{"id":115054,"date":"2017-06-12T10:52:38","date_gmt":"2017-06-12T18:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=115054"},"modified":"2019-06-23T14:00:47","modified_gmt":"2019-06-23T22:00:47","slug":"do-we-want-the-likes-of-norman-podhoretz-running-our-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=115054","title":{"rendered":"Do We Want The Likes Of Norman Podhoretz Running Our Culture?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jews tend to put more value on success than other groups do. It’s not enough in much of Jewish life to just do your best. You have to succeed to be a real Jew. This pressure leads some people to take shortcuts to success. They don’t care what crap they have to pull to get ahead<\/a>. It’s ugly and it creates resentment. The truly smart Jews, on the other hand, probably feel less need to cheat. <\/p>\n

Benjamin Balint writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\u201cBenjamin Balint has a Norman Podhoretz problem. He appears not to have been able to decide if Podhoretz is a good or bad hombre.\u201d Such was the verdict of longtime Commentary contributor Joseph Epstein, in an incisive 5,000-word review of my book, Running Commentary (2010). \u201cWhat Balint cannot quite make up his mind about is whether Podhoretz is a main-chancer looking to promote himself through his magazine or, instead, a man of high principle devoted to his country, to fellow Jews, and to staving off barbarians who, often during the years of his editorship of Commentary between 1960 and 1995, seemed not at but well inside the gates.\u201d Mr. Epstein had long since made up his mind in favor of the latter view.<\/p>\n

On the fiftieth anniversary of Making It\u2019s publication, the New York Review Books has just reissued the first of Podhoretz\u2019s four memoirs\u2014the sequels being Breaking Ranks (1979); Ex-Friends (1999); and My Love Affair with America (2000). The occasion not only compels a reassessment of the book and its author, now 87 years old, but also presents me with a chance to offer Mr. Epstein a reply.<\/p>\n

Equal parts memoir and polemic, Making It is not a success story tranquilly recollected, but, according to its author, \u201ca frank, Mailer-like bid for literary distinction, fame, and money all in one package.\u201d It is a study in careerism, in the unabashed pursuit of ambition and esteem, and in the contradictions inherent in that pursuit. Podhoretz writes:<\/p>\n

On the one hand, our culture teaches us to shape our lives in accordance with the hunger for worldly things; on the other hand, it spitefully contrives to make us ashamed of the presence of those hungers in ourselves and to deprive us as far as possible of any pleasure in their satisfaction. Nothing, I believe, defines the spiritual character of American life more saliently than this contradiction\u2026. I may perhaps lay claim to a particularly good vantage point from which to report on how the two warring American attitudes toward the pursuit of success are likely to reveal themselves concretely in the details of an individual career.<\/p>\n

Podhoretz focuses on those elites who frown on brash ambitiousness as something tasteless and tawdry: \u201cPeople capable of the most brutal honesty in other areas would at the mention of the word success suddenly lift their eyes up to the heavens and begin chanting the most horrendous pieties imaginable.\u201d In response to their hypocrisy, he recounts his appetite for fame and money, for power and position, for \u201cthe perquisites of rank,\u201d as he says\u2014the chief aims and rewards of worldly ambition.<\/p>\n

Podhoretz opens his account in Brownsville, Brooklyn. As a son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants (a \u201cfilthy little slum child\u201d), but also \u201ca boy of literary bent\u201d driven by \u201cthe vulgar desire to rise above the class into which I was born,\u201d he was preoccupied with gaining approval and embraced the role of teacher\u2019s pet. Winning a Columbia College (class of 1950) scholarship, he sat at the feet of Lionel Trilling, the first Jew in the English department. Here the young man discovered the \u201clife of the mind,\u201d and what Trilling called \u201cthe bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.\u201d As a Fulbright Scholar and a Kellett Fellow, he attended Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied with the combative British literary critic F.R. Leavis, founding editor of Scrutiny. \u201cStudied\u201d is perhaps too neutral a word: the disciple learned \u201chow to respond in terms of [Leavis\u2019s] temperament, to think in terms of his categories, to judge in terms of his values.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army\u2014\u201ca world built to all my weaknesses and not a single one of my strengths\u201d\u2014Podhoretz gained entree to the New Yorker and the Partisan Review, the highbrow journal founded in 1934 that married Marxism to literary modernism.<\/p>\n

Partisan Review was the arbiter and embodiment of intellectual sophistication, and the New Yorker was the arbiter and embodiment of worldly sophistication. I was therefore presumed, even by people who had never read a word I had written, to be uniquely endowed with both\u2014and the more so as I had with such rapidity and apparent ease moved into the pages of both magazines.<\/p>\n

In early 1960, aged thirty, the \u201cyoung man from the provinces\u201d (Trilling\u2019s phrase )\u2014or in this case from the outer boroughs\u2014took over Commentary\u2019s editorship. Recalling this experience gives rise to some of the memoir\u2019s best passages:<\/p>\n

“It was as though I had been editing manuscripts all my life in the Commentary way; it was as though the peculiar pleasure of getting inside someone else\u2019s mind, and yet managing to keep a firm enough hold on one\u2019s critical sense to prevent oneself from being swallowed up by that other mind once inside, had been a lifetime craving of my soul which had at long last found its object and been satisfied.”<\/p>\n

