The Left Hates Anything Old. By Dennis Prager.

The Left Hates Anything Old. By Dennis Prager. National Review Online, October 8, 2013.

Miley Cyrus’s Kind of Cool. By Mona Charen.

Miley Cyrus’s Kind of Cool. By Mona Charen. National Review Online, October 8, 2013.

Remembering Ovadia Yosef, the Israeli Ayatollah. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

Remembering Ovadia Yosef, the Israeli Ayatollah. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, October 8, 2013.

Goldberg:

More than 700,000 people gathered in Jerusalem yesterday to mourn the death of a great sage, Ovadia Yosef, a former chief rabbi of Israel and the supreme guide of the Shas political party.

 

The country had never before seen a funeral of this size. The mass of mourners was a testament to Yosef’s magnetism and scholarship, as well as to the work he did to lift up his community, the once-aggrieved (and still occasionally put-upon) Mizrachim, or Jews from Arab countries. (Yosef was himself born in Baghdad and served as a rabbi in Cairo.)

 

The party Yosef created made him a kingmaker in Israeli politics (read Noah Feldman’s incisive look at Yosef's revolutionary role in transforming Israeli political culture), and he was perhaps best known, beyond the walls of ultra-Orthodoxy, for his ruling that it would be permissible under Jewish law to cede biblical land to Palestinians if lives would be saved by doing so.

 

Much of the coverage of Yosef’s death has focused on the transformative role he played in the lives of Mizrachim. But much of it has neglected to mention the unfortunate fact that Yosef was a mean-spirited fundamentalist who created a corrupt party that coarsened Israeli politics, held a medieval belief in a vindictive God, and made abominable pronouncements on the moral and personal qualities of those of different races, religions and political views.

 

I spend a lot of time in this space highlighting the corrosive anti-Semitism of such figures as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian leader, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the extremist Al Jazeera televangelist. It’s unpleasant but necessary to note that Israel, too, has its share of religious fanatics. Yosef was his country’s most eminent. It’s true that he endorsed (as a theoretical matter) the idea of Israeli withdrawal from territories captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. But when former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon argued for a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Yosef said, “God will strike him with one blow and he will die. He will sleep and not awake.” (Some of Yosef’s followers were ecstatic – I saw their ecstasy with my own eyes – when Sharon later suffered a stroke.)

 

In the manner of the crudest fundamentalists everywhere, Yosef blamed misfortune and death on apostasy, irreligiosity and homosexuality (gay people, in his eyes, were “completely evil”). About Israeli soldiers who fell in battle, Yosef once said, “Is it any wonder if, heaven forbid, soldiers are killed in a war? They don’t observe the Sabbath, they don’t observe the Torah, they don’t pray, they don’t put on phylacteries every day. Is it any wonder that they’re killed? It’s no wonder.” Even more famously, he blamed the deaths of Jews during the Holocaust on the spiritual deficiencies of their ancestors.

 

In 2005, he argued that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for the Gaza withdrawal and for the alleged godlessness of the black residents of New Orleans. “There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, because there isn't enough Torah study,” he said. “Tens of thousands have been killed. All of this because they have no God.” He went on to argue – if that’s the word for it – that the deaths were also punishment directed at President George W. Bush for pressuring Sharon to remove Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. “It was God’s retribution,” he said. “God does not short-change anyone.”

 

Yosef’s excoriations of Israeli politicians were legendary. In the last election, Yosef said this about the leadership of the right-wing Jewish Home party: “Those are religious people? They come to uproot the Torah. Those who elect them deny the Torah, this is the Jewish Home? This is the Jewish Home of the gentiles.”

 

The most devastating insult Yosef could muster against a Jew was to label him a gentile. He held gentiles in general contempt. “Goyim were born only to serve us,” he said in a 2010 sermon. “Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the people of Israel.” 

Of Muslims, he said, “They’re stupid. Their religion is as ugly as they are.” His hatred of Palestinians was obvious. Speaking of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides, Yosef said, “All these evil people should perish from this world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”

 

Yosef’s defenders will note that Abbas was one of the many dignitaries who expressed his condolences on learning of Yosef’s death. Abbas did so for the same reason Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did: because Yosef represented a vast and powerful political constituency.

