Tony Judt targets the ability of many smart people to always manage to see "no alternatives" to the orthodoxies handed down to them

Czesław Miłosz (right) with his brother Andrzej in 1999

"Those who have internalized the way of being called 'Ketman' can live with the contradictions of saying one thing and believing another, adapting freely to each new requirement of their rulers while believing that they have preserved somewhere within themselves the autonomy of a free thinker -- or at any rate a thinker who has freely chosen to subordinate himself to the ideas and dictates of others."

-- from Tony Judt's memoir essay "Captive Minds"

by Ken

On Sunday I quoted the striking conclusion of what I assume is one of the last of Tony Judt's "memoir essays, "Captive Minds":

One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay [The Captive Mind], [Czesław] Miłosz’s indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: “his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.”

Judt evokes Miłosz as a peerless guide to "the attraction of intellectuals to Stalinism and, more generally, of the appeal of authority and authoritarianism to the intelligentsia." He begins the piece recalling a visit to the restored manor house of Miłosz (1911-2004) near the Polish-Lithuanian border, and notes resonances in his own family history. Later he places the writer, like many Poles not strictly Polish by descent, for us:

Raised in the interwar Polish republic, Miłosz survived the occupation and was already a poet of some standing when he was sent to Paris as the cultural attaché of the new People’s Republic. But in 1951 he defected to the West and two years later he published his most influential work, The Captive Mind. Never out of print, it is by far the most insightful and enduring account of the attraction of intellectuals to Stalinism and, more generally, of the appeal of authority and authoritarianism to the intelligentsia.

Miłosz studies four of his contemporaries and the self-delusions to which they fell prey on their journey from autonomy to obedience, emphasizing what he calls the intellectuals’ need for “a feeling of belonging.” Two of his subjects -- Jerzy Andrzejewski and Tadeusz Borowski -- may be familiar to English readers, Andrzejewski as the author of Ashes and Diamonds (adapted for the cinema by Andrzej Wajda) and Borowski as the author of a searing memoir of Auschwitz, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

"[T]he book is most memorable for two images," Judt tells us: the “Pill of Murti-Bing,” and "Ketman."

THE "PILL OF MURTI-BING"

Miłosz came across this in an obscure novel by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Insatiability (1927). In this story, Central Europeans facing the prospect of being overrun by unidentified Asiatic hordes pop a little pill, which relieves them of fear and anxiety; buoyed by its effects, they not only accept their new rulers but are positively happy to receive them.

"KETMAN"

The second image is that of “Ketman,” borrowed from Arthur de Gobineau’s Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia, in which the French traveler reports the Persian phenomenon of elective identities. Those who have internalized the way of being called “Ketman” can live with the contradictions of saying one thing and believing another, adapting freely to each new requirement of their rulers while believing that they have preserved somewhere within themselves the autonomy of a free thinker—or at any rate a thinker who has freely chosen to subordinate himself to the ideas and dictates of others.

Ketman, in Miłosz’s words, “brings comfort, fostering dreams of what might be, and even the enclosing fence affords the solace of reverie.” Writing for the desk drawer becomes a sign of inner liberty. At least his audience would take him seriously if only they could read him.

"Between Ketman and the Pill of Murti-Bing," Judt writes, "Miłosz brilliantly dissects the state of mind of the fellow traveler, the deluded idealist, and the cynical time server."

As I mentioned Sunday, Judt tells us that The Captive Mind is a book he loved to teach, in one of the courses he most enjoyed teaching, but that over the years his late-20th-century American students found it increasingly remote.

[W]hen I first taught the book in the 1970s, I spent most of my time explaining to would-be radical students just why a “captive mind” was not a good thing. Thirty years on, my young audience is simply mystified: Why would someone sell his soul to any idea, much less a repressive one? By the turn of the twenty-first century, few of my North American students had ever met a Marxist. A self-abnegating commitment to a secular faith was beyond their imaginative reach. When I started out, my challenge was to explain why people became disillusioned with Marxism; today, the insuperable hurdle one faces is explaining the illusion itself.

