RUTHFULLY YOURS

The suffocating sense of guilt that afflicts university life has beenwhipped into a cocktail of self-congratulation, on the one hand, and menacing intolerance, on the other. Doubtless it portends many things, but support for liberal education or liberal society, properly understood, is not among them
Who says the guild system is dead? In New York, these days, you seem to need a licence for everything. The prominent Catholic journalist Ross Douthat discovered this mournful truth recently when he practised theology without a licence in his column for the New York Times. The offending column, “The Plot to Change Catholicism”, was published on October 18 and sparked an immediate rebuke from the Fraternal Order of Snot-Nosed Leftish Academic Theologians, Ltd. (I may not have the name exactly right.)

Here’s what the brotherhood had to say (as an aid to the reader, I italicise a few phrases):

Aside from the fact that Mr Douthat has no professional qualifications for writing on the subject, the problem with his article and other recent statements is his view of Catholicism as unapologetically subject to a politically partisan narrative that has very little to do with what Catholicism really is. Moreover, accusing other members of the Catholic church of heresy, sometimes subtly, sometimes openly, is serious business that can have serious consequences for those so accused. This is not what we expect of the New York Times.

This effusion was signed by more than fifty academics and many more have subsequently weighed in to denounce Douthat for practising theology without a licence. The “Twitter war” that erupted is partly comical, partly alarming, as such public displays of intemperateness often are. “Own your heresy,” Douthat recommended to one left-wing interlocutor, a piece of advice that sent the groupthink brigades over the edge.

The case of Douthat is actually more complicated than a bare recitation of the events might suggest. The reason the brotherhood refused to issue the old nihil obstat to Ross Douthat was not really because he violated the cardinal guild rule against freelance theology. The guild suffers many interlopers to wax theological, provided that they come to the right conclusions.

Ross Douthat’s real sin was not so much theo­logising as expressing the wrong opinion about certain sensitive subjects dear to the brotherhood’s collective heart (and other organs). Specifically, when writing about the recent Synod on the family in Rome, Douthat expressed the heretical view that the Catholic Church ought to abide by Catholic teachings. If that seems elliptical, let me explain that by “heretical” I mean “orthodox”. Douthat, as a traditionalist Catholic, had the temerity to point out that Pope Francis aimed to use the Synod to advance the Left-liberal view that marriage is a relationship of convenience that can be revised or abrogated at will without incurring ecclesiastical censure. Specifically, Douthat charged, the Pope “favors the proposal, put forward by the church’s liberal cardinals, that would allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion without having their first marriage declared null”. Douthat continued:

The entire situation abounds with ironies. Aging progressives are seizing a moment they thought had slipped away, trying to outmaneuver younger conservatives who recently thought they owned the Catholic future. The African bishops are defending the faith of the European past against Germans and Italians weary of their own patrimony. A Jesuit pope is effectively at war with his own Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the erstwhile Inquisition—a situation that would make 16th century heads spin.

The university generates more invective than paeans. In Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” the author’s etiology of the university’s malaise was a German invasion of Marx, Weber and Freud, smuggled in through works by French authors. But while we might remember Bloom deriding “the Nietzschean left,” in fact what he lambastes is the left’s misappropriation of Nietzsche. “Nietzsche’s call to revolt against liberal democracy,” Bloom commented, is a call “from the Right.” Few today would be comfortable with his answers to the nihilism he diagnosed.

The record might be set straight with the publication of this curious little volume, “Anti-Education.” It might have just as easily been titled, “The Closing of the German Mind.” Billed as lectures “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” this is instead a dramatic dialogue. A renegade group of students take flight from their “pleasure-loving” confrères” into the woods, where they happen to overhear a conversation between a great philosopher (who sounds a lot like Schopenhauer) and his assistant about what constitutes “true education.”
Anti-Education

By Friedrich Nietzsche
New York Review, 124 pages, $14.95

Already in 1872 Nietzsche is criticizing a twofold tendency: toward expansion and dissemination on the one hand and narrowing and weakening on the other. As education aims to reach everyone, it gives up its “highest, noblest, loftiest claims” and contents itself “with serving some other form of life, for instance, the state.”

The latest federal education reform sends more power back to states and local districts, but that poses risks to the extent they are captured by teachers unions. Witness New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo is retreating on teacher accountability.

In a bid to snag Race to the Top funds in 2010, New York adopted Common Core standards and required that 20% of teacher evaluations be based on student scores on state tests and another 20% on local objective measures of student learning. Student scores on the tougher new tests plunged. Proficiency dropped to 31% in reading and math in 2013 from 69% and 82%, respectively, in 2009.

Yet even as student measures plunged, local school districts in cahoots with the unions rigged evaluations to ensure that nearly all teachers got good marks. One tactic: Unions collectively bargained for easier local tests to be part of their evaluations. Lo, 96% of teachers statewide were rated “effective” or “highly effective” last year while only about a third of students passed state reading and math tests.

As humans, we instinctively root for the underdog. Movies and books exalt the underfunded, undereducated (and often underage) underdog in his fight against the polished grown-ups with their money, influence, and three-piece suits. From a young age, we imbibe the idea that those with money and power are always bad, leaving the “little guy” to save the day. Large organizations are generally viewed with suspicion, regardless of the actual character of the entity. Likewise, irrespective of the goals of the smaller group, the underdog more easily garners our sympathies.

The painful realization is that we, the campus pro-Israel movement, the ones fighting the “good fight” for democracy, human rights, and tolerance in the Middle East, are seen as the “big dog” — the suspect corporate entity. We have funds, and we use them. We are the distributors of shiny pamphlets, the orderers of beautifully arranged food, and the coaches of groomed speakers. We are the ever-present “Israel advocates.” And yet despite — or more aptly because of our well-funded arsenal of promotional tactics — pro-Israel advocates are more often than not on the losing end when put against the world’s newest underdog: the BDS movement.
Seemingly underfunded and representing an “oppressed” people, the BDS movement rarely, if ever, caters events; it hires somewhat radical (and often uncouth) speakers; and it never hands out glossy pamphlets with long words (other than “apartheid,” of course). And in order to critically appeal to the universalist biases of the poorly informed, BDS does not call its supporters “Palestine advocates” — it calls them “human rights activists.”

Israel is facing a grave “king” crisis. Never mind the Muslim terrorists stabbing, slashing and shooting any Jews in range. The real threat was uncovered by Shabak’s Jewish section, a gang of Jewish youths had plotted to “appoint a king”. It’s a lucky thing that Shabak had prevented the “return of the king” through the usual measures of planting informants and torturing detainees.

Just think, if they hadn’t arrested and detained those “right-wing extremists”, Israelis today might be forced to take orders from an undemocratic king instead of an undemocratic Supreme Court.

After Rabin’s death, Kikar Malchei Yisrael, the Square of the Kings of Israel, was renamed Kikar Rabin. The kings of Israel had to make way for the eternal celebrations of outrage for the murder of the Labor PM at the hands of a pawn of a Shabak employee. That killing led to the same ritual cries about the threat of “right-wing extremism” which was somehow worse than the “left-wing extremism” whose pandering to terrorism had killed over 100 Israelis since Oslo.

It’s a lot more than 100 today. And center-right prime ministers have come and gone with bold promises and only made things worse. The regular chants of “Insert name here melech yisrael” at political conventions don’t lead to any arrests. Though considering their tackiness maybe they should.

Still ex-Shabak boss Carmi Gillon has reemerged to cry “We’re at a worse point than before the assassination of Rabin.” Not in the sense that the terrorists set off by his old boss can now bombard Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But in the sense that more “right-wing extremists” are noticing it.