YDS: The Clare Spark Blog

February 25, 2012

Moral atheists?

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarespark @ 9:36 pm
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Blake's Ancient of Days, 1794

[This blog is dedicated to my daughter Jenny, who called my attention to the missing father in the Whitney Houston death coverage. See http://clarespark.com/2012/02/13/whitneys-spectacular-demise/.] Fox News Channel is usually vigilant in exposing atheists and watching out for threatened family values and “the folks,” who may be waylaid by “secularists”; i.e., nihilists and cultural relativists. It is often imagined that feminists, like communists before them, are adherents to such destructive beliefs, beliefs that send its adherents to hell in this world and/or the next.

I noticed yesterday that one Republican operative who posts on Facebook had asked the question, “does not atheism lead to the breakdown of society”—or words to that effect. I engaged the question and realized I had the germ of an idea for a new blog.

On a recent blog (http://clarespark.com/2011/10/19/sex-without-freud/), I have noted that the “Jew” Freud was more controversial than the “Jew” Marx as I researched literary criticism and the reconstruction of the humanities curriculum between the wars. It was probably Freud’s The Future of An Illusion (1927) that was most offensive to the progressives I was studying, for Marx’s anticapitalism was not far from their own. Though many of these academics were not overtly religious and may have been agnostic or atheistic or primitivist followers of “the Greek Way,” they were strongly defending the notion of “the good father” (e.g., FDR) as “the focus of veneration.” Hence, Melville’s straying father as depicted in his “crazy” novel Pierre, or, the Ambiguities (1852) had to be defended against excessive [female, Hebraic] puritanism, while Melville himself, a covert sympathizer with Captain Ahab, had to be denounced as murderer and/or abuser of his wife and sons. (See http://clarespark.com/2011/06/12/call-me-isabel-a-reflection-on-lying/.)

[It is well known that antisemites and anti-imperialists have pictured the Hebrew God (whose name may be spoken or written only as Yahweh) as brutal, warlike, and domineering, in contrast to themselves, who walk in the steps of the gentle, peacemaking, even maternal, Christ, (or perhaps they reject all religion along with their families of origin, turning themselves into Nietzschean man-gods and goddesses). Only a selective, ahistoric, and misguided reading of the Christian Bible could support such a sharp antithesis between Jew and Christian. See http://clarespark.com/2010/11/14/the-abcs-of-antisemitism/, especially the note on Harvard historian Crane Brinton, who associated Jacobins with "Hebraic fury" and Calvinism.]

To return to my chat with the Republican operative: I argued that it was not belief in God that was decisive to a moral, law-abiding, politically engaged, creative adulthood, but rather family structure. I referred to such issues as the presence or absence of a strong, loving, protective, emotionally present father, and such relatively unstudied questions as sibling rivalry and birth order (mental health workers will know what I mean. Some economists and sociologists will strongly disagree, arguing that it is the amount of money in the family that most affects life chances for the children. I don’t know how this could be proven one way or another.).

A weak, mostly absent father, averse to domesticity and to close contact with children in their most crucial period of brain development (starting at birth but continuing through their 20s!) is more likely than not to incite cult-like behavior and nihilism in his children. Without that introjected paternal superego, we are adrift in a sea of competing ideologies, and well may seek an anchor in a repressive dictatorial father-substitute, or, as in the case of the French Revolution, we may seek direction in a vindictive mob.

As I studied misogyny in 19th century and 20th century authors, including poets, I saw frequent terror of the modern woman, a figure most notable for her switching from indulgent, constant comforter to horrifying, death-dealing witch. (http://clarespark.com/2009/10/23/murdered-by-the-mob-moral-mothers-and-symbolist-poets/).  Single mothers today are expected to be both disciplinarian and bearer of unconditional love. I wonder if this double role is not too much to expect from single mothers, indeed the double role may be the precursor to misogyny, yet some counter-culture figures, including some feminists, are not daunted by the possibility that the male-free home is not the mark of progress they imagine. Is it not likely that “the kids are not all right?”

