Wrestling With The Is

I see now that I’m not the first person to point this out, but Washington Monthly has an interesting take up on the short-lived life of Culture11 (Rod gets the h/t because I saw it there first).  Before saying something myself, I want to point out two things.  First, from the article itself:

“What Culture11’s editors got right was the observation that, regardless of what you think of the world as it is, you can’t figure out how to wrestle with it until you understand what’s actually happening in it.”

 And then this, from Rod’s discussion of the article:

“As Claes Ryn put it in a penetrating TAC essay, organized conservatism finds itself wrecked today because it abandoned the culture, and taught itself to see the culture only in political terms.What we’ve turned into is a slightly more sophisticated, somewhat more secular version of Joe Carter’s Christian “shit-counters.” And see, this goes back to yesterday’s discussion (which I tried to launch, but which, like every homosexuality-related thread on this blog, gets taken over by the grinds) about why churches and social conservatives have got to find some way to articulate the old verities, the permanent things, in a way that’s compelling to people in this culture. You can’t just stand there and yell, “No!” at whatever the liberals throw out there, and expect that to change minds and win hearts.” [emphasis mine -- JLW]

Reminiscent of any famous conservative line from a famous conservative writer?  Pace William F. Buckley, standing athwart history yelling, “Stop!” ought not be the underlying principle of any conservative politics.  It’s a good quip, and as such, I don’t think you can claim in good faith that it was meant, as phrased, as a philosophical principle, but still — standing athwart history yelling stop can’t work, and cannot work because we live within history.  While the man who sees his calling as yelling, “Stop!” may be filling a needed role, it can’t be more than a role, and he as well as others need to accept that he will always appear somewhat like Kubrick’s Major Kong in his final moments on camera in Dr. Strangelove.

Standing athwart history means standing outside of history.  Any successful politics cannot must stand and act within history; within history is where we live.  Any successful — or even unsuccessful — conservatism must as well: isn’t it conservatism which eschews the messianic impulse toward perfection, toward removing humanity from the realm of history ourselves?  (Again, Buckley: “Don’t immanitize the eschaton.”)  And, living and acting within history, for conservatism to be successful, it must be more than yelling, “Stop!” or “No!” (though sometimes it may be justified and called for).

I don’t pretend to do more now than come at a particular aspect of what it must do, but I see it as important: it must appreciate.  The teaching of others — and learning ourselves — of appreciation of culture, and tradition: of what-is, and what-was — though by doing so we vivify the what-was and it remains the what-is.  Cultural prizes, from Homer to Chartres to Keats to those of the present day, are not past so long as they are appreciated and understood and prized.  But the last cannot happen without at least the first, and an effort made toward the second.  The cultural tradition is a living tradition: so are the political, and moral, and religious traditions of our lives; but I can better talk about it in terms of culture.  All of those discussions, of course, are different, but not so much that they can’t be understood by analogy.

Jewish Thoughts on Israel’s Moral Failures in Gaza

The repercussions of these reports from the Israeli army are, on a more universal perspective, fairly clear. It is, as Michael Weiss puts it, “demoralizing” to Israel’s supporters. So forgive me if I come at it from a much more particularly Jewish perspective.Let’s begin with this: there is no right for any particular generation of Jews to Israel. There are duties that Jews can perform best in Diaspora, duties that can only be performed in Israel, and duties that can only be performed by a Jewish state in Israel.  There is a need, for the fulfilment of earthly duties as a Jewish people, to exist at some point within a Jewish state in Israel.  But the Diaspora, or so the tradition goes, began because of failures on the part of the Jewish people within Israel. That is, we as Jews must be deserving – must live our lives in sufficiently holy ways so as to be deserving – of the chance to perform our duties and obligations as Jews leading a Jewish state in Israel.

This isn’t a call for perfection. Perfection isn’t a possibility within history. It is the simple statement that Jews – as Jews and especially as Jews in Israel – have an obligation to lead lives that strive toward holiness – which is demanded by the Covenant (which ought to merit a discussion itself, as the most terrifying part of Judaism).

