Washington D.C. is some kinda weird place, because it appears that David Brooks has made it through his entire adult life without ever attending a Bar Mitvah. His wide-eyed astonishment at the most basic principles of Jewish thought is actually incredible. Has no one ever taken this guy to shul before?
When [many people] go in search of answers, they generally find people who offer them comfort and ways to ease their anxiety.Nothing against this Erica Brown character that Brooks has dredged up. She sounds like a nice lady. (Actually, with her late-seating policy, she sounds like my religious school teacher, Mrs. Eiseman.) But this is hardly The Guide for the Perplexed here. My own d'var Torah was on this very subject. When, you know, I was thirteen.
Brown tries to do the opposite. Jewish learning, she says, isn’t about achieving tranquility. It’s about the struggle.
This does, however, advance my general thesis. For all the talk about "Judeo-Christian" whathaveyou, Christians, for the most part, when they actually encounter Judaism, are shocked to find that it is not some old-fashioned version of Christianity, that it is, in fact, entirely alien from their own goofball synecretic post-pagan faith.
UPDATE: A commenter notes, and la wiki confirms, that Brooks is, in fact a Jew. Well, Jew-ish. At this point, I really don't know what to say. This is like a Catholic expressing surprise at the trinity.
41 comments:
You are awesome but this is the best ever. Indeed they think we are exotic creatures with checkbooks. Well maybe we sorta are.
"...the tyranny of the perpetually open mind..."??
Oh my! Who will protect us now?
A note to ALL religious freaks.. Playing with yourself is okay. There's no shame in it. Do it like you're proud!
A truly well-rounded thinker understands the basics of all the world's goofball religions.
Dude. The best part about this? BROOKS IS JEWISH.
Really? Are you shitting me?
Reminds me of, I believe, Live from Golgotha, where one of the ancient characters hears someone referred to as Jewish and says, Jewish? You either are a Jew or you're not. How can you be Jew-ish?
Well, maybe not Jew-ish. But certainly Jew-y.
In her classes and groups, she tries to create arduous countercultural communities.
(my emphasis)
A double-oxymoron!
This ability to remaing ignorant of the most basic features of reality is the mark of a NY Time op-ed writer. Friedman is a globe-trotter who thinks that the world is flat. Brooks is a Jew who has never heard of Judaism. This is presumably why NY Times readers love them: their perpetual ability to be surprised and enlightened by encounters with everyday facts that the rest of us absorbed at age 6 or 7.
Brooks shows how one can be Jewish without being a Jew. "Jew" connotes three things: (1) a race, that is, a human subpopulation, (2) a set of religious beliefs, and (3) a culture or ethny (or a clade of ethnies). Brooks is a Jew (1), but not (2) and apparently not (3) either. In my experience living around DC, this is quite common among assimilated Jews. Progressive Judaism is an enlightened syncretism of Judaism's identity memes and the ruling class religion, namely, atheized Quakerism. One need not look far to find Jews preaching personal autonomy, racial/sexual/etc. equality, the brotherhood of man, redistribution of wealth, peace on earth, turning the other cheek, etc. Jesus rules the synagogue!
@Picador: Indeed
http://www.simpsoncrazy.com/content/lists/newspaper/news_182.jpg
Uh, Leo, you don't know shit about Quakers.
Uh, luc, you don't know shit about me.
I'm not sure why he'd have to know anything about you to know that accusing the American ruling class of Quakerism means that you don't know shit about Quakers. Or the American ruling class. Please spring on us that you were raised a Quaker or some shit, so we can make funner of ya.
Maybe he had one of the notoriously authoritarian Quaker upbringings and rebelled...
I love the way this tripe is written. "I learned...", "I discovered...", "It's interesting that...". It's a fourth-grader's school essay on what did I do this summer. He even gives a quote from the lady on how "many people have no firm categories to organize their thinking"!
Nixon was a Quaker, like I'm a Jew..not so much.
Your fuzziness, I listed some of the attributes of the religion that I was talking about. You may not have understood what I meant, seeing as my elaboration of the concept is in an entirely separate sentence.