October 23, 2010

The Neutral State and the Williams firing

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarespark @ 9:01 pm
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Vivian Schiller, CEO of NPR

[Added 10-24-2010: On local NPR station KPCC, Brooke Gladstone took up the cudgel to beat JW. Her strategy was to play the neutral examiner of facts: 1. The media were wrong to truncate JW's original comment on Fox, hence making him sound like a bigot; but 2. Given his record at NPR as transmitted [vaguely] by Vivian Schiller, he should have been terminated long ago.] What do Ilearn from the abrupt firing of “news analyst” Juan Williams by National Public Radio on Wednesday October 20, 2010, a day and a half after he expressed anxiety (on Fox News Channel) when persons in Muslim dress shared a plane flight with him? The dumping of NPR’s token black male excited the media, NPR listeners, and the political class–and the fallout continues as of this writing–but no one has attempted an explanation of what a “news analyst” does, nor has anyone made the connection to the supposed “neutrality” of the State, or to the “neutrality” of the arbitrator of disputes as asserted by the moderate men, i.e., social democrats and “progressives.”

   Apart from the astonishing control-freakiness of NPR management, it is worth noting what “analysis” means to a professional historian who also addresses a general public, and did so on another public broadcasting outlet before graduate school.

    I remember being chided by one KPFK listener when I was program director (2-81 through 7-82). This caller during my weekly live Report to the Listener complained that our News Department (headed by Marc Cooper) was not “objective.” I remember my answer very well. I asked her if she would not prefer an acknowledged subjectivity to the phony air of objectivity put forth by commercial media? I also recall that my happiest moment on the radio, ever, was not the broadcast of my own work, but that of a high school girl who had written a poem for one of our Peace Festivals, expressing her revulsion at the dominant war-celebrating culture. It ended with the defiant line “Hell no, we’re not objective!” It was a creditable effort, but what made the poem memorable to me was how I programmed it. During the news broadcast, I had her read the poem in between news reports, which one would be determined by chance. Entirely by accident, it happened that the report preceding her reading related to the purchase of a new type of airplane by the Pentagon. She read her poem live; I and two of her friends were in the control room when she read it, and my eyes filled with tears. (I think I must have gotten the idea from Cocteau’s movie Orpheus, when a strange message comes out of the radio, unexplained.)

     It was the opportunity to shake things up, form-wise, that endeared me to Pacifica, and made my firing so traumatic. I feel for Juan Williams, but neither he nor his former colleagues in public radio would ever have tampered with the categories as I felt free to do, let alone to stigmatize the phony objectivity of NPR, funded not only by the government but by tax-deductible donations from listeners, foundations, corporate grants, all of whom view themselves proudly as progressives on the side of the angels, and never, never taking sides.

     But though as an artist and troublemaker, I messed with the format, as an historian I am supposed to be objective, however much postmodernists like Hayden White deny the possibility of doing history altogether (we are supposedly incapable of telling stories that depart from literary genres).  Still, bowing to the limitations of my own intelligence and to the blinkered times in which I live, I try to be relatively objective. How? Let me count two of the obstacles to my omniscience.

1. We are limited by our access to facts, never more so than when we opine about current events. But governments are highly secretive. It may be decades before historians are allowed access to classified materials, or to the private papers of movers and shakers. For instance, I have written extensively about the elusive and low-profile Dr. Henry A. Murray on this website, but I was able to see only a tiny fraction of his Melville notes in 1991, and then denied access in 1995 to the rest of his immense cache of personal papers held by Harvard University Archives. His widow, Caroline Fish Murray, wanted to see an outline of a prospective biography before she would allow me to view his correspondence, although she had given blanket permission to his lubricious biographer Forrest Robinson some years earlier.  It costs Harvard money to catalog and maintain the Murray papers, and we pay for it indirectly because Harvard U., though exclusive and independent in its selection of overseers, is an educational institution like NPR, so bequests are deducted from the taxable estate of the donor. So how does this affect my writing on Murray? I must make inferences and read him with an eye to ideology, as I would do with materials of persons long deceased.

