Israel and the West’s Suicidal Progressivism
In the remarkable, daunting, and hurried times in which we live, and which our parents and grandparents already lived and were startled by “the new”, the world must go “forward” and the past forgotten. We are told repeatedly that progress is a necessity, and that progress means conditioning ourselves to think, feel, and act in new and “better” ways, to adopt values and habits, constraints on our freedoms, and intrusions into our privacy that are not only different from what we once held permissible but the opposite of what we had been taught, and believed, often still do believe and feel, is good and true. Esau, he is progress…
The dogma of progress often is a bludgeon that acts not mainly or directly on the body but first on the mind and soul, generation after generation through schools, the media, political “ideas” and speech in which what is allowed becomes increasingly odd, from a traditional stance, and what is forbidden becomes ever more expansive; in which the process of estrangement from our roots and ourselves becomes ever more extreme; in which history is buried or radically revised. And so the modern age is the age of anxiety, the age of horror, the inevitable upshot of all the idealistic transgressions of Romanticism: scientific, social, ideological, and sexual transgressions.
Thus, the Enlightenment finally and inevitably is the age of terrors. For terror is what comes of attacking one\’s cultural roots, of rejecting or re-writing one\’s personal or national or cultural history; of basing reason on Nature and making of Nature a god in which each person is urged to read and write their own text. Modernism puts the individual in the place of G-d, saying, “do your own thing”. How quickly such people will become ruled and terrorized by their appetites. How easy they will be for other people to rule.
”We will put the spectator in the center of the picture”, wrote the polemicist F. T. Marinetti (Futurist Manifesto, 1910), and let him or her find their own way out, let the individual create meaning from the flux of surrounding sensations. “We will augment the primordial emotions….We will glorify war, the only true hygiene of the world. We will glorify the gestures of anarchism. We will destroy museums, libraries and moralism. We are the advance guard and will warm our hands at the fire made by our present books. When we are forty, let others, younger and more daring throw us into the wastepaper basket like useless manuscripts… for art can be only violence, cruelty and injustice”.
Perhaps more than he intended, Marinetti was describing not only art but the Modern art of politics. Perhaps he might now be dismayed by the application of his ideas to culture. In any case, his paean to progress was a symptom and harbinger of the century to come. It is important to examine how such violent appeals to un-reason, how the glorification of sensation and the passions grew from the Enlightenment. It has much to do with the burden that the Enlightenment put on the individual mind and reason to reform and re-construct the world, to be as gods.
The West is lost and nearly consumed in bewildering terrors, to quote Psalms, and has been lost for many decades before the physical violence, the war that we now call “terrorism” appeared in the world. The “terrorism” that the powers now pretend to fight appeared previously as state terror against civilians. And the origin of this terror was bad ideas, “vain reason all and false philosophy”, to quote Milton again.
Decades before what is called the “war on terror” our culture was characterized by world wars, nuclear terrors, the terrors of pseudo-science [the earth is burning up; no, it\'s freezing, etc]; terrorized by the ugliness and purposeful hostility toward society, tradition and ordinary people of all the \’isms\’ of modern art; terrorized, shocked and dismayed by the aggressive arrogance and power lust of the ideological movements born of Modernism and progress: Futurism, Socialism, Communism, Nazism, and their numbing, seemingly innocuous and happy-face correlative, consumerism, seduction on a global scale.
As Aldous Huxley calls it in his prophetic novel, Brave New World (1931), “the conscription of consumption” to produce generic human beings who are conditioned to want and be happy with what “the market” is going to give them. And all of these terrors of Modernism have celebrated and continue to promote the “war between the generations” that was a sure sign that western civilization was decisively uprooting itself; a sure sign, it should have been, that Judaism and the Jewish People were on the chopping block because Judaism is a way of life, a path founded on respect for elders, and on establishing an unbreakable threefold cord between the generations by teaching history, by teaching habits of faith and memory; in which soul and mind work together, allies in the conservation of history, the past as the bedrock of the purposeful goodness of the present.
But the modern world, going back to the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, the haskala, and especially in its various Romantic and Modernist sequels requires that one be malleable; that one live in the present, floating on a sea of sensation, preoccupied with products to buy, with happiness to buy, with other identities to become. It bids us taste the fruit of the forbidden tree: that by looking into nature, anyone\’s reason can find universally tolerant and joyous paths for the passions. Nature, red in fang and claw, somehow will teach us all to “just get along”.
Modernism bids us forget the past because, we are told tens of thousands of times from infancy onward, “every body\’s happy now”, or at least will be if they purchase and use certain medications, diets, products. And we are told, as in Brave New World, “every one belongs to every one else”. Anyone or any nation who for whatever reason cannot get with the program is put outside the circle, ostracized, airbrushed from history, liquidated, vaporized, subject to what N.A.T.O. now calls, “humanitarian intervention” and re-arrangement (Tony Blair, 1999); subject to being expelled from their homes and the earth leveled behind them so that the official histories can say, “they never existed”. And everyone else, the officially happy, can then get on with their orgy…
The problems generated from the decadence of Kedar are familiar; were it not for inflammatory gambits by Esau they would be dormant and in time heal themselves. But Esau is unstable, as Ishmael remarks in the midrash, demonically unstable in his power lust. “And Esau took Machalat the daughter of Ishmael” already having seen that his marriages with Canaanite women were a torment to his parents. But there was method in his newer lust. “What did he do? He went to Ishmael and said to him, ‘let us join together you and me, and we will rule the whole world.” Indeed, this ancient text has been affirmed by the mad machinations of Edom in our day as it is anticipated in psalm 83. As the aggada on Midrash HaGadol continues, Esau plans to use Ishmael to murder Jacob and then to sanctimoniously establish himself as judge and executioner of Ishmael; then he, the wicked kingdom, will rule what is left of the world. This is the progress to which the West is committed and of which its various clients had best be wary.