Contemporary students do not see the point of the book: the whole exercise seems futile. Repression, suffering, irony, and even religious belief: these they can grasp. But ideological self-delusion? Miłosz’s posthumous readers thus resemble the Westerners and émigrés whose incomprehension he describes so well: “They do not know how one pays -- those abroad do not know. They do not know what one buys, and at what price.”

"But," Judt writes, "there is more than one kind of captivity."

Recall the Ketman-like trance of those intellectuals swept up in George W. Bush’s hysterical drive to war just a few years ago. Few of them would have admitted to admiring the President, much less sharing his worldview. So they typically aligned themselves behind him while doubtless maintaining private reservations. Later, when it was clear they had made a mistake, they blamed it upon the administration’s incompetence. With Ketman-like qualifications they proudly assert, in effect, “we were right to be wrong”—a revealing if unconscious echo of the plaidoyer of the French fellow travelers, “better to have been wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.”

Today, we can still hear sputtering echoes of the attempt to reignite the cold war around a crusade against “Islamo-fascism.” But the true mental captivity of our time lies elsewhere. Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger -- the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History. Just as the hapless British Labour chancellor in 1929–1931, Philip Snowden, threw up his hands in the face of the Depression and declared that there was no point opposing the ineluctable laws of capitalism, so Europe’s leaders today scuttle into budgetary austerity to appease “the markets.”

But “the market” -- like “dialectical materialism” -- is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers -- mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers -- who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.

"Above all," Judt writes, "the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives."

We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the “Washington consensus” in vulnerable developing countries -- with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation -- has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent “commercial terms” on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

It was in just such terms that communism was presented to its beneficiaries following World War II; and it was because History afforded no apparent alternative to a Communist future that so many of Stalin’s foreign admirers were swept into intellectual captivity. But when Miłosz published The Captive Mind, Western intellectuals were still debating among genuinely competitive social models—whether social democratic, social market, or regulated market variants of liberal capitalism. Today, despite the odd Keynesian protest from below the salt, a consensus reigns.

For Miłosz, “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” This is doubtless so and explains the continuing skepticism of the Eastern European in the face of Western innocence. But there is nothing innocent about Western (and Eastern) commentators’ voluntary servitude before the new pan-orthodoxy. Many of them, Ketman-like, know better but prefer not to raise their heads above the parapet. In this sense at least, they have something truly in common with the intellectuals of the Communist age. One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay, Miłosz’s indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: “his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.”

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Tony Judt explores the capacity for self-delusion of smart people whose greatest fear is thinking for themselves

In the new NYRB, Timothy Garton Ash describes his friend the British-American historian Tony Judt's Postwar as "the first major history of contemporary Europe to analyze the stories of Eastern and Western Europe in equally rigorous, nuanced detail, but also as part of a single, larger whole."

by Ken

In the new (September 30) New York Review of Books Timothy Garton Ash, the great historian of the late-20th-century transformation of Eastern Europe, pays unsentimental but large-scaled homage to his friend and onetime Oxford colleague Tony Judt, who died August 6 after a horrifying two-year siege of a variant of ALS (better known as Lou Gehrig's disease) that left his body all but totally useless even while his mind was apparently functioning at about as high a level as a human mind can function.

I can't do any sort of justice to Garton Ash's tribute, but it includes this characterization:

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of polemical intellectuals. There are those for whom the taking of controversial positions is primarily a matter of personal peacock display, factional or clique positioning, hidden agendas, score-settling, or serial, knee-jerk revisionism. Then there are those who, while not without personal motivations and biases, are fundamentally concerned with seeking the truth. Tony Judt was of the latter kind.

Sharp and cutting his pen could be, but his work was always about seeking the truth as best we can, with all the search tools at our disposal—from the toothpick of Anglo-American empiricism to the searchlight of Gallic overstatement. . . .

For our immediate purposes I want to quote Garton Ash's first and last paragraphs:

The poet Paul Celan said of his native Czernowitz that it was a place where people and books used to live. Tony Judt was a man for whom books lived, as well as people. His mind, like his apartment on Washington Square, was full of books—and they walked with him, arguing, to the very end.