I will confess that the epithet "Quakerism" is only really semi-apt; Quakers were merely one of the very many Christian sects in the lead in going where democracy leads: the priesthood of the individual; the discarding of the supernatural even unto God Himself. I use "Quaker" for this mostly because it has displayed the tendency for longer than most other Christian sects, and also, that it is still a living tradition (unlike the Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians, and other such dissenting groups). Check the link if you want to read up on them; the Diggers for example beat Marx to Communism by 200 years. "Are we really to believe that Marx, on his own, invented the idea that all men are brothers, despite living in a society dominated by a religion whose creed taught exactly that?"
But don't let's fight over the label; let's fight over the modern content asserted. Do you or do you not think that the American ruling class preach personal autonomy, racial/sexual/etc. equality, the brotherhood of man, redistribution of wealth, peace on earth, turning the other cheek, etc. Please do notice I said "preach", not "practice". The hypocrisy of a class that preaches about peace yet attempts to rule the world by whatever means necessary is not lost on me.
Since you ask, I was raised an agnostic, quite literally. A religious zero. However, this being America, I got a healthy dose of atheistic Quakerism from my education, the media, and from society generally. Go ahead and make funner.
While Quakerism is certainly the most egalitarian of active religions [and you rightly point to its Dutch protestant roots], it is also the most anti-statist and antithetical to the idea of a 'ruling class'. So, no, fail.
Leonard: no. Although I suppose that once again you may have confused the ruling class with the faculty of some liberal arts college you once read about somewhere some time, and even that's a stretch.
Shame on you for not having compassion for Brooks. Surely you know, that as a child he put a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich on the wrong plate and got slapped silly by his kosher Aunt Miriam.
The faculty of some liberal arts college I once read about somewhere some time is only part of the ruling class. But it is certainly a part of it. (I have also personally known several faculty of various actual universities, that I have physically set foot on.)
I think that it is you who are confused about who the ruling class are. Presumably you are with Marx on this. I am not a Marxist, at least not that way.
Do you or do you not think that the American ruling class preach personal autonomy, racial/sexual/etc. equality, the brotherhood of man, redistribution of wealth, peace on earth, turning the other cheek, etc. Please do notice I said "preach", not "practice".
Who was it who reintroduced us to the phrase "not even wrong" just a few short days ago? Was it you, Leonard? I think it was you.
Well what's equally funny is that he seems to believe these attributes not only to belong to Quakerism, but uniquely to belong to it.
Let's bring this back to David Brooks. What will be next? A dispatch from Israel where he explains that part of the reason for that country's siege mentality is the near-total annihilation of European Jewry within living memory? A column on Saul Bellow's letters? Brooks noticing that many (most?) Jews live in New York, Southern California, Chicago and Florida? The realization dawning on Brooks that that's why part of his cock is missing...
IOZ, "seems" it does perhaps to you, but in point of fact "does not", because of the latter half of your projected conjunction. I explicitly rejected that at 4:14 but you are arguing in bad faith. (The former half of your conjunctions is true).
BTW, do you know any Quakers? I know quite a many, mostly birthright, some convinced. And yeah, even the most conservative of them are liberal. The most liberal are flaming communists. All of them vote practically as a sacrament, and all vote Democrat to the (wy)man.
Coldheart, yes that was me. I am glad you learned something, if only a low-down offhand dismissal. Perhaps you may learn something else.
I'm all for making fun of David Brooks, but can't we make fun of Erica Brown a little as well? Or do we actually think she's a lot cooler than she comes off in Brooks's column?
"We live in a relativistic society." Wow, Erica.
Truth told she sounds okay to me, not her fault that Brooks is so astounded to find that a religious person is... religious. Pretty sure that Brooks could sit down for coffee with Nietzche and he'd end up quoting something like "We live in a relativistic society."
Actually Erica, we live in a relativistic universe!
Reminds me of, I believe, Live from Golgotha, where one of the ancient characters hears someone referred to as Jewish and says, Jewish? You either are a Jew or you're not. How can you be Jew-ish?
