By Irving Kristol
The novelist Saul Bellow is fond of recalling a political incident from
his youth. Saul, then an undergraduate at the University of Chicago,
was, like so many of us in the 1930s, powerfully attracted to the ideologies of
socialism, Marxism, Leninism and Trotskyism, as well as to the idea of “the
Revolution.” He and a group of highly intellectual and like-minded fellow
students would meet frequently at his aunt’s apartment, which was located
next to the university. The meetings lasted long into the night, as abstract
points of Marxism and Leninism agitated and excited these young intellectuals. Saul’s aunt, meanwhile, would try to slow things down by stuffing their
mouths with tea and cakes. After the meetings broke up in the early hours of
the morning, Saul’s aunt would remark to him: “Your friends, they are so
smart, so smart. But stupid!” Of course, such hard-core adherence to Marxist
or Leninist doctrines has declined with the years. But while the particular
doctrines in question may have changed, the Jews, for the most part, have
not. In Israel as well as in America, Jews to this day continue to combine an
almost pathologically intense concern for politics with a seemingly equally
intense inclination towards political foolishness, often crossing over into
the realm of the politically suicidal. How is one to understand this very odd
Jewish condition—the political stupidity of Jews?
It seems that the easiest explanation of this phenomenon is in terms of
the actual political history of the Jewish people, a history which is for the
most part one of political impotence. A people whose history is largely a story
of powerlessness and victimization, or at least is felt to be such, is not likely to
acquire the kinds of skills necessary for astute statesmanship. Political thinking is inherently secular thinking, so that Jewish secular
thinking about politics has traditionally focused on some splendid isolated
incidents of resistance and rebellion, such as the wars of the Maccabees, and
the resistance against Rome. But the memory of these incidents is hardly a
sufficient basis on which to ground a real tradition of political wisdom that
could teach contemporary Jews how to wield power and successfully defend
Jewish interests. And the absence of such a tradition of political wisdom
continues to haunt all Jewish politics, including the politics of Israeli
Jews, despite the fact that they now have so much experience in self
government.
In fact, one of the most striking features of Israeli political discourse,
when considered from the perspective of Anglo-American and European po
litical thought, is how narrow and constricted it is. Public discourse in Israel
is often superficially sophisticated, even trendy, but it lacks genuine historical
echoes, historical tonalities. Echoes of references to the traditions of Western
political thought, which are common in American and Western European
journalism, are relatively absent in Israel. It is not any deficiency of scholarly
knowledge—Israel does have some fine academics in disciplines such as po
litical theory and philosophy—but the presence of such individuals does not
begin to repair the deficiency of Israel’s own political traditions. The main
stream of Zionist political thought arose from the political thinking of nine
teenth-century romantic nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe—and
this is itself a movement whose shortcomings are plainly visible in Central
and Eastern Europe today. In the Jewish state, as in Eastern Europe, an infusion of thought is needed from the outside; an infusion of thought, by which
I mean the importation of genuine political wisdom, not just the imitation of
whatever attitudes are prevailing in the West.
In this regard, it is tremendously important to translate the classics of
Western political conservatism into Hebrew for the benefit of Israeli readers.
It is possible that the readership of these translations will be small, but only
through a serious study of this tradition will it be possible for Israelis to begin
to develop a genuine understanding of the function of a conservative politics
in a healthy polity.
Given the historic attitude of the European Right toward Jews, it is natural that Jews in Israel should incline to ignore the conservative political
thought of other countries, thinking almost automatically in terms drawn
from the European Left. And Israeli political discourse, in fact, is drenched
with left-wing attitudes and assumptions. It is so drenched, in fact, that even
where the socialist agenda has been largely discredited, the socialist ethos remains as powerful as ever, successfully delegitimizing any serious effort to
pursue a non-socialist agenda. It is my experience that the majority of former
socialists—in almost every country—remain opponents of capitalism. Socialism today is a political goal that dares not say its name, because socialism as a
system has been discredited. But this does not mean that socialist societies
stop being socialist. Instead, socialism takes refuge in a large variety of anti
capitalist attitudes and policies, which simply go under other names, or under
no name at all. It is this type of socialism that is visible in Israel today, as well
as in England and France, and elsewhere. Israel is almost singularly bereft of
the kind of clear pre-socialist or post-socialist thinking that would be most
useful to its leaders and citizens.
