Yoram Hazony: Dark side of the Enlightenment.

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Yoram Hazony in Wall Street Journal.

A lot of people are selling Enlightenment these days. After the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump, David Brooks published a paean to the “Enlightenment project,” declaring it under attack and calling on readers to “rise up” and save it. Commentary magazine sent me a letter asking for a donation to provide readers “with the enlightenment we all so desperately crave.” And now there’s Steven Pinker’s impressive new book, “Enlightenment Now,” which may be the definitive statement of the neo-Enlightenment movement that is fighting the tide of nationalist thinking in America, Britain and beyond.

Do we all crave enlightenment? I don’t. I like and respect Mr. Pinker, Mr. Brooks and others in their camp. But Enlightenment philosophy didn’t achieve a fraction of the good they claim, and it has done much harm.

Boosters of the Enlightenment make an attractive case. Science, medicine, free political institutions, the market economy—these things have dramatically improved our lives. They are all, Mr. Pinker writes, the result of “a process set in motion by the Enlightenment in the late 18th century,” when philosophers “replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking.” Mr. Brooks concurs, assuring his readers that “the Enlightenment project gave us the modern world.” So give thanks for “thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant who argued that people should stop deferring blindly to authority” and instead “think things through from the ground up.”

As Mr. Pinker sums it up: “Progress is a gift of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and will continue to the extent that we rededicate ourselves to those ideals.”

Very little of this is true. Consider the claim that the U.S. Constitution was a product of Enlightenment thought, derived by throwing out the political traditions of the past and applying unfettered human reason. Disproving this idea requires only reading earlier writers on the English constitution. The widely circulated 15th-century treatise “In Praise of the Laws of England,” written by the jurist John Fortescue, clearly explains due process and the theory now called “checks and balances.” The English constitution, Fortescue wrote, establishes personal liberty and economic prosperity by shielding the individual and his property from the government. The protections that appear in the U.S. Bill of Rights were mostly set down in the 1600s by those drafting England’s constitutional documents—men such as John Selden, Edward Hyde and Matthew Hale. …

Read the whole thing. (Non-paywall article here.)

Free Republic post here.

American Creation responds to Hazony.

While I can’t speak to the Royal Society or Boyle, I think it’s wrong to categorize Newton as a “politically and religiously conservative figure[].” He was actually some kind of heterodox unitarian Christian of the Arian variety and like his friend John Locke had to be careful with the way in which he publicly articulated his views. Indeed, Newton, even more so than Locke leaves us with a record of private heterodox sentiments that could have gotten him in serious trouble with the then “politically and religiously conservative” figures in Great Britain who could enforce their orthodoxy with teeth provided by the state.

But John Locke gets categorized by Hazony as one of the “dark” Enlighteners. For instance:

One such myth was Locke’s claim that the state was founded on a contract among free and equal individuals—a theory the Enlightenment’s critics understood to be both historically false and dangerous. While the theory did relatively little harm in tradition-bound Britain, it led to catastrophe in Europe. Imported into France by Rousseau, it quickly pulled down the monarchy and the state, producing a series of failed constitutions, the Reign of Terror and finally the Napoleonic Wars—all in the name of infallible and universal reason. Millions died as Napoleon’s armies sought to destroy and rebuild every government in Europe in accordance with the one correct political theory allowed by Enlightenment philosophy. …

The vast majority of scholars who have studied the religious and political positions of both Locke and Newton would agree it makes no sense to categorize them so differently. Either both were “Enlightenment” during the same time and place in Great Britain or neither were. Both were self proclaimed “Christians”; both privately and secretly held heterodox positions; both cautiously articulated novel ideas in politics, science and theology attempting to give a veneer of respectability to the ideas they publicly posited; both were suspected of secret heterodoxy by the orthodox forces of “religious correctness” then in power.

America was very influenced by more moderate strains of Enlightenment, those Scottish “common sense” figures that Hazony doesn’t want to categorize as Enlightenment. But America was also influenced by what Hazony categorizes as bad or “dark” Enlightenment. …

How do we know what we know?

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Source analysis toolbox: an ongoing work-in-progress.

Look in the mirror.
This is really the most important thing when analyzing a source for credibility or bias: knowing your own beliefs and your own possible biases. It’s always tempting to accept something uncritically because it fits what we think we already know.