 

Defenders of Yosef will also argue that his outbursts and prejudices came late in life (though not all of them did) or that they were the product of his upbringing, as a Jew who was both discriminated against by Muslims and who led an ethnic group that suffered at their hands. Yosef’s apologists also argue that the good work he did – on behalf of war widows, for instance – mitigates the damage of his egregious words.

 

Sorry, no: Prejudice is prejudice, whether it comes from an imam in Qatar or from the man whose Jewish critics labeled him, correctly, the “Israeli ayatollah.”

Ovadia Yosef, the Rabbi Who Brought Religion Into Israeli Politics. By Noah Feldman.

The Rabbi Who Brought Religion Into Israeli Politics. By Noah Feldman. Bloomberg, October 7, 2013.

Feldman:

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who died at age 93 in Jerusalem, wasn’t just the most important rabbi in the world. He was a transformative figure in Israeli politics, galvanizing Israelis of Middle Eastern origin into their own ethnically distinct political identity and founding the religious-ethnic party Shas.

 

Although he viewed the Israeli state with ambivalent engagement, Yosef was a harbinger of Israel’s epochal transformation from a secular nationalist Jewish state into a religious nationalist state – in other words, a country much more like its Middle Eastern neighbors than it otherwise would be.

 

Born Abdullah Yusef in Baghdad in 1920, Yosef moved to Palestine with his family as a small child and was educated in a yeshiva called Porat Yosef, founded a few years earlier to perpetuate the distinctive traditions of Jews from Arabic-speaking Mediterranean lands, a group sometimes imprecisely labeled Sephardic and today in Israel called Mizrahi, meaning “Eastern” or “Oriental.”

 

His rise to rabbinic prominence grew from his encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish law, which reflected the traditional Mizrahi preference for breadth of legal knowledge and practical study rather than the northern European emphasis on depth at the expense of coverage. He served as the Sephardic chief rabbi from 1973 to 1983, after a contested election in which he successfully challenged the incumbent chief rabbi with whose rulings he disagreed.

 

Yosef’s willingness to serve in the official governmental post of chief rabbi differentiated him from the European-origin, or Ashkenazi, leaders of ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel. Those men were either skeptical of the Zionist project or outright opposed to it, and traditionally believed that the Jewish people should not attempt to exercise political sovereignty until a supernatural messianic age brought it about. They viewed the state of Israel as secular and therefore illegitimate, and felt the chief rabbinate office gave a false religious patina to an essentially nonreligious polity.

 

In contrast, Yosef was willing to meet the state halfway: to insist that a truly legitimate Israel would be based on Jewish religion, not Jewish nationalism, while still engaging with the state’s political institutions. In one remarkable decision, he opined that it was prohibited for an observant Jew to initiate a lawsuit in Israel’s secular courts because their status was comparable to that of non-Jewish courts in the diaspora. Yet at the same time, he refused to call himself a non-Zionist, pointing to his service as chief rabbi.

 

This complexity, not to say contradiction, led Yosef to the most astonishing act of his career when in 1984 he was a founder of the Shas Party, which was both a religious party and at the same time the first overtly ethnic party in Israeli political history, aimed at furthering the interests of Mizrahi Israelis. The brilliance of Shas was that unlike previous ultra-Orthodox parties, which could not hope to get votes from anyone but the then-small minority of ultra-Orthodox Jewish voters, Shas appealed to all Jews of Eastern origin, regardless of how religiously observant they might be.

 

The key to this appeal was that, unlike their Ashkenazi counterparts, Mizrahi Jews had never developed an aggressive secular nationalist ideology. Even those who might not be scrupulous in their personal religious observance tended to feel warmth, not hostility, for those more pious than they. The simplest analogy is to the population in the Arabic speaking countries from which most of them came: Secularism never really caught on in the Arab world, and until today, many of those who vote for Islamic political parties are not themselves devout.

 

Shas caught fire and in 1999 became the third largest party in the Knesset. Although plagued by corruption scandals – none of which touched Yosef personally – it has remained an important force in Israeli politics. The rise of Shas made Yosef more famous and important outside the religious world than any other rabbi in Israeli life had ever been. As spiritual leader of a major party, his judgments could lead to the rise and fall of prime ministers, as has been the case for Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Yosef’s native Iraq.