Translating such thinking into accurate and readable Hebrew is essential.
Translate and publish, and the readers will come eventually. I have seen this
happen in the United States and in Britain, although it does require a tremendous amount of patience to see the process through—often more pa
tience than we can imagine. Wrong ideas, once implanted in a young
person’s mind, become so plausible, so self-evident as it were, that change is
hard. I remember a course I once taught at New York University on urban
problems, in which we took up the issue of rent control. After a few weeks,
the students had grasped what is apparent to most people who study the
problem: That, except under emergency conditions, rent control is a bad idea
in both theory and practice. Nevertheless, by the time the students took their
examinations at the end of the term, it became clear that at least half the class
had simply forgotten what they had learned about rent control; and once
again, it seemed to them to be a perfectly good idea. It is a “progressive” illusion to think that, in the marketplace of ideas, truth will always win out over
error. It is truth that needs help, while error usually manages to make its own
way very nicely.
So in pursuing the path to political wisdom, one needs books to read,
magazines and essays and articles to read. One has to be willing to work tirelessly to produce all these books and articles until the climate of opinion
slowly changes. What I am describing is actually a formula for success devised
by Lenin, which I still remember from my days as a young Trotskyist. First
you publish a theoretical organ, then you proceed to books and pamphlets,
and finally you publish a newspaper. Once you have a newspaper that can
apply the theories developed in more sophisticated publications to day-to-day
politics, you are in business.
This formula does not always work, of course, and one certainly cannot
expect it to work if the ideas in question are poor ones. But one of the important virtues of the conservative political tradition is that, from a literary and
intellectual point of view, it is really first rate. And this is not merely a question of one’s subjective preferences. The test of a great tradition is whether its
perspective is sufficiently insightful to be of use long after it is first written,
and the fact is that conservatives can continue to read and reread a good part
of the literature in this tradition and profit from it. One should compare this
to what happens to leftist political thinkers, who have their day and then disappear from sight. The risk of being progressive is that there is always some
new version of “progress” which seeks to outgrow whatever was thought to be
important by progressives a few years earlier.
Who, for example, reads Harold Laski today? When I was in college ev
eryone read him. He was one of the world’s leading political philosophers.
He was a socialist and chairman of the British Labor Party, a very intelligent
man who wrote endless volumes, and of course he was Jewish. He is simply
not read anymore in political science courses in the United States or in England, and his books are out of print. Yet his successor at the London School
of Economics, Michael Oakeshott, who was a conservative, was able to produce essays that are still being reprinted, still being quoted and still very read
able— because the ideas contained in them were of enduring value. This is the advantage the conservative
has over thinkers on the Left writing on contemporary affairs. The conservative tends to think in permanent terms, so his ideas remain relevant.
The living presence of such a conservative tradition in Israel could
contribute much, not only in changing the socialist atmosphere of the
country. For example, it could move some to think in ways that might assist
in bridging the divide between religious and secular Jews in Israel, which is
one of the most vexing curses of Israeli politics. When I first started writing
on conservatism, one of my major points was the need to reconcile Adam
Smith with Edmund Burke—the economics of a free market with the politi
cal sociology of a conservative society. This contradiction between the two
ways of thinking is a problem for American politics, since Smith’s perspective
frequently clashes with that of Burke within the Republican Party. It is obviously, and very dramatically, a problem for Israeli politics, where those who
have an appreciation for the importance of freedom frequently have difficulty
understanding the role played in a healthy society by tradition, and vice versa.
Yet oddly enough, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke were friends who
admired each other’s writings and, to the best of our knowledge, did not see
them as being in conflict or fundamentally contradictory. Moreover,
throughout the nineteenth century, conservatives in Great Britain had no
problem regarding them with equal respect. How did they manage it?
