization of the institution of the family led to the current anarchy (which certainly did not improve the quality of intimate relationships), and the rationalization of the sanctity of human life leads to killing for ‘justified’ reasons, such as abortion, euthanasia, unnecessary wars, abuse, torture, and the like, so too the rationalization of the prohibition of incest will lead to the undermining of this prohibition. This will be done either with pills against the psychological harms, or alternatively in a different social atmosphere that will allow such acts without the harms they currently cause. It should be noted that according to Jewish law, intercourse with a married woman is included among the forbidden sexual relations. This component has already been rationalized and completely undermined.

So much, then, for why reductionism is dangerous. As stated, in my opinion it is also incorrect. To the best of my fundamentalist understanding, the psychological harms are a result of the moral prohibition, not its reasons.

Taub, in his book ‘The Slouching Revolt,’ tries to present a modernist position and sharpen the difference between it and postmodernism (=’the new Enlightenment’). In my opinion he does not succeed in this, and this is not the place to elaborate on that issue, but the reasons for this, along with other characteristic shortcomings of his book, recur in this article as well. Here, as there, instead of modernist values that are supposed to constitute a ‘full wagon’ of liberal values, he offers a postmodern reductionism that gives rise to pseudo-values that are fluid and fashion-dependent.