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February 10, 2012
Lisa M. Krieger: Man with defibrillator demands access to his own heart's information
David G. Savage: Why activists may not be in a hurry to have High Court rule on alternative marriage
February 9, 2012
Laura McMullen: 10 Least Expensive Public Schools for Out-of-State Students
Kimberly Palmer: How to actually enjoy -- relaxing, financially -- your vacation
February 8, 2012
Warren Richey: Why momentous Prop. 8 ruling might not satisfy gay-rights groups
Menachem Wecker: Though Controversial, LL.M.'s Can Lead to Specialized Legal Jobs
The Kosher Gourmet byDana Velden: Going to the bother of making soup? You know it better be good. This CREAM OF TOMATO SOUP certainly is! And it's a cinch to make, too (Includes techinques and serving secrets)
February 7, 2012
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Caught off-guard? President's Super Bowl interview with Matt Lauer gives those who need a reason not to vote for him, a darn good one
Suzanne Bohan: Leaping lizards! Tiny reptiles advancing robot design
February 6, 2012
Jonathan Tobin: Iran Threatens Israel With Destruction, But the New York Times Doesn't Hear It
Jeffrey Fleishman: In newly democratic Egypt, tens of democracy activists jailed, to stand trial; their groups are 'threatening the stability of the homeland'
Julie Deardorff : Researchers say antioxidants may not be that effective and could do more harm than good
Mark Clayton: How did Anonymous hackers eavesdrop on FBI and Scotland Yard?
February 3, 2012
Edmund Sanders : Israeli official says Iran is creating missile that could reach East Coast of US
Victoria Kim: Immigrant-smuggling ring used black drivers to avoid racial profiling
February 2, 2012
Jim Carney: Wrong number call may have saved her life
Reza Kahlili : Ex-CIA spy in Iran's Revolutionary Guard: What Obama doesn't grasp about striking deals with Tehran
Tina Susman: For woodchuck rescuer, every day is Groundhog Day
February 1, 2012
Brian Bennett: US officials see increasing threat of domestic attack from Iran
Emily Brandon: How to Take Advantage of New 401(k) Fee Disclosures
January 31, 2012
January 30, 2012
Paul Richter and Ramin Mostaghim: Misreading Teheran's limits -- deadly and economically devastating as they may be -- is a risk administration, Europe seem willing to take
Suzanne Bohan: Warning: Nap-deprived tots missing more than sleep, study finds
Meg Handley: Banks Revamping Rewards Programs to Woo Customers
January 27, 2012
Caroline B. Glick: Obama: Of course I intend to prevent a nuclear holocaust . . . in a few months
Yochonon Donn: In liberal New York City, fervently-Orthodox Jews may soon be getting a district to call their own
Jeannine Stein: An inflated ego and thinking you're 'all that' doesn't just make others sick of you, it can make you ill
Katy Hopkins: New budget rules may affect how much money you get for college
January 26, 2012
Ed Koch: To the New York Times, calling for the murder of Jews by those capable of having their incitement taken seriously isn't news
Jeannine Stein: Mental illness struck one in five U.S. adults in 2010: Report
January 25, 2012
Richard Simon: House passes two bills endorsing the use of religious symbols at military memorials
Fred Weir: Putin: Multiethnic Russia cannot survive as a US-style 'melting pot'; must find its own way
Susan Johnston: 5 Sneaky Coupon Strategies Consumers Should Watch Out For
January 24, 2012
Carol Clark: The price of your soul: How your brain decides whether to 'sell out'
Caroline B. Glick: America lost most in 'Arab Spring'. Sadly, many voters still don't grasp the extent
Warren Richey: Drug criminal scores win in GPS ruling from conservative-leaning high court
Erika Bolstad: Black conservatives gather to talk about gaining strength
January 23, 2012
Melissa Dribben: Jewish voters to play a key role in Florida's Republican primary
Jordan Rau: In quest to grow, Catholic hospital system will announce this morning its break from church
Ali Safi: U.S. envoy gives Taliban terms for peace talks
January 19, 2012
January 18, 2012
January 17, 2012
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: No-kidding red lines: U.S. response to an Iranian nuke may be bluster, but Israel's won't be
David G. Savage: They sued their principals after slandering them online --- now the cases are headed to the Supreme Court