•

It is probably inevitable that his life and work will now be viewed, at least for some time, through the prism of his cruel illness—and the quite public way in which he described and fought it. But death should not be allowed to define life. These were, after all, only two years out of sixty-two. As a hardheaded, nonreligious, unsentimental realist, Tony would have greeted any formulaic sentimentalities about what “lives on” with that dismissive shake of the hand. But in some important sense, his intellectual Czernowitz is still alive; and his books will long be walking and talking among us.

Garton Ash notes of the period of Judt's physical deterioration (the photo, by the way, was taken in his NYU office in 2006): "With the dedicated support of his family, devoted students, and professional carers, he found a way to go on doing what he did best—thinking, talking, and writing. In fact, the two years of his fatal illness were the occasion for a creative outpouring." He cites several projects still to appear in book form, including a "a set of memoir essays, composed in his head in those long periods of immobilized solitude, and then dictated," a number of which have been published in NYRB. I've written about several of them here, and to me they would be wonders of lucidity without regard to the author's near-total physical incapacitation. Factor that in and the achievement boggles the ordinary mind.

I confess that I've never read any of Judt's books, though I'm thinking I really need to get to Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) among others. I realize that my "relationship" with him is based entirely on his voluminous output in NYRB, where he became a regularly appearing literary friend. By profession he was a historian, but I don't remember ever coming away from one of his pieces without a sharpened and/or expanded perspective on social, moral, and political philosophy. And I don't remember any of them being more concentrated, or perhaps crystallized, than those astonishing "memoir essays."

After his death, I wrote: "Judt was one of the most penetrating and illuminating writers of his time. He left behind an extraordinary body of writing which I suspect can continue to nourish us for as long as we need." The September 30 NYRB contains another of the memoir essays, titled "Captive Minds," which I'm sure the author understood would have strong resonance for readers aware of his personal condition. The subject, though, is the remarkable capacity of people, even (especially?) really smart people, to reconcile themselves to the status of "mental captivity" to ideological orthodoxy.

The title is taken from Czeslaw Miłosz's "most influential work," The Captive Mind (1953), a book that Judt took special pleasure teaching, but that, he explains, became increasingly difficult to teach to his American students.

[W]hen I first taught the book in the 1970s, I spent most of my time explaining to would-be radical students just why a “captive mind” was not a good thing. Thirty years on, my young audience is simply mystified: Why would someone sell his soul to any idea, much less a repressive one? By the turn of the twenty-first century, few of my North American students had ever met a Marxist. A self-abnegating commitment to a secular faith was beyond their imaginative reach. When I started out, my challenge was to explain why people became disillusioned with Marxism; today, the insuperable hurdle one faces is explaining the illusion itself.

As usual with Judt, he's headed toward an eye- and mind-opening observation about our present-day political and social reality:

One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay, Miłosz’s indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: “his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.”

I have no doubt that the only proper way to explain what Judt means by this and how he arrives here is the way Judt did, and I can't encourage you enough to let him do so for you -- before I blunder my way through an attempt tomorrow.


UPDATE: A SLIGHT
SCHEDULE CORRECTION

It occurred to me that we can't continue our discussion of this provocative Tony Judt piece tomorrow; that'll have to wait till Tuesday. Tomorrow is the eve of this week's round of primaries, being held in lots of jurisdictions that make a point of holding off till after -- albeit just after -- Labor Day, when tradition says that average Americans not only are at home and in harness but have finally begun thinking about elections. I'll have some thoughts about why this round of elections matters, which will include an admonitory reminder to residents of New York State to vote for Eric Schneiderman for the Democratic nomination for state attorney general.

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Tony Judt (1948-2010)

by Ken

In the February 11 New York Review of Books, in a piece called "Night," which launched what the magazine described as "a series of short reflections," the British-born historian Tony Judt detailed the physical state to which his neurological disorder, "a variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): Lou Gehrig’s disease," had reduced him. "Progressive imprisonment without parole," he called it. (He was then, he wrote, "effectively quadriplegic.")