Central to all this talk of “holiness” and “hallowing” (there is a reason for the preponderance of variations on the qof-dalet-shin root in prayer) is an understanding of the sanctity of a single human life. The world was created for no man individually but every man in particular. Not for the collective, but for the whole, individually. And that is why to save a life is as to save all Creation; to destroy a life as to destroy all Creation. And why the Sabbath may be broken to save a life, though the Sabbath is the holiest of days; its rules superceding the rules and rituals of all others.

Which is why, even without the reports out of Gaza, I would be concerned to see this opinion from the Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Army:

“He has also said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath, when work is prohibited but treating the sick and injured is expected, is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.”

It demonstrates an obsessive, exclusionist misreading of the concept of “Chosenness”: his would have it that Jews only have true obligations to other Jews and to G-d. Which is, suffice it to say, ridiculous – and borderline racist. He forgets the purpose of the Covenant: not that Jews alone might be “saved” and have some sort of millennial/eternal party with the divine, but (as the Aleinu, a prayer I suppose he recites at least as often as I do) has it (and has had it for about a thousand years): that, in the end, when “the words of the prophet are fulfilled” all will be united in love and worship of, and service to, G-d.  And considering that, it is utterly irresponsible – and hardly Jewish – theology to assert that there is a difference in sanctity between a Jewish life and a non-Jewish one. Though the nature of how that life is lived may differ, the sacredness of all human life is equal. There can be no difference in the sanctity of a Jewish life and a non-Jewish one.

So when you can read reports like these, published in Israel’s major daily

” ‘And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to … I don’t know how to describe it …. The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way,’ he [an Israeli squad leader] said.

[...]

“[‘Another squad leader from the same brigade'] said he argued with his commander over the permissive rules of engagement that allowed the clearing out of houses by shooting without warning the residents beforehand. After the orders were changed, the squad leader’s soldiers complained that ‘we should kill everyone there [in the center of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist.’

The squad leader said: ‘You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won’t say anything. To write ‘death to the Arabs’ on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It’s what I’ll remember the most.’”

And then see that this is not treated as an essential crisis of purpose by the Israeli government – that Avigdor Lieberman and his backers may hold multiple and important cabinet portfolios – is more than merely demoralizing. It is utterly devastating in that respect.

The State of Israel is a human political entity distinct from Am Yisra’el – I get that. But it is a political entity run by Jews, for Jews, in Israel. It cannot escape the essential Jewishness of its character. When it transgresses, it transgresses not just as a political entity, but as a Jewish entity. And from a believing, religious perspective, the Covenant will always be more terrifying and aw(e)ful than the United Nations; breaking it more a transgression than violating any Security Council decree.

When we – Jews, anywhere – behave like this, it is a violation of the Covenant. There is a right to defense, yes. But there is not a right to toss aside the belief in the essential sanctity of all human life, to toss aside our duty to lead hallowed lives as Jews, because of threats to safety. (And I acknowledge that I say this sitting in a Southern city a Jewish mayor and Jewish Congressman: a place, that is, safe for Jews, far from violence. It’s harder in Israel, and failure is human. But deliberate transgression is a far different matter than accidental transgression when threatened.)

To behave like this is a violation of the Covenant. And there is no fundamental right for any particular generation of Jews to Israel.  Juxtaposed, the two are truly frightening.

Israel & Gaza

Commenting on this Ha’aretz report on the IDF, Michael Weiss makes an astute comment and nails my immediate reaction to them:

“[T]he responsible first response to them is one of demoralization.”

I’ll have more to say on it later — it’s been on my mind as of late — but I’m still not quite feeling up to full strength (made a deal with the devil about delaying geting sick until after I finished with final papers) and have a flight to catch soon.  Speaking of which: next time you feel like being irresponsible with your health, insist on finishing Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein rather than go to bed while your fever spikes to 103.  That way, you get to have your fever-dreams merge with scenes from Ravelstein’s illness and the narrator’s fever-dreams.  Hannah Arendt kept showing up, also — still trying to figure that one out.  I think my mind had married her to both Leo Strauss and Bellow… anyway…

“No man faces the world as if it had just left the hand of the Creator.”