2. We are supposed to know the “context” of events so that our interpretations (or “analyses”) are not distorted. But the “context” is enormous and much of it is unknown to the “analyst.” But even when we think we have a handle on “the big picture” we must, as historians, locate the relevant context. That is, we must get inside the heads of the persons we “analyze” and present to the world, so that we can determine the precipitating event that cause the action we write about. Is this always possible? When I was in graduate school, I had to take an introduction to the various sub-fields of history. Our first assignment was to rank the causes of the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s. Never one to change my spots overnight, I titled my paper “How Could White People Act Like This?”  I still don’t know how to rank the causes of this event, my point being that we can do our best to reconstruct a situation, but we are only making a stab at it, even when we have lots of data to work with. So much for interpretation by “analysts.”

   But some aspects of the context are determinable, for there are always, but always, visible or invisible antagonists (including their families: father, mother, siblings) addressed by historical actors. That is why I called my blog on Herder and Fichte a foray into dialectics. They were seemingly arguing against the mechanical materialists, those Jack the Rippers of the social fabric, who preceded them, and who would later be blamed for the excesses of the French Revolution. So when we learn the range of debates, of all the related social conflicts, we may possibly read texts with greater accuracy, finding ideology and propaganda in what we first took to be a sober account of the writer’s world. This is labor-intensive and not for the impatient.

   To conclude what should be a book, not a blog, I doubt that anyone at NPR, deep down, believes that they are objective. But they must say so, because that is the deal they made with the devil as middle managers. Progressivism, with its usually undetected co-opting of the Enlightenment and science, forces its followers to put on that impassive mask, lest their inner resentments at being managed, should reveal themselves. Juan Williams, ever since I have seen and heard him on Fox News Channel, has almost always raised his voice as if speaking to partly deaf people. I know how he feels. Or maybe not.

February 20, 2010

The Glenn Beck Problem

Filed under: 1 — clarespark @ 10:39 pm
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Pierrot collage by Clare Spark

[Added 9-1-10: This blog has obviously been evolving as I have tried to place Glenn Beck's views in some recognizable historical narrative. For a liberal account of Beck as demagogue that I find disturbingly distorted see http://hnn.us/articles/130820.html. My search for Beck follows; I should say that Beck does urge his viewers to do their homework and to read primary sources, then challenge him if he is mistaken in his characterization of the Founders, or any other claim he makes. That is not the usual practice of a demagogue (who does not permit, let alone welcome, criticism from the crowd):]

Click onto the illustration and read what German agent George Sylvester Viereck wrote about Hitler in 1923: you will find the line “he storms their reserve with his passion.” Yesterday I posted my objection to Glenn Beck’s obsession with blaming everything wrong with our society on “the progressive movement.”  I also objected to his tendency to equate right-wing social democrats with communists, an error only a person with little knowledge of 20th century European history would make. Given the millions who tune into every program and who think he is a powerful weapon in the campaign against “Big Government,” it is not surprising that one of my Facebook friends immediately objected to my criticism of a man he thinks is a hero, but who, though I often agree with him, sometime suspect to be a power-hungry demagogue, taking advantage of ever-growing dissatisfaction with U.S. domestic and foreign policies to feed his ego and to line his pocket, while playing the earnest clown. Whatever his motives, there is no excuse for indicting “progressivism” as a “cancer….” as he did in his keynote address at CPAC, or his comments today (May 26, 2010) trashing Bernays and Lippmann. Usually  this is an antisemitic jibe from the Left and Chomsky, but Beck was vehement and nasty.  I am disgusted. See my widely circulated essay http://clarespark.com/2009/08/19/noam-chomskys-misrepresentation-of-walter-lippmanns-chief-ideas-on-manufacturing-consent/ [Added, March 19. I have been reading about Edmund Burke and his revival from the 1950s on. Paleoconservative Russell Kirk (a founder of National Review) and his ultraconservative Burkean allies in academe are probably the intellectual sources for Beck. Although on many points, he seems to be a libertarian, he is also opposed to any view that does not regard the Christian God as the source of order and liberty--along with Bill O'Reilly and Newt Gingrich, his opponents are "secularists." Hence his attempt to remake the Founding Fathers into believers in God as the chief lawgiver of "moral natural law"--the source of order, with the state as a usurper insofar as it threatens (upper- or middle-class) property, the ballast for "tradition." This places Beck as a follower of Edmund Burke, as I believe Jonah Goldberg to be, who is as rattled by "the Jacobins" as the source of totalitarian/statist control.)* [Added 6-6-10: I was much mollified and gratified by Beck's support for Israel during the last week. How this fits in with his general ideology, I cannot say. Added 7-18-10: Beck clarified what he means by rights being God-given: he was contrasting this position with the competing notion that rights are gifts from the State, a key Nazi idea.] [Added 10-30-10. I am taken aback by the Harvard UP published book by Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (2002). This book is more helpful in explaining the religious Right and their alarm at secularism than any other history book I have ever read. If intent matters, Hamburger bolsters the case that the writers of the Constitution did not banish religion from the public square, far from it. See http://clarespark.com/2010/11/05/hamburgers-separation-of-church-and-state/.]