 

Most significantly, Yosef in the 1990s issued a highly controversial judgment that it was permissible as a matter of Jewish law for the state to exchange territory for peace with Palestinian negotiating counterparts. This ruling, far more lenient than that of other prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis who have considered the subject, captured Yosef’s distinctive mix of legal acumen and flexible statecraft.

 

In recent years, Shas has crept to the right in the Israeli political spectrum. But the real political legacy of Yosef’s career is that, by making a religious party into a mainstream, non-rejectionist national actor, he helped move Israeli political culture from secular nationalism to a more religiously-informed model. In a rough parallel to the rise of Islamic politics in Arabic-speaking countries, the politics of Jewish religion, not just Jewish nationalism, is now an enduring part of the Israeli landscape.

 

That this was accomplished by a rabbi of unquestioned legal preeminence, born in Baghdad, is not a coincidence.

A Fairytale of Two Cities. By Myron Magnet.

A Fairytale of Two Cities. By Myron Magnet. City Journal, October 7, 2013.

Can You Feel Love and Lust for the Same Person. By Esther Perel.

Can You Feel Love and Lust for the Same Person. By Esther Perel. The Huffington Post, October 4, 2013.

Erotic Fantasy Reconsidered: From Tragedy to Triumph. By Esther Perel. American Family Therapy Academy Monograph Series, Vol. 7 (Spring 2011).

Esther Perel website.

Esther Perel: The secret to desire in a long-term relationship. Video. TED, February 2013. YouTube.

Why Bother Being Jewish? By Caroline Glick.

Why bother being Jewish? By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, October 8, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.

American Jews: Laughing But Shrinking. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, October 1, 2013. With related articles.


Glick:

Why should American Jews bother to be Jewish? According to a new Pew Research Center survey of the American Jewish community, more and more American Jews have reached the conclusion that there is no reason to be Jewish.

 

Outside of the Orthodox Jewish community, intermarriage rates have reached 71 percent. Thirty-two percent of Jews born since 1980 and 22% of Jews overall do not describe themselves as Jews by religion. They base their Jewish identity on ancestry, ethnicity or culture.

 

Whereas 73% of Jews say that remembering the Holocaust is an essential part of being Jewish, only 19% said that observing Jewish law is a vital aspect of Jewish identity. Fourteen percent say eating Jewish foods is indispensable for their Jewish identity. Forty-two percent say that having a sense of humor is a critical part of being a Jew.

 

Gabriel Roth, an intermarried Jewish author, welcomes these numbers. In a column in Slate, Roth claimed that the reason most cultural Jews keep traditions of any kind is a sense of guilt toward their parents and previous generations of Jews. He believes that it’s time to get over the guilt. Keeping such traditions has “no intrinsic meaning.”

 

“How much value can ‘Jewish heritage’ have if it signifies nothing beyond its own perpetuation?” he asked sneeringly.

 

Obviously, the answer is no value. To do something you feel is intrinsically meaningless just because your forefathers did the same meaningless thing is a waste of time. If Judaism has nothing to offer beyond lox and Seinfeld, then there is no reason to remain Jewish.

 

The findings of the Pew survey, and indeed, sentiments like those that Roth described are no surprise to those who have been following the downward trajectory of the American Jewish community.

 

Numerous initiatives have been adopted over the past decade or so to try to reverse the trend toward assimilation and loss of Jewish identity. These initiatives, including websites like JDate that help Jewish singles find and marry one another, and Birthright, which has brought tens of thousands of young, largely unaffiliated Jews to Israel, have had a positive impact in slowing down the trend. But the move away from Judaism for non-Orthodox American Jews remains seemingly inexorable.

 

“We have tried a lot of different things and created a lot of wonderful programs,” explains political theorist Yoram Hazony, the founder of the Shalem Center and author of The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, published last year.

 

Hazony, who now heads the Herzl Institute, continues, “We’ve tried everything other than the central thing. Jews need to understand that there is an attractive and compelling idea that makes it valuable to be Jews.”

