Minority Report: Update on the Christian Left

In the Sunday NYTimes Book Review, David R. Swartz's new book, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism is reviewed by Molly Worthen (who will be a member of a panel at the S-USIH conference in a month).  Overall, Worthen finds much to praise about Swartz's book, not least that it is one of the few books to ask what happened to the religious left following the Vietnam War.  Readers of this blog know I am interested in this question as well and having ordered Swartz's book look forward to seeing how he addresses it.

Of particular interest to the ongoing discussion over Andrew's forthcoming book on the culture wars is where the evangelical left found itself.  According to Worthen, Swartz provides valuable discussions of the internal disputes that fractured the evangelical left (politics of identity as well as theology) and the political platform of the Democratic Party which made support of abortion rights a difficult position for Christians on the left to accept.  Certainly Christian Left leaders such as Jim Wallis and a few American Catholic bishops and priests devised a strategy that used the "consistent ethic of life" as a rallying call.  But then, as Andrew will probably tell us, such theological consistency was no match for culture war issues that pitted the dire warnings from the left against apocalyptic pronouncements about the end of the American family, American freedom, and American education that came from the right.

Worthen takes issue with Swartz's claim that actions by the Evangelical Left both pushed Christians into the conservative movement AND provided a strategy that conservatives used to solidify support for their culture war positions.  As many folks have written and debated here, such strategies came from a plethora of sources: the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, William F. Buckley's minions, and the cold war.  Worthen insists that (as Swartz also intimates) the "evangelical left was too divided...to offer a competing grand narrative that would resonate with ordinary evangelicals and transform scattered sympathetic student gatherings into a national movement."  In other words, "the evangelical left was a casualty of the radical polarization of American politics after 1970s."

What I find somewhat confounding as an intellectual problem is what happened to religion in the radical polarization of American politics.  In a way, both left and right accepted the message in the sign above--they both believed that Vietnam, Watergate, and the drift of the cold war in the late 1970s presaged a day of reckoning for Americans.  The two sides differed (so I argue in God and War) over their theological interpretation of the United States.  Wallis and others on the Christian Left appeared to advocate a post-American era (the title of the first magazine he published); this was not merely a counter exceptionalist narrative but an scathing critique of the foundations of the nation itself.  The Christian Right also believed the nation was in peril, but were more than willing to defend it and find a great deal of righteousness is the foundations of America itself.  On this point, Richard John Neuhaus's reflections on asking fellow clergy to sign the Hartford Appeal are instructive--the upshot was that he began to see a growing schism among clergy between those who believed the nation could be saved and those who seemed to believe it was hopeless and lost.  One can see this conflict in sharp relief in the days just before the First Gulf War when Wallis went to the Middle East to stop the war, and Neuhaus wrote a long editorial in the Wall Street Journal defending it.  The bottom line was this: the right would defend going to war for the nation; the left believed killing in the name of the nation perpetuated a tragedy made evident in Vietnam.  For me, this is where the culture wars literally bled into real war.

Book Review: Zubovich on Connelly's *From Enemy to Brother*

Review of John Connelly's From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012)
ISBN 9780674057821

Reviewed by Gene Zubovich

    It may seem strange that a nearly four-hundred page book would be dedicated to fifteen sentences of the proclamation Nostra Aetate, a Vatican II document of 1965 dealing with the relationship between Catholics and other religions. But the subject matter is by no means small: these paragraphs changed the official Catholic teaching on the Jews that had prevailed for 1,700 years. Indeed, John Connelly does not shy away from the word “revolution” in the title of his book, From Enemy To Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965.

    Connelly, an historian of East-Central Europe whose first book dealt with the transformation of higher education under Stalinism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, began this research a decade ago, setting out to find Catholic resistance to Hitler's persecution of the Jews during the 1930s. Much to his surprise he found Catholic critiques of antisemitism largely absent. When appeals on behalf of the Jews did appear they lacked a concrete moral language and were full of anti-Judaic assumptions.[1] Catholics, particularly German-speaking Catholics, were part of an intellectual tradition that could not accept Jews as anything other than a cursed people who were destined to suffer for their historical rejection of Jesus.

    Connelly does not claim that Catholics didn't help Jews during the 1930s and 1940s, but he does argue that those who helped Jews most—like women's groups—were farthest removed from theological disputes (42). It was the theological absence, the lack of clear statements by bishops or the Vatican, that Connelly sees as the church's biggest failure.

   What, then, happened between the 1930s and the Vatican II proclamation of 1965 that declared the Jews to be the “older brothers” of Christians who ought not be converted to Christianity? Connelly argues that the roots of the proclamation came from a small group of Catholics in 1930s Vienna who were concerned with the treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany. [2] Vienna proved to be a fertile ground for men like Karl Thieme and Johannes Oesterreicher, who formulated a specifically Catholic argument against antisemitism. Thieme, Oesterreicher, and nearly all of the other anti-racist activists in their circle were converts to Catholicism from Judaism and Protestantism. They eschewed nationalisms and freely moved about from place to place without a feeling of rootedness. Without such border-crossers, as Connelly calls them, Catholicism could not have found a new language to speak about the Jews. Without them, he argues, “the Catholic Church would never have 'thought its way' out of the challenges of racist anti-Judaism” (287).

    Connelly's early chapters discuss the prevalence of antisemitism within the Catholic Church during the first half of the twentieth century. He points to German-speaking lands as particularly prone to racist assumptions. The border-crossers of Vienna had to contend with a German-language theological tradition in which words—like “Volk” and “Erbsünde” (“inherited sin” instead of “original sin”)—trapped theologians in a biological and racial understanding of theological problems. The chief task of the border-crossers was to root a critique of antisemitism in Catholic theology and to provoke Catholic officials to speak clearly on behalf of the Jews.