Premises / logic / values.
Know what you differ on: what you believe is a fact, or what consequences follow from it, or whether something is good or bad.

The spam filter.
All of us have a mental filter that works like the spam filter in your e-mail program: it examines input and tries to weed out stuff that appears irrelevant, false, or that just wastes your time. It’s what makes you tune out crazy people. And we need that filter – our mind couldn’t function without it. But the filter is not perfect, and every so often we have to re-calibrate it (just as we need to check our spam folder every so often) to make sure we’re not missing something important. Every once in a while, even the person we thought was crazy might have something important to say.

Flattering beliefs.
We have a natural tendency to want to believe things that are flattering to ourselves. For example, I may be tempted to hold a belief because it makes me feel more virtuous or more intelligent, rather than because it is supported by the evidence.

Competing values.
“I believe in peace.” “I believe in justice.” “I believe in freedom.” “I believe in security.” And so on. These are all perfectly fine things to believe in, but real life often requires us to make trade-offs. Very often the person who disagrees with you believes in the same good things you believe in, but assesses the trade-offs differently.

Confirmation bias.
This is our natural tendency to believe things that fit our world-view. I find it helpful to divide between “things I think I know” and “things I know I know”. Only verified factual information – things I KNOW that I know – is useful for evaluating the truth or falsity of a new claim.

Narrative.
What kind of overall picture, or “narrative”, is the source trying to present?

Baseline.
Before you can determine whether an event is significant or unusual (for example, a crime wave), you need to know what the normal state of affairs is (for example, the average crime rate).

Question sensational reports.
There’s a military saying that “nothing is as good or as bad as first reported”. Sensational reports do just what the name says – they appeal to our sensations (of fear, hope, disgust, arousal, etc.) and can short-circuit our critical thinking. News stories with especially lurid details should be treated with skepticism.

Internal consistency.
Do all the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense?

External consistency.
Does the report agree with verified facts – things I know I know?

Dialog and dissent.
Does the source welcome opposing views and seek to respond to them?

Awareness of objections.
Does the source attempt to anticipate and refute objections?

Nuance.
By nuance I mean the recognition that a thing can be true in general and still admit of exceptions. For example, it may be true that tall people are generally better basketball players, but it can also be true that some short people may be outstanding players.

Logical fallacies.
There are many mistakes in basic reasoning that can lead us to wrong conclusions.

Red herrings / straw men.
A straw man is an argument that can be easily overcome, but that nobody on the other side actually made; you can “refute” this kind of argument to try to make it look like you refuted your opponent’s argument, but you didn’t actually respond to the claim they were making. A red herring is any kind of argument that is irrelevant to the main issue, and distracts you from it.

Unexamined assumptions.
If I ask, “Why is Smith so evil?” I am not questioning whether he is evil, and the form of my question does not allow you to question the assumption “Smith is evil” either. Similarly, if I say “Jones, who was responsible for the disastrous Program X …”, I am closing off any question as to whether Program X was a disaster, or whether Jones was responsible for it. These are examples of framing a question or a statement so as to avoid debating certain things that you don’t want to debate – assumptions that you don’t want to examine.

Snarl / purr words.
Some words have negative connotations (snarl words) or positive ones (purr words). Using them can be a way to appeal to people’s emotions instead of arguing by reason.

Vague quantifiers.
“Many experts believe …” Stop! How many is “many”? A majority? Half? Two or three? A claim involving numbers needs to give you specifics, or it tells you nothing.

Attributions.
Misquoting another party is, literally, the oldest trick in the Book – going all the way back to the Serpent in Genesis. It is also easy to selectively or misleadingly quote somebody, to give a false impression of what they said. My rule is, “go by what the person said, not what somebody else SAID they said.”

Black propaganda – rhetorical false flag.
This is a particularly nasty trick: creating outrageous or shocking arguments and making them appear to be coming from your opponent, to discredit the opponent.

Discrediting by association – “57 Communists”.
This is a little more subtle than the rhetorical false flag. This is the practice of making known false statements, which can be easily disproved, that appear to come from your opponent. The goal is to damage your opponent’s credibility – or more accurately, to damage the credibility of a CLAIM made by your opponent. A real-life example was the case of ‘National Report’ – the granddaddy of fake-news sites – which created all kinds of hoax stories designed to fool conservatives; the conservatives then would be made to look gullible when the stories were shown to be false. (See the “fifty-seven Communists” scene in the film ‘The Manchurian Candidate’.)