This blog is about the danger of allowing any media personalities to do our thinking for us, and I am not speaking about Glenn Beck alone, nor do I wish to insult his viewers or listeners, but they should be on guard. As my long-time friend political scientist Stephen Eric Bronner wrote in one of his first books (this on German Expressionism), making a passionate work of art or viewing it, though valuable in itself, cannot substitute for the thoughtful study, investigating, organizing and other activity that resists illegitimate authority. Professor Bronner wrote enthusiastically about Rosa Luxemburg too, as well as other radical social democrats who were associated with the Second International. These activists were called left-wing social democrats, because they meant to educate the masses in the most advanced industrialized societies and through majority acquiescence (as opposed to bureaucratic centralism) make the transition from capitalism to socialism. Luxemburg herself was an anti-Bolshevik and argued with Lenin about issues that are still red-hot today, such as supporting anti-colonial social movements that were antidemocratic and backward. (I am updating the debate between Luxemburg and Lenin, originally about the nature of imperialism, and about self-determination in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, not about Third World dictatorships of today. (Thanks to Steve Bronner for the correction. But as Robert Brenner and Perry Anderson taught the debate in a session I audited, the issue concerned  left-wing alliances with antidemocratic entities, so I extrapolated to the present, when the hard Left does ally itself with dubious entities. For an entirely negative view of Luxemburg and other “Non-Jewish Jews” see Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews. Johnson has the clearest exposition of twentieth-century politics and diplomacy affecting the future of Jewry that I have ever read. It is especially welcome at a time when a new “peace process” is under way.)

All this is to explain that “right-wing social democrats” like FDR were conservative reformers, similar in their views to those of Edmund Burke, ardent critic of the French Revolution and its threat of popular sovereignty. Bronner, though a prolific author, is not typical of today’s radical (Leninist) Left. And I have shifted my own position, as my Pacifica memoir makes clear. As an historian with a background in science education, my most positive contribution must be to encourage individuals to be skeptical of all pronouncements from politicians and other celebrities, and to withhold their support until they know among other things, who is financing their endeavors: Arab sheiks? Closet Islamic jihadists? Americans remain innocent, characters in a novel by Henry James. We remain child-like in our quickness to trust. We are not experienced in the ways of amoral and jaded Europeans or elites from other societies who would destroy democratic movements in their own countries and who seek to bring down the West tout court, for the West is full of bad examples, such as the American and French Revolutions. Do we know the extent to which their financing of university programs and media corporations such as Rupert Murdoch’s outfit is affecting their programming (Fox) or curriculum (Columbia U.)?

While reading Schiller’s and Goethe’s plays over the last few years, I was struck by the complexities of their plots, for they were writing in a time when court life was full of intrigue. Perhaps that is why I collect masks and images of Pierrot. Artists knew that it was bad, really bad out there.

* On the subject of Edmund Burke as a liberal constitutionalist and not an organicist, see Rod Preece, “Edmund Burke and his European Reception,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation Vol.21, Number 3 (Autumn 1980): 255-273. Preece argues that Burke’s European admirers mistook him for an organicist thinker, and that for Burke, there was a contract between the state and the individual; moreover that he was opposed to Platonic guardians, but preferred practical men of affairs (the moderates) to be running things. But that Burke was horrified by Jacobins and the French Revolution, there is no dispute. If Preece is correct, then Russell Kirk’s name should be added to those who have misunderstood Burke.

