Friday, March 14, 2025
From Ian:
What’s Worth Dying For?
What’s Worth Dying For?
In her new book, “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It,” Melanie Phillips takes a candid look at the corrosion of the West and the hard road back.“In That Basic Sense the Zionists Were Right”: A Conversation with Irving Howe
For life to have meaning, it needs a sense of purpose. In recent decades, however, the West has taught itself that life is purposeless. There is nothing beyond ourselves. Life, the universe, and everything are the result of accidental developments. The appearance of design in the universe doesn’t mean there’s a designer; in Professor Richard Dawkins’s famous image, the watchmaker is blind, working without foresight or purpose.
For Dawkins, facing up to the randomness of existence is a heroic act. For countless others, however, it is a recipe for despair and demoralization. Random developments produce unforeseen consequences that we are unable to affect in any way. By contrast, moral agency means we make a difference through how we choose to behave. Our actions matter.
Moral agency is therefore a principal source of individual power; but the West has dispensed with moral codes as a curb on the freedom of the individual. So the paradox is that the more freedom we have, the less point there is to anything. Without moral agency, we become powerless, the plaything of determinist forces beyond our control. Human beings are helpless, in the grip of uncontrollable forces whether they be — as Marx, Darwin, and Freud told us—economic, biological, or psychological.
If the human being is nothing more than a sack of atoms whirling through space and time, if our consciousness is nothing more than the snapping of synapses and selfish genes, existence is random and therefore pointless. The resulting sense of powerlessness is a recipe for exponential misery, a ratchet effect of unrealistic expectations and the creation of permanent disappointment, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment.
This has driven, in turn, increasing attempts to forge a meaning to life beyond both religion and the satisfaction of the individual self.
The most obvious expression of this quest is the array of causes to which young people gravitate to find a focus for their idealism. One cause after the other claims to be about the betterment of the world — eradicating prejudice on grounds of race, sexuality, or gender, promoting the Palestinian agenda, saving the planet.
In fact, these causes are all based on demonizing and hating other people: white people, men, heterosexuals, Jews, and humanity in general.
Worse still, since these causes are utopian, they all fail to deliver the perfection of the world that they have promised. From multiculturalism to environmentalism to post-nationalism, Western progressives have fixated on unattainable abstractions for the realization of utopia. Since this inevitably results in disappointment, they consequently seek scapegoats upon whom they turn with a rage that’s as self-righteous as it is ferocious in order to bring about by coercion the state of purity that the designated culprits have purportedly thwarted.
Traditional liberal values, in the settlement that arose from the Enlightenment, involved tolerance, freedom, and the pursuit of reason. These values have come to characterize modernity in the Western world. Yet what’s called “liberalism” today has involved the repudiation of those virtues and replaced them with intolerance, oppression, and irrationality. Liberalism has mutated into its nemesis. These ideologies are all fueled by a rage against the world that exists and a desire to remake it anew. But rather than filling the existential vacuum, these ideologies merely deepen it.
A truncated version of the following interview, conducted in 1986, first appeared in the Jerusalem Post on September 5 of that year.Peter Beinart, Pundit (Declined)
—The Editors
America in the 20th century was a strange place. It could let a man spend 30 years writing essays, translating Yiddish stories, and editing a socialist magazine, which had few readers and barely paid the rent, and then, overnight, make him comfortable if not rich with a best seller about the vanished world of his immigrant parents.
Irving Howe (1920–1993), thanks to the commercial success of World of Our Fathers—his elegiac, not-so-sentimental account of the sweatshop Jews of Lower East Side—was able to move to the snazzier, safer side of Central Park. The book also made him, as he wrote in his autobiography, “famous for fifteen minutes.” Perhaps because his modest measure of money and fame came late in life, perhaps thanks to some strength of character acquired through early poverty, Howe’s popular success didn’t seem to have gone to his head.
As he answered my questions in his apartment in 1986, he was straightforward and serious, and as he stroked a fringe of white beard he seemed simultaneously bemused and grieved by what America had given him and what it had taken away from a generation of Jews like him.
He’d published more than 30 books on literature, politics, culture, and history. He taught English for many years at Brandeis, Stanford, and Hunter College. His wife, Ilana, was an Israeli, and he had two children from two previous marriages.
