RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.lawliberty.org/liberty-classic/wanting-the-worst-helmut-schoeck-envy/

Peter Wood is President of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books, 2003). He is also the 2019 recipient of the Jeane Kirkpatrick Award for Academic Freedom.

“Let’s talk about envy. Give us some more beer…”

That’s Ivan, in Yuri Olesha’s short novel, Envy, published in 1927. Ivan is drawing the young and envious Nikolai further into a plot to disrupt Soviet society. His protégé, Nikolai Kavalero, dreams of glory but is stuck on the margins of society. He stews over the privileges and honors bestowed on others. Ivan feeds Nickolai’s envy, his sense of unfair exclusion.

Olesha’s novel is cited by Helmut Schoeck in his magisterial work, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, originally published in German in 1966 and republished by Liberty Fund in 1987. According to Schoeck, Olesha’s novel is a rarity in openly addressing this powerful and disruptive emotion. Envy, says Schoeck, is something we all feel but hardly ever talk about. Other negative emotions are granted a degree of public respect. We can admit to hatred, fear, and even jealousy, but envy is a quality we attribute only to others, whose envy is to be feared.

That’s because the envious have only one real goal: to see the people they envy brought low. In Schoeck’s telling, the envious man doesn’t want the good things—the house, the farm, the wife, the children—of the person he envies. He simply wants that person to lose those good things. The pleasure he looks forward to is the misery of his rival. The rival, moreover, need not even know he is the target of envy. The man who envies hides his resentment, typically by dressing it up in the clothes of altruism. He calls for “social justice,” for example, when what he really wants is to inflict suffering on the people he resents.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-meritocracy-trap

The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by Daniel Markovits (Penguin Press, 448 pp., $30)

In 1958, the English sociologist Michael Young famously invented the term “meritocracy.” Sixty years later—after a financial crisis, a major recession, record-high inequality, and stubborn racial gaps have led to skepticism about opportunity in America—Young’s formulation is afire. In less than a decade, we’ve seen an outpouring of articles and books on meritocracy’s contribution to America’s ills.  The library includes MSNBC host (and Brown graduate) Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites, Harvard law professor Lani Guinier’s The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, and Cornell economist Robert Frank’s Success and Luck: Good Fortune and The Myth of the Meritocracy; soon to come is Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit.

The Meritocracy Trap, by Oxford-educated, Yale law professor Daniel Markovits, is the latest entry into this crowded arena. Markovits is fully aware of the irony of his resume, given his disgust with the system by which American society chooses its elites, and he’s got lots of company. As economist (yes, Harvard-educated ) Tyler Cowen has quipped: “The best critiques of the meritocracy have come from those with extreme merit.”  I’ll come back to this puzzle later, for it’s one that Markovits’s book, like others in the genre, doesn’t fully explore. 

The current meritocratic system began as an effort to open up a hereditary WASP elite to outsiders—and for a while, as immigrants, minorities, and women earned their way into America’s legacy campuses, writes Markovits, it looked like it was working more or less as intended. In the last few decades, however, the system has morphed into a do-or-die tournament for the prize of an Ivy League degree and a bonus-rich job at a swanky address. Instead of being democracies of talent, Harvard and Yale and their elite cronies are now quasi-exclusive clubs for the children of wealth. Money gives rich parents the means to groom their kids for these clubs as early as infancy with classes, books, and trips to museums meant to enhance kids’ development. They move to wealthy neighborhoods, where schools offer a vast array of (ahem) “enrichment” activities, including test prep and college-essay tutoring. Alternatively, they put their kids through 12 years of $40,000-a-year-plus private schools, whose administrators just happen to be chummy with Princeton admission officers. 

https://nypost.com/2019/10/13/inside-the-medias-relentless-crusade-to-destroy-president-trump/

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the mainstream media has shed its once-noble mission — the pursuit of the truth — and instead adopted a new purpose: to take down the president. In an excerpt from her new book, “Resistance at All Costs: How Trump Haters are Breaking America,” out Tuesday, KIMBERLEY STRASSEL examines how far the press will go in its relentless crusade . . .