Bias of intermediaries.
More subtle than the ‘straw man’ is the practice of pretending to present a neutral forum for debate, but deliberately choosing a more articulate, stronger debater for one side and a weaker debater for the other.

What are the source’s financial interests?
I think this one is a no-brainer, but a person who owns a lot of stock in XYZ Corporation is going to have an incentive to promote pro-XYZ legislation and contracts. In the case of the MSM, we all know that “bad news sells”.

Debts and favors.
Is the source looking for a payoff down the road? If I go on record saying nice things about Candidate A, maybe I am hoping to get appointed to a nice comfy job if A wins the election.

The medium is the message.
News stories go through news networks, broadcast networks, and publishers. Books go through publishing houses. In other words, somebody has to provide the materials for the message to be communicated. Somewhere, a network executive makes decisions about what gets on the air and what doesn’t. Somewhere, an editor or publisher decides what gets printed and what doesn’t. So if you’re reading a book you have to think about not only the author’s background and point of view, but also the publisher’s orientation: for example, they might publish mostly liberal books or mostly conservative books. Knowing something about the background of a publisher or a broadcast network can help give you an idea of what to expect.

What are the source’s own experiences? How might those experiences be relevant, and how might they affect the source’s perceptions?
First-hand knowledge of any issue is always helpful; on the other hand, a person might have had an experience that was atypical or unrepresentative. A soldier on the front lines is going to have a very vivid, detailed, and specific recollection of a battle. The general in a command bunker may not see the battle up close, but he will have information on the “big picture” of troop strengths, enemy positions, strategic decisions, and other things that the soldier will not know, and may not be allowed to know. The soldier’s memory may be distorted by trauma, confusion, fear, or shame (of a real or imagined failiing on the battlefield); the general may ignore or suppress key information, perhaps with his career in mind. Both perspectives are valuable, both have their limitations.

Psychological factors.
There are basic psychological factors that operate in all of us to one degree or another. Resistance to change is one. There is a need for approval of others; there is also a need for a sense of autonomy and a belief that we determine our own destiny. And of course we all like to be thought knowledgeable, which is why we are often tempted to speak more than we actually know.

The human voice.
By this I mean an intangible quality that may include a distinctive personality, awareness of ambivalence, self-analysis and self-criticism. This one is not a matter of rigorous logic but of gut instinct: something tells you that the person sounds real or fake.

Hard to win a debate, easy to lose one.
When you’re debating an issue, it is very difficult to “win” in the sense that your opponent throws up their hands and says “Oh, you were right and I was wrong.” Or even to definitively convince an audience that your position is the correct one. However, it is very very easy to LOSE a debate, simply by saying or doing something that brings discredit to yourself and your cause: getting your facts wrong, making a basic logic error, or losing your cool and cursing or attacking your opponent. Sometimes the most important part of debating is knowing when to stop.

Back to blogging.

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Robert Tracinski at The Federalist:

What strikes me most is the contrast between this and the Internet era before social media, before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube swallowed up everything. I’m talking about the 2000s, the great era of the blogs. Do you remember what that blog era was like? It felt like liberation.

The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience. Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers. And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated. I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.

But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. …

So we get shadowbanning, arbitrary Twitter suspensions, and Twitter throttling the traffic of people they don’t like and controlling what articles you can tweet links to. We traded the old mainstream media gatekeepers for new, worse, less publicly accountable gatekeepers in Silicon Valley—a new breed of pinch-nosed Puritans with pink hair, piercings, and tattoos, who will shut us down if we don’t use the right pronouns. …

The role of social media as the new ideological gatekeepers is just part, although the leading part, of our overall dissatisfaction with their product. There is the damage they are doing to the attention spans and social lives of teens who are growing up on them. There is the phenomenon of the Twitter mob and the way social media is responsible for gamifying moral outrage, where readers score points and level up by getting people fired, often based on nothing more than rumors and mass hysteria.