September 14, 2009

Historians, journalists and polarization

Filed under: 1 — clarespark @ 1:53 am
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Jean-Jaques Rousseau

I suppose you could call this blog a kind of discourse on method, with apologies to Descartes.

     The term “polarization” does not mean that a group (in this case the U.S.) simply has sharp disagreements over policy. Rather it describes a situation that is highly irrational, in which hatred of the opposition is the dominant emotion. In such heightened emotional states, it is pointless to ask that we step back and 1. Describe with accuracy the status quo that the policy aims to reform; 2. Analyze proposed policies in detail, asking whether the reform in question can achieve the stated goals of its proponents; 3. Imagine better alternatives, describing these in sufficient detail to elicit either assent or opposition from concerned voters.

   That sounds reasonable, right? But it is impossible to get agreement over the basic facts, or to even want to know them, in a society that is moved by partisan propaganda, often vitriolic, and where key words mean different things to different individuals and groups. (Take the word “secular” for instance. More on that later.)

   Note that I did not specify what polarizing policy I had in mind. These (rational) protocols listed above could be applied to any of the current debates that roil the country: health care (or health insurance) reform; the war in Afghanistan; U.S. relations with Israel; whether or not radical Islam poses a deadly threat to the security of the West; and the chief cause of the recession and measures that would aid recovery. (The latter dispute could include the causes of the Great Depression and how we got out of it.)

    During the month of August and early September I blogged here almost every day, hoping that an historical perspective that was also informed by depth psychology might contribute to the return of curiosity and rationality in a public sphere that seems to me to be spinning out of control toward either violent confrontations, even race riots, or toward the instituting of dangerous, misconceived policies that could hurt people with even greater inhumanity. In particular, I have emphasized embedded antisemitism in popular culture, an ever more visible phobia that defeats the rational scrutiny of controversial subjects as listed above. Not every historian does this kind of analysis, and why this is so is in itself historically determined.

     First, there is the chasm between 1. Those whose intellectual and emotional makeup leads them toward skepticism to all authority until that authority is able to justify its existence and power to affect individual life; and 2. Those who are driven by faith in leaders, and who generally submit to their will, without too many questions. Let me stipulate here that historians are, by training, supposed to line up with the first group, whether their emphasis is on institutional structures, cultural patterns, the decisions of leaders, or the imperatives of the natural world and its slow or rapid transformations. Preferably, historians should provide an explanatory synthesis that comprehends, however tentatively, all of these great forces for change or stasis, but few have the training, the imagination, and the nerve to attempt it. Could it be that some do not want to appear as ”Jewish” troublemakers and catalysts of social change?

    Unfortunately, given the immensity of the task facing the historian who wants to explain any conflict of significance, it is rare to find one with the imaginative skills and time to develop a satisfactory theory on all but a limited terrain. That is why I wish historians would shake off their graduate school training and its approved “lines” of interpretation coming from senior faculty, and move toward greater intellectual independence. “Faith” in our dissertation directors or other mentors must give way to bold forays into uncharted waters, where we identify those areas and conceptions most helpful in depolarizing the conflicts that rule the day.* One challenge is deciding the level of detail and context needed by a broad public in assessing foreign and  domestic policy. (I tried to do that yesterday in my account of oil politics and Obama’s framing of the Arab-Israeli conflict: I drastically reframed the conflict as generally transmitted in schools and in the media.) Another area of activity would be to define key words as they are deployed by competing social movements, for instance “secular” forces as opposed to “traditional” ones.

     The word “secular” has changed its meaning: no longer commonly understood as a reference to the separation of church and state, i.e., a plurality of institutions affecting our orientation to public policy, hence enhancing “choice,”  “secular” now is often a curse word for some opinion leaders on the Right who take it to mean the mindless destruction of American values, as these are embodied in the beliefs of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. Whereas, instead of using scary words implying parricide and patricide, they could be doing real, appropriately detailed investigations, assuming that they are allowed to by their colleagues and employers. Or how about historians decoding the omnipresent admonition to “take responsibility” for one’s health? How can there be meaningful choice when determining structures remain invisible, and where we have only limited understanding of the emotions within ourselves that muddle “rational choice?” 