    At the moral and intellectual center of the battle against racist acquiescence to Nazi policy was an Austro-Jewish convert named John (“Johannes” prior to 1940) Oesterreicher, who became the primary architect of the Vatican II statement on the Jews. Here the book approximates a bildungsroman, as we follow Oesterreicher's (and by extension the Catholic Church's) intellectual and spiritual growth. We witness his quixotic attempt to get Pious XII to speak out clearly on behalf of the Jews during the late 1930s (he asked the Pope to free Catholic soldiers from their oath to Hitler) and his desperate attempt to formulate a Catholic anti-racist theology based on the sparse statements of past popes and councils. He broadcast sermons into Nazi territory that referred to Hitler as the anti-Christ and called on Germans to oppose the Nazi “enemies of the Lord” (161). All the while he continued to believe that the Jews were a people destined to suffer until they turned to Christ. In fact Oesterreicher continued his missionary activities to the Jews until he narrowly escaped arrest and near-certain death by boarding a ship to New York City in 1940.

    His parents were not so lucky. His father died in a concentration camp, “thank God, of pneumonia,” he wrote to a friend. “My poor mother, however, was taken to Poland; I need not tell you what that implies” (232-3). This profound personal loss moved Oesterreicher to search for new ways to talk to and about Jews, but the basic missionary impulse remained. Six months after he arrived in the US, Oesterreicher was preaching in New York City and began missionary work amongst New York Jews. Many of the harsh words like “curse” “deicide” and “enemies of God” that had been used by Catholics, including Oesterreicher, in the prior decades disappeared from Catholic discourse during the 1940s and 1950s along with much of the racist antisemitism, but the missionary impulse and anti-Judaism remained intact.

During these years little was said by Catholic theologians on Christian-Jewish relations. The few statements that were made came mainly out of  interfaith conferences organized by the American occupation forces and were based on the model of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. For the first time, at least in the twentieth century, Catholic and Jewish leaders in Europe began talking to one another. And it would be through dialogue with Jews that men like Oesterreicher would change their views. His friend and sparring partner Karl Thieme, for example, would ultimately call for an end to a mission to the Jews after a Jewish author pointed out the antisemitic language he had used his book published in the 1930s (198). But these conversations had limited impact on the Church at the time—those who engaged in conversations with Jews did so despite Vatican warnings against interfaith conferences.

    Behind the indifference of the Catholic Church toward relations with the Jews was a subtle shift that is described by Connelly but needs further elaboration. Catholics became less likely to read worldly events as providential, demanding acquiescence to God's work. They did not want to say that the Holocaust was God's punishment for the Jews. Instead, “a new way of reading the signs of the times” meant “rejecting as presumptuous the idea that any human can know whether and how God might punish humanity” (173). How this change came about is solely attributed to the Holocaust but there were certainly other developments that helped propel this momentous change, which seems underemphasized in this book. The earlier reading of events was a major theological presupposition  of those (including Oesterreicher) who believed that Hitler's persecution of the Jews was part of a curse resulting from deicide. After the Holocaust, Catholics came to see worldly events as something that required ethical action.

But things were slow to change. Oesterreicher founded an institute at Seton Hall University that he described as “missionary” in 1953. Yet, somehow, his attitude began to shift in ways he would never fully acknowledge. By the late 1950s he began describing his work at Seton Hall as “ecumenical” and began turning away entreaties from missionaries interested in working with Jews.[2] He came to emphasize—based on a passage from Romans 9 through 11—that missionary efforts ought to be directed at Catholics themselves and that the eschatological expectations of Jewish conversion en masse would remain mysterious and uncertain. Based on these passages of St. Paul's writings, as well as the thinking of his Austrian cohort, Oesterreicher found new ways to talk about Jews as “older brothers,” words that would find their way into the Vatican II statement on the Jews.

    The book concludes with the developments of Vatican II. Connelly makes clear that the new statement was by no means inevitable. In fact, he argues, the theological implications of De Judaeis (the statement on the Jews) went further than many of the bishops who voted for it were comfortable with. Early drafts of the proclamation had absolved Jews of ancient charges of deicide and spoke of the Jews as clearly loved by God. This new way of talking about the Jews was opposed by some Catholic leaders but also by several Arab states in the Middle East. Catholic bishops working in Muslim lands worried about repercussions of the statement. Indeed, the Syrian and Jordanian governments protested against the absolution of Jewish guilt for Christ's crucifixion (250). The conservative Roman Curia, the theological center of Catholicism, shortened the draft to exclude any mention of deicide and expressed hope that Jews would one day join the church. But reports of the early draft had  already been leaked to the press and the ensuing controversy, including a statement by Holocaust-survivor Rabbi Abraham Heschel that he would prefer Auschwitz over conversion, meant that backtracking would be impossible without severe humiliation. In the end the statement lacked any mention of the Holocaust or the Church's own responsibility for antisemitism. But the refutation of the deicide charge was reinstated and the statement spoke in positive language that God continued to love the Jews. Many contemporary observers complained that the statement was mild and should have been made long ago. But Connelly is persuasive in showing what a major departure this was from just decades earlier.

    Specialists in American intellectual history will note that liberalism plays no role in the story told in From Enemy To Brother. The United States is one of the settings for Connelly's story and he notes the more tolerant atmosphere of US Catholicism in comparison with that of Europe. But the roots of the Vatican II proclamation on the Jews are found in an Austro-fascist context, where many of the protagonists adopted a form of personalism that had much in common with fascist corporatism. Connelly stresses that the conditions of Austria were ripe in creating border-crossers and that there were advantages to thinking through specifically Catholic arguments in that context. But all this begs the question: why did American Catholics and Protestants, who began talking to Jews well before their Europeans counterparts, not develop a more accommodating theology?