Somehow, though, he produced the extraordinary series of memoir-reflections we've talked about some -- but not nearly enough -- here. He explained that he developed the process to cope with his helplessness at night.

My solution has been to scroll through my life, my thoughts, my fantasies, my memories, mis-memories, and the like until I have chanced upon events, people, or narratives that I can employ to divert my mind from the body in which it is encased. These mental exercises have to be interesting enough to hold my attention and see me through an intolerable itch in my inner ear or lower back; but they also have to be boring and predictable enough to serve as a reliable prelude and encouragement to sleep. It took me some time to identify this process as a workable alternative to insomnia and physical discomfort and it is by no means infallible. But I am occasionally astonished, when I reflect upon the matter, at how readily I seem to get through, night after night, week after week, month after month, what was once an almost insufferable nocturnal ordeal. I wake up in exactly the position, frame of mind, and state of suspended despair with which I went to bed—which in the circumstances might be thought a considerable achievement.

Judt was one of the most penetrating and illuminating writers of his time. He left behind an extraordinary body of writing which I suspect can continue to nourish us for as long as we need. At the moment, the home page of the NYRB website has links to some of his work for the magazine, and a link to a full list.

He made clear that he dreaded the inevitable even-further deterioration of his condition. He died Friday.

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At least in NYRB it's possible to discuss seriously what it means to be Jewish in America (and how that relates to Israel)

From the NYU website: The Remarque Institute was created at New York University in 1995 under the direction of Professor Tony Judt to support and promote the study and discussion of Europe and its near neighbors; to encourage greater mutual understanding between Americans and Europeans; and to host talks and debates on subjects of common concern and topical significance. The Institute was named after Erich Maria Remarque, whose widow, Paulette Goddard, made a generous bequest to New York University.

"I reject the authority of the rabbis -- all of them (and for this I have rabbinical authority on my side). I participate in no Jewish community life, nor do I practice Jewish rituals. I don't make a point of socializing with Jews in particular -- and for the most part I haven't married them. I am not a 'lapsed' Jew, having never conformed to requirements in the first place. I don't 'love Israel' (either in the modern sense or in the original generic meaning of loving the Jewish people), and I don't care if the sentiment is reciprocated. But whenever anyone asks me whether or not I am Jewish, I unhesitatingly respond in the affirmative and would be ashamed to do otherwise."

-- Tony Judt, in the "memoir piece" "Toni,"
in the May 13 New York Review of Books

by Ken

As I mentioned Sunday, the British-American historian Tony Judt has been publishing an extraordinary series of "memoir pieces" in the NYRB. On Sunday I wrote about the first of two that appeared in the May 13 issue, called "Austerity," where he recalled the conditions of deprivation, and consquent austerity, in the postwar decade in Britain into which he was born, and in which "the greatest age of reform in modern British history" took place.

He worked his way to a proposition that I find remarkable -- boldface emphasis added:

Sixty years after Churchill could offer only “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” our very own war president—notwithstanding the hyperventilated moralism of his rhetoric—could think of nothing more to ask of us in the wake of September 11, 2001, than to continue shopping. This impoverished view of community—the “togetherness” of consumption—is all we deserve from those who now govern us.Sixty years after Churchill could offer only “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” our very own war president—notwithstanding the hyperventilated moralism of his rhetoric—could think of nothing more to ask of us in the wake of September 11, 2001, than to continue shopping. This impoverished view of community—the “togetherness” of consumption—is all we deserve from those who now govern us. If we want better rulers, we must learn to ask more from them and less for ourselves. A little austerity might be in order.

Our subject today is quite different. In the other May 13 piece, "Toni" (the link is above, but unfortunately only the start of the piece is available free on the website). Judt explores "the curiosities of Jewish identity," which he has found even more curious since coming to the U.S. "Most American Jews of my acquaintance," he writes, "are not particularly well informed about Jewish culture or history; they are blithely ignorant of Yiddish or Hebrew and rarely attend religious ceremonies. When they do, they behave in ways that strike me as curious." In fact, he finds much of the way in which American Jews express our Jewishness curious, not least the slavish devotion to Israel, and particularly the increasingly right-wing and increasingly appalling government.