They managed it by being sensible and non-dogmatic, and by under
standing that ideas that are incompatible in the abstract can often coexist and
complement one another in practice, so long as the imperial sweep of these
grand theories is limited by political wisdom, which is itself distilled from
popular common sense. In a way, this is the most conservative of all ideas,
that there is such a thing as wisdom and that, in the end, it is of greater im
portance in determining good policy than any theory. It is this idea which,
more than any other, is in need of affirmation in our time. We live in an age
when wisdom is suspect in the eyes of what can only be understood as an
overweening rationalism, and when what works in practice is inevitably regarded with suspicion until it is proved in theory.
The history of economic thought in the modern era is worthy of study
precisely because it represents a largely successful effort to make rational sense
of the workings of the free market, which had once appeared to be nothing
but a seething cauldron of anarchic individual impulses, which could in no
way be reconciled with what was good for a society. Today, one can come by
an understanding of why a market economy is so beneficial to society without
too great an effort; a careful reading of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek will
do the job. But this understanding flies in the face of our initial intuitions on
the subject, so the educational effort to retain our hold on this tradition of
ideas has to be constantly renewed, year after year, generation after genera
tion, or the profound insights contained in these books will simply be lost.
And unless government and society work diligently to “internalize” what has
been learned on this subject, transforming the abstract economic ideas in
volved into practical habits of the heart, the ability to make sound decisions
in this realm will continually slip from our grasp. In other words, govern
ment and society must take steps—educational steps, legal steps—which are
independent of the market, and which are necessary to make the market pos
sible and profitable for all of society.
The success involved in making a market economy work and prosper is a
success of statesmanship—another conservative idea which is not rooted in
ideology, but in experience. The statesman may pursue any policy, so long as
it is derived from political wisdom concerning what has worked to protect
and better society in the past, and so long as it continues to work well in the
present. And statesmanship is something that both Israel and the United
States are today noticeably lacking.
Now, if we have such a successful and refined political tradition in eco
nomic affairs, which leaves so much up to the initiative and decisions of the
individual, why do we need religion? Doesn’t liberty suffice to create the
good society? Although there are certainly those who make this claim, the
Western conservative tradition holds otherwise. According to conservative
thought, a market economy cannot work except in a society comprised of
people who are, in sufficient degree, bourgeois: That is, people who are or
derly, law-abiding and diligent, and who resolutely defer gratification—
sexual as well as financial—so that, despite the freedom granted each individual, the future nonetheless continues to be nourished at the expense of the
present. For people of this kind to lead lives of this kind, it seems to be the
case that religion is indispensable. This appears to be a sociological truth. It is
religion that reassures people that this world of ours is a home, not just a
habitat, and that the tragedies and unfairness we all experience are features of
a more benign, if not necessarily comprehensible, whole. It is religion that restrains the self-seeking hedonistic impulse so easily engendered by a successful
market economy.
It is here that Edmund Burke makes such a decisive contribution to the
political tradition of the West. Not that he was a particularly pious man (he
was not a pious man) or a brilliant theologian (he was no kind of theologian).
Burke’s importance lies in the fact that he was a secular political theorist
who could explain, to a critical mind, why a religious orthodoxy (like a politi
cal orthodoxy) can make intellectual sense. My wife, Professor Gertrude
Himmelfarb, tells a pertinent story from a graduate course she taught on British political thought. In her class there was an Orthodox young woman, quiet
and industrious. After several class sessions devoted to a close reading of
Edmund Burke, this young woman approached my wife, and told her: “Now
I know why I am Orthodox.” What she meant was that she could now de
fend Orthodoxy in terms that made sense to the non-Orthodox, because she
could now defend a strong deference to tradition which is the keystone of any
orthodoxy in the language of rational secular discourse, which was the lan
guage in which Burke wrote.