Then there are the awful economics for actual producers of content. Social media companies are designed to profit off our free labor while they treat us like garbage. For example, I have 11,000 Twitter followers, but I don’t know who they are or have any independent way of contacting them. In effect, I have spent years building up a mailing list for Twitter, not myself. What kind of raw deal is that? …

Read the whole thing for Tracinski’s four-step program, and consider adding The Tracinski Letter to your blogroll. (Uh, that’s “a roster of websites and blogs with good information.”)

On the same theme, here is one of my favorite old school bloggers, Cobb: Bring blogs back.

Everybody who thinks about it knows it to be true. Social media isn’t working the way we thought it would.

There are a lot of reasons. Some are simple and some are rather complex. But let’s look at the simplest reason and to my mind, one of the most important. You don’t own your own words. When you live on Facebook’s property, you don’t own your own words. They can be deleted by someone other than you. They can be banned by someone other than you. You can hardly even know what you said a year ago by searching for it. I don’t mean to suggest that Facebook alone is capable of this, but it is the 900 pound gorilla. The same things are true of Twitter and the comments sections of hundreds of new media outlets.

When it comes to participating in the debates that a free and open society require, these social media spaces do not facilitate. That is not why they exist. That is not their business model. They were not created to sustain collaborative thought, but to let everybody connect in social ways. They are not town halls so much as they are gas station bathrooms on the information superhighway. …

Go read it all at Cobb.

Meaning and identity.

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Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.

– Viktor E. Frankl, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’

One universal quality of identity is that it gives life a meaning beyond life itself. It offers a connection to the world beyond the self. … Whatever its form, identity offers a sense of life beyond the physical and material, beyond mere personal existence. It is this sense of a common world that stretches before and beyond the self, of belonging to something greater than the self, that gives strength not only to the community but to the individual as well.

– Natan Sharansky, ‘Defending Identity’

‘Or’: New Jewish Journal

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Tablet:

If you’ve spent a lot of time on a college campus recently, particularly one with a storied tradition of intellectual excellence, you may have felt, at some point, some subtle metaphysical blues: your friends are cool, your professors are interesting, but the fire you’d hoped would consume you—that flaming obsession with big ideas that have big consequences—just isn’t there.

Celeste Marcus felt it, too. She entered the University of Pennsylvania last year, and was soon, she said, happy to be introduced to diverse groups of people she’d never met before and challenged by divergent ways of looking at the world. “But I also wanted to be around people who were as passionate as I am about sharing ideas that really move them,” she said, “and that was much harder to find.”

It wasn’t that other students were shallow, she said, or hurried, or more interested in Kanye than in Kant. It’s just that people deeply committed to ideas are hard to find these days, even—one is tempted to say particularly—on the campuses on elite universities. Undeterred, Marcus sat down and did what serious and dedicated men and women had done when moved by the spirit for at least six hundred years: she wrote a manifesto. …

The result is Or.

Clara Collier (Yale) on Shylock: ‘It will go without saying that Shylock is a terrible role model. He is small-minded, embittered; his obsession for revenge is a hollow perversion of a healthy desire for justice. But his monomania bears unintentional traces of Judaism’s radical unromanticism. Our scriptures do not promise us radical moral transformation or teach us to focus on an eternal reward. Human perfectibility is a matter of theological speculation; the details of shechitah [kosher slaughter] are a subject of intense debate. …’

Celeste Marcus (U of Pennsylvania) on Deism and Torah: ‘What is the nafka mina, the practical difference, between a deist’s religion and a Jew’s? In either, one absorbs his own dependence on God’s goodness constantly. But for the Jew, this is an abstraction made concrete, and constantly put before him through the rituals in which he engages. …’

Avinoam Stillman (Columbia) on Emerson and Rav Kook: ‘Emerson and R. Kook envisioned an ideal future in which the light in all things will be perceptible in a way that is hidden today. But their utopian vision had practical applications in the cultural life of their societies, and stood as a bulwark against stultifying conformism or reactionary cowardice. Authenticity and insight mediate between national pride and tradition on the one hand, and universality and innovation on the other. …’

Read the rest and more at Or. They’re on WordPress, so you can follow them if you have an account.

Socialism and Philanthropy

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The same arguments that hold against socialism in the commercial sphere, also apply with equal or greater force, I think, in the world of charity and philanthropy.