In "Toni," Judt recalls this tableau:

Some years ago I attended a gala benefit dinner in Manhattan for prominent celebrities in the arts and journalism. Halfway through the ceremonies, a middle-aged man leaned across the table and glared at me: "Are you Tony Judt? You really must stop writing these terrible things about Israel!" Primed for such interrogations, I asked him what was so terrible about what I had written. "I don't know. You may be right -- I've never been to Israel. But we Jews must stick together: we may need Israel one day."

Again looking back through his personal history, Judt notes that for the generation of his parents, immigrants from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, the sense of Jewishness might have died out if not for the rise of Hitler.

A generation of emancipated young Jews, many of whom had fondly imagined themselves fully integrated into a post-communitarian world, was forcibly re-introduced to Judaism as civic identity: one that they were no longer free to decline. Religion -- once the foundation of Jewish experience -- was pushed ever further to the margin. In Hitler's wake, Zionism (hitherto a sectarian minority preference) became a realistic option. Jewishness became a secular attribute, externally attributed.

And in this country, he says, the after-effect has been "a sensitivity to past suffering that can appear disproportionate even to fellow Jews."

Shortly after publishing an essay on Israel's future, I was invited to London for an interview with The Jewish Chronicle -- the local Jewish paper of record. I went with trepidation, anticipating further aspersions upon my imperfect identification with the Chosen People. To my surprise, the editor turned off the microphone: "Before we start," she began, "I'd like to ask you something. How can you stand to live among those awful American Jews?"

"And yet," he continues, "maybe those 'awful American Jews' are onto something despite themselves."

For what can it mean -- following the decline of faith, the abatement of persecution, and the fragmentation of community -- to insist upon one's Jewishness? A "Jewish" state where one has no intention of living and whose intolerant clerisy excludes ever more Jews from official recognition? An "ethnic" membership criterion that one would be embarrassed to invoke for any other purpose?

The "Holocaust obsession" of American Jews, he suggests, "provides reference, liturgy, example, and moral instruction -- as well as historical proximity." And yet, he asks, "Are we really Jews for no better reason than that Hitler sought to exterminate our grandparents? If we fail to rise above this consideration, our grandchildren will have little cause to identify with us."

Remembering is important, he insists, but as "part of a broader social obligation by no means confined to Jews."

I choose to invoke a Jewish past that is impervious to orthodoxy: that opens conversations rather than closes them. Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling: the dafka[contrarian]-like quality of awkwardness and dissent for which we were once known. It is not enough to stand at a tangent to other peoples' conventions; we should also be the most unforgiving critics of our own. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

There is one brief paragraph left in the piece, but in order to quote it I have to go back to Judt's opening invocation of the Toni of the title: his father's first cousin Toni Avegael, whom Tony never knew, though he knew her older sister Lily, "a tall, sad lady whom my parents and I used to visit in a little house somewhere in northwest London." Toni Avegael "was born in Antwerp and lived there most of her life." Judt thinks of the Avegael sisters "whenever I ask myself -- or am asked -- what it means to be Jewish."

Here's that final paragraph of the piece:

Toni Avegael was transported to Auschwitz in 1942 and gassed to death there as a Jew. I am named after her.

SPEAKING OF AMERICAN JEWS AND ISRAEL: PETER
BEINART TAKES ON THE AMERICAN JEWISH ESTABLISHMENT

There has been a lot of chatter about a piece in the current NYRB by Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic (and now a political commentator on The Daily Beast), called "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment." It's a sound piece, and worth reading, but I doubt that there's much that will be new to anyone who's been paying attention to the evolution of attitudes among American Jews toward both their religion and the state of Israel. I suspect that the only reason the piece has caused such a furor is the identity of the writer.

Beinart starts from the perplexity of the powerful American Jewish infrastructure, as represented by groups like the muscular pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, at the frightening (to them) loss of concern for Israel among younger American Jews. As Tony Judt points out in "Toni" -- and Beinart makes essentially the same point -- they have no personal recollection of persecution, whether by Cossacks or Nazis.