 

That idea, as Hazony explained in his recent book, is found first and foremost in the Bible.

 

Roth wrote, “If you believe that Jewish traditions are part of a covenant with God, of course you want your children to continue them.”

 

Yes, of course. But if you think that Judaism can be summed up so glibly, then you have no idea what it is that you are abandoning.

 

So in a sense, you are abandoning nothing. Because you cannot abandon what you never had in the first place.

 

And what Jews like Roth never had is basic Jewish literacy.

Hazony’s excellent book explains in easy, approachable language that the wisdom and philosophy imparted by the Hebrew Bible was purposely denied by the anti-Semitic philosophers of the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel and other leading philosophers of the Enlightenment were vicious Jew haters. They sought to cleanse modern philosophy of all references to the Bible in a bid to write Jews and Judaism out of the history of ideas and the contemporary intellectual world.

 

This they accomplished by subsuming the Hebrew scriptures (like the New Testament) under a broader criticism of “work of revelation.” As a revealed text, (a divine covenant ordered by a deity with which none of us have direct dealings), the Hebrew scripture was then misrepresented as something that has no relevance for people trying to determine for themselves what it means to live a good, moral and just life. Those concepts, we were told, could only be learned from Greek philosophers, who, in turn, were falsely characterized as atheists.

 

Hazony does not simply expose the philosophical crime against the Jews undertaken by the Enlightenment philosophers. He demonstrates why the ideas found in the Bible are deeply relevant and important to our lives, and indeed, how they form the basis for man’s quest to live a good, moral life.

 

“The Jewish idea is in the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinical commentaries on the Tanach,” he explains.

 

“To the extent we care and see something worthwhile in these ideas then everything falls into place. When you take it all out, everything turns into a bagel – it all tastes good but there’s a big hole in the center where the idea is supposed to be.

 

“The Jews were the people who brought the idea that an individual was responsible for discovering truth and right and for bringing it into the world.

 

That is the idea that freed mankind.

 

That is the biblical idea. The Bible is about the expectation that a human being is going to take responsibility for discovering the truth and what’s right and devote his or her life to bringing what is right to the world.

 

“The fact that most Jews no longer study it, no longer remember it, means they stopped being part of the historic Jewish drama. It is being part of that great drama that makes people care whether their children receive a Jewish education and marry Jews, and that makes them support Israel. Without the great drama that we learn from the Bible, then Israel becomes meaningless and intermarriage becomes obvious,” Hazony concludes.

 

Orthodox Jews feel that the Holocaust is less essential to their Jewish identity than Conservative and Reform Jews, (66% of Orthodox, versus 78% and 77% of Conservative and Reform Jews, respectively). On the other hand, 69% of Orthodox Jews believe that being part of a Jewish community is essential to their Judaism. Just 40% and 25% of Conservative and Reform Jews, respectively, feel this way. And this makes sense.

 

The Holocaust was the most recent attempt of an oppressor to annihilate the Jews. In the 4,000-year history of the Jewish people, there have been dozens of attempts to annihilate us. The Jewish story is the story not of others’ attempts to destroy us, nor even of our capacity to withstand and survive these attempts. The Jewish story is the story of the lives we lived, the culture we developed, and the life of the mind that bound us together.

 

Jews who have learned the Bible know their history did not start in 1933. They know that the Jewish story is the story of a people that believes so strongly in its mission to bring the liberating idea of personal responsibility to choose good and life over evil and death that it refused to surrender to its oppressors.

 

The Jewish drama, as set out in the Bible, is the story of a nation that from the outset and until the present day chooses freedom over submission, while maintaining allegiance to a sacred trust, and an ancient people and a promised land.

 

When you understand this, remaining Jewish is a privilege, not a sacrifice.

 

And, alas, when you fail to understand this, leaving Judaism not a tragedy but simply a natural progression.

Tyler Cowen’s Future Shock: No More Average People. By Michael Barone.

Tyler Cowen’s Future Shock: No More Average People. By Michael Barone. National Review Online, October 8, 2013. Also at Real Clear Politics, Townhall.com.