David Francis: Where to Invest in 2012: With stocks expected to rebound, opportunity abounds for investors
January 13, 2012
Ben Lynfield: Israeli lawmakers move to annex Jewish Judea, one museum at a time
Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz: Thriving through touch: Gentle massage helps older people with low mobility improve in mind and body
January 12, 2012
Warren Richey: Landmark Supreme Court ruling a 'resounding win' for religious groups
Warren Richey: Supreme Court says no to new rule on eyewitness testimony
John Fauber : Statins found to raise diabetes risk in postmenopausal women
Katy Hopkins : Consider This Before You Pay for an Online Degree
The Kosher Gourmet by Joseph Erdos: This mushroom and barley soup has an intense -- almost nutty -- flavor that mixes robust with Middle East. It has creaminess without cream
January 11, 2012
Shari Roan: Millions of atrial fibrillation sufferers at risk for devastating, but preventable, stroke
Tom Hussain: Pakistan -- recipient of more than $21 billion in civilian and military aid -- speeds pursuit of Iranian pipeline, defying US
David G. Savage: High court signals it won't be loosening TV's 'indecency' rules
Stephen Ceasar: Oklahoma's Islamic law amendment can't go into effect, court rules
January 10, 2012
Reza Kahlili: From an ex-CIA spy: US must exploit new split in Iran's Revolutionary Guard
Karen Kaplan: Study: Nicotine replacement products ineffective when used in real-life situations
January 9, 2012
Michael Doyle: Put through legal hell over dream home, couple fought back hard --- all the way to Supreme Court
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Jewish World Review
Repentance for a misspent youth
By
Jonathan Rosenblum
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they return to us with a certain alienated majesty," wrote Emerson. That pretty much captures my feelings upon finishing Michael Ignatieff's superb biography of Isaiah Berlin.
Berlin's command of the history of ideas grounds many of the intuitions that have guided my repentance over the past 30 years for the intellectual hubris of my friends and myself at Yale Law School. An important strand in Berlin's work was the demonstration of how the Enlightenment project of making human reason the measure of all things could end in the Gulag.
The anti-clericalism of the leading Enlightenment thinkers contained within it the potential for a new clericalism more authoritarian and murderous than that which it superseded, with intellectuals as its priests.
But Berlin was not just concerned with the most extreme deformations of the Enlightenment ideals. Though he defined himself as a man of the Left, he found that a similar cast of mind underpinned much left-wing thought from the French Revolution. Belief in a unitary human nature and a fixed hierarchy of values gave rise to the confident assumption that human reason can design a society in which the parts fit together harmoniously. The society thus designed would "free" man as never before by allowing him to fully develop all his capabilities.
The latter doctrine of "positive liberty," so admired in the young, "humanitarian" Marx, could easily end with Stalin's engineers of the soul. As Ignatieff sums up the matter: In Berlin's view, "the European Enlightenment was divided by a central contradiction between maintaining that men should be free to choose and insisting that they should be only free to choose what it would be rational to desire."
Rationality, of course, is best determined by the experts.
Berlin's project was to demonstrate that our most precious values — liberty, freedom and justice — inevitably conflict. Continually raising taxes on the top 1% of wage earners may bring about a more egalitarian society, for instance, but it is ridiculous to insist that there has not been some corresponding loss of freedom.
Disagreements about ends make it inevitable that the quest for smooth managerial resolution of conflict, Berlin felt, will forever remain a search for the Holy Grail. Soviet Marxism took the belief in central planning by experts to its apogee. But, Berlin pointed out, Western liberals were also prone to the illusion that all dilemmas of public and private life can be resolved by experts, psychotherapists and other "engineers of the human soul." The most learned of men, Berlin nevertheless insisted that intellectual elites have no business presuming that they know better than the man or woman in the street.