    The United States, after all, had a strong tradition of religious tolerance that expressed itself in the “tri-faith” or “Judeo-Christian” concepts.[3] And individual figures developed promising ideas about the Jews earlier than in the European context. Reinhold Niebuhr, a major theologian during the middle of the twentieth century, is a particularly good example of someone arising out of the liberal tradition and developing positive attitudes towards Jews. As late as 1923 Niebuhr had argued for a mission to the Jews but just three years later he changed his mind in an article that praised Jews for their ethics and theological tradition. In the same article he sounded like a modern-day pluralist when he disavowed the need for Jews to convert and encouraged Jews to perpetuate their own communities. This would later lead Niebuhr to become one of the first and most prominent religious figures to sound warnings about Nazi treatment of the Jews and to urge government aid. He would also become a life-long supporter of Zionism.

    Niebuhr’s thought on the Jews was largely ignored by his peers, much like Oesterreicher’s, and it was not until Vatican II that Protestant denominations would reconsider their positions on Jewish conversion. Indeed the story of Protestant inaction on behalf of the victims of the Holocaust parallels the Catholic one. In the US the leading Protestant journal The Christian Century expressed skepticism toward atrocity stories. The Federal Council of Churches, the united voice of ecumenical Protestantism, sponsored a Day of Compassion in 1942 but it ended in embarrassment because of low participation and general indifference.[4] Moreover, Niebuhr himself did not fully develop his thoughts on the Jews until the 1960s and 1970s, largely in response to Vatican II.[5]

    As it turns out, many of the critiques of racism and antisemitism produced by Protestants and Catholics during the mid-century were more often rooted in political liberalism than in theology. Leading protestants often spoke confidently, prior to the 1960s, as spokesmen for the American liberal tradition and they saw little need to tackle issues of pluralism from a theological standpoint.[6] American Catholics had a more tentative relationship with American liberalism prior to Vatican II. But figures like John Courtney Murray were working in the 1940s and 1950s to reconcile the two. And when American Catholics spoke out on behalf of Jews, as they did in the wake of Kristallnacht, they usually spoke the language of political liberalism.[7]

    Perhaps recourse to political liberalism created an atmosphere in which difficult theological issues could be avoided. Why bother reconciling the book of John with Romans when you could appeal to the Bill of Rights or the principle of equality of all peoples? Connelly, however, makes it clear that there is a special relationship between Catholics and Jews that could not be done away with through appeals to universal equality (248). One simply could not simultaneously affirm equality of all peoples while believing that Jews lived under a curse.

    From Enemy to Brother should become required reading for historians interested in modern religion, cosmopolitanism, and pluralism. The book provokes difficult questions about the American liberal tradition and its relationship to religion. How did American theologians reconcile the affirmation of universal equality with the kinds of theological problems described by Connelly? Were the kinds of arguments against antisemitism produced by American theologians who affirmed the notions of “Tri-Faith” or “Judeo-Christian” America less tenable and convincing than those produced by Oesterreicher and other border-crossers? Did Protestants coexist as easily with the American liberal tradition as they believed they did?

    From Enemy to Brother is a powerful and moving account of the origins and passage of the 1965 statement on the Jews that changed centuries of official Catholic teaching. It is a book that pushes historians to explore new avenues in intellectual and religious history. For specialists in American intellectual history in particular Connelly's book raises important questions and opens up new subject matter for discussion.

_____________________
[1]    On the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Judaism, a distinction Connelly uses but does not fully accept, see George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)
[2]  Connelly acknowledges the scholarship on French Catholic thought on the Jews and discusses the work of Leon Bloy and Jacques Maritain. He contends, however, that the German-language Catholic group went further than the French, since the latter group never moved beyond its anti-Judaic assumptions. He further argues that the German-language thought is more relevant to the discussion of Vatican II

[32]    At the time “inter-faith” was the most common way to describe relations between Christians and Jews, which implied a much clearer separation than “ecumenical”. On the notion of “interfaith” see Kevin Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Postwar Catholics and Jews Held America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[3]     Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Schultz, Tri-Faith America. William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

[ 4]    On the Day of Compassion, see Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 3, pp. 61-62. On Protestant indifference toward Jewish suffering see  Robert W. Ross, So It Was True: The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews; also David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust. The major exceptions were the historical Peace Churches (Quakers, Brethren, etc.) and the Unitarian Church.

[5]    On Niebuhr as a product of the liberal theological tradition see Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985) and Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2008); see also Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism and Modernity, 1900-1950 (New York: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).

 [6]    On the interrelationship between political and theological liberalism see Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey, ed., American Religious Liberalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).

[7]    John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); American Religious Responses to Kristallnacht, ed. Maria Mazzenga (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

_________
Gene Zubovich is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. He is completing his dissertation on Protestant social thought during the 1940s.

Reinterpreting and Rethinking Lovejoy's Unit Ideas

Dan Wickberg has been rethinking Arthur O. Lovejoy's vision of the history of ideas for some time (as partially evidenced here). But now we have another contributor to that effort---from a philosopher, Carl Knight. Through my regular PhilPapers update I received the following a few weeks ago:

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Carl Knight (2012). "Unit-Ideas Unleashed: A Reinterpretation and Reassessment of Lovejovian Methodology in the History of Ideas." Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (2):195-217.

