RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/03/the-moral-society/

This book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, by one of the contemporary world’s most accomplished proponents of religion, ethics and philosophy, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died on November 7, 2020, is both ambitious in scope and richly rewarding on a topic that in the third millennium could not be more fraught.

Morality is a word that had almost vanished from the lingua franca of the swinging 1960s when Jonathan Sacks, then a student at Cambridge, enrolled in his first course on the Moral Sciences. By then the idea of morality as an objective reality was considered a quaint remnant of a previous era and the young Sacks was left bewildered by the prevailing mood of unbridled personal freedom that championed “feelings” over responsibilities. Linked with religion in the popular mind, morality already had had the stuffing kicked out of it by the cult anarchist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who proclaimed, “God is dead … We have killed him … Do we not hear the noise of the gravediggers burying God?” On April 8, 1966, Time Magazine was less subtle: on a black front cover glared the question, “Is God Dead?”

To the man who would become the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom for twenty-two years, knighted for his inter-faith work in 2005, a member of the House of Lords in 2009, and a prolific author of books on the essential role of religion in public life, we can presume the answer was a resounding No. But the surrounding culture reverberated with Nietzsche’s conviction that the Judeo-Christian era was at an end, along with its moral heritage. The French postmodernists, following Descartes’s radical scepticism, declared morality to be a matter of interpretation, leaving us with the relativisation of values. In America, the “Me Generation” put personal satisfaction and self-actualisation—the “I”—at the centre of existence, leaving the “We” of shared community values, commitments and responsibilities on a one-way descent to oblivion.

Sacks cautions that his book, which was fated to be his last, is not a work of cultural pessimism. However, in chapter after chapter, citing a now formidable corpus of literature on the decline of Western civilisation, he outlines the signposts of that cultural descent, beginning with the “outsourcing” of moral responsibility to government bodies in highly secularised democracies, to the monetisation of “happiness” in cultures driven by consumerism in an amoral free-market economy. No longer personally responsible for one’s neighbours, the individual is set adrift. Social capital diminishes and brings in its wake an epidemic of frantic materialism and profound loneliness. Self-medication and suicide rates spike in an attempt to assuage the malaise, but even the 2.41 billion active users of Facebook (as of June 2019) cannot stem the tide. “Unsocial media” actually feeds the condition of anomie (the loss of communal structures and shared values), by removing individuals from the face-to-face encounters that test those values on which society depends. The French Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim, who came to similar conclusions in the late nineteenth century when commenting on the social dislocations of the newly industrialised cities, remains relevant.

House Divided Charles R. Kesler’s new book brings together the classical beginnings of the study of politics with the story of our nation in thought and deed.

American politics grows embittered because it is increasingly torn between two rival constitutions, two opposed cultures, two contrary ways of life. American conservatives rally around the founders’ Constitution, as amended, and as grounded in the natural and divine rights and duties of the Declaration of Independence. American liberals herald their “living Constitution,” a term that implies the original is dead or superseded, and that the fundamental political imperative is constant change or “transformation” (as President Obama called it) toward a more and more perfect social democracy, made possible by man’s increasingly god-like control of his own moral evolution. 

Crisis of the Two Constitutions details how we got to and what is at stake in our increasingly divided America.

In an era when bipartisanship seems impossible, and votes on people, policies and bills are riven with harsh rhetoric and monolithic and intractable behavior by the Democrat legislators, I returned to a book which details the partnership of a Democrat President with a staunch conservative Republican Senator.  rsk

Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World by Lawrence J. Haas

With Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April of 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as America’s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan time to craft a dramatic new foreign policy through which the United States stepped boldly onto the world stage to protect its friends, confront its enemies, and promote freedom. These two men transformed America from a reluctant global giant to a self-confident leader; from a nation that traditionally turned inward after war to one that remained engaged to shape the postwar landscape; and from a nation with no real military establishment to one that now spends more on defense than the next dozen nations combined.

Lawrence J. Haas, an award-winning journalist, reveals how, through the close collaboration of Truman and Vandenberg, the United States created the United Nations to replace the League of Nations, pursued the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom from communist threat, launched the Marshall Plan to rescue Western Europe’s economy from the devastation of war, and established NATO to defend Western Europe.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-childrens-book-scheduled-for-publication-in-june/

Simon & Schuster will publish a children’s book about Dr. Anthony Fauci on June 29, CNN reported on Monday.

The book was written with Dr. Fauci’s approval, and he and his team were consulted throughout the process, a Simon & Schuster spokesperson confirmed. Author Kate Messner said she contacted Dr. Fauci‘s office in spring 2020 to consult about a separate book project, but inquired in the fall on whether she could write a standalone book about him.

