dhorowitz

Noam Chomsky is a pathological hater of his own country, which is why Chavez likes him. In Chomsky’s view America is worse than Hitler Germany, the quintessence of worldly evil. Chomsky’s entire intellectual output is designed to prove this, although his work is so manipulative and dishonest and has been exposed so many times that only the credulous, the uninformed (Hollywood celebrities would seem to fit both categories) and those already disposed to despise America could find anything persuasive in what he has written.

In this passage Robert Kennedy is attempting to dissuade blacks from hating whites by pointing out that a white man also killed his father who was white. But this is an inadequate response, since it only adds to the bad image of whites, as though they were equal opportunity killers. If Kennedy wants to defend white people from the prejudice that all whites are racists, he should point out the overwhelming support that Martin Luther King had from the vast majority of whites, and that individual blacks also kill white people, yet no one should blame all black people for their crimes.

All quests for an earthly redemption, whether religious or secular, seek to purify the world. They are born of an inability to accept the fallen state of the human condition, the normal corruption of human affairs, and an urgency to “repair the world.” All such quests are totalitarian in that they seek to control every aspect of human behavior to produce a moral and harmonious world.

It’s interesting how the human story keeps returning to Genesis — and this whether you are a believer or not. “You shall be as gods” was the serpent’s seduction of Adam and Eve, and it has remained the destructive ambition of radicals and progressives ever since.

It is a moral imperative to connect our own lives to others, to seek an understanding — at least an intellectual understanding if not a felt or sympathetic one — of even our most bizarre adversaries. And so I felt it important to understand at least to my own satisfaction the human well-springs of the beliefs of the fanatical assassins of 9/11.“Love death” at first appears incomprehensible. But reflecting on it one soon realized that it is an aspect of all noble aspirations, which are so characterized because they represent desires that are larger than self. To love death is the epitome of the self-less act. Or at first it seems so. It is actually the epitome of a self-aggrandizing narcissism which is characteristic of all revolutionaries and martyrs.

My father the pessimist, whose pessimism I tried to escape was after all the realist. On the other hand, escaping his pessimism gave me life.

It is a sort of cliche of the observing class that Jews as social outsiders have functioned as the critics of social order — Freud and Marx come immediately to mind, but the list is very long. On the other hand every sentient being sees themselves in this way. To be human is to be an outsider. We are part of the natural world, born to die like everything else, but unlike all other natural beings we are conscious of this fact — that one day we will be leaving, and that nothing is permanent. This is the truest alienation.

This is the subject of the sequel to this book, A Point In Time, which looks at the quest for an earthly redemption as the source of great human misery.

This is probably one of the hardest — if also the most eye-opening — consequences of age. The deja vu all over again syndrome. It is a challenge keeping one’s interest going after you reach a certain point in your journey. I seem to have managed it for myself but not with out some struggle.

This is a mouthful. It’s an old idea — all wise ideas are old — that understanding death is the key to understanding life, or as Saul Bellow put it in the beautiful quote cited at the end of this page, “Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything,” But you can’t really appreciate the idea until you feel it, until you have the experience and the life span to feel it, which is what happened to me around the time I began writing this book.

And one of the advantages you gain by living long enough is see what a tremendous roles deception and self-deception play in our human affairs.

In re-reading this passage one of the phrases that seems particularly apt to me with the passage of time is the statement that the inattention of others makes the lying and deception and deviousness possible. This is such a pervasive fact of human interaction both at the individual and especially at the public-political level as to undermine and make impossible the integrity of most human affairs.