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Political Correctness, American Education, and the Roots of Anti-Israel Sentiment
Because I’ve pondered the issue before, Conor, your interesting post on Shelby Steele’s latest made my eyes flash. One line of Steele’s jumped out at you — “we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist.” You think there’s more to the story. I agree — in a way that challenges your thesis.
Here’s some of what you write:
I’ve heard this kind of complaint before, paired with critiques of multiculturalism’s excesses and foreboding warnings about the folly of politically correct educators. But […] I can’t help but conclude that the vast majority of our educational curricula is thoroughly western, that Western Civilization indisputably gets primacy […].
At most, you claim, Steele’s foes “want to augment the Western canon with voices by groups historically marginalized in the West — so yes, maybe Thomas Paine is given a little bit less time, and Martin Luther King a little bit more, but almost everything concerns the west and its frames fully and automatically. There is no danger,” you conclude, “of Westerners ceding the privileged place their own civilization and its norms enjoy in American education systems.”
My experience is largely consonant with yours. Ironically, back in the old days at the single-shingle Pomocon I argued that Western civilization was so big, contained such multitudes, that it was already ‘multicultural’. Western parochialism is almost, to use your phraseology, an oxymoron.
But the closer you look, here, the more you see, and if you’re looking closely you can’t help but confront the ugly truth at the center of Steele’s op-ed. Because you omit it from your analysis, even though it follows directly after the line you quote, I have to conclude that you don’t think it’s central to Steele’s claims about our PC self-editing and our fear of seeming supremacist. But I think it is central. Here’s what Steele says right after the paragraph you quote and critique:
When the Israeli commandos boarded that last boat in the flotilla and, after being attacked with metal rods, killed nine of their attackers, they were acting in a world without the moral authority to give them the benefit of the doubt. By appearances they were shock troopers from a largely white First World nation willing to slaughter even “peace activists” in order to enforce a blockade against the impoverished brown people of Gaza. Thus the irony: In the eyes of a morally compromised Western world, the Israelis looked like the Gestapo.
I don’t think you can make sense of Steele’s complaint, or give it its due, unless you put it in this context. Steele is arguing that the typical American education treats Western civilization in a way that causes many of us to experience a profound moral confusion about the state of Israel. He characterizes the educators he criticizes as being at pains not to present Western civilization as primary, lest they appear to have judged Western civilization supreme.
What does it mean to present Western civilization as primary or (gasp) supreme? I think we would readily agree that it doesn’t mean treating every Western idea, movement, ethnic group, and ideology as intellectually and morally equal. Hitler, Torquemada, Plato, Hobbes, Jesus, Machiavelli, Napoleon, Marx, Lenin, Locke, join hands! Respect all! Nobody thinks or talks this way, and for good reason. Western civilization is so great because of its tremendous power of auto-critique — its willingness and ability to kill off, figuratively or literally, its worst ideas and its worst people. That’s not at all to say we live in the best possible West, or that the best people and the best ideas always win. It is to say that judging Western civilization primary or supreme most commonly and correctly means judging on the basis of the best of the West.
And the fact is — I think we’d both concede — that here is exactly where you find the mincing and oversensitivity and the PC and the mania for theatrically staged revisionism. As western-centric as an American education may be, there seems to me no doubt at all that the attitude holding sway is dominated by a staunch refusal to judge the best of the West as proof that the West as such is the best — not Western civilization as a precursor or evolutionary ape pointing toward some future human civilization where true justice will finally be achieved. When Martin Luther King, Jr., is praised — as our own President has praised him — it is (very often) only out of pride in Western civilization insofar as the west is understood as the only civilization that makes possible our enlightened elevation to the standpoint of a cosmic or global humanity that ultimately transcends the particularity of the west — and, in so transcending, destroys it. The goodness and greatness of the west, when it is touted, must only be recognized as a means to an end that makes specifically western primacy or supremacy obsolete.
Now, Steele’s contention, as I understand it, is that this attitude has caused many people to adopt a view of Israel that is intensely critical at the least. Indeed, I think Steele says that this attitude causes people to see Israel as bad, if not evil, and Israel’s enemies as, if not exactly good, then at least as victims.
