Tuesday 10 March 2009

Whose Promised Land?

Over in The American Conservative, Brendan O'Neill's superb article includes the following gems:

"A hundred years ago, the German Socialist August Bebel coined the phrase “socialism of fools” to describe those left-wingers who blamed Jews for the ills of modern society. Today, in the elevation of Israel to the position of protector of “the very future of the human species,” we have an “Enlightenment of Fools”—a political posture that both obscures the true origins of anti-Enlightenment sentiments today and places an intolerable burden on the shoulders of the tiny Jewish state."

"Here we can glimpse the fantasy politics, even the conspiracy theory, that underpins the promotion of Israel as the urgent defender of “morality, justice and civilization.”"

"In effect, Israel is cynically, and lazily, being turned into a proxy army for a faction in the Western Culture Wars that has lost its ability to defend Enlightenment values on their own terms or even to define and face up to the central problem of anti-Enlightenment tendencies today."

Do read the whole thing.

O'Neill is published from time to time in the Catholic Herald, so presumably has not cast off his background entirely. Those of us who stand in the tradition of constructive, creative, but, as it were, very critical criticism of the Enlightenment remain faithful to the recapitulation in Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire.

Reactions against that recapitulation may be wholly Classical in inspiration (as in the writings of A C Grayling, only the latest in a very long line), or wholly Semitic (Judaism and Islam), or some combination of the two. Into that last category falls "the Enlightenment" both as era and as continuing tradition, with its deep roots in both the ostensibly Classical and the Semitic (specifically, Jewish) reactions.

Even more than the American Republic (with her constant internal battle between the ferocious anti-Christianity of the Founding Fathers and the Christendom of which she is an inheritor whether she likes it or not), and even more than the French Republic (of the present Fifth version of which at least the first three Presidents, and probably the fifth as well, have been monarchists in every sense, and there are lots, short of actually trying to restore the His Most Christian Majesty), Israel is the State that embodies the repudiation of that three-fold recapitulation, the repudiation of Christendom, the repudiation of the West.

America could one day become formally and constitutionally an embodiment of the West properly defined, as France could one day do again. But Israel, as such (and she is by no means the permanent political arrangement in the Levant), can never, ever do so, by definition.

That is what neoconservatives like about Israel. And that is why the rest of us should be as wary as possible of identifying our interests with hers.

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