Will Herberg poses a situation in which a man is forced to choose between killing one man (an enemy aviator) or letting that man destroy an entire town by taking no action — both result in responsibility for death and violation of the sacredness of every life.  “Why is it he is compelled to violate the divine law?  The compulsive factors are obviously not of the natural order…” (Judaism and Modern Man, p. 217)  To answer, he brings up that (often problematic) line of Scripture: “The Lord visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children unto the third and fourth generations.”  His use might be more commonplace than I realize, but I find it fascinating nonetheless:

“What men have done at other times and places, what men do elsewhere in our own time, what we ourselves have done in the past, enter into the conditions that compel us to take life, to live by exploitation, to eat while others go hungry — just as what we do now adds to the burden of sin that will beset the men of time to come and cruelly restrict their freedom of action.  [...]

“The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children not merely in the sense that one generation has to bear the consequences of the deeds of another — ‘Our fathers have sinned. . .and we have borne their iniquities’ (Lam. 5:7) — but in the far more important sense that the sins of the fathers create a situation in which the children, too, do evil, if only because, in the concrete circumstances, no course of action is open to them that is not to some degree infected with it.  There is no escaping the solidarity of sin because there is no escaping the solidarity of mankind.” (Judaism and Modern Man, p. 218)

3… 2… 1…

And … I’m back!  Farewell, winter quarter; hello sunshine and (ever briefly) the warmth of the South!  It may take another 24 hours for my mind to clear up after yesterday’s Oh-Shit-I-Forgot-To-Ask-For-That-Extension-Term-Paper-In-A-Single-Day-Session.  (Not as much of a disaster as I thought it might be, though the last 1500 words went very slowly.)

Not that you care.  However, this article on American Jews and the Holocaust might pique your curiosity.  In short, the philosophical relationship to the event is awkward.

And, to give you an idea of how out of it I was lately, apparently Andrew Sullivan linked here (and misspelled my name!) and I didn’t notice it.  And then this place went dimmer than John’s.  Ah, such is life.

Dr. More! Paging Dr. More!

I really don’t mean this as any comment on the veracity of the claim (I haven’t the intellectual capacity right now — and won’t for another week — for anything but bemusement), but ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Peggy Noonan:

“The sale of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the ’00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn’t notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Sterns, and Merrill, and Citi.

“Gun sales continue up. … ”Smith & Wesson stands for protection.” People are scared.

…

“In Manhattan, Catholic church attendance appears to be up.

…

“I spoke to a Manhattan-based psychiatrist who said there is an uptick in the number of his patients reporting depression and anxiety.”

One of her conclusions?

“Something is happening.”

Ah, those dread latter days!  Lapsometers at the ready, boys and girls!

The End Is Nigh!

Of the quarter, that is.  So if I’m more sporadic than usual, rest assured that it has nothing to do with the state of UK basketball and everything to do with the number of papers I’ve set myself up for in the immediate future.

All I’m Gonna Say…

…is that it will only be appropriate that UK won’t be able to play an opening round NIT game at Rupp Arena because it’ll be otherwise occupied by high school kids that weekend.

(On the other hand, Northwestern’s trying to play it’s way back into the bubble…)

Doubt, Faith, the Bible

Rod Dreher linked to this article by way of Biblical literacy, but what I found truly striking was Plotz’s confession of his struggles with God and the idea of God during and after reading the Bible:

“I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn’t really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I’m brokenhearted about God.”

Then he ends by noting something important:

“As I read the book, I realized that the Bible’s greatest heroes-or, at least, my greatest heroes-are not those who are most faithful, but those who are most contentious and doubtful: Moses negotiating with God at the burning bush, Gideon demanding divine proof before going to war, Job questioning God’s own justice, Abraham demanding that God be merciful to the innocent of Sodom. They challenge God for his capriciousness, and demand justice, order, and morality, even when God refuses to provide them.”

Those Biblical figures called heroes, and pillars, and faithful, and righteous: they doubted. They struggled. Faith did not preclude that; those titles that they earned — could they have earned them without doubting? Would Abraham have been Abraham had he not negotiated for Sodom and Gomorrah? Moses, lost in the desert, doubted and struck the rock in his own name when bringing forth water.