Why would this be so? Well, Steele provides his own answers, and he can hardly go as deep into the background as I am in a post which I’m sure is already longer than his op-ed. But let me venture to say that the attitude in question, in which the west is only redeemed insofar as it transcends and thereby abandons itself, is a secularization of a quite specifically Christian theological concept. The key scripture is Matthew 5:17:
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.
Now, Luther read these words of Christ and decided that the new dispensation ushered in by Jesus really did transcend the old dispensation of Moses in a way that made the abandonment of the old the prerogative, and indeed the sacred duty, of Christians. But Calvin offered a different interpretation — in my view, one that accords better with the words of Christ. Calvin’s interpretation is the more difficult one, because it teaches that Christians are stuck with a certain amount of Jewishness, both figurative and literal: even though the spirit (Christ/the love of God) perfects and understands what is first present, less comprehendingly, in the flesh (Moses/the law of God), it nonetheless is essential that the new dispensation fulfills, and not destroys, the old.
Return then to the Israel problem. A secularized version of Luther’s interpretation of Matthew 5:17, as opposed to Calvin’s, seeks just the same to free spirit of its fleshly particularity. Only, instead of spirit being the love of God, and the fleshly particularity being the law of God, spirit is our sense of common humanity, or the “arc of justice” — insert your favorite line from Emerson, your second-grade classroom wall, or your Human Resources handbook — and flesh is the incarnate particularity, locality, and uniqueness of Western people, western ideas, and western morality. As even Nietzsche recognized, western civilization is a nonsensical, murderous, and even suicidal abstraction when purged of its Jewishness — and Jewishness is put on a similarly surreal footing when purged of its Mosaic character. Hitler realized that ‘the Jewish problem’ was the problem of a people who purported to have an irreducibly particular relationship with God himself; you could not get God out of the world unless you got that people out of the world.
Obviously I do not want to claim that the typical American education makes people think more like Hitler about Israel. But if your view of Western civilization is a secular one that rejects the centrality to the West of biblical civilization, in all its Jewishness, you are more likely to be made uncomfortable by people who think and act on the basis of their conviction that biblical civilization in all its Jewishness is central to the best of Western civilization. And you are more likely to view unfavorably both the insistence of many Israeli Jews on the peace and security of Israel and their willingness to support violent measures in pursuit of that goal. You will be inclined to see Israel as an atavistic impediment — perhaps the atavistic impediment — to the destiny of western civilization, namely, to transcend and outmode itself in the fulfillment of our human potential to one day realize global or cosmic secular justice.
I admit this is a lot to unpack from only a few lines, but I really do think this is an accurate depiction of the hugely high stakes playing out at their source. We’re not focusing on what Steele is really saying, it seems to me, unless we take the conversation here. Since California soothes the mind and calms the soul, I’m certain you’ve read every word of this lengthy monologue with a placid and preternatural focus, so I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
Published in General
James,
One more thing before I’m off to bed, so that I’ve afforded you more than a tangential hypothetical as fodder. You’re saying in part that America’s educational system is a secular one that denies the centrality of biblical civilization. That’s been my experience (and I went to 14 years of Catholic school!).
What I’m not sure I understand is the alternative you’re imagining. What would an educational system look like that validated the centrality of Jewishness, or the centrality of biblical civilization, or whatever. How would it be different from the educational system we have, and how would those differences cause people to think about Israel-Palestine differently?
Also, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that there are lots of people who are basically okay with Western primacy in our educational system, who are critical of Israel, who reject the biblical view of civilization you described… but who also broadly support Israel, fully believe it has the right to exist, and don’t see it as a — let alone the — atavistic impediment. Examples: Freddie and Peter Beinart.
Thanks, Conor.
(1) I don’t know about lots, but let’s suppose I concede that there must be a significant number of people who fit the profile you describe. I don’t think they’re a particularly potent force in American education, no matter how many college tours Hitchens does.