It is the idea of tradition as a political concept which was central to the
ideological debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, the latter be
ing one of the best-known exponents of the French Revolution. It was Paine
who declared: Let the dead bury their dead. It was Burke, on the other hand,
who argued that the dead should have the right of suffrage. We should in
effect give them the vote in deciding on the ordering of our government and
society because of the wisdom which we may gain from the ideas which they
had derived from their experience.
Paine won this debate, unfortunately, which is why arguments based on
tradition make so little headway with most young people today. There was a
game I used to play with my own students in New York to try to assist them
in understanding Burke’s point. I would point out that in the United States,
we have fifty states which are extremely different from one another in size,
population, natural resources, per capita income, and so on. Yet despite these
differences, each of these states has the same powers for dealing with such
crucial matters as education, energy, transportation and welfare within its
borders. Moreover, each of these fifty states sends two members to the United
States Senate. I would ask them whether this was reasonable. Of course, they
did not think so, and in the blink of an eye they would begin redrawing the
map of the United States, completely redesigning the country so that all the
states were more equal in every possible respect. Only once they had thought
about it did they begin to wonder whether this perfectly egalitarian scheme
made practical sense. They realized that the people living in other regions had
social, economic and political attitudes which were not identical to those of
New Yorkers, and that the new regions that they were inventing were not go
ing to be homogeneous areas with a homogeneous population. And as they
thought about this, they began to realize that at least some of the states repre
sent local interests and points of view which would be silenced by their efforts
to reach a kind of a pure rationalism in politics.
On the other hand, given the opportunity to study both Paine and
Burke, there will always be some students who find Burke more persuasive.
These include students who are subscribers to a religious tradition or are
thinking vaguely of drawing closer to such a tradition. Burke is not usually
thought of as a defender of Jews or Judaism, to which he seems to have given
little thought. But it is interesting to read his remarks on what he called
“prejudice”—by which he meant habit, custom, convention, tradition—with
the Orthodox Jewish tradition in mind. According to Burke:
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of
reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small and that the
individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and
capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of
exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent
wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they sel
dom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason
involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but
the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give
action … and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of
ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a
steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating
in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice
renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts.
Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.
It is impossible to legitimize a conservative predisposition in politics, as
well as a conservative predisposition in religion, without having an au
thentic respect for tradition. And this respect for tradition must be intellectu
ally defensible. For such a defense one turns to Burke who, when confronted
by the radical opposition to tradition which was the essence of the French
Revolution, became the first political theorist of the modern world to articu
late a powerful defense of tradition.
But once deference to tradition has been rationally justified, it has to be
put into practice in society, and in government. And to do this, the innova
tive market economy which characterizes contemporary democracy, and the
conservative tradition, have to be adjusted to one another—a fact which was
well understood by the father of capitalist thought, Adam Smith. For unlike
some of today’s free-market enthusiasts, Adam Smith was no radical eco
nomic individualist. He thought a state would be foolish to try to usurp the
prerogatives of the market, but he did not give these prerogatives a universal
scope. He saw an important role for the state in education, in taxation includ
ing redistributive taxation, and in certain forms of poor relief. It is impossible
to say what his attitudes would be regarding the affluent societies of our cen
tury, but he did, after all, write a book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which
placed a strong emphasis on compassion as the natural bond between human
beings, including human beings in a capitalistic market economy. So it is
likely that, were he alive, he would not wish to uproot the welfare state root
and branch. And as for Burke, while he emphasized the importance of the
family and of the institutions of what we now call civil society, he also praised
the properly ordered state—whose propriety was visible in the respect it
showed for the institution of property—as a partner in the perfection of all
things human. Nothing less than that.
The possibility of reconciling conservative traditions of religion or moral
ity with the freedom of a market economy is not only a matter of speculation.
It has formidable historical antecedents, which, even if they are unfamiliar to
many today, are nevertheless at the heart of the Anglo-American tradition of
free government. In the United States, between the founding of the republic
and World War II, approximately 175 years of conflict between the secular
market economy and a religious predisposition excited scarcely a tremor in
the body politic. One can find proof of this by consulting any major textbook
in American history published before 1945. A glance at the index may reveal
a few passing references to “church and state” relations, but nothing more.