This article argues for an unconventional interpretation of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s distinctive approach to method in the history of ideas. It is maintained that the value of the central concept of the ‘unit-idea’ has been misunderstood by friends and foes alike. The commonality of unit-ideas at different times and places is often defined in terms of familial resemblance. But such an approach must necessarily define unit-ideas as being something other than the smallest conceptual unit. It is therefore in tension with Lovejoy’s methodological prescription and, more importantly, disregards a potentially important aspect of intellectual history – the smaller conceptual units themselves. In response to this, an alternative interpretation of unit-ideas as ‘elemental’ – as the smallest identifiable conceptual components – is put forward. Unlike the familial resemblance approach, the elemental approach can provide a plausible explanation for changes in ideas. These are construed as being either the creation of new unit-ideas, the disappearance of existing ones, or alterations in the groups of unit-ideas that compose idea-complexes. The focus on the movement of unit-ideas and idea-complexes through history can also be sensitive to contextual issues, carefully distinguishing the different meanings that single words may have, in much the way that both Lovejoy and his influential critic Quentin Skinner suggest.

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Given Dr. Knight's prior work on luck, justice, and egalitarianism, this seems like an unusual, or at least new, research path for him. I wonder what prompted this new line of work?

That aside, based on the abstract, this elemental (over a familial resemblance) approach doesn't seem to have a ready application to the work of intellectual historians. But maybe I'm not looking at this in an optimal way? - TL

R.I.P. Eugene Genovese

As reported by The Historical Society, Eugene Genovese died. I look forward to reading the many reflections on the life and work of this brilliant historian and intellectual, who famously made the transition from Marxism to conservative Catholicism and, in the process, made a lot of enemies. I still consider Roll, Jordan, Roll one of the best works of American history ever written.

Teaching W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk

This week and last in my Paideia course, I had the opportunity of choosing my own "open unit" text. This summer when asked, I looked around for a shortish, important text that I knew fairly well and choose The Souls of Black Folk.  I remembered from it his mind-blowing description of double consciousness, "two-ness" and The Veil that I had encountered as an undergrad. I remembered how many other books and memoirs have referenced those concepts. I remembered the debate with Booker T. Washington and the heart-rending discussion of the loss of his first-born. Seemed like a great text to introduce to undergrads.



What I forgot is how hard it would be for freshmen to read the text. Du Bois has a very florid, Victorian style and uses words that the freshmen are not familiar with.

So how am I dealing with these difficulties? I tried to listen to this roundtable with David Levering Lewis on How to Teach The Souls of Black Folk, but I found the sound trying. It seemed like it would be a great resource, so it is too bad about the sound. Then I decided to focus on a few key concepts (especially as I had to develop paper topics for last Friday's class. Their rough drafts are due this Friday and their final drafts due next Friday. With a library day Monday and presentations on library day Wednesday, last Friday was the first day we really started to delve into the text.

So...major concepts. Double Consciousness. The Veil. Library day I had them search for books and articles in groups that used the concepts. My point was that they were long-lasting and significant ideas that have persisted for a century and more. And that many African Americans still feel like they live with double consciousness and life within the Veil. In order to encourage the understanding of these concepts as conflict for the individual, but also a powerful insight--"gifted with second sight"--I called it a super power. One of my few black students pointed out that it is educated black people who have the super power. I thought that was perceptive, particularly because I think that educated black people, who move between white and black worlds more frequently, experience double consciousness more than black people who live primarily within black communities (even though whites still intrude in the form of tv and institutional power structures). One of my white students seemed affronted that Du Bois was suggesting blacks had this insight into the white and black sides of the Veil while whites do not.

I brought in some contemporary reactions to Double Consciousness and The Veil from this book, which is a collection of interviews and memoir responses to Du Bois's work. That somewhat helped open up the two concepts, although one class did better with it than the other.

The next thing I did was break them up into pairs and have them take on individual chapters. That allowed me to walk through the room and work with some of the struggling students on what their chapter meant. I told them to go to the back of the chapter first, as Du Bois tends to flourish in the beginning and explain by the end. We went through sentence by sentence and that seemed to help.

Monday I had the groups report on their findings. They seemed to get the main points when the text was divided up in this way. I even had a couple of students say they loved the lyricism and symbolism of certain chapters.

Here are the topics I decided to offer for their papers. Too many, I know, but so far at least one student has picked each one of them......

1. Souls of Black Folk was written in 1903, almost forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation. How had life for African Americans changed and stayed the same according to Du Bois?
2. What was the "Veil" in Du Bois' formulation and how did he use it throughout the book?
3. What was Du Bois' theory of education? Do you agree with him about the importance of a liberal arts education?
4. Explain the debate between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois. Which man do you agree with and why?
5. What was "Double Consciousness" to Du Bois? How did he experience it? How have others experienced it?
6. What did the "Sorrow Songs" mean to Du Bois? Why does he start each chapter with one?

P.S. I'd not thought before about how odd "Of the Coming of John" is in the context of Du Bois' great apologia for the liberal arts education. Here is a fictional piece about a young man profoundly changed by a liberal arts education, but there is no where he can fit--the north rejects him as much as the south. He finally returns to the small Georgian town of his birth, where he commits murder to save his sister from rape. The last sentence is "The world whistled in his ears"--he is lynched. How does that fit into the notion that the liberal arts educated Talented Tenth would help solve the "race problem"?

The After-Thought

             Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful dead to reap the harvest wonderful. (Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare.) Thus in Thy good time may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed

The End

Someone should write a book about white people and race and title it "Ears Tingling with Truth."

Did Conservatives Kill the Liberal Arts?

In a recent Salon article, Katie Billotte, a classics scholar based in Berlin, answers the rhetorical question of my title with an emphatic “yes!” “The conservative movement killed the liberal arts,” she writes, “Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch, William F. Buckley and their latter-day heirs.” How? “They have done so through a combination of decreasing access to education and demonizing academic culture and academics. Make no mistake about it: The death of the humanities is an ideologically motivated murder, more like a massacre.”

There are elements of truth in Billotte’s argument. For example, higher education is more expensive, and the liberal arts are underfunded, in part because of an environment of austerity that conservatives have done much to foster. But the good parts of Billotte’s article are lost in a haze of reductionism.