How to Avoid the Coming Middle-Class Meltdown. By James Pethokoukis. National Review Online, October 7, 2013.

Which workers will survive the robot age? By Kyle Smith. New York Post, October 5, 2013.

Visions of a Permanent Underclass. By William A. Galston. Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2013. Also here.

Two Nations, Under Mammon. By Patrick J. Deneen. The American Conservative, October 2, 2013.

Book Review: “Average Is Over” by Tyler Cowen. By Philip Delves Broughton. Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2013.

America Has Become a “Cheater-Take-All” Nation. By William K. Black. AlterNet, October 4, 2013.

Tyler Cowen’s Gloomy Vision Is Flawed In Its Very Conception. By Mark Hendrickson. Forbes, October 14, 2013.

Average Is Over—But the American Dream Lives On. By Andrew Lewis. The American Interest, October 15, 2013.

Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit. By George A. Akerlof and Paul M. Romer. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 1993, No. 2. Also here.

Average Is Over – if We Want It to Be. By Matthew Yglesias. Slate, September 26, 2013.

One Man’s Brave New World. By Richard Reeves. Truthdig, September 13, 2013.

Tired Of Inequality? One Economist Says It’ll Only Get Worse. Tyler Cowen interviewed by Steve Inskeep. NPR, September 12, 2013.

Tyler Cowen on Inequality, the Future, and Average Is Over. Interviewed by Russ Roberts. Audio. Library of Economics and Liberty, September 30, 2013.

Is Downton Abbey the Future of the US Economy? By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, November 9, 2013. 

Outsource Your Way to Success. By Catherine Rampell. New York Times Magazine, November 10, 2013. Also here.

Average Is Over. By Tyler Cowen. NJBR, September 7, 2013.

Victorian Values For the 21st Century. By Margaret Wente.

Victorian values for the 21st century. By Margaret Wente. The Globe and Mail, October 5, 2013.

Wente:

The new economy will be won by those who can exercise discipline, conscientiousness and diligence

 

My dental hygienist is one of the most important people in my life. She keeps my teeth from falling out. She's highly skilled, diligent and conscientious, and when she tells me I need to floss more, she does it in the nicest way. Like the vast majority of dental hygienists, she’s a woman.

 

“Are there any men who do this?” I asked. She laughed. She said she’d never met one.

 

Being a dental hygienist is a pretty good career, especially as boomers enter their periodontal years. But the aptitudes you need to do the work are far more common among women than men: attention to detail, good people skills, super-cleanliness, ability to work in teams, calm and steady temperament. Men who go into the field are often the only males in their classes.

 

The 21st century will have a lot more work like dental hygiene, and a lot less work where it’s okay to skip the morning shower, have a few beers at lunch and screw off in the fall to go duck hunting. That’s an important reason why female employment has been on the rise and men’s participation in the work force has plunged to record lows.

 

We hear a lot of noise about creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. These are supposedly the defining traits that will separate the winners from the losers in the new hyper-competitive meritocracy. But for most of us, the real keys to success are far more old-fashioned – Victorian, even. They are self-regulation, conscientiousness and diligence. More than ever, perhaps, 21st-century success will require 19th-century values.

 

As for education, it won’t do much good for people who aren’t motivated or disciplined enough to acquire it. These people are mainly men. We all know that low-skilled men will be our world’s biggest losers, but it’s often not lack of skills that holds them back. It’s lack of the aptitudes and attitudes required for success. These are the men who can’t stay in school, can’t apply themselves, can’t take direction or defer rewards, can’t be reliable and can’t function well in teams. “Young male hotheads who just can’t follow orders are pretty well doomed,” economist Tyler Cowen says in Average is Over, a sharp and sobering book on who will get ahead, and why.

 

Self-regulation matters more today in every field – even journalism. In the distant mists of time, when newspapers were still set in hot type and women were relegated to the women’s section, newsmen smoked like chimneys, cursed like sailors and got hammered at the Press Club every night. Their social skills would never make the cut today. In modern newsrooms, no one ever drinks or smokes or yells. Young reporters are required to have advanced degrees, take direction well and work in teams. Their idea of substance abuse is eating doughnuts in the office.