You look up “censorship” and you find no reference at all, although there was
a great deal of censorship taking place. Over the last fifty years, the national
issue which we now refer to as “religion in the public square” has engendered
an entire library of legal arguments, but prior to 1945, it is clear that the issue
could not have been that controversial, for the simple reason that there were
hardly any legal rulings on the subject: There were virtually no Supreme
Court decisions that addressed this issue.
The reason for this is an instructively practical one: Under the American
federal system, issues such as school prayer, religious activities on public
grounds, censorship of pornography—in short, the great majority of religious
and moral issues—were adjudicated by political negotiations at the local
level. These negotiations took into account the magnitude and intensity of
public opinion on either side of an issue, and after some useful if sometimes
painful experience, each community reached a via media that it could live
with. In general, minority opinion was always respected, but majority opinion always received the greater deference. To reach such accepted norms in
such a way that people could live together did not require a great deal of theorizing about absolute systems of universal rights; but what it did require was a
great deal of inherited wisdom and common sense, on the part of the majority and on the part of the minority.
A few examples will suffice to make it clear what this meant in practice.
When I went to elementary school in Brooklyn, we had an assembly once a
week, which the principal of the school always began with a prayer. Now, the
school was about one-half Jewish, with the rest of the students being Irish,
Italian or Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The principal was no fool, so he read a
Psalm. The nice thing about the Psalms is that they are of Jewish origin, are
part of the Christian Bible, but Jesus is not mentioned. So what Jew was go
ing to object? Mind you, Jews these days do object to the reading of Psalms in
public schools. But in those days, there were no Jews who would object to
reading a Psalm, and no Christians who would object either. It was a com
mon-sense solution to a problem; it worked for many, many decades.
Similarly, when I was young, there were burlesque [featuring very immodestly dressed women] shows in New York, and Fiorello La Guardia, a very liberal and progressive mayor, decided that this was not good for the city. He
did not want New York City to be known as a center for immorality, so
he prohibited them. Just like that. The issue was taken to court, and the court
ruled that La Guardia was the elected representative of the public, and if the
public wanted things that way, it was their right. People who didn’t like it
could leave New York City and move to Newark, where you could go to a
burlesque show. There was no outraged public debate, no crisis, no book
written on the subject. In the United States in that era, any community that
wanted to order its public life in a certain way was permitted to do so. One’s
position had to be “within reason,” but the point is that the range of issues
which one could reasonably decide one way or another was considered to be
quite broad, and open to a process of political trial and error. If Boston
wanted to ban a book that had immodest scenes in it, it did so. And then the book
sellers in New York put up big signs in their store windows that said “Banned
in Boston,” and this would be great for business. This might have been diffi
cult to fit into some great universal system, but it took into account the tradi
tions and feelings of these very different cities, and as a consequence, public
life in both Boston and New York was conducted in a way that allowed most
people in both cities to be happy.
In general, the political handling of controversial religious and moral
issues in the United States prior to World War II was a triumph of rea
soned experience over abstract dogmatism. Unfortunately, since around
1950, it is abstract dogmatism that has triumphed over reasoned experience
in American public life. As everyone knows, this unwarranted and unfortu
nate reversal has provoked a constitutional crisis where there had never been
one before. And much as I regret to say this, the sad fact is that American
Jews have played a very important role—in some ways a crucial role—in creating this crisis.