      One more word about journalists who are not trained historians, but who work for the media, and for whom loyalty to the organization often trumps loyalty to seeking the truth and educating the public about events and their causes. Newspapers and other media are in my view, adding to the polarization owing to the political postures of the owners and their advertised intentions to act as the “newspaper of record” or to achieve “fairness and balance.” Of course, the New York Times and Fox (owned by Newscorp) provide neither a complete record, nor fairness and balance, for few even know what “balance” signifies (as I have argued in a previous blog); nor is it widely known that “balance,” like “equilibrium” is a word used in psychological warfare to soothe the target audience. That is why the failure of the Pacifica Foundation remains such a bitter disappointment in my own personal history, for I once thought that listener-sponsorship would remedy the structural causes of bias and finally bring about a vibrant marketplace of ideas, but I did not take into consideration the overwhelming influence of corporatist liberalism and its concealed collectivist (“multicultural”) outlook, a matter discussed on this website at length.

   Will the internet provide the much-needed way out of this imbroglio, a tangle of clashing opinion pushing us into some form of madness? As long as our schools and families do not prepare children to “quarrel with God” as Herman Melville did throughout his literary career (and for this he was read as a “Jew” by some prominent critics), the internet will add to the noise, but will not help us distinguish between true and false claims as to the crucial facts that affect public policy-making in a democratic republic: a democracy that does not call the primitivist Rousseau its intellectual parent, but is the creature of  Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.

[Added 1-9-11:] I did not mention demonizing as a habit of the media, along with demonic possession as an explanation for psychosis or sociopathy. If your core readers believe in the Devil or in innate evil in human nature, calling out the dark forces is another strategy for selling newspapers and increasing traffic on cable television and websites. Goethe (illustrated) made a dramatic intervention in the Faust legend when he wrote his two-part drama in which Faust does not sell his soul, but makes a bet with Mephistopheles, a point that is ignored by those who don’t study intellectual history. But the Romantic Goethe, like Schiller, did become more conservative after the French Revolution, and it shows in their dramas.]

*One such historian is Niall Ferguson, whose masterful synthesis explaining Western ascendancy is of intense interest to me.

Tischbein portrait of classicist Goethe

July 31, 2009

More On The ABCs of Staying Alive and Preserving The Planet

Filed under: 1 — clarespark @ 9:05 pm
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Simon Schaffer of Cambridge U.

I. Life is just a bunch of stories, or so sayeth some high-achieving men who were or are close to me: all “narratives” are idiosyncratic to individuals or groups, they believe(d). In the case of one trendy political scientist, his anti-science, irrationalist world view proved fatal, and he was dead at 64. Another friend/mentor was dead at age 55. Both men were academic stars whose careerist allegiance to anti-medical, anti-science views deprived them of the accumulated knowledge of medicine and hygiene, much of it achieved despite centuries of persecution by those reactionaries who are now sometimes called “traditionalists.” Postmodernists and multiculturalists would agree with my prematurely deceased ex-lovers, but few public intellectuals today seem interested in tracking down the sources of their quack belief systems, despite their professed love for “nature” and the preservation of the natural world. For them, science is “essentially a swindle” [Simon Schaffer, declared in a UCLA seminar that I audited] and cannot help us think and test our way out of the ecological catastrophe that they fear, for science and technology are the culprits who must be overcome.

I have written elsewhere on this site how the rule of law, the very foundation of what we call “civilization,” is undermined by such assaults on facts or the ranking of historical narratives so that the ordinary citizen has a basis for judging the worth and validity of contending “stories.” It is to me unbelievable that I have had to write of such basic conceptions in political and social theory as I have done over the last few decades, but such is the almost incomprehensible deterioration of our shared culture since at least the second world war, a dumbing down that was exacerbated during the 1960s counter-culture, that I find myself having to remind readers of historical developments, conflicts, and methods of investigation that they should have thought about and mastered in high school and college. So please bear with me, those of you for whom these arguments are old hat, or a not-so-fresh bowl of cherries.