(2) I’m not looking for a direct solution (the 10 Commandments in every classroom!) to what I tried to describe as an indirect problem (politically correct orthodoxy issues from a worldview that causes Israel to appear as an impediment to the destiny of humanity to those who take on that worldview). I would hope for an education that the destiny of man is not found in the transcendence & abandonment (t&a) of all our particularities, and that justice does not require their t&a. Wait, isn’t multicultural orthodoxy precisely about celebrating our particularities? No, this is a red herring. The key to the celebration is rendering all differences equal and interchangeable in value — equally meaningless by any ultimate measure. That’s t&a. Such an ideology cannot accept a “chosen people.” And that rejection powerfully shapes one’s view of Israel.
One more important point. One can accept everything I say, adopt my position, and still criticize Israel, or move Israeli policy to the “left” — as did Ariel Sharon. But the nature and purpose of the criticism will be quite different from that of the criticism one is likely to advance if one rejects what I say and what I endorse. The policy criticism — blockade bad! settlements bad! etc — is less important to me than the motive, the aim, the endgame behind the criticism. That’s a level of nuance that doesn’t fit into Steele’s short piece, but it’s essential.
James: Have you read George Gilder’s The Israel Test? It was an eye-opener for me, since it offers a simple, easy-to-grasp explanation for anti-semitism throughout history and anti-Israel sentiment today. In a nutshell: The Jewish people have been the highest achievers per capita throughout history, and, due to humanity’s persistent inability to grasp that economics is not zero-sum, they have been resented for it. Spot-on, I believe. Their wealth resulting from their excellence and hard work is perceived to have come at the expense of the have-nots.
This also explains perfectly why leftists–Obama among them–embrace the victim narrative of the Palistinians. As Steele explains the Palistinian mindset: “I have the innocence that defines victims. I may be poor but my hands are clean. Even my backwardness and poverty only effect a moral superiority, while my enemy’s wealth proves his inhumanity.” Bingo.
continued….
Quote of the day for me:
“Western civilization is so great because of its tremendous power of auto-critique — its willingness and ability to kill off, figuratively or literally, its worst ideas and its worst people.”
Other civilizations, it could be argued, do a surprising amount of the opposite.
That was quite a post James. My head is spinning a bit. Could it be, maybe, that folks just hate Jews? They are little, physically unattractive, and too damn smart. Why is it they succeed in any environment, in any culture, when by all that is right, they should be squashed? They are .02% of the worlds population. Yet look at medicine, physics, literature, music and the arts, and of course, business, filled and led by those creepy little Jews. Doesn’t it just drive you crazy? And now those bstards have the unmitigated gall to be fierce warriors as well. Where do they get off, who the heck do they think they are, defending themselves? Oh, now I remember, they started Western Civilization. I hate the West. Don’t we use 20% of the world’s resources (USA) and only have 3% of the world population. We are guilty as sin. Every underpriviledged sufferer owes his pain to us, directly. And the Jews started it all. This Jewish problem can be easily solved, though. Fire up the ovens. Eliminate the source of these Westerns, eliminate the West. Then we can all suffer equally. Feel better now?
And, I contend, this basic ignorance about wealth creation and its beneficial effects for all is at the heart of anti-Americanism around the world and, yes, even here at home and in our schools. If it’s true that our nation is rich because other nations are poor, then we ARE bad and we SHOULD be ashamed of the USA. Almost every time I encounter anti-American–even anti-Western–rubbish from my kids’ teachers, it boils down to this basic lack of understanding.
We Americans have been dealing with this for a hundred years or so; the Jews for a couple thousand.
James: I wonder if “the motive, the aim, the endgame behind the criticism”–be it your theory, Gilder’s theory, or whatever–are ever actually consciously examined by those who share them. Is it just an inchoate feeling, an introspection-free zone? I think so. I think Obama, for instance, looks at the Israel/Palistine situation and ‘feels’–without thinking it through, even–that Israelis must be rich because Palistinians are poor. This same unexamined emotion explains his ambivalence about the US as well, I suspect, and is the root cause of the utopian standard by which the left judges the US, Israel, and the West, even if the left is not self-aware enough to realize it.