It is a fairly extraordinary story when one stops to think about it. In the
decades after World War II, as anti-Semitism declined precipitously, and as
Jews moved massively into the mainstream of American life, the official Jew
ish organizations took advantage of these new circumstances to prosecute an
aggressive campaign against any public recognition, however slight, of the
fact that most Americans are Christian. It is not that the leaders of the Jewish
organizations were anti-religious. Most of the Jewish advocates of a secularized “public square” were themselves members of Jewish congregations. They
believed, in all sincerity, that religion should be the private affair of the individual. Religion belonged in the home, in the church and synagogue, and
nowhere else. And they believed in this despite the fact that no society in his
tory has ever acceded to the complete privatization of a religion embraced by
the overwhelming majority of its members. The truth, of course, is that there
is no way that religion can be obliterated from public life when 95 percent of
the population is Christian. There is no way of preventing the Christian holidays, for instance, from spilling over into public life. But again, before World
War II, there were practically no Jews who cared about such things. I went to
a public school, where the children sang carols at Christmastime. Even
among those Jews who sang them, I never knew a single one who was drawn
to the practice of Christianity by them. Sometimes, the schools sponsored
Nativity plays, and the response of the Jews was simply not to participate in
them. There was no public “issue” until the American Civil Liberties
Union—which is financed primarily by Jews—arrived on the scene with the
discovery that Christmas carols and pageants were a violation of the Consti
tution. As a matter of fact, our Jewish population in the United States be
lieved in this so passionately that when the Supreme Court, having been
prodded by the aclu, ruled it unconstitutional for the Ten Commandments
to be displayed in a public school, the Jewish organizations found this ruling
unobjectionable. People who wanted their children to know about the Ten
Commandments could send their children to a Talmud Torah/cheder.
Since there was a powerful secularizing trend among American Christians after World War II, there was far less outrage over all this than one
might have anticipated. The Jewish campaign against any suggestion that
America was a Christian nation won one battle after another; eventually it
made sufficient headway in the media and the legal profession—most impor
tantly on the Supreme Court—that today there is widespread popular accep
tance of the belief that this kind of secularism, which is tolerant of religion
only so long as it is practiced privately and very discreetly, was indigenously
and authoritatively “American,” and had always been so. Of course, it has not
always been so, and Americans have always thought of themselves as a Christian nation—one with a secular government, which was equally tolerant of all
religions so long as they were congruent with traditional Judeo-Christian
morality. But equal toleration under the law never meant perfect equality of
status in fact. Christianity is not the legally established religion in the United
States, but it is established informally, nevertheless. And in the past forty
years, this informal establishment in American society has grown more secure, even as the legal position of religion in public life has been attenuated.
In this respect, the United States differs markedly from the democracies of
Western Europe, where religion continues steadily to decline and is regarded
as an anachronism grudgingly tolerated. In the United States, religion is more
popular today than it was in the 1960s, and its influence is growing, so the
difference between the United States and Europe becomes more evident with
every passing year. Europeans are baffled and a little frightened by the reli
gious revival in America, while Americans take the continuing decline of reli
gion in Europe as just another symptom of European decadence.
And even as the Christian revival in the United States gathers strength,
the Jewish community is experiencing a modest religious revival of its own.
Alarmed by a rate of intermarriage of about 70 percent, the money and
energy that used to go into fighting anti-Semitism, or Israel Bonds, is now
being channeled into Jewish education. Jewish day schools have become
more popular, and the ritual in both Reform and Conservative synagogues
has become more traditional. But this Jewish revival does not prevent American Jews from being intensely and automatically hostile to the concurrent
Christian revival. It is fair to say that American Jews wish to be more Jewish
while at the same time being frightened at the prospect of American Christians becoming more Christian. It is also fair to say that American Jews see
nothing odd in this attitude. Intoxicated with their economic, political and
judicial success over the past half-century, American Jews seem to have no reluctance in expressing their vision of an ideal America: A country where
Christians are purely nominal, if that, in their Christianity, while they want
the Jews to remain a flourishing religious community. One can easily under
stand the attractiveness of this vision to Jews. What is less easy to understand
is the chutzpah of American Jews in publicly embracing this dual vision. Such
arrogance is, I would suggest, a peculiarly Jewish form of political stupidity.
For the time being, American Jews are getting away with this arrogance.