A competitive free “market” of benevolent organizations ensures that I remain in charge of my charitable giving. If I learn or suspect that the ABC Foundation is abusing its donors’ trust, with its executives living in luxury while its purported beneficiaries receive scant aid, I can choose to withhold my donations from ABC Foundation and give instead to the better-reputed XYZ Foundation.

Entrusting charitable functions to the Government risks shielding those functions from scrutiny, and deprives the “donor” – that is, the taxpayer – of any direct control over how his or her funds are to be used. This is not to say that the Government should never attempt to “do good”, but it is to say that this is a slippery slope.

Socialism appeals to idealists who harbor a sincere and laudable desire to “make the world a better place”. The correct path to this goal is through liberty, not tyranny.

The Hours, the Days, and the Years

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The Matrix (1999)

The Hours (2002)

There are no computers and no kung fu fights in “The Hours”; and when people fall out of buildings, they don’t get up again.  And yet, like the denizens of the apocalyptic world of “The Matrix”, many of the characters seem to live in an invisible prison – one they cannot “smell or taste or touch”.  And some of them, like Neo and the other inhabitants of Zion, choose to confront the reality of their world – even if it is unpleasant and dangerous, even if it threatens their very sanity.  Virginia Woolf has no use for the comforting retreat of the suburbs, and precious little patience for the well-intentioned efforts of others to “take care” of her.  She, too, prefers “always to look life in the face, and to know it … to love it, for what it is.”  She is a red-pill person.

But there are many kinds of prisons.  Mental illness – Virginia’s depression, Richard’s schizophrenia – can also be a prison.  Sometimes the only way to exercise your autonomy is to have some say (as Virginia says) in your “own prescription”, just as Neo must choose for himself which pill to take.  (Or like Richard, who simply takes too many pills.)  The choice is in your hands; but once the choice is made, you must live with the consequences.

I live alone, and spend a great deal of time in my own company.  Often, this blog is the only conversation I get during the day.  It’s a strange conversation, the one you and I are having:  we do not meet face to face, and with the exception of a few friends who read my blog, we are probably strangers to each other.  All you know about me is what you read here; and all I know of you is the anonymous statistics collected by SiteMeter.

Sometimes I have a certain feeling – as if something is wrong, it’s not fitting together somehow, and it’s not a problem that’s definable, and it’s not a problem that is fixable.  As if no matter where I go or what I do, I’ll always be surrounded by this invisible membrane that keeps me separated and locked away from the rest of the world, from humanity, from life.  I don’t even know what name to call it; I don’t know if it has a name.

I do know that I can make my own choices.  I do not want anyone making them for me.  I don’t want anyone telling me how to live, or what to read, or what to listen to, or how to think.  I don’t want anyone feeding me pre-digested answers like some kind of processed food.  And I do not want to be stuffed into some kind of mental coccoon and told that it’s for my own good.

We do not get a choice whether or not to die.  That decision is made for us, and in the end, without exception, it will always end the same way.  The choice we do get is whether to face each and every day.  Sometimes it is not an easy choice.  Even the most fortunate among us may inhabit prisons invisible to others.  Freedom from fear does not, alas, bring freedom from suffering.  To choose, consciously, to live each and every day that is given to us – to say, “Today is not the day” – this is the real test of our humanity.

We are at our most when we forget ourselves.  Clarissa is sustained through the difficult years – which seem to go on and on – by her duty to her old lover.  (“When I’m gone,” Richard mockingly reminds her, “you’ll have to think about yourself.”)  Neo can fulfill his mission only after the Oracle convinces him that he is not “the One”, the messiah of Zion.

When Virginia walks into the river, she makes a choice that many of us have contemplated at one time or another.  Perhaps, like many people who make the same choice, she is no longer the master of her own actions.  Do such people sin by this act?  Perhaps that is for the Righteous Judge to decide.  What we do know with a certainty is this:  That just as the actions and kindnesses of others have affected our own lives, so too do we affect the lives of others, even in ways that are hidden from us.  We have the choice to extend and accept such kindnesses – whether in the form of a fancy dinner or a simple cookie – at every moment we draw breath.  By choosing kindness and love, we also choose conflict and suffering; but we choose life.

Originally published 2005 May 6.