His autobiographical A Margin of Hope was a fairly honest and occasionally moving report on, among other things, Howe’s attempt to “reconquer” his Jewishness as “American socialism reached an impasse.”
The son of Yiddish-speaking garment workers, Howe was a Trotskyite in his youth, and even after World War II—during which he was in the army in Alaska—he clung to a vision of socialism in the New World.
He made his first mark among New York Jewish intellectuals by writing for Partisan Review, and Commentary. Soon, however, when he judged that they were celebrating America too uncritically, he launched his own magazine, Dissent, which for three decades had been trying to keep the ideals of socialism, or at least social democracy, fresh and bright. But, Howe admitted in his memoirs, Dissent was often boring.
Politically and culturally, Howe’s search for a Third Way had left him lonely—even stranded him. He broke with the New Left when it degenerated into tantrums, and was estranged from former friends and colleagues in the New York Jewish intellectual “family” who became neoconservatives and who flayed him for not learning all he should from his disillusion.
As for Jewishness, Howe had written that he, and others like him, long “avoided thinking about it.” He’d been, he said, rather indifferent if not actually cool to Israel—yet he’d relished the victory of the IDF in 1967. Howe, the ex-Trotskyite, had edited an anthology defending Israel and Zionism against the left. And he was known as an American supporter of Peace Now.
This brilliant essay first appeared in the print edition of Commentary magazine in 2010. We’re publishing it here on the occasion of Peter Beinart’s tour to sell his latest book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning”—another broadside against Israel. As part of the monthslong publicity jaunt, Beinart has launched attacks on, among other things, Purim, the Jewish holiday which begins tonight.
We were reminded of this essay while watching his press tour to promote himself and his book, which is only his latest episode in his ceaseless political transformation. —The Editors
Peter Beinart is one of those journalists, common in Washington, D.C., who is less interesting for what he says than for who he is, or who he wants to be thought to be. He’s an exemplar, and when, in May [2010], he published an essay in The New York Review of Books announcing that “morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral,” he deserved the considerable notice that the article brought him. As a piece of reasoned argument, or even as an anguished moral plea, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” was a mess: a goulash of overstatement, baseless accusation, statistical sleight-of-hand, strategic omission, and wince-making self-regard. As a piece of attention-getting, however, it was a masterstroke, and it’s on those terms, rather than its own, that the article and Beinart are best understood.
Beinart is well-known among Washington journalists as a quick-witted polemicist and a gifted stylist. He’s also regarded as one of the most energetic careerists anyone has ever seen. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Banish careerists from the ranks of Washington journalism and the only people left would be a handful of newsroom librarians and a couple of copy editors from Human Events. What makes Beinart’s campaign of self-promotion conspicuous—week after week, year after year—is its utter lack of inhibition. There’s a kind of insouciance to it.
As far as I know, it first came to general notice in a brief biographical sketch that Beinart circulated early in his career. Having climbed over the bloody, dismembered carcasses of his co-workers and mentors, Beinart was named editor of The New Republic in 1999, at the dewy age of 28. His self-written bio made unsurprising mention of an undergraduate degree (Yale), a Rhodes Scholarship (Oxford), and a master’s degree in international relations (ditto). And then, deathlessly, there was this: “Beinart won a Marshall Scholarship (declined).”
That “(declined)” became a much-loved inside joke among Beinart watchers, a large and contented group who have known ever since that their man always repays scrutiny.
Back then, Beinart wanted to be thought of as a neoliberal, a “liberal hawk.” A neoliberal—you youngsters might want to listen up now—was someone who, although allied with the center-left, nonetheless thought of himself as tough-minded and wised-up, intent on beating down the pacifist illusions of his pantywaisted fellow Democrats. Irving Kristol, who had famously defined a neoconservative as a liberal who had been mugged by reality, said (not quite so famously) that a neoliberal was a liberal who had been mugged by reality but refused to press charges. To Beinart and his fellow neolibs, these were, appropriately enough, fighting words. They stormed the nation’s cable shows and editorial pages, launching precision-guided op-eds and multiple-warhead blog posts to demonstrate their eagerness to use American military might to advance the nation’s interests.
Buy 
.jpg)
.jpg)