1) Conservatives, or at least Republicans, have not acted alone in implementing economic policies that have made higher education more expensive. Since Clinton, Democrats (albeit, not the same thing as liberals) have been the party of austerity.Austerity limits public subsidies to higher education, one of the main reasons the cost of tuition has risen exponentially. As the cost of college increases, more and more students who do not hail from economically privileged backgrounds opt for vocational or trade majors that they think are more likely to provide them with a job after graduation. It’s not for nothing that “business” (the antithesis of the liberal arts) has been the fastest growing degree since the 1970s and is currently the most popular major in American universities.

2) The cost of education is also rising because of decisions being made by university administrators who might or might not be conservative (chances are the majority of them vote Democratic, for what that’s worth). As Marc Bousquet, among others, has shown, universities operate by the logic of capital. They’re every bit as interested in capital accumulation as are corporations, even though shareholders don’t reap the profits from university accumulation, as with corporations. Capital accumulation in the university works as such: presidents and assorted higher ups make obscene salaries; high-profile football and basketball coaches make even more, and are usually a state’s top paid employee, as the university operates as a sports spectacle; the president uses capital for power and prestige, by funding pet projects; and perhaps most nefariously, capital accumulation in the university has allowed for the growth of a large administrative class. University administration is a career path of its own now. All of this is to say that operating by the logic of capital is bad news for the liberal arts (and also bad news, more central to Bousquet’s point, for the army of adjuncts who are forced to work for little pay and benefits and no job security). I’m not exactly sure how the “conservative movement” is specifically to blame for these developments. Sure, conservatives have a hand in it, but, again, they did not act alone. If the liberal arts were massacred we can’t single out conservatives as the culprits.

3) My last point goes directly to the heart of my research on the culture wars. Has the conservative demonization of professors, which Billotte ritualistically dates to Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, created a context for the death of the liberal arts? It is tough to answer this question one way or the other in empirical fashion. There is little doubt that conservative critics of the academy in the late 1980s and early 1990s succeeded in reorienting many people’s opinions regarding the nation’s institutions of higher learning, reconceptualized as a leftist redoubt, where standards were destroyed and the best of Western Civilization had been replaced by a “politically correct” mish-mash of multicultural nonsense. But to what degree did this create a context for the death of the liberal arts?

In the academic culture wars of the 80s and 90s, the debate often focused on the humanities, specifically the teaching of literature and history. Both sides tended to argue that the humanities were important, though the reasons given for their importance were dramatically at odds. Left-leaning academics argued that learning how to interpret texts would make people better able to think critically about the world around them and to make better political choices. Conservatives argued that the humanities—in Matthew Arnold’s words, “the best which has been thought and said”—were the repository of the values that made America a free nation and thus crucial for young Americans to study. Both sides blamed the other for the diminishing prominence of the humanities. Conservatives like William Bennett, who kick-started the humanities wars with his 1984 report as chairman of the NEH, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, contended that students were turned off by the humanities by professors who “present their subjects in a tendentious, ideological manner.” Left-leaning academics, on the other hand, made the same move that Billotte makes in her Salon piece: they blamed conservatives for poisoning the wells, often, they argued, done in bad faith.

The question to you, dear reader, is this: to what extent do you think conservative culture warriors are to blame for the sad state of the liberal arts? I tend to think that my first two points are much more determinative, but I am genuinely curious about what you think.

TLS Reviews Sehat Book

FYI: David Sehat's award-winning book The Myth of American Religious Freedom is favorably reviewed in the latest edition of TLS. (It requires a subscription.) Congratulations David! I guess this is a more prominent review than the roundtable we ran on David's book when it was first published.

David is chairing this year's S-USIH conference. Longtime USIH readers know that David used to be a regular writer for us. Perhaps my favorite post of his is when he criticized Gordon Wood's review of Jill Lepore's book on the Tea Party.

Revisiting Leo Strauss's "Why We Remain Jews" (A High Holidays Post)

We're currently in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays: last Monday and Tuesday were Rosh Hashanah; Yom Kippur starts this Tuesday at sunset.  I have a fairly complicated, and fluctuating, personal relationship to Judaism. I can't--and don't--claim to be a believer of any sort. Yet I always celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Since moving to Norman, I've attended a traditional High Holiday minyan that a number of faculty and community members put together at the University of Oklahoma's Hillel.  Being essentially a non-believer yet spending all day on Yom Kippur fasting and attending shul both is, and isn't, unusual.  It's unusual because, on the face of it, it doesn't make a lot of sense (it puzzled many of my non-Jewish friends in college). Yet, within the Jewish community, it's its own kind of tradition. People like me are often called "three-day Jews," a term that began life entirely pejoratively within the late-nineteenth or early twentieth-century German Jewish community, but now has slightly less negative baggage associated  with it.*

Thinking about these issues this year led me to reread Leo Strauss's lecture, "Why We Remain Jews," which was given at the University of Chicago's Hillel half a century ago, on February 4, 1962.  This talk has received much attention since its initial publication in the 1990s.** The lecture's appearance in print, and the subsequent interest in it, has reflected a more general reconsideration of Strauss as a Jewish thinker and as a thinker about Jewish things that has taken place in the last two decades or so, and which has led Strauss to be taken more seriously by a variety of academics outside the intellectual circle defined by his students and his students' students.