And yet even in his thirties, a self-confessed \u201cchildish desire for everyone to love me\u201d never quite left him. \u201cI could not bear the idea of not being great,\u201d he admits. Podhoretz craved invitations to parties for Partisan Review, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and Random House; to Hannah Arendt\u2019s New Year\u2019s Eve soirees; to Mary McCarthy\u2019s Upper East Side gatherings; to Park Avenue salons. These parties, where literary celebrities mixed with \u201cbeautifully begowned women,\u201d he says, \u201cserved as a barometer of the progress of my career.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the book, Podhoretz shifts metaphors:<\/p>\n

“Every morning, a stock-market report on reputation comes out in New York. It is invisible, but those who have eyes to see can read it. Did so-and-so have dinner at Jacqueline Kennedy\u2019s apartment last night? Up five points. Was so-and-so not invited by the Lowells to meet the latest visiting Russian poet? Down one-eighth. Did so-and-so\u2019s book get nominated for the National Book Award? Up two and five-eighths. Did Partisan Review neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Down two.”<\/p>\n

Podhoretz published his first book Doings and Undoings in 1964, a collection of appraisals of the Beat Generation, covering \u201cthe Negro problem,\u201d Saul Bellow (\u201cperhaps the greatest virtuoso of language the novel has seen since Joyce\u201d), Hannah Arendt, Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, and others. Doings and Undoings was his attempt \u201cto be a critic of the contemporary rather than a browser among masterpieces or a reverent.\u201d In Making It, he reports on the high hopes he had set on this collection of essays: \u201cI had been dreaming that the appearance of the book would become the occasion for a general proclamation of my appointment to the office of \u2018leading young critic in America.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The qualities that Norman Podhoretz embodies are quite different from the Anglo-Saxon ideal (the major Jewish cultural contribution to America has been the overthrow of Anglo-Saxon rule). They are quite different from the norms of Orthodox Judaism. They are quite different from the norms of any religion or spiritual path of which I am aware. Perhaps it is Norman’s nihilism that accounts for the overall uselessness of his work (with exceptions such as his essay “My Negro Problem – And Ours<\/a>“). <\/p>\n

Incidentally, statistically speaking, Jews are less nihilistic than the gentiles around them<\/a>. <\/p>\n

All minority groups are likely to hold a burn against the majority, particularly if there is a religious dispute. Social identity theory holds that the more we identify with our group, the more likely we are to have hostile feelings towards out-groups. That means that as long as Jews or Muslims maintain their identity in the West, they are likely to have negative feelings towards the majority. They may well speak the language of the majority, learn his history and culture, and use his modes of dress, but they won’t forget that inside they are different and superior. Every group thinks it is the center of the universe and looks at the world in ways in which their own superiority is constantly confirmed. If the minority group has a higher average IQ and cohesion than the majority, they will in certain times and ways, become the master of the majority group. <\/p>\n

Martin Heidegger wrote: “To appropriate ‘culture’ as a means of power and thus to assert oneself and affect a superiority is at bottom Jewish behavior. What follows from this for cultural politics as such?”<\/p>\n

The great thing about being an Orthodox Jew is that you know who you are. You have your own culture. You don’t need the goyim’s. You’re not a Norman Podhoretz. You have a specific identity and are consequently not as dependent on your wider social status to give you meaning in life. Your status as an Orthodox Jew comes from your place within the Orthodox community. <\/p>\n

Tom Wolfe’s 1975 book, The Painted Word, examined art criticism.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Wolfe’s thesis in The Painted Word was that by the 1970s, modern art had moved away from being a visual experience, and more often was an illustration of art critics’ theories. Wolfe criticized avant-garde art, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. The main target of Wolfe’s book, however, was not so much the artists, as the critics. In particular, Wolfe criticized three prominent art critics whom he dubbed the kings of “Cultureburg”: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe argued that these three men were dominating the world of art with their theories and that, unlike the world of literature in which anyone can buy a book, the art world was controlled by an insular circle of rich collectors, museums and critics with outsized influence.[1]<\/p>\n

Wolfe provides his own history of what he sees as the devolution of modern art. He summarized that history: “In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs”. After providing examples of other techniques and the schools that abandoned them, Wolfe concluded with Conceptual Art: “\u2026there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. \u2026Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until\u2026 it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture\u2026 and came out the other side as Art Theory!\u2026 Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision\u2026 late twentieth-century Modern Art was about to fulfill its destiny, which was: to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wolfe argues that parvenu Jews have destroyed modern art. <\/p>\n

Heidegger attributes to Judaism the \u201cprinciple of destruction.” I think he is correct. Judaism came into being denying the false gods of the ancient world and Jews to the present continue to degrade and deny what the goyim worship. Sometimes Jews offer worthy alternatives to the deities of the goyim, sometimes they don’t. <\/p>\n

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, says<\/a>: \u201cThe thing that makes Judaism dangerous to everybody, to every race, to every nation, to every idea, is that we smash things that aren\u2019t true. We don\u2019t believe in the boundaries of nation states, we don\u2019t believe in these ideas of individual gods that protect individual people, these are all artificial constructions and Judaism really teaches us how to see that. In a sense, our detractors have us right in that we are a corrosive force, we\u2019re breaking down the false gods of all nations and all people because they\u2019re not real and that\u2019s very upsetting to people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jews tend to put more value on success than other groups do. It’s not enough in much of Jewish life to just do your best. You have to succeed to be a real Jew. This pressure leads some people to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791,194,229,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-art","category-commentary-mag","category-jews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t