It’s Later Than I Thought
(A politically-incorrect evaluation)
I thought it wouldn’t happen until my grandchildren had to deal with it. I thought I had time. My children might notice real differences, but the truly horrible impact would be later.
I was wrong.
Since the first time I visited South Africa, I would tell my American acquaintances that if they wanted to see where America was heading, they should fly to Johannesburg with me. That was ten years ago. The continual political corruption, the collapse of a work-ethic culture, the flight of prosperity and the ubiquitous presence of racial tension defines South Africa. Forget Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. South Africa is far from a “rainbow nation.” As I used to say, “It’s a Black and White nightmare.” People I knew who live there used the phrase, “a culture of theft.” Everything was racist. I remember my shock at reading employment ads that stated, “Whites need not apply.” But I always got on an airplane and flew back to “safe” America. Occasionally, I saw hints of this kind of collapse but I didn’t think it would boil into revolution in my lifetime. I wasn’t so sure about the world of my grandchildren.
I was wrong.
I was wrong, not because I wasn’t politically astute, not because I didn’t understand racial issues, not because I belonged to some privileged class. I was wrong because I believed what I was taught as a child. I believed in the Enlightenment.
Does that sound odd to you? Do you even know what the Enlightenment was? Do you realize that our civilization was built on the values of Seventeenth Century intellectuals now deeply embedded in our culture? Do you understand that these ideals will kill us?
Lee Harris’ book, Civilization and Its Enemies, wasn’t written about race in America. It never mentions Black Lives Matter. It’s about ISIS and Islamic consciousness. But the crisis we face might as well have been Harris’ agenda. The roots are the same. First, he summarizes the Enlightenment’s utopia:
“ . . . the Enlightenment dream that all men could one day embrace in the spirit of universal cosmopolitanism, . .”[1]
“That is why those who uphold the values of the Enlightenment so often refuse to recognize that those who are trying to kill them are their enemy. They hope that by pretending that the enemy is simply misguided, or misunderstood, or politically immature, he will cease to be an enemy. This is an illusion. To see the enemy as someone who is merely an awkward negotiator or sadly lacking in savior faire and diplomatic aplomb is perverse. It shows contempt for the depth and sincerity of his convictions, a terrible mistake to make when you are dealing with someone who wants you dead.”[2]
The result is tragic delusion.
“All of this explains why those who subscribe to the values of the Enlightenment find the existence of the enemy so distressing. . . The ideals that our intellectuals have been instilling in us are utopian ideals, designed for men and women who know no enemy and who do not need to take precautions against him. They are values appropriate for a world in which everyone plays by the same rules, and accepts the same standards, or rational cooperation; they are fatally unrealistic in a world in which the enemy acknowledges no rule except that of ruthlessness. To insist on maintaining utopian values when your society is facing an enemy who wishes only to annihilate you is to invite annihilation. And that is unacceptable.”[3]
Harris concludes: “Only those who have mastered ruthlessness can defend their society from the ruthlessness of others.”[4]
That’s the problem, isn’t it? We aren’t ruthless anymore. We have adopted the Judeo-Christian Victorian Enlightenment ideals. Our own morality makes us vulnerable to the ruthlessness of those who would destroy our idea of civilization. We are afraid to be ruthless. It’s culturally repugnant. We don’t ask why. We just know we shouldn’t be cruel, so we don’t employ ruthlessness to defend ourselves. As a result, we will be plowed under like every other civilization that made its moral ideals the only acceptable way of living.
Once in Israel I had the opportunity to speak with a member of the Knesset. I asked him if he realized that Israel’s policy of not executing terrorists effectively insured that terrorism would continue. He responded by telling me that Israel had not enforced capital punishment since Eichmann, and proudly so since that proved that Israel was a peace-loving nation. This is Enlightenment morality, refusing to recognize that the enemy just wants to kill you. Loving peace makes no difference if you aren’t willing to ruthlessly defend it.
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that this is exactly where America stands today. Our moral heritage—the confluence of the Ten Commandments and the Christian ideals of peace and love modified by the Enlightenment—stand in the way of defending the very civilization that made these ideals possible. That’s why “racist” and “bigot” are such powerful political words. They don’t have to be true. They only have to make us feel guilty. Someone I read wrote about America’s core wound—slavery, of course—but, frankly, that’s bull. America’s core wound is passively accepting the utopian morality that prevents it from fighting against those who seek to destroy its culture. It’s an old story. The same thing happened to Rome. In fact, it’s even older than the Roman Empire. Biblical Israel demonstrates the same path to extinction. Consider Altar’s introductory comments to the book of Joshua:
“This story, then, of the annihilation of the indigenous population of Canaan belongs not to historical memory but rather to cultural memory, . . what is reported as the national past is grounded not in the factual historical experience of the nation but in the image of the nation that the guardians of the national literary legacy seek to fix for their audiences and for future generations.”[5]
“The story of the conquest, then, served as a countermove in the work of cultural memory: Israel had entered its land in a stirring triumphal drive as a power before which no man could stand. The theological warrant for this vision, antithetical as it was to the historical facts, was that as long as Israel remained faithful to all that its God had enjoined upon it, the people would be invincible.”[6]
Altar makes it clear: history has nothing to do with the need to show that if we are just “good” people, God will make sure we are victorious. How did that turn out for Israel? How did it work for Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome and so many other great civilizations. They came to power through ruthlessness. They disappeared because they embraced a peaceable morality taught by their intellectuals.
“The problem is rather that the intellectual, simply by being an intellectual, automatically assumes the logical and moral priority of abstract ideas, so that he never thinks of challenging the validity of his own fundamental conceptual categories but always assumes that any misfit between his ideals and reality must be the fault of reality, and nowhere is this more dangerously true than in political thinking.”[7]
We don’t like to think of God as the Exterminator. It shocks our moral consciousness, particularly the “turn the other cheek” idealism. But the ancient authors of the biblical narrative were quite familiar with extermination tactics. Most ancient cultures practiced this form of warfare. Don’t leave anyone alive who might later become your enemy. Shechem is our real biblical model. We eschew such thinking. We believe in negotiation. We think all men are basically civil. We can’t imagine what it would be like to drop an atomic bomb in order to stop a war. Since Truman, we no longer have the stomach for ruthlessness. We can’t impose law and order through force. Oh, no! That would be immoral.
And that’s why we will fall.
It’s much later than I thought.
[1] Lee Harris, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (Free Press, 2004), p. xiv.
[2] Ibid., p. xiv.
[3] Ibid., p. xvii.
[4] Ibid., p. xvi.
[5] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Volume 2, Prophets, Nevi’im: A Translation with Commentary (W. W. Norton & Company, New York: 2019), p. 5.
[6] Ibid., p. 6.
[7] Lee Harris, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (Free Press, 2004), p. 149.