"Why We Remain Jews," in particular, seems to have an appeal for people who have an otherwise ambivalent relationship to Strauss.  To take two examples:  Eugene Sheppard concludes his critical, but not hostile, intellectual biography of the young Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile (Brandeis, 2006), with a discussion of "Why We Remain Jews." This leads into the book's two concluding, unusually personal paragraphs, in which Sheppard notes that while he "reject[s] many of Strauss's fundamental convictions about humanity and politics," he sees a "progressive and radical alternative" in Strauss that has been, as yet, too little explored.*** The political scientist and anti-Straussian student of Straussians Anne Norton provides another example. Norton, author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Yale, 2004), which excoriates the Straussians while attempting to rescue Strauss's legacy from them, gave a talk at a conference I attended on Leo Strauss in Nottingham, England, in which she used "Why We Remain Jews" as the (somewhat, but only somewhat, ironic) basis of a bitterly righteous critique of Guantanamo and the torture and detention policies initiated by George W. Bush.  Having largely blamed Straussians for what went wrong in the Bush years in her book, Norton managed to find in Strauss's "Why We Remain Jews" resources with which to attack what she saw as his students' works.

In the broadest sense, Strauss makes a case in "Why We Remain Jews" that Judaism as a religion, very traditionally conceived, remains necessary, even for those Jews for whom religious belief "is not feasible, humanly speaking" (320).  Such a message might, in principle, be illuminating for Jews like myself.  And it was in this spirit that I reread the text during these High Holidays.

What I found, however, was not a particularly usable Strauss, at least not for me.

Like practically everything written by Leo Strauss, "Why We Remain Jews" is a complicated, multilayered text, and I'm not going to be able to summarize it comprehensively in a blog post (it's available, if you're interested, at the Internet Archive, at the link above).  The title as well as the subtitle ("Can Jewish Faith and History Still Speak to Us?") were not chosen by Strauss. Instead, his talk was one of a series of lectures on this theme, which seems to have been chosen by the U of C Hillel Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky.  Strauss reframes the theme in terms of "the Jewish Question," which Strauss does not explicitly define, but which he seems to understand very traditionally.  And his overall thesis about it is, at first glance, very straightforward: "there is no solution to the Jewish problem" (317).

Much of the talk consists of rejecting a series of potential solutions.  Individual acts of assimilation are generally doomed to failure, as people will continue to recognize the assimilated Jew (whether he has assimilated to Christianity or to secularism) as a Jew and will continue to discriminate against him (313-317).****  Collective assimilation "as a sect like any other sect" is also, in Strauss's view impossible, in part because such sects are entirely voluntary, while one's status as a Jew is a matter, in the first instance, of birth (318).  A third possible solution is "assimilation as a nation," i.e. Zionism.  But Strauss, who had been active in Zionist circles in his youth, rejects Zionism as a solution to the Jewish problem, as well. "Political Zionism," which stressed the creation of a Jewish state was too strictly political: "The mind was in no way employed, or even the heart was in no way employed, in matters Jewish" (319).  "Cultural Zionism," created in reaction to this deficit, hoped to supplement political Zionism by making "products of the Jewish mind" central to Zionism. But Strauss suggests that this effort was doomed to fail, as the "rock bottom of any Jewish culture is the Bible, the Talmud, and the Midrash. And if you take these things with a minimum of respect or seriousness, you must say that they were not meant to be products of the Jewish mind"(319-20).  This leads, in turn, to "religious Zionism," which runs aground on the fact that some Jews simply cannot return to the faith of their ancestors.

Nonetheless, argues Strauss, "[i]t is necessary to accept one's past. That means that out of this undeniable necessity one must make a virtue. The virtue in question is fidelity, loyalty, piety in the old Latin sense of the word pietas" (320). There follows a long discussion of varieties of anti-Jewish sentiment through the ages, meant to establish both the noble nature of Jewish belief and the heroic nature of Jewish struggle against persecution.  After a somewhat ironic side journey to Nietzsche's Morgenröte (The Dawn), aphorism 205 ("Of the people of Israel"), which Strauss uses to suggest that the creation of the state of Israel is, in a positive sense, the fulfillment of Nietzsche's radical vision of Jewish assimilation, Strauss reaches his conclusion:  Judaism is a "heroic delusion."  After referencing the prayer Aleinu as "the greatest expression" of this delusion, Strauss elaborates: "What is a delusion? We also say a 'dream.' No nobler dream was ever dreamt. It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and wallow in it." (328)

Strauss concludes with a discussion of the insufficiency of "positivism" and the need for science, too, to strive for the infinite:

the object of science is everything that is--being.  The belief admitted by all believers in science today--that science is by its nature essentially progressive, and eternally progressive--implies, without saying it, that being is mysterious.  And here is the point where the two lines I have tried to trace do not meet exactly, but where they come within hailing distance. And, I believe, to expect more in a general way, of people in general, would be unreasonable. (329)

After Strauss finished, Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's old friend and colleague, who had introduced the talk, noted "Dr. Strauss is known to have spoken other times on the theme of 'Jerusalem and Athens.' My only observation tonight is, I believe he has done it again." (329)

In a sense, I think Cropsey has hit the nail on the head, despite the fact that classical philosophy ("Athens") goes virtually unmentioned in the talk. Strauss's theme of "Jerusalem and Athens" consisted of the notion that revealed religion and classical philosophy were in constant tension with each other, and that the vibrancy of the West had historically depended on this tension. But modern political philosophy threatened both sides of this binary.

Classical philosophy's most significant appearance in "Why We Remain Jews" is Strauss's invocation of the virtue of pietas as underscoring the need for Jews who cannot believe to nonetheless remain loyal to the faith of their ancestors.  Strauss, it should be said, was such a Jew: an atheist by belief, but willing to affirm the importance of the most traditional understanding of Jewish religion as revealed, divine law. Strauss himself embraced neither of the possibilities that he invokes at the end of his talk, science and revealed religion. Then again, the careful listener will have noted that these are all that can be expected of "people in general." And, in Strauss's view, those fit for philosophy are, by definition, not "people in general."