Heh. Jonathan Miller did that gag in 1961.
I have only two questions for you, Mr Vidal. First, as an American housewife, what can I do to stop plagiarism? And secondly, what is plagiarism?
What's up with this genre of interpreting David Brooks as uncharitably as possible? In this case, the excerpt you quoted was just a prelude to describing how Brown makes her students uncomfortable. It's bland in the way topic sentences usually are, especially when you're writing a puff piece about someone.
Even weirder is this idea that "faith is a challenge, not an opiate" is some sort of distinctive Jewish doctrine that Christians can't grok. It's the sort of banal and uncontroversial sentiment you hear from religious leaders of all faiths. I can't tell you how many Christian sermons I've heard that say the same thing (usually as a gloss on the "I am come to set a man at variance against his father" verse), and I'm one of those atavistic Jews who doesn't go inside churches.
Anonymous@5:37 apparently thinks it's a truism that what s/he calls Israel's siege mentality is due to the Holocaust. This seems to be a common belief among non-Israelis, but it's not true at all. The "siege mentality" is most present among Mizrahim, who have less personal connection to the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the yefei nefesh who constitute the peace camp are overwhelmingly Ashkenazi. A better candidate for explaining Israeli attitudes is the second Intifada.
Sorry, I didn't mean to derail this into yet another Israel/Palestine debate. But this attempt to attribute present-day attitudes to ancient historical causes ("We must understand their history to understand how they think") is just condescending, since it overlooks the actual, proximate events that cause people to think the way they do. It's just like the people who say the Palestinians are hostile to Israel because it was once part of Dar al-Islam. In both cases, it ignores what the various sides are actually saying.
Beaten to the punch on Nixon. I suppose he really ruined it for the rest of the Quakers. Ike wasn't so bad, how about another Jehovah's Witness?
Lenny: BTW, do you know any Quakers? I know quite a many, mostly birthright, some convinced. And yeah, even the most conservative of them are liberal. The most liberal are flaming communists. All of them vote practically as a sacrament, and all vote Democrat to the (wy)man.
I can't speak for Ioz, but while all of my points have been directed at your understanding of both the 'ruling class' and Quakerism, and it is a long proved conclusion that you have no idea what the 'ruling class' is, I'll retire to this for a moment, because it humors me.
I do know a lot of Quakers. I chose to go to a Quaker school, that still took it seriously, because at that point in my religious development, I was moving from more authoritarian versions of protestantism and catholicicm into a space where I believed in God and religious history differently. I was still a theist, and a Quaker oriented education, from all sides, at age 17, seemed the best offered out there. So I went to the Kremlin on the Crum Creek, home to Alice Paul and the Weathermen collective that broke into the Media PA FBI office and exposed COINTELLPRO.
While the institution itself was trying to hide behind 'liberalism' during the rightist onslaught that started in the '50's, and hasn't yet reached its fevered peak, It couldn't get rid of its Quakerism. No flag flew over its campus. It had a law outside the law of the land, and it protected its students against that, as best it could. And it gave its students free reign to explore their own identities, so long as they didn't hurt anyone or themselves.
It still exemplified the essential 'communitarian' & universal ideas in Quakerism - the idea that we are ultimately equals AND the idea that this means any governance defies these principles. The 19th amendment happened not because establishment 'liberals' worked through the machinery of the political class, but because Alice Paul, a Quaker, perpetrated acts that would be considered 'terrorist' today and was willingly tortured for them, and had that torture shame the US government into recognizing a certain inequality. Quakers don't vote, they kick ass.
And they do it through non-violent non-compliance. They have no respect for the state, the 'law', the mechanisms of power, or often, their own continued existence.
Of course, most Quakers today do vote, and probably a majority also vote for the 'Democratic Party'. This is a very recent phenomenon, and an entirely different discussion the entails the collapse of the American left precisely because of those 'liberal institutions' about which the right always fantasizes.
General Garcia: "I am a pacifist by nature with a deep Quaker belief in the sanctity of human life. I wish I had a choice but to kill you."
lucid, I am not sure what point you were trying to make.