Beinart makes what I think is an unexceptionable connection between this state of affairs and the Israel-can-do-no-wrong attitude of those masters of the American Jewish agenda, who have made Zionism incompatible with the traditional liberalism of American Jews.

[T]he leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States -- so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel -- is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where {the students polled by the dean of Republican pollsters, Frank Luntz, at the instigation of a group of Jewish philanthropists] wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.

As Beinart notes, and American Jews are never allowed by that Israel-can-do-no-wrong leadership to acknowledge, a debate about appropriate Israeli attitudes and behavior toward its Arab citizens and neighbors has raged for decades in Israel.

The forces of bigotry, reaction, and hatred have long since had the upper hand, but still haven't silenced the voices of those who understand that the hardliners' way is a guarantee of the destruction of Israel, except possibly as an apartheid state. Of course American Jewish leaders and the people who follow them go berserk when you talk about Israel as an apartheid state, but to deny that that's where Israel is headed, if it isn't already there, is possible only if you're either a groaning imbecile or a thuggish liar.

Beinart doesn't put it quite that bluntly, but he comes remarkably close, and he is unflinching in examining the terrifying attitudes of the people who drive policymaking in present-day Israel. Some of what he reports -- namely a widely held attitude that is openly eliminationist -- is new to me, and is awfuler than what I already knew or even suspected. Much of the rest is sound but hardly unfamiliar or surprising to American Jews who have found, at last, a sane public voice in the thinking person's pro-Israel lobby, J Street.

As I say, I really have no major complaint with Beinart's piece, except that so little of it is new. It may be that coming from him the case will reach bastions of American illiberal Zionism -- a phrase he uses which I quite like. Which brings us back to that basic fact of who Beinart is: for more than decade a top editor, and for some seven years the editor, of what we might call the house organ of American illiberal Zionism, The New Republic. And as some commentators have pointed out, even now this piece appears in the NYRB, to whose readers the basic argument is old hat, and not in The New Republic.

To put it another way, if Beinart is now taking on the American Jewish establishment, what about those years in which he was, if not part of that establishment, then a highly outspoken tool of it? There is the vaguest reference to possible past error (looking through the piece again quickly I can't even find it), but that really doesn't add up to acknowledgment. It would have been nice if he had chosen to come clean in that regard.

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E. J. Dionne Jr.: "How many more scandals will it take for people who call themselves Christian to rediscover the virtues of humility and solidarity?"

Defrocked Indiana moralist Mark Souder inspires E. J. Dionne Jr. to say to "my conservative Christian friends": "Enough with dividing the world between moral, family-loving Christians and supposedly permissive, corrupt, family-destroying secularists."

"It's not the self-righteousness of religious conservatives that bothers me most. We liberals can be pretty self-righteous, too. It's the refusal to acknowledge that the pressures endangering the family do not come from some dark secular leftist conspiracy but from cultural and economic forces that affect us all."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column today,

"Mark Souder's downfall shows virtue knows no ideology"

by Ken

I more or less promised yesterday, when I talked about Tony Judt's remarkable memoir vignette, "Austerity," in the May 13 New York Review of Books, that today we would come back to the second vignette from that issue, about his complicated (or maybe not so complicated) relationship to his Jewishness. We're definitely going to come back to it, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, but since we're on the subject of the role of religious faith in a person's life, I had to pause for consideration of E. J. Dionne Jr.'s eloquent column today.

Dionne, of course, resolutely refuses to raise his voice, and in that quiet, humble voice all sorts of wisdom slips into the Post's editorial pages, apparently beyond the reach (or perhaps awareness?) of the paper's increasingly cynical and corrupt management, not to mention the ministrations of closet neanderthal Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt. Or maybe they're all too aware, and that's why they feel the need to print that entire platoon of screamingly imbecilic, dishonest, and corrupt right-wing columnistic phrauds and fonies.

Today's column takes off from the spectacular fall from grace of former Indiana Rep. Mark Souder, one of the most aggressively -- and, we now discover, not entirely surprisingly, fraudulently -- morality-imposing Visigoths in American public life. Souder, of course, is merely the latest in the seemingly endless procession of fake-moral fire-and-brimstone Christian Right hypocrites to be exposed for the lying sack of doody he is.