For all its intellectual interest and occasional elegance, "Why We Remain Jews" remains rather unappealing to me, for the same reason that I find most of Strauss's political and philosophical conceptions unappealing.  At its heart is a rather pessimistic and deeply hierarchical understanding of human possibilities. Whatever else it may mean, my fasting on Wednesday will not be an attempt on my part to forestall nihilism by publicly reaffirming a necessary, noble delusion.

To all our Jewish readers: G'mar chatima tovah!
____________________________________________
* In the interest of full disclosure, like many contemporary American "three-day Jews," I actually only celebrate one day of Rosh Hashanah, but I also celebrate Hanukkah and Passover. Yet the old German epithet remains.

** "Why We Remain Jews" first appeared in print in Kenneth Deutch and Walter Nicgorski (eds), Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), pp. 43-79.  It was subsequently reprinted in Leo Strauss (Kenneth Hart Green, ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought (Albany: SUNY, 1997), pp. 311-356. Page numbers above reference this second work, which is also what I have linked to above.

*** Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, pp. 119-130.

**** This point is accompanied by a rather Friedmanite discussion of the impossibility of preventing discrimination in a liberal society, complete with warnings that the USSR is a fine example of a country that has tried to legally prohibit discrimination.  Like his fellow German-Jewish émigré Hannah Arendt, Strauss was skeptical about the advisability--or even the possibility--of attempting to legally end racial discrimination.


UPDATE (5:36 pm CDT, 9/25):  I've corrected the title of the Norton book above. I had mistakenly repeated the (very similar) title of the Sheppard book when originally posting this.

An Overheard Conversation: Loving History, a Sixteenth Birthday, Blogging, and Youth against the Youth Culture

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Yesterday, I suddenly found myself in the position of a fly on the wall in a conversation

between a graduate student in her late twenties and someone who was just about to

turn sixteen--today. It made me think of a different side of the subject of my recent posts

here regarding the drastically increased role of electronics technologies in early twentyfirst-

century life. While I've been voicing my concerns, of necessity, given my focus on

the fate of letter writing, in the more somber registers, I want to sound a different note

here. It's a rather simple one, and hardly new. I just want to add my own hope and

enthusiasm to that of others who see true benefit in some uses of the new medium.

Technology's role is all in how we use it and today some people are using it to

undermine illegitimate hierarchies and unfair limits on aspiration that are placed by the

dominant culture. While there are other examples, I'm thinking of the truly remarkable

blogs--the USIH blog is at the forefront of my mind, of course--that have arisen, outside

of the usual corridors of cultural power and influence. Some of these represent a true

alternative to prevailing practices and, because an alternative is so badly needed, in our

profession as in many others, I want to acknowledge this most emphatically. For all of

the drawbacks, there are heartening developments. One of them is the way in which the

art of blogging can allow people to move forward to fruition of their creative powers even

when the powers that be may never grant them permission or entrance to the club. As

the autodidacts inside and outside of professions prove again and again, industry and

true passion for a subject can constitute their own invitation to the table.

First, the conversation; then just a hint of one of the many reasons why some of the

more penetrating blogs out there today can be so inspiring to someone probably

basically a Luddite at heart (my preference will always be for the real, no matter how

you spin it).

The near sixteen-year-old began by expressing her passion for the liberal arts,

especially history. While to date she had done well at the full range of subjects taught in

school, and cultivated an interest in all aspects of the curriculum, which worked well in

accordance with her aims of doing well, she admitted to being less than excited about

what was on offer in her eleventh-grade science and math classes. She revealed this in

a set of questions revolving around a two-pronged issue for her: what difference there

might be, if any, between the pursuit of science and math, which she saw as lying on

one part of the spectrum, and another part involving history and literature, where she

confessed her greatest interests lay; and whether it was acceptable, at her level, to feel

a strong preference for the history, in particular, over science. Of vital importance in

understanding her tentativeness, perhaps, and the rather turgid response her inquiry

drew, in turn, was that her interlocutor declared herself to be pursuing a doctorate in

chemistry.

The graduate student began with a dubious claim, which maybe you have heard before,

or even hold to be the case. The 15-year old had not heard it before, and, in fact, I too

had been previously spared. It is the idea that the liberal arts has to do with people

whereas science concerns "the world." (The latter words even seemed to be uttered

with a kind of breathlessness that seemed to underscore the limited horizons of the

former, but I could have been hearing things.)

Well, this dichotomy did not sit well with the teenager and I must say, more power to her.

With the utmost respect and even deference, she begged to differ, mostly by means of a

quiet yet persistent line of inquiry. She got across her sense that history, her favorite

subject, also has to do with the world, just as science can have rather a lot to do with

people; in fact, people and the world are so closely entwined as to be difficult to

extricate from one another. The graduate student, conceding nothing, pulled out all the

stops, including referring to the great many people she knew who thought as she did.

The teenager's argument, for it really was one, however cloaked in query, continued to

be conveyed in this deft manner until the topic changed somewhat, along with the tenor

of the conversation, into a question of whether it is really possible to know, at such an

early age, whether one's main interests lay in history and literature or the hard sciences.

The youngster momentarily sought the firmer grounding, usually a sure-fire argument

winner in this age of personal preference, the emotivism Alasdair MacIntyre criticizes,

by reiterating and underscoring the depth of her interest in matters of interpretation over

scientific empiricism, but this was a no go and she soon returned to her style of goodnatured

yet relentless questioning. It was a formidable modus operandi. Her stealth

would have put many a trained rhetorician to shame.

The 15-year-old unfurled a line of reasoning qua inquiry that ran something like this (I'm

paraphrasing for brevity's sake): if she herself already knew that this was where her

greatest passion lay, and that the subject was simply pregnant with potential illumination

and exciting beyond one's wildest imagination, wasn't it okay to go ahead and choose

now, before her own inner judge and jury, securing a verdict that it was fine to cultivate a

vision of a future for herself that involved the liberal arts somehow and did not

necessarily involve math and science? Was it normal and healthy to have this

inclination? It seems to me she was wondering, as teenagers are wont to do, though

often regarding matters less academic, whether her desires were natural and legitimate.