We are seeing much the same asserted beliefs and some of the same behavior. You admit that Quakers are radically egalitarian; and that is the heart of the left. And you admit that they vote, and they vote almost monolithicly Democrat.
I agree that historically, and even a little bit even now, Quakers have opposed the state -- from the left, of course. But opposed it nonetheless.
Where do I disagree? You say that Quakers today have no respect for the state -- but this is nearly completely wrong. What they have no respect for is the particular organs of the state that remain outside of the progressive consensus -- primarily the military, and to some extent the banking system, the police and the machinery of criminal law. (Remind you of anyone we might know?) They have plenty of respect for the IRS, the State Department, socialized medicine, the EPA, "programs that could help... individuals and families overcome poverty", etc. In short: they are strongly pro-government on most issues. They are radically anti-government on one issue: war.
All of that does support my use of the Quakers as a synecdoche for the left. Do they support a "ruling class"? Hell yes! They support practically all the "ruling" that comes out of Washington, and they support (and indeed are a significant part of) the class that supplies the academics, reporters, judges, and bureaucrats that make, popularize, and impose those rules.
So perhaps this really gets back to your ideas about the ruling class. To you, I imagine, they are capitalists in tall hats and monocles, chortling as they cheat the workers out of another dollar a week. Suffice to say that I find this view of the ruling class outdated.
Lenny, you didn't use "atheized Quakerism" as a "synecdoche for the left." You used it as a synecdoche for the "ruling class."
If, in your view, the power elite "do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever," then I want a can of what you're huffing. Cause the toluene just so isn't doing it for me anymore.
You dolt! Teh Left is the ruling class. They rule, um, the Starbucks on Church Street off of Harvard Square... you know, Skip Gates's headquarters for world domination!
There never was any ruling class! You threw out a synecdoche for a metonym!
PDA: the ruling class is a subgroup of the left. As for whether the power elite practice what Quakers preach about war: no. (Duh.) But as I said at 4:14: Please do notice I said "preach", not "practice". The hypocrisy of a class that preaches about peace yet attempts to rule the world by whatever means necessary is not lost on me. What about that is unclear?
You may have noticed, especially in the last two years, how progressives seem to change when they get power. The left is a broad group, most of whom have only a tiny slice of power. These people, the amateur left, are quite anti-war. (I was at the demonstration in Washington against war in January 2003. No blood for oil! Down with Bushitler!) Strangely, the more power a man gets, the less antiwar he seems to become. Of course, even the most powerful leftists are antiwar when it comes to people attacking them or their clients. But they become strangely ambivalent when it comes to their own clients attacking other people. Their own clients are righteous, you see, and that makes all the difference. War for me, but not for thee!
Nony mocks the idea that the ruling class is leftist: maybe members of the Left do run the Starbucks on Church Street off of Harvard Square. (Certainly they are the customers.) Of course, the left also control and run the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all other journalism of note, excepting Fox News and some blogs. And they run the permanent government; that is, they dominate the ranks of the civil service. And they control most NGOs. And they both run and control all schools and universities: they educate practically everyone, and have been for 40 years. Other than those minor things, though, they have no power, except for of course controlling one house of Congress and the Presidency, and much of the judiciary branch.
Ahhhh, I get it, Leonard. By "the left" you mean "everyone to the left of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who's still dead." It would include Ronald Reagan (who's also still dead, but Franco has a head start), William F. Buckley (ditto), Gen. Augusto Pinochet (doubleditto) and George W. Bush.
"Of course, even the most powerful leftists are antiwar when it comes to people attacking them or their clients." You mean the Right doesn't feel the same way?
Um, dude, the only person on 'the left' who has any sort of media or political clout in this country is Chomsky - and that's only to be mocked. 'Liberals' and 'progressives' aren't leftists. I wouldn't even consider Nader a leftist, though he has some leftist leanings. There hasn't been an organized 'left' in this country since the early '60's, when 'the left' essentially splintered into factions with the rise of identity politics. And even when it was organized, it only had political power insofar as it constituted a great enough perceived threat by the established order that they legislated some satiating scraps.
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