The Radical

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I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading ‘My Year Inside Radical Islam‘ by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross. Daveed’s book interested me because his journey in some ways paralleled, and in some ways mirrored, my own. And I believe there are also important lessons to be learned about identity, will, and the spread of radical Islam today.

Daveed was born in 1976, into a liberal, secular Jewish family in Ashland, Oregon. They lived at what he describes as “the hippie end of a hippie town” and embraced a spiritual, multicultural ethos. In his activist college days, he became friends with al-Husein Madhany, who would provide Daveed’s introduction to Islam. Before long, Daveed embraced the Muslim faith and converted.

Al-Husein’s mystical, universalistic, Sufi-oriented brand of Islam appealed to Daveed. But as he became more deeply involved in Islam through the Al-Haramain Foundation, he quickly became exposed to a very different side of the faith – one bitterly opposed to the message of people like Al-Husein.

I recommend reading the book to find out how Daveed found his way out of radical Islam, and came to embrace another faith.

I found DGR’s book fascinating on a number of levels, some of them personal. Like Daveed, I’m a convert, but not to Islam or Christianity. Born in suburban New England about half a generation earlier than Daveed, I grew up in a home that, apart from my family’s lack of Jewish roots, sounds similar to Daveed’s in a lot of ways. My parents were nominally Unitarian Universalists, who had broken away from their conservative Christian upbringings and met in a Unitarian church. As a young adult I became interested in Judaism, learning Hebrew and attending Jewish services (first Reform and Conservative, later Orthodox) from my late teens to early twenties. At 25 I had an Orthodox Jewish conversion.

But I want to get back to DGR’s book. Reading ‘My Year Inside Radical Islam’, I was struck by the way the fanatical Salafi stream of Islam drove out the milder Sufi and Nashqibandi strains – and I was reminded of my friend Michael Totten’s book ‘Where the West Ends‘. Totten traveled throughout eastern Europe and western Asia, along the fault-lines of cultures. He witnessed many things, including the inexorable advance of radical Islam against the moderate forms of the religion. In my review of the book I wrote that

There is the image of the lonely liberal, surrounded by a sea of increasingly hostile and violent factions. There is the conflict between old traditionalism and new fundamentalism. …

The Serbian film writer Filip David is one of those lonely liberals; so is the half-Serbian, half-Bosnian Predag Delibasic, who takes pride in having declared himself variously a Jew, a Muslim, and a Yugoslav – and claims that nonexistent nationality to this day. Perhaps the loneliest, though, is Shpetim Mahmudi, an Albanian Sufi mystic who must watch the gradual encroachment of foreign-backed Arab islamists on the grounds of his religious compound. His story is tragic.

It also points to something important about religious conflict in the Muslim world: that the conflict is often not – as Westerners sometimes imagine – a case of Western modernity threatening to extinguish Islamic tradition. Rather, it is instead a direct attack on centuries-old, evolving religious traditions by well-armed, well-financed followers of a comparatively recent fundamentalist sect. It is ancient moderation versus newfangled fanaticism.

And I think that that’s the same thing Daveed Gartenstein-Ross witnessed in his time in the world of Islam.

My own relationship to religion is complicated and better suited to another post. But I do want to bring up Natan Sharansky’s central insight from his book ‘Defending Identity‘:

“The enemy’s will is strong because his identity is strong. And we must match his strength of purpose with strong identities of our own.”

The widely-accepted fallacy is that “conflicts arise because of religious dogma, so if we get rid of religious dogma we’ll reduce conflicts”. But the danger in having no fixed set of doctrines is that you can easily get drawn into all kinds of crazy stuff. And that’s as true today as it was when Daveed was in college.

Devotion to a good doctrine can give you the strength and the faith to reject bad ones. What you believe matters.

Woody Allen and the Non-Threatening Jewish Man

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Woody Allen admits, at least in theory, that he (and the media upon whom he bases his opinions) might be wrong.

Unintentionally, he makes an important point about the left-wing media in the USA and the West generally: the people whom they admire, and who admire them, are precisely those who are the least equipped to deal with the rough realities of a brutal world. They are the artists, the intellectuals, the liberals – those who have no tools in their toolkit other than their creative talents and their immense self-regard.

The woody allens of the world aspire to being the Non-Threatening Jewish Man who’s adored by the sophisticates. But Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו isn’t playing that game.