Last week The Washington Post revealed the alarming news that House Democrats were considering having their anonymous “whistleblower” testify from a remote location, and in disguise. Just as shocking as the details of this plan was the justification the Post ladled on this Democratic effort to hide impeachment information from the public.

It explained, high up in the story, that the cloak-and-dagger approach was merely Democrats expressing “distrust of their GOP colleagues, whom they see as fully invested in defending a president who has attacked the whistleblower’s credibility and demanded absolute loyalty from Republicans.”

This, from a newspaper with a tagline of “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Maybe the better journalistic epitaph is: Democracy dies in bias. How did journalism get here?

I’ve never engaged much in media criticism, because it’s almost too obvious. Yes, the mainstream media is liberal and biased. But at least in the past, that bias was largely a function of insularity. Most reporters weren’t even fully aware they were prejudiced politically; everyone they worked and socialized with held the same left-of-center views.

That’s changed in the age of Trump. The press has embraced its bias, joined the Resistance and declared its allegiance to one side of a partisan war. It now openly declares those who offer any fair defense of this administration as Trump “enablers.” It writes off those who question the FBI or Department of Justice actions in 2016 as “conspiracy” theorists. It acts as willing scribes for Democrats and former Obama officials; peddles evidence-free accusations; sources stories from people with clear political axes to grind; and closes its eyes to clear evidence of government abuse.

This media war is extraordinary, overt and increasingly damaging to the country.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/11/the-original-nation

How to Fight Anti-Semitism
by Bari Weiss

Hate: 
The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France
by Marc Weitzmann

No one views Israel with indifference. As an old joke puts it, a philo-Semite is just an anti-Semite who likes Jews. Bari Weiss quotes this joke (to disparage Donald Trump) without grasping its deeper meaning. Anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism respond to the same thing, namely, God’s promise to the descendants of Abraham and Sarah. Supersessionist Christians hate the Jews because they covet the Election of Israel. Other Christians take heart from the miracle of Jewish survival and bless the Jews in the spirit of Genesis 12:3 and Romans 11.

The same people may do either at different times. The great-­grandparents of today’s evangelical Christians were the Protestants who blocked Jewish immigration before and during World War II. When everyone professed Christianity, it was fashionable to despise Jews as recalcitrant holdouts against the manifest truth of the gospels. When the cultural tide turned against Christianity during the 1960s, though, the miracle of Jewish national rebirth in the Holy Land appeared as a sign to Christians that the God of the Bible kept his promises.

Israel’s success is the point of departure for both the new philo-­Semitism and the new anti-Semitism. The mainstream American Jewish ­organizations put the Holocaust at the center of their representations to the broad public. But revulsion at the mass murder of Jews did not cause the surge of sympathy for Israel among Christians. On the contrary, the ­Holocaust at first reinforced the common ­Christian belief that God had abandoned the Jewish people. Israel’s rebirth and flourishing moved Christian opinion. Israel’s victory in the 1967 war was seen as a validation of God’s promise to the Jews and a beacon of hope to Christians.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/arts-culture/2019/10/what-saul-bellow-saw/

In May 1949, a year after the establishment of the state of Israel, the American Jewish literary critic Leslie Fiedler published in Commentary an essay about the fundamental challenge facing American Jewish writers: that is, novelists, poets, and intellectuals like Fiedler himself.

Entitled “What Can We Do About Fagin?”—Fagin being the Jewish villain of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist—the essay shows that the modern Jew who adopts English as his language is joining a culture riddled with negative stereotypes of . . . himself. These demonic images figure in some of the best works of some of the best writers, and form an indelible part of the English literary tradition—not just in the earlier form of Dickens’ Fagin, or still earlier of Shakespeare’s Shylock, but in, to mention only two famous modern poets, Ezra Pound’s wartime broadcasts inveighing against “Jew slime” or such memorable lines by T.S. Eliot as “The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot” and the same venerated poet’s 1933 admonition that, in any well-ordered society, “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”

How should Jewish writers proceed on this inhospitable ground?