There is an argument to be made that the struggle with doubt is among the most important aspects of faith. I think I would believe that, though I don’t harbor any presumptions about being the one to make it. But we oughtn’t confuse faith with mere belief — the one is a component, an aspect of the other, though integral to it.

Mr. Rupp, Meet Mr. Berry; Mr. Berry, Meet Mr. Rupp: Thoughts On Place And College Basketball

So in case you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a very nice article profiling the Elliot County, Kentucky high school basketball teamat ESPN.com, written by my former home-town sportswriter, Pat Forde. It’s one of those underdog stories (like Hoosiers, to borrow Forde’s analogue), but in Appalachia rather than the Rust Belt/rural Indiana (which makes it more of an underdog story, really, because Appalachia is poorer and more generally forgotten).  Anyway, that’s nice and all, but the really intriguing line of thought comes in the second comment on the piece, by a certain “cstorm06″:

“Send them all to UK, No kid would ever work harder than these kids. I’d take them over a Liggins or Bradley any ol’day. [sic]“

Now, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a hell of a lot wrongwith my Wildcats right about now. And this line of thought — that what they need are a few sharpshooting hillbillies or small-town kids, raised on Kentucky basketball but undersized and “undertalented” so with a chip on their shoulders — isn’t uncommon. In fact, I remember saying aloud after Billy Gillispie was hired that I hoped he’d go get a couple of under-sized clutch-shooting kids from Eastern Kentucky.

To continue drawing examples from my own experiences with Kentucky basketball: I used to predict the outcome of the Kentucky-Louisville game based on which team had more native Kentuckians; it worked for two or three years in a row, actually. I thought for a long time that Chuck Hayes — the under-sized, “under-talented” power forward who through sheer force of will has developed an NBA career — was a native Kentuckian; in my family, the highest praise a player can receive (and it was frequent for Hayes) is, “He plays like he’s from Kentucky.”

The theory isn’t that the size or haircuts or whatnot make them that good; it’s where they’re from. That, because of place-a sense of “from-ness”-they will play harder, and have more devotion than anyone not from Kentucky and not raised on Kentucky basketball. That, contra Seinfeld, the “Kentucky” they’re playing for isn’t just a set of jerseys, or a university over in Lexington. It’s not even a state, this line of reasoning goes, but the state-the one that raised them, that they’ve grown up in. That, in addition to everything else that can come with/from playing college basketball for what is (still) the winningest program in the NCAA, there is a sense of playing for the place which one is from. That it raises the performance of individual players, and therefore of the team.

That’s nice and all, I can hear you saying, but come on!  And I would think that, too.  Only, somehow, history supports the view that being from a lifelong Kentucky fan makes a Kentucky player better (particularly if one is a guard). Forde mentions King Kelly Coleman and Richie Farmer; but three of the four seniors of the 1992 Unforgettables were from small-town Eastern Kentucky (John Pelphrey and Deron Feldhaus along with Farmer) – they were a team that over-performed their way into the Final Four and would have over-performed into the Finals were it not for a certain Duke thug named Christian “That Bastard” Laettner.  Not to mention: Patrick Sparks, Ravi Moss, and Cameron Mills (who avenged ‘92), among others.

And, at the risk of opening up an entirely different can of worms, Adolph Rupp on his recruiting practices: “It’s got to be a Kentucky boy or from a neighbor state. We can’t go raid some schoolyard.” And it didn’t work out too poorly for him, at least not until John Wooden came along and built himself a few basketball teams.

So I haven’t meant this as simple glorification of the grand past of Kentucky basketball because I can’t bear to look at the present (though that’s roughly where I’m at this season); but as another piece of evidence that there is meaning and importance in one’s native hill, wherever it may be. I can’t, of course, call for a team of all Kentuckians and expect “greatness”: but on those great teams-and the not-so-great ones-the players with a habit of over-performing and rising to the occasion when the situation most demanded it have a disproportionate habit of being Kentuckians. And warnings be damned: it can’t just be dismissed as random correlation.