I am arguing here for an ever-evolving but deepening objectivity as we contemplate conflict. To be sure, we experience the world through lenses that are often distorted by those ideologies or unhealthy family relationships that formed our personal subjectivities. But it is our life task as would-be enlightened and progressive liberals to reconstruct over time just how our personal stories or narratives wired our brains in a particular way, so that we are predisposed either to love or hate or feel indifference to those individuals, groups, and principles that compete for our attention and loyalty. To be less abstract, consider the case of the child caught in the middle between divorcing parents. Each party to the conflict, say mom and dad, has a different story about the cause(s) of the breakup and the character of the other parent, and the bewildered young child who does not, cannot at this stage of life (for s/he is dependent on a unified family for protection), favor one parent over the other, may throw up his or her hands and state, over and over, “there are only stories: there is no truth. I cannot bear the thought that one of my beloved parents is lying to me, or is a flawed person in any way.” In adulthood, that grown (but emotionally stuck) child of a messy divorce may embrace what is now called postmodernism, that is the radical subjectivism or “perspectivism” that permeates the humanities: it is argued in our “elitist liberal” schools that there is no universal truth, no compelling universal moral order, but that there are only points of view, and we should not intervene to establish which stories are in accord with facts or correct conduct, for now all “facts” are factoids, or are observations entirely dependent on context and the will to control wealth and hence those groups said to be oppressed. As for bourgeois “morality” (a.k.a. the rule of law, often blamed on Jewish “legalism”) it is a confidence game contrived by the rising middle-class (the modernists) to displace libertine monarchs, and it is the job of the postmodernist to rip off the mask of the new oppressors. Take that, Thomas Jefferson, you sanctimonious hypocrite!

II. Secularists versus traditionalists. Assimilation and its complications. The melting pot and its vicissitudes.
I watch Fox News Channel to see what Catholic rightists are dispensing to their populist supporters. O’Reilly and Hannity in particular are indignant with “secular progressives” who are destroying “traditionalism.” It seems to be a replay of the Reformation-Counter-Reformation argument. For these spokesmen for the conservative movement, “secularism” has changed its meaning from what I once understood it to be; i.e., for the popular Fox pundits, secularists are now atheistic heretics (archetypally Hebraic/Protestant) out to destroy all religion, the better to enslave the credulous masses with materialism, the masses being “the folks” for whom these pundits purport to speak. But this was not the meaning of “secular” as I have understood it. Secularism was that Enlightenment pluralism that prevented the establishment of a state religion, and it was another term for tolerance—including toleration for the non-believer. It was a brilliant innovation in government that aimed to prevent wars of religion as had convulsed Europe with huge consequences for subsequent history, for instance, in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). And secularism also signifies the “worldliness” also blamed on “the Jews” and their refusal of Christ and the promised eternal afterlife.

In one of my essays posted here (“Why Multiculturalists and Wilsonians Can’t Diagnose the New Antisemitism” http://clarespark.com/2009/07/11/multiculturalists-and-wilsonians-cant-diagnose-the-new-antisemitism/) I mention the conditions of assimilation for a certain group of upwardly mobile Jews, who may have felt that they had to conform to all the precepts of Christianity in order to find acceptance and earn a fine living. Since the “traditionalists” are dead set against liberalism tout court, (all the while defending “liberty” or “free will” and the God-loving Founding Fathers) I should explain my position, especially as what I found in my research on the origins of multiculturalism is relevant to this nation of immigrants and the descendants of slaves, many of whom as “cultural nationalists” and “anti-imperialists” now refuse “assimilation.” The turn to “culturalism” as a substitute for a scientific education, and yet, an education that would oppose racism (racism being a well-known feature of Nazi ideology), occurred during the Roosevelt administration, and here below is a revealing document that is conscious of the difficulties in adapting to the secular state—a liberal state that demands critical analysis of its operations by all its voters (blame Jefferson and the Enlightenment for this).