 

Today, it’s work habits – not credentials or connections – that separate one liberal-arts BA from another. The one who works her butt off and saves her money is still destined for the upper middle-class. The Grand Theft Auto addict is destined for his parents’ basement.

 

The trouble is that cultivating 19th-century habits in the 21st century isn’t easy. In Victorian times, self-regulation was reinforced by many kinds of external pressure, including social norms, religion, family and Queen. The consequences of lapsing from the straight and narrow – social disgrace, even ruin – could be severe. Today, you’re far more reliant on yourself to stay the course, and nobody else much cares if you don’t.

 

On top of that, we face temptations our ancestors could never have imagined – many of them engineered to zero in on our pleasure centres with scientific precision. As Daniel Akst argues in his highly readable book, Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess, modern life requires an unnatural degree of self-control. Our ancestors were too busy just surviving to succumb to bad habits. But in an age of super-affluence, it’s a constant struggle to keep our appetites in check. “It’s not that we have less willpower than we used to,” he writes, “but rather that modern life immerses us daily in a set of temptations far more evolved than we are.”

 

Self-discipline and high IQ often go together. But they are not the same. As Mr. Akst reports, self-discipline is a far better predictor of university grades than either IQ or SAT scores. Two University of Pennsylvania research psychologists, Martin Seligman and Angela Duckworth, have argued that a major reason for student underachievement is not inadequate schools or boring textbooks, but “failure to exercise self-discipline . . . we believe that many of America’s children have trouble making choices that require them to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain.”

 

The million-dollar question is to what extent these qualities can be instilled in kids – especially poor ones, who lack the family support and other advantages available to children from better-off families. That’s the new holy grail in education. It’s also the foundation of the KIPP charter school movement, which emphasizes character, high expectations and discipline. And it’s the reason that Ms. Duckworth won a MacArthur “Genius” award. The money will be used to fund her research into practical ways of strengthening self-regulation among children.

 

“The more a society progesses, the bigger a problem self-control turns out to be,” Mr. Cowen says. In the new hyper-meritocracy, people with temperate habits and Victorian values will do better than ever – and people who can't resist temptation will do even worse.

 

Which reminds me: I’ve got to go home and floss my teeth.

How to Revive the American Family. By Michael J. Lotus.

How to Revive the American Family. By Michael J. Lotus. Real Clear Religion, October 7, 2013.

The Promise and Peril of Pope Francis. By Ross Douthat.

The Promise and Peril of Pope Francis. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, October 5, 2013.

Douthat:

To understand Pope Francis — his purpose, his program and its potential pitfalls — it’s useful to think about what’s been happening to New York City’s Jews.

 

From the 1950s on, New York’s Jewish population declined, amid suburbanization and assimilation. But over the last 10 years, the numbers began to rise again, climbing 10 percent between 2002 and 2011.

 

But this growth was almost all among Orthodox Jews. The city’s Reform and Conservative populations continued to drop, as did Jewish religious observance over all.

 

As a result, New York’s Jewish community is increasingly polarized, with more Jews at the most traditional end of the theological spectrum, more Jews entirely detached from the institutions of their ancestral faith — and ever-fewer observant Jews anywhere in the middle. What’s happened in New York is happening nationally: a recent Pew study found a similar pattern of growth among the Orthodox and a similar waning of religious practice and affiliation in the rest of the American Jewish population.

 

This is not just a Jewish story. It’s been the story of religion in the West for over 40 years. The most traditional groups have been relatively resilient. The more liberal, modernizing bodies have lost membership, money, morale. And the culture as a whole has become steadily more disengaged from organized faith. There is still a religious middle today, but it isn’t institutionally Judeo-Christian in the way it was in 1945. Instead, it’s defined by nondenominational ministries, “spiritual but not religious” pieties and ancient heresies reinvented as self-help.

 

Of late, this process of polarization has carried an air of inevitability. You can hew to a traditional faith in late modernity, it has seemed, only to the extent that you separate yourself from the American and Western mainstream. There is no middle ground, no center that holds for long, and the attempt to find one quickly leads to accommodation, drift and dissolution.