James, Scott, Christopher, and Cdor,
Is it possible to discuss the attitude of westerners toward out education system without bringing current events in Israel into it? I intentionally avoided the Israel question because while Shelby Steele tied the concepts together with perfect coherence, my purpose was to discuss only our education system and anxiety about it, a topic that concerns many for reasons apart from the flotilla incident.
But James, I’m thrilled you’ve raised this larger conversation, and I hope it proceeds across many comments, because in 200 words I cannot give a response that nearly does it justice.
Here’s a beginning: seems to me that an American atheist who reveres the Greeks, fetishizes the Roman Empire, thinks that Shakespeare is the apex of written language, and subscribes to the political philosophy embodied in the Declaration of Independence would be perfectly comfortable — not at all pained — by the supremacy of Western Civ in our education system, and that this same man might strenuously object to the notion that biblical civilization is central to the West. Don’t lots of people believe in Western supremacy and reject biblical supremacy?
Also, what do you prefer I address next?
To test your theory, I’d like to see the reception Netanyahu would receive at an Ivy League school. You might be right, but I think it just as likely we’d have faculty petitions protesting his appearance, in a manner that would not be the case for Abbas, say.
And a growing problem that needs to be mentioned is that certain tenets of pc are mutually exclusive: a reluctance to criticize (or even acknowledge) Islamism vs a revulsion against anti-semitism. In a pc world, one side has to win, and my money’s on the former.
Scott,
In the bad old days, Ivy League schools deliberately rejected Jews as students, and many a university president worried about their universities becoming “too Jewish” (in the same way that some people — not university presidents, thankfully — now whisper about the University of California Berkeley being “too Asian”). It’s this kind of bigotry that I’m talking about.
I think this is relevant because if America treats its Jews better in post-PC culture, where it’s no longer okay to exclude people from universities or country clubs because they are Jewish or Japanese or Palestinian, and where the religious right is as likely to embrace Jewishness as to denigrate it, it seems like on the whole our education system has mitigated rather than indirectly contributed to anti-Semitism.
But I can’t help feeling as though I am failing to respond to what James would like me to grapple with, and I hope he’ll challenge me if I’m missing something important.
Conor: good rejoinder. The union of national identity with religious identity is what offends so deeply the secular vision of justice that I described. One way to overcome this is to define Jewishness strictly in terms of “race or ethnicity,” so anti-Semitism means, and can only mean, hating Jews because of their biology. Then this hatred can be quickly and fully subsumed under “racism” — the hatred of anyone because of their biological racial or ethnic makeup — and stigmatized and stamped out accordingly. But isn’t this abstract abridgement a strategic sleight of hand?
It has failed to prevent the return of the repressed issue in the case of Israel. What offends the secular vision is the idea that Israel is the political incarnation of the national and religious Jewish identity. This unitary religion-nation-state — even if it is a democracy, and even if it admits of citizens who are not ethnic or religious Jews — looks like something which it is unjust to fight for, especially to fight for as Israel has fought and has had to fight. The full Jewish identity manifest in Israel looks itself like an injustice. The only escape from this secular anger? Secularization!
Conor: Agreed, but it’s the very recent momentum that I’m worried about–a fear that the pendulum is swinging back, and that secular, pc society is now trending in a benighted direction vis-a-vis the Jews, with the right–religious or otherwise–holding the line and ratifying and securing the progress we’ve made.
Beyond whatever attitudes we have in common as westerners, Americans embrace a kind of utopianism that’s neither left nor right, premised on the idea that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — and that freedom of speech, association, and religion are the proper rights of a free people. George W. Bush’s 2nd Inaugural, and his rhetoric about spreading democracy, can only be understood as applications — proper or improper — of those foundational ideals.
Given that, it makes sense that many Americans who support Israel’s right to exist premise that stance on its right to self-determination, or its status as a staunch ally, or as a democracy among autocracies, etc… and that many would be much less comfortable premising their support of Israel on the notion of a biblically chosen people. I do not think this is pcness.
But speaking of pcness, it also seems to me that US tolerance for Jews increased and bigotry against them decreased as our educational system became more politically correct/less biblically based, and valued Jewishness and Christianity equally. See the Ivy League.