She seemed to be referring to the allowances we tend either to allow or deprive

ourselves regarding the hopes and dreams that populate our hours and days; in the

case of the young, as we desperately await the chance to grow up and enter into adult

work life as equal partners.

The graduate student's response interested and, I admit, surprised me by its certainty.

The years separating the conversation partners couldn't have been much more than

eight or ten. Yet they didn't seem close to seeing eye to eye on this, at least in that

sitting. For the older person, who had clearly now opted for role of advisor, insisted that

the advisee was way too young to cast her lot--that it was premature to bestow her

scholarly affections in this way. Look at me, she said. At your age I thought I would be a

nurse and "now I am a chemist." When asked by her companion whether being a nurse

wasn't also a profession, she was told it is "more of a trade."

There are all sorts of points latent in this rich (for someone in hearing range) exchange,

and you will take from it what you will. But the one that stands out for my purposes is

that here I saw a young person, poised right on the brink of the birthday we often think

of as a kind of landmark or turning point, the onset of adulthood, asking piercing

questions of herself and others about her present and future.

It was impressive.

What was she getting at, really, with this line of questioning? Did she really think she

needed someone else's permission to like some subjects and not others in high school?

Probably not. Did she want confirmation that it was okay not to like science? I doubt it,

as she seemed well aware the graduate student, given her own evident passion for her

own subject, would not provide anything of the sort. What were they arguing over and

why would neither budge?

Maybe it was just an obvious case of love of history coming head to head with love of

science. And the subtext might have been each subject's relative merits in representing

and illuminating "the world."

But also at stake seemed to be the meaning of childhood and adulthood and when and

where the one was to phase into the next. Unconsciously perhaps the fifteen-year-old

was thinking about what it meant to turn sixteen and the twenty-something

unconsciously reminding her that sixteen is not twenty something. We won't know the

inner workings of the unconscious and conscious minds of these incredibly bright and

thoughtful individuals.

It reminded me of the Cat Stevens song from 1970, "Father and Son," that non-duet duet in which the singer-songwriter sings both parts, expressing the tension in the intimate

generational bond, the father's primordial instinct to protect coming up against the son's

desire to be free--to get away from authority, yes, in the sixties' generation gap sort of

way but also to be free to enter full adulthood in that small "r" republican way we study

so much in our field. The song seems to be suggesting that the son wants to be freed

up so he can follow his own dreams in order to find out what unique contribution he can

make. The father counsels patience and conformity:

"It's not time to make a change,

Just relax, take it easy.

You're still young, that's your fault,

There's so much you have to know.

Find a girl, settle down,

If you want you can marry.

Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy.

I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy,

To be calm when you've found something going on.

But take your time, think a lot,

Why, think of everything you've got.

For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not."

It seems to me that the conversation to which I was privy had elements of this same

tension. The dominant culture we have inherited, charted in too-painful detail by recent

historians and social critics, is one that supposedly holds youth in high regard. Yet, as

we know well, by placing youth on a pedestal for people of all ages, as the most

desirable state, it fosters a basic defeatism or nihilism, since our nature, the fortunate

ones among us, is to grow and to age. If we cannot muster enthusiasm for those things,

the very definition of what it is to be alive, can we about anything?

One of the things that is so glorious about bløgging, as I've spelled it elsewhere in order

to distinguish the elegant, deep, worthwhile, and meaningful variety from the not-so, is

that it is, in some cases anyway, turning the mainstream cult of youth on its head, and

along with it some other cultish practices such as a kind of professionalism that

discourages free thought and speech until such time as a person has all of the proper

passports, visas, degrees, tenure and promotion votes--until all of the working papers

are in order. At the foundation of today's culture rests an unquestioned assumption--that

the longer we delay the onset of adulthood the better. This might be partially true

enough when we have an adult world of such dreary predictability as so much of ours

today, which is protected from any serious questioning by elephantine bureaucracies,

protracted credentialing systems, and narrow notions of professionalism that really

mean gatekeeping and homogenization. But it is sure to cut us off from the sustainable

practices and renewable intellectual energies we so badly need in order to marshal

forces against just such stultifying realities. Continually depleting the influx of the sorely

needed powers of new energy and fresh perspectives, all in the name of the protection

and extension of youth, has become a way of life. It never makes sense, but is

especially useless when there aren't even very many credentialized, overprofessionalized

jobs to speak of.

I think high-quality blogging is one of the more exciting things to appear on the

intellectual horizon in recent years. In the case of the contribution of newer scholars,

especially in a time in which the terrible outlook for the future of our field and the

humanities generally is a given, this public intellectual activity has potentially farreaching

ramifications for the prospects of our field and profession--and, to a certain

degree, the state of intellectual, social, and political life more broadly.

I think a lot about that line, the father's charge that you are young and it's your fault. Of

course, that charge is unfair; it goes without saying. How young we are is precisely one

of the only things for which we cannot possibly be held responsible. Then I remember

the wisdom and yearning of that remarkable conversationalist, who turns sixteen this

very day, and I am forced to ask...or can we?

She was quietly insistent on winning the case for at least a hypothetical acceptance that

her scholarly passions and goals might be real ones in the long-term, as if presciently

aware that if she does not press and even win the case now in behalf of her visions of

contribution and fulfillment she might be here tomorrow but her dreams may not. It was

as if she couldn't rest her case until the question was answered in the affirmative.

Happy Birthday, passionate young scholar, wherever you are. I have a feeling your

dreams will still be there with you, wherever you choose to go.