Indeed, American Christians—and most especially the rising Evan
gelical movements—are extraordinarily tolerant, if more than a little puzzled,
by this novel Jewish posture. And the lack of any negative Christian reaction
has only encouraged American Jews in the belief that they have discovered
some kind of universally applicable formula for dealing with non-Jews. One
can see this in the way many American Jews have taken to speaking about Israeli foreign policy in recent years. After all, why should getting along with
believing Moslems be different from getting along with non-believing Chris
tians? Many Jews honestly do not appreciate the difference, and therefore as
sume that if there is no peace in the Middle East, Israeli Jews must be doing
something wrong.
But the political attitudes of American Jews have been shaped by some
thing far deeper than their benign experience of life in Christian America in
the last few decades. For what liberal American Jews, as well as liberal Israelis,
have in common is nothing less than a deeply grounded utopian expectation
that good “human relations” can replace political relations between other ethnic and religious groups, whether one faces these groups within the context of
domestic American life, or across the border in Israeli foreign affairs. At the
end of World War II, the major American Jewish organizations, preparing to
fight a possible upsurge in anti-Semitism (which never came), discovered a
category of contemporary psychology called “conflict resolution,” which they
believed to be ideally suited to the problem they were facing; in fact, its great
virtue was that it was ideally suited to their ideological predisposition. Ac
cording to this branch of social science, ethnic, racial or religious conflicts are
the result of bias, prejudice, misunderstanding or ignorance. The vision of
politics derived from this kind of social science can fairly be described as
“therapeutic,” as it assumes that ethnic, religious or racial conflicts can be re
solved by educational therapy that will uproot the psychological causes of the
conflict. But ultimately it is just one more variant of the universal humanism
which was the unofficial religion of the Enlightenment—to which Jews, lack
ing a realistic political tradition, were especially susceptible, and still are. In
the United States, as well as in certain circles in Israel, such a universal hu
manism has acquired the status of a quintessentially Jewish belief. Whereas
once upon a time it was not unreasonable to ask whether a given turn of
events or policy was “good for the Jews,” to ask that question in the United
States today in Jewish circles is to invite a mixture of ridicule and indignation:
Ridicule at the retrograde parochialism of such an attitude; indignation at the
suggestion that there is such a thing as a Jewish interest distinct from the in
terests of mankind as a whole. This is the reason that Jews, of all the religious
and ethnic groups in the United States, are the most committed supporters of
the United Nations. They may whine about the UN’s unfriendliness toward
Israel, but, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, prefer to think that
this is a passing phenomenon; and like the aclu, the United Nations Association floats on Jewish funding. The truth is that liberal Jews desperately
need the United Nations, because it is their anchor in reality; the United
Nations proves to them that their universal humanist ideals are not just
daydreams, that they have a real existence in the world. The UN protects
them from having to consider a reality of competition and painful political
dilemmas and particularistic Jewish interests—which is to say, it protects
them from thinking politically about foreign policy, something they have
never done.
Europe’s Jews were vulnerable to the universalist utopianism that characterized the Enlightenment,
whose essence is the attempt to make do with abstract theories of universal
rights and international laws, in precisely those areas in which a people most
desperately needs the practical experience of statesmanship and the political
wisdom which at great length grows out of it. This political utopianism has
left the Jews intellectually disarmed as they attempt to deal with the intrac
table foreign policy problems of an independent Jewish state, and charging
down a blind alley in their search for constitutional arrangements that serve
the Jewish interest in both the United States and Israel.
Before the daunting task of instilling a tradition of thinking politically
among the Jews, there is little to be done other than to continue the work of
education. Such work is very difficult, but it must be done if both Jews and
Judaism are to survive. Those of us in the United States who have been in
volved in this enterprise for some years now are certainly encouraged to see
a comparable enterprise under way in Israel. For our destinies are fused.
American Jewry will not survive without Israel, and Israel cannot survive
without the Jews of the United States. And neither community can survive
without the development of a sound Jewish political tradition, which
will teach us to think realistically about our politics, our economics, and our
foreign relations.