“I was aware that I was asking for time from someone who was literally one of the busiest people in America as he provided public health guidance during the worst of the pandemic, but I also knew that Dr. Fauci understands how essential education is in public health,” Messner told CNN. Messner was able to interview Dr. Fauci several times “at the edges of his long work days.”

The book will in part highlight Dr. Fauci’s own childhood in the New York borough of Brooklyn, during which he delivered prescriptions for his father’s pharmacy.

Dr. Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been at the forefront of the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Trump administration brought Dr. Fauci on as part of the White House coronavirus task force, although the former president repeatedly clashed with him on pandemic policy, at one point calling him a “disaster” and “an idiot.”

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/live-not-by-politics?token=

EXCERPTS

I realize that sounds nuts given that my work requires me to read for many hours each day. But I don’t mean Internet-reading or newspaper-reading or even magazine-reading. I mean paper in hand, curled up on couch while eating chips, or laying in the Los Angeles sun old-fashioned reading. This mostly happens on Shabbat, when we mostly turn off our phones for 25 hours. (Nellie, who has the zeal of the convert, sometimes catches me texting in a closet.)

I wanted to share some of my favorites of the past six months. Soon I’m going to launch a book club to bring my favorite writers to you, so consider this a very initial foray into that project.

What the hell is going on? How did things get so broken? And how can we live well inside (or despite) the brokenness? There are three books I’ve read that answer each one of those questions.

THE REVOLT OF THE PUBLIC by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri is the book I have recommended more than any other this past year. He owes me a cut, as I told him in a recent interview, which I’m going to write up for a future column.

Anyone that thinks the primary conflict in America is between Republicans and Democrats is out to lunch. The real conflict — not just in this country but in the 21st century — is the one between what Gurri variously calls the center and the border, the hierarchy and the network, or the elites in their ivory towers and the public in their chaotic squares. That conflict has been created by the digital revolution. If you dream of things calming down or going back to normal anytime soon, bad news: we are only at the very beginning.

The tool of the revolution is information. The authority of 20th century institutions like Harvard or The New York Times depended on scarcity; they genuinely had access to exclusive information and secret knowledge. That authority has utterly collapsed under the force of the never-ending tsunami of information available to any fool with Google.

If you want to understand how seemingly discreet phenomenon like Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the GameStop short squeeze are actually all part of one story, Gurri, who published this book in 2014, will show you.

Most important, he will convince you, once and for all, that the old hierarchies are dead and no amount of nostalgia can revive them. The real question is what comes next.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-wont-let-you-read-my-book-11615934447?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A decade ago, most Americans had never had a conversation about transgender issues. Now a question few had asked has only one acceptable answer. “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time,” President Biden tweeted in January 2020. “There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.”

Can we talk about that?

We might want to talk about what policies are best when it comes to athletics, for example. Should high-school girls be losing championship races to boys who identify as girls? How about female-only spaces, like shelters for victims of domestic violence? Should women in dire straits be forced to spend the night with men who identify as women?

And what’s causing the surge in the number of girls seeking sex-reassignment procedures in the past decade? Might we want to find that out before we rush to conclude that puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormone therapies—and even double mastectomies for 13-year-olds—are a human right?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/anti-semite-chief-frontpage-magazine/

Editors’ note: Below is a letter from the leaders of ZOA to the publishers of Obama’s new book, “A Promised Land.” They point out all the falsehoods, lies and omissions about Israel in the book, and make a request for their correction.

Re: Falsehoods, Misleading Statements and Material Omissions in “A Promised Land,” by Barack Obama

Dear Mr. Dohle and Ms. McIntosh:           

We write on behalf of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the oldest and one of the largest pro-Israel organizations in the U.S.  The ZOA is a leader in fighting against antisemitism and anti-Israel bias wherever these problems arise.

Having received complaints from our supporters and conducting our own review, we are deeply concerned about the factual inaccuracies, material omissions and outright falsehoods contained in one of your recent publications – “A Promised Land” by former U.S. President Barack Obama.  The many errors are serious and damaging.  The book has already reached and influenced millions of readers and will impact many more.  We expect that this book will be assigned reading in schools and at colleges and universities, affecting how young people and future leaders perceive Israel.  Obama’s many factual errors and misleading statements will likely be repeated and quoted in articles and other books.  As a result, millions of people will be misled into drawing false and negative conclusions about Jews and Israel. 

To paraphrase Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, President Obama is entitled to his own opinions about Israel, which he expresses in Chapter 25 of his book.  But he is not entitled to his own facts.

We believe that you value the accuracy of your nonfiction books and support appropriate vetting because reportedly, you provide a stipend for your nonfiction authors to hire fact-checkers.  Given the many factual errors that we have identified and outlined below, the fact-checking of “A Promised Land” was sloppily done, if it was done at all.  Knowing that this book, written by a former U.S. president, would have enormous reach and influence, it was a mistake not to subject this book to the most scrupulous fact-checking possible.