[Mordecai Grossman, “The Schools Fight Prejudice,” Commentary, Nov. 1945:] “To many school people and laymen, prevailing widespread intergroup antagonisms with their tensions and outbreaks, like the recent school strikes and riots, testify to the school’s failure to date to communicate America’s democratic heritage.

The intercultural education movement [begun with the New Deal Bureau for Intercultural Education, 1935] in which many teachers, schools and national organizations of teachers…are now joined, is based on two principal assumptions: first, that prejudices are culturally transmitted rather than biologically inherited, and second, that the school can, by one method or another, contribute significantly to the transformation of self-enclosed, mutually exclusive and hate-breeding cultures into open, interplaying and cooperating cultures. We have here a reaffirmation of the faith in education as a force for human progress and in the schools as the principal instrument of education in democratic ideals.
A democratic way of life…is one which seeks to provide every individual with the maximum possible opportunity for personal growth and community service, for sharing in the control over the economic, political, and social conditions of group life, and for mastery over his own destiny–for all individuals regardless of race, creed, or ancestry.
However, inter-individual (man-to-man) democracy is…only one aspect of the democratic way of life. The other is intercultural democracy [that] occupies a somewhat intermediate position between the ideals of “cultural pluralism” and of the “melting pot.” In contrast with the former, intercultural democracy denies both the possibility and the desirability of maintaining fairly intact the ancestral cultures of the varied ethnic groups that came here. But it also denies the possibility and desirability of stamping the 140,000,000 Americans in the mold of a uniform dominant culture–of a “melting pot” Americanism. For a democratic culture is an open culture, continually growing through individual and group interaction. Advocates of intercultural education recognize the survival of elements of old world culture in the new. Such elements of the old world heritage that are at odds with a democratic way of life are to be eliminated. But there are others which do not impede the growth of a common democratic culture, and which may even enrich it. These are to be retained…(35). [The Program:]…to contrast democracy with rival ways of life, say fascism…The thick walls which separate the social and ethnic groups in American society consist in large part of the stereotyped pictures that members of the “in” group have in their minds of individuals in the “out” group…[We must study] the tricks the human mind plays on itself, including those of “rationalization,” “projection,” and “scapegoating,” and which others play on us by means of propaganda techniques, etc.(37, 38)…[T]here is the risk that the gains likely to accrue from the school’s attempt to develop an appreciation of the sub-culture will be nullified by the possible heightening of the sense of difference. Much depends on the way the intercultural program is administered (42).”

All of postwar pedagogy fits into this impossible dream, a scheme to be realized by an artful administrator. But Grossman has distorted the meaning of “the melting pot” as it was previously understood and bodied forth in Israel Zangwill’s famous play of 1908. For Zangwill and his predecessors (including de Crèvecoeur and Jefferson), a new man would be created out of the religious and ethnic mix unique to America, and this rights-endowed individual new man and woman would be fit to judge their elected government representatives with the critical tools of the Enlightenment: analysis of propaganda and access to primary source documents, ending the monopoly of rulers whose affairs were conducted far from the public eye. By misreporting the culturally syncretic “melting pot,” Grossman was left with the cultural pluralism he was presumably replacing with a vaguely defined “intercultural democracy.” There are no autonomous free-standing individuals in his model, only interactive entities. Since he was actually reversing the Enlightenment by replacing individuals with groups (today we would say “community” as a substitute for the group and a corrective to hyper-individualistic loose cannons of all types),  he resorted to the contrast of “democracy” with “fascism,” all the while ignoring the statism and destruction of the dissenting individual that was common to both ideologies. And of course he underestimated the grip that authoritarian ideologies and ancestor-worship maintained in the offspring of his would-be democrats.

As I have argued in all my recent outpourings here, in my articles on History News Network, and in my book on the Melville Revival, the necessity of group cohesion (or “consensus”) trumped the critical processes that make a rational democracy possible, and here in Grossman’s well-meaning but irrational policy statement was only one example of a flood of crazy-making institutional practices from the late 1930s on, although the stage had been set from the Reformation and the invention of the printing press onward. Stay tuned.

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