It was supposed to be my 50th graduation anniversary this June. We were asked to write for the yearbook. I just received an email from a classmate who saw my remarks in response to the question: What do you consider your most important accomplishment in life thus far? He asked permission to send it to some friends. It occurred to me that it’s worth posting at my blog, hence…
Translated into Polish by Malgorzata Koraszewska.
So far, I’d say my life, despite its many high points, including three independent children and a wonderful wife (I’m not complaining in any way), has been a failure. I’m an historian of 2000+ years of Western history, trained in an age when it was still possible to acknowledge reality — i.e., the West is exceptional, especially when it comes to human rights and freedom. I have a deep appreciation for the generosity and humanity that inspires the best of the West, and which, without the West, would wither in the cold. And I am witness to a generation that is literally throwing it away, in the very name of the values that make it so exceptional.
My specialty is apocalyptic millennialism, that is movements that think they on the verge of introducing a golden age of felicity and peace on earth. Over the last 20 years, I’ve witnessed a global clash between one of the most ruthless, imperial of such movements, seeking global dominion, and Western civilization, which has created and still presides over the new global community. The West, in my reading, is the most successful carrier of demotic millennialism — egalitarian, dignity-culture that prized productive labor — and our institutions are hot-beds of rare progressive flowers that would wither in the cold air of prime-divider societies.
And among the rare flowers in these hotbeds we call universities, we have a progressive millennialism that takes the very self-criticism that is the lifeblood of any always-improving society, gets turned against itself. We (i.e. the civilization we grew up in, created by “white supremacists”) are the enemy, not them, the medieval holy warriors. The marriage of pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism.
In the process of adopting this millennial logic, woke Westerners have made it literally impossible to discuss the real enemy, the Caliphators, whose power politics and genocidal desires are actually very close to Hitler’s, whom they openly admire, whose “sacred task” they want to “finish.” But say so, and the cries of Islamophobia come crashing down. So for years and decades, no one wanted to even mention this terrifying dimension of Arab-Muslim hatred for Israel, even as progressives adopted whole-heartedly the cause of one of the worst (and best documented) promoters of this Arab-Muslim neo-Nazism, the Palestinians.
In the 90s I warned about a possible wave of antisemitism after the passage of 2000. (I thought it would come from the Christian right, not the progressive left.) When not dismissed, I got laughed at; and when it hit hard in 2002, I got sidelined from the public discussion by the very people who had dismissed me earlier.
Granted my thought has developed over time, but for the last 20 years I’ve been warning about the catastrophically self-defeating behavior of Western elites, especially PoMo-PoCo professors with dogmatic post-colonial narratives, and the lethal journalists, who pass on Palestinian war propaganda as news, and stay silent about their Nazi-like genocidal ideology.
What I saw in the 21st century, was that the “clash of civilizations†predicted by Huntington in 1995, and resoundingly confirmed by both the assault on Israel and the USA in 2000/2001, got internalized into a war between left and right in the West, in which, for the left, the evil on the right makes an alliance with the Caliphators legitimate, the very deed that convinced the still tribal right, that the left was betraying them. And here, I’ve got to side with “the deplorables.” They’re right, their alleged leaders and information professionals, were selling them a bill of goods. And however crude they might be to the progressive palette, these Americans, conservative, suspicious of the latte liberals, distrustful of the media, members of the productive classes, are far closer in values and commitments to the woke, than the progressive alliance of Caliphators and revolutionaries like BLM.
It looks more and more every day that the West cannot control the catastrophic concessions its woke millennialists made over the course of the last two decades — in the name of progressive values.
* the fake news — first and foremost, and on a massive scale in both consensus and duration — about Israel; now, just when we need a reliable professional information elite to understand Corona, we’re stuck in a terrible corruption (politicization) of the entire information profession.
* the imposition of a politically correct critical theory dogma, deviation from which entails loss of job, reputation, platform, the heavy chill in discussion, and the creation of a generation of scholars with little skill or will to think out of woke parameters. Campus today is not the electric open place it was when we went.
* the tribalization of politics, so one side views the others as deplorably tribal, while the other views the first as deplorably universalistic and traitors to “our side.” This loops back to the fake news, distorted to push a cause.
Trump’s stunning victory turned up the volume ten times the already loud cacophony, and Floyd’s killing has made the woke paradigm dominant, a new catechism. Now I’m watching the slow-motion train wreck of the 2020 elections from afar in Israel, but fully aware of the stakes for the global community. In part, I’m privy to the highly intelligent ecumenical tribe on our class’ listserv, think their way into the war against their fellow citizens.
At this point, it’s so involved, evolved and devolved that it’s hard to articulate a sane path. When I studied apocalyptic in the Middle Ages I ran across the expression saniores mentis, those of sounder mind, who resisted the apocalyptic madness of their day. At the time, I identified with the demotic millennialists and not the sane Church, but now I have a sense of the importance of sound minds guiding us, which in this election means nobody in sight.
And basically, I’ve failed to communicate this effectively. I definitely feel like Cassandra.
A friend said, “It’s not entirely “”their fault” [i.e., those “progressives” who are helping our civilization commit suicide], we still haven’t found the right way to say it.” I certainly have not figured it out, and my upcoming book, tentatively (today) titled: Losing the Western Front: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and the Global Caliphate in the Third Millennium, will testify to over a decade of trying to say it and failing. It’s not that this triumphalist imperialist Islam will take over the world in the new, “global” millennium. It’s that, as with all apocalyptic millennial movements, although they’re wrong, that doesn’t mean they’re inconsequential. But certainly the appalling way we Western thought leaders have dealt with them, makes the potential damage all the greater.
It may be that I’m angry. Indeed I am.
I am full of gratitude for the life I’ve lived, the people I’ve met, worked with, argued with, and loved, my children, my wife, my parents (may their memory be a blessing), my family, my friends and colleagues, my many opportunities, those I took and those I did not. I’m only sorry that I’ve failed to communicate my understanding to people at a time when it really matters to see clearly.
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