There was a paradox in the timing of Fiedler’s essay, since this was actually the postwar moment when Jews were themselves beginning to move into the forefront of Anglo-American culture. The “New York Intellectuals”—the first European-style intelligentsia on American soil, clustered around several magazines and publishing houses—were beginning to gain prominence as writers, thinkers, critics, and professors. Fiedler was thus not a petitioner requesting permission to enter American letters but someone already in place and intending to stay. Indeed, by the end of his essay, after laying out the problem, he proposes an answer:

[We] can begin to build rival myths of our meaning for the Western world, other images of the Jew to dispossess the ancient images of terror. Several, of varying dignity and depth, are already in existence: the happy Hebrew peasant of the new Israel; the alienated Jew as artist (Kafka’s protagonist Josef K.) or dilettante (Proust’s Charles Swann) or citizen (Joyce’s Leopold Bloom); the sensitive young victim of the recent crop of American war novels; the ambiguous figure of Saul Bellow’s novel [The Victim], both victim and oppressor.

According to Fiedler, the response to existing negative stereotypes was to create autonomous new representations. For him, as for others at the time, the modern Jew could possibly even become a literary archetype: the new Everyman of a society in which many felt somewhat alienated, or marginal. In charting this proposed new path of Jewish fiction, Fiedler singles out such forerunners as Kafka and Proust and then, as a contemporary exemplar, Saul Bellow, whose second novel, The Victim, about a New York Jew who is being stalked by an anti-Semite, had been published two years earlier.

It was an auspicious choice of writer and book.

https://quillette.com/2019/10/02/gilead-resembles-

Margaret Atwood, whose work I have long admired, is now being hailed as a prophet. It is quite the phenomenon. According to the pundits, Atwood’s 1985 work, The Handmaid’s Tale, which Mary McCarthy once savaged, and the recently-published 2019 sequel, The Testaments, are dystopias which aptly describe the contemporary climate change crisis, toxic environments, the rise in infertility, and the enslavement of women in Trump’s America.

Is this all Atwood is writing about? Do the increasing restrictions on abortion in America parallel the extreme misogyny of Gilead, the theocratic state in Atwood’s saga? Is the unjust separation of mothers and children, a la Trump on the southern border, what Atwood has foretold? Every review and interview with Atwood that I could find strongly insists that this is the case.

Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times, attributes the current popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale to Trump’s ascendancy. She writes: “It’s hardly surprising that in 2016 the book resonated—particularly women—stunned that a brazen misogynist, given to fascist rhetoric and backed by religious fundamentalists was taking power.”

Michiko Kakutani recently reviewed The Testaments for the New York Times. She writes:

Atwood understands that the fascist crimes of Gilead speak for themselves…just as their relevance to our own times does not need to be put in boldface. Many American readers and viewers of The Handmaid’s Tale are already heavily invested with the story of Gilead because we’ve come to identify with the Handmaids’ hopes that the nightmare will end and the United States—with its democratic norms and constitutional guarantees—will soon be restored. We identify because the events in Atwood’s novel…now feel frighteningly real. Because news segments on television in 2019 are filled with images of children being torn from their parents’ arms, a president using racist language to sow fear and hatred and reports of accelerating climate change jeopardizing life as we know it on the planet.

At the anti-Trump pro-women’s rights marches around the country, some feminist protesters dressed like Handmaids in billowing, shapeless red dresses, their facial identities obscured by large, white Victorian-era bonnets, carrying signs that read: “Make Margaret Atwood fiction again” and “The Handmaid’s Tale is not an instruction manual.”

They have a point. Abortion rights are being steadily challenged and nearly eviscerated in the formerly slave-owning American states. Right-to-life lawyers insist that the protection of unborn children without any gestational markers is the law of the land. We now have free states and slave states in terms of access to high quality, insurance-funded abortions. Pregnant, drug-addicted women are being jailed for child abuse.

However, Atwood’s Gilead reflects and foretells two other profoundly devastating realities, which neither the critics nor Atwood dwell upon.