That the cult of the expert — itself an outgrowth of the Enlightenment's enthroning of human reason above all — should appeal to intellectual elites is unsurprising: It is a form of the revenge of the nerds whose superior qualities were unnoted by the pretty girls in high school. The assumption that "rationality" is a matter easily ascertained, at least by the brainy folks, underlies the preference for centrally planned economies by many intellectuals. Free markets are deemed too unruly, too irrational, as they give equal weight to the decisions of millions of consumers, those with high IQs and low IQs alike.
Belief in a single rational solution to every problem leads as well to nasty politics. Marxists have a term for those who fail to acknowledge the rational solution: "false consciousness." False consciousness can infect entire social classes, and when it does they must either be re-educated or eliminated. In non-totalitarian regimes, ridicule replaces re-education for all those too stupid to accept the consensus. Perhaps that explains why so many writers to the Yale Law Magazine find calling George W. Bush an idiot the height of sophisticated wit. Even "jokes" about Sarah Palin's Down Syndrome son and "retarded" family are not beyond the pale.
Not since the heady days of Camelot has the easy assumption that the "brightest" are the "best" held such sway in Washington D.C., or the cachet of prestigious Ivy League degrees been so high. The cult of the "expert" is reflected in the 30 or so "czars" designated to date. President Obama's choice for science czar, John Holdren, suffers from a particularly hardy case.
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In the late 1970s, when it was claimed that the "population bomb" would render the planet uninhabitable within a generation, Holdren proposed a Planetary Regime to control the development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources, with the power to set optimal population levels for every region of the globe and to enforce those limits by compulsory abortion.
Hubris levels are correspondingly high in D.C. today. The Obama administration tried to redesign the entire United States health care system — one-sixth of the economy — in a couple of months.
One notable aspect of the administration's proposals is the attempt to end competition between private health insurers, and with it the ability of individual citizens to decide what kind of medical conditions they wish to insure against and what percentage of their budget to allocate to health insurance. One size fits all.
With equal rapidity, the administration seeks to put in place Rube Goldbergesque cap-and-trade limits on carbon emissions that even President Obama admits will cause electricity prices to skyrocket, and which will, at least in the short-run, make America more dependent on foreign oil. All in the name of staving off a global climate change catastrophe, even though major polluters and economic competitors like China, India and Brazil have made it clear they will not sign up.
No wonder forging a "solution" to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to be imposed on the parties seems like child's play.
Ironically, the new "experts" are not notably more empirically based than was Soviet genetics under Stalin. Global warming — or rather catastrophic climate change, now that the Earth turns out to be cooling — is, says Nobel Laureate in Physics Ivan Giaever, the "new religion." Even as the ranks of leading scientists in the ranks of skeptics of alarmist global warming swell, and the predictive power of the alarmists' computer-generated models is repeatedly undermined, the first impulse is to stifle dissent.
Dr. Mitchell Taylor, one of the world's leading experts on polar bears, who has written that virtually all Arctic bear populations have either grown over the past 30 years or at are optimal levels, was disinvited to a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group leading up to the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change in December, on the grounds that his views on global warming are "unhelpful."
When Alan Carlin, a 35-year employee of the Environment Protection Agency, prepared a 100-page report questioning the agency's decision to classify carbon as a "pollutant," and thereby subject to EPA regulation without any Congressional action, he was ordered not to disseminate his report.
Closer to home, the anti-empiricism of the administration's foreign policy experts manifests itself in their inability to process the overwhelming evidence that the Palestinians do not share their definition of rationality, or seek a state of their own alongside Israel. Bigger still is the refusal to acknowledge Israel's less-than-happy experience with territorial withdrawals for peace.
Now back to rereading Sir Isaiah's classic essays on liberty.
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JWR contributor Jonathan Rosenblum is founder of Jewish Media Resources and a widely-read columnist for the Jerusalem Post's domestic and international editions and for the Hebrew daily Maariv. He is also a respected commentator on Israeli politics, society, culture and the Israeli legal system, who speaks frequently on these topics in the United States, Europe, and Israel. His articles appear regularly in numerous Jewish periodicals in the United States and Israel. Rosenblum is the author of seven biographies of major modern Jewish figures. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Law School. Rosenblum lives in Jerusalem with his wife and eight children.
© 2009, Jonathan Rosenblum
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