Dionne begins by noting: "I always thought he was the real deal, both serious and thoughtful in his approach to religious and political questions." Unfortunately for the dwindling band of Christians who actually understand and attempt to live by the teachings of Jesus, they are always at a disadvantage in dealing with the Crap Christians all around them, who never come closer to spirituality than feeling superior by beating others over the head with rigid bogus-moral prescriptions, which they don't (a) understand, (b) believe in, or -- all too often (c) practice.

Because Dionne actually understands the concept of "fairness," which most people, including virtually every right-winger I've known or heard of, think of as "getting what I delusionally believe I'm entitled to," he is at pains not to gloat, or to excuse liberals from the sin of self-righteousness. It's with apparent pain that he recalls Souder saying: "To ask me to check my Christian beliefs at the public door is to ask me to expel the Holy Spirit from my life when I serve as a congressman, and that I will not do. Either I am a Christian or I am not."

To me this simply explains why Souder is doomed to rot in the Hell to which he so easily consigned others for a (hopefully) limitlessly agonizing eternity. Whereas in Dionne it merely inspires the "hope that Souder finds a way to work out his redemption." Which sets the stage for this amazing burst of soft-spoken eloquence:

[I]t is precisely because this story hits me personally that I want to shout as forcefully as I can to my conservative Christian friends: Enough!

Enough with dividing the world between moral, family-loving Christians and supposedly permissive, corrupt, family-destroying secularists.

Enough with pretending that personal virtue is connected with political creeds. Enough with condemning your adversaries, sometimes viciously, and then insisting upon understanding after the failures of someone on your own side become known to the world. And enough with claiming that support for gay rights and gay marriage is synonymous with opposition to family values and sexual responsibility.

Dionne offers the example of his own "very liberal Maryland neighborhood -- 80 percent of my precinct voted for Barack Obama" to propose that concerned parents, regardless of ideology or religious persuasion (including no religious persuasion) approach their responsibility to have their children educated and to instill ethical values do so in similar ways, and with indistinguishable seriousness.

Dionne concludes:

[T]hose of us who are liberal would insist that our support for the rights of gays and lesbians grows from our sense of what family values demand. How can being pro-family possibly mean holding in contempt our homosexual relatives, neighbors and friends? How much sense does it make to preach fidelity and commitment and then deny marriage to those whose sexual orientation is different from our own? Rights for gays and lesbians don't wreck heterosexual families. Heterosexuals are doing a fine job of this on their own.

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." It's a scriptural passage that no doubt appeals to Mark Souder. But it would be lovely if conservative Christians remembered Jesus's words not only when needing a lifeline but also when they are tempted to give speeches or send out mailers excoriating their political foes as permissive anti-family libertines. How many more scandals will it take for people who call themselves Christian to rediscover the virtues of humility and solidarity?

Amen.

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Tony Judt: "If we want better rulers, we must learn to ask more from them and less for ourselves"

Clement Attlee (1883-1967), Britain's Labour prime minister, 1945-51: "It was Attlee who presided over the greatest age of reform in modern British history" (Tony Judt).

by Ken

Packing hastily for a short trip, I pounced on the nearly intact-looking New York Review of Books, figuring it must be the issue that turned up in the mailbox most recently, which I'd hardly looked at. However, it turned out to be the previous issue (May 13), but that worked out great, because it contained some really important stuff, notably two more installments in what is described as "a continuing series of memoirs by Tony Judt," the extraordinary British-born historian and political and social commentator (author of, among many other books, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945). I want to talk a bit about one today and the other tomorrow.

The first piece is titled simply "Austerity," and describes the period of extreme austerity in which he grew up in postwar Britain, with shortages (and in many cases of rationing) of almost every imaginable commodity last well into the 1950s, bringing with it a uniformity of such things as dress which often cut across class lines, and breeding to at least an extent a feeling of Britons all all muddling through together.

As Judt, now a New York resident (the May 27 NYRB has another in this "series of memoirs," dealing with his coming to America), establishes straightaway, in his ecologically enlightened family he is regarded as "a prelapsarian relic from the age of ecological innocence." "But," he writes --

who traipses through the apartment switching off lights and checking for leaking faucets? Who favors make-do-and-mend in an era of instant replacement? Who recycles leftovers and carefully preserves old wrapping paper? My sons nudge their friends: Dad grew up in poverty. Not at all, I correct them: I grew up in austerity.

I can't begin to do justice to his description of the conditions he grew up in, so I won't try. But I have to quote this paragraph:

I grew up at least as familiar with World War I as with the one that had just ended. Veterans, memorials, and invocations abounded; but the ostentatious patriotism of contemporary American bellicosity was altogether absent. War, too, was austere: I had two uncles who fought with Montgomery’s Eighth Army from Africa through Italy and there was nothing nostalgic or triumphalist in their accounts of shortage, error, and incompetence. Arrogant music hall evocations of empire --

We don’t want to fight them, but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too!

-- had been replaced by the wartime radio lament of Vera Lynn: We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when. Even in the afterglow of victory, things would never be the same.

Judt writes of the "togetherness" bred in the British public by the hardships of the time:

It was this “togetherness” that made tolerable the characteristic shortages and grayness of postwar Britain. Of course, we weren’t really a family: if we were, then the wrong members -- as Orwell had once noted -- were still in charge. All the same, since the war the rich kept a prudently low profile. There was little evidence in those years of conspicuous consumption. Everyone looked the same and dressed in the same materials: worsted, flannel, or corduroy. People came in modest colors -- brown, beige, gray -- and lived remarkably similar lives. We schoolchildren accepted uniforms all the more readily because our parents too appeared in sartorial lockstep. In April 1947, the ever-dyspeptic Cyril Connolly wrote of our “drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories…. London [is] now the largest, saddest and dirtiest of great cities.”

Now he prepares to make the point he draws from this stroll down memory lane:

I don’t think I fully appreciated the impact of those early childhood years until quite recently. Looking back from our present vantage point, one sees more clearly the virtues of that bare-bones age. No one would welcome its return. But austerity was not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic. Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister from 1945 to 1951, had emerged -- like Harry Truman -- from the shadow of a charismatic war leader and embodied the reduced expectations of the age.

Judt recalls Churchill's mocking description of Attlee as a modest man “who has much to be modest about,” but observes, as I've noted at the top of this post, that --

it was Attlee who presided over the greatest age of reform in modern British history -- comparable to the achievements of Lyndon Johnson two decades later but under far less auspicious circumstances. Like Truman, he lived and died parsimoniously -- reaping scant material gain from a lifetime of public service. Attlee was an exemplary representative of the great age of middle-class Edwardian reformers: morally serious and a trifle austere. Who among our present leaders could make such a claim—or even understand it?

Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography: hard to define but you know it when you see it. It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the profession: precise, restrained -- and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Salvador Dalí (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing -- and cupidity -- of Damien Hirst.

Judt writes then of moral seriousness in the arts, which he argues "speaks to an economy of form and aesthetic restraint," citing The Bicycle Thief and Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959), and the experience of introducing it to his 12-year-old son.

Of a generation raised on a diet of contemporary “message” cinema from The Day After Tomorrow through Avatar, he was stunned: “It’s spare. He does so much with so little.” Quite so. The wealth of resources we apply to entertainment serves only to shield us from the poverty of the product; likewise in politics, where ceaseless chatter and grandiloquent rhetoric mask a yawning emptiness.

And he concludes:

The opposite of austerity is not prosperity but luxe et volupté. We have substituted endless commerce for public purpose, and expect no higher aspirations from our leaders. Sixty years after Churchill could offer only “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” our very own war president -- notwithstanding the hyperventilated moralism of his rhetoric -- could think of nothing more to ask of us in the wake of September 11, 2001, than to continue shopping. This impoverished view of community -- the “togetherness” of consumption -- is all we deserve from those who now govern us. If we want better rulers, we must learn to ask more from them and less for ourselves. A little austerity might be in order.

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