 

And this is where Pope Francis comes in, because so much of the excitement around his pontificate is a response to his obvious desire to reject these alternatives — self-segregation or surrender — in favor of an almost-frantic engagement with the lapsed-Catholic, post-Catholic and non-Catholic world.

 

The idea of such engagement — of a “new evangelization,” a “new springtime” for Christianity — is hardly a novel one for the Vatican. But Francis’s style and substance are pitched much more aggressively to a world that often tuned out his predecessors. His deliberate demystification of the papacy, his digressive interviews with outlets secular and religious, his calls for experimentation within the church and his softer tone on the issues — abortion, gay marriage — where traditional religion and the culture are in sharpest conflict: these are not doctrinal changes, but they are clear strategic shifts.

 

John Allen Jr., one of the keenest observers of the Vatican, has called Francis a “pope for the Catholic middle,” positioned somewhere between the church’s rigorists and the progressives who pine to Episcopalianize the faith.

 

But the significance of this positioning goes beyond Catholicism. In words and gestures, Francis seems to be determined to recreate, or regain, the kind of center that has failed to hold in every major Western faith.

 

So far, he has at least gained the world’s attention. The question is whether that attention will translate into real interest in the pope’s underlying religious message or whether the culture will simply claim him for its own — finally, a pope who doesn’t harsh our buzz! — without being inspired to actually consider Christianity anew.

 

In the uncertain reaction to Francis from many conservative Catholics, you can see the fear that the second possibility is more likely. Their anxiety is not that the new pope is about to radically change church teaching, since part of being a conservative Catholic is believing that such a change can’t happen. Rather, they fear that the center he’s trying to seize will crumble beneath him, because the chasm between the culture and orthodox faith is simply too immense.

 

And they worry as well that we have seen something like his strategy attempted before, when the church’s 1970s-era emphasis on social justice, liturgical improvisation and casual-cool style had disappointing results: not a rich engagement with modern culture but a surrender to that culture’s “Me Decade” manifestations — producing tacky liturgy, ugly churches, Jonathan Livingston Seagull theology and ultimately empty pews.

 

Francis seems acquainted with that danger — witness his warnings against a church that just “becomes an N.G.O.,” or against reducing Christianity to “taking a spiritual bath in the cosmos.”

 

But the test of his approach will ultimately be a practical one. Will the church grow or stagnate under his leadership? Will his style just win casual admirers, or will it gain converts, inspire vocations, create saints? Will it actually change the world, or just give the worldly another excuse to close their ears to the church’s moral message?

 

By his fruits we will know — but not for some time yet.

The Nature of Peacemaking According to Netanyahu. By Haviv Rettig Gur.

Why it matters that Netanyahu doesn’t know that Iranians wear jeans. By Max Fisher. Washington Post, October 7, 2013. Also here.

Netanyahu: For peace, Palestinians must recognize Jewish homeland. By Herb Keinon. Jerusalem Post, October 6, 2013.

Netanyahu blames Mideast conflict on refusal to recognize Jewish state. The Times of Israel, October 6, 2013.

State of myopia. The Daily Star (Lebanon), October 8, 2013.

Top PLO official dubs Netanyahu “number one extremist.” By Elhanan Miller. The Times of Israel, October 8, 2013.

The nature of peacemaking according to Netanyahu. By Haviv Rettig Gur. The Times of Israel, October 7, 2013.

Gur:

The point here goes to the psychology of leadership: If the enemy is viewed as implacably evil, peacemaking necessarily becomes politically ruinous. It is only when the enemy is seen as possessing some justice on their side that a leader’s efforts to accommodate that enemy become legitimate and politically palatable.

 

This difference in the perception of the enemy has arguably played an oversized role in recent Israeli history. During the 1990s, those Israelis who believed the Oslo peace process was addressing the Palestinians’ just demand for self-determination often saw the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as a national hero, “a warrior for peace.” Those who saw the Palestinians as an implacable, illegitimate enemy viewed Rabin as either a dangerous fool or a traitor.

 

Netanyahu’s demand for recognition has its roots in this Israeli experience. The Palestinians cannot bring themselves to end the conflict, Netanyahu believes, because they cannot bring themselves to compromise with an enemy they view as completely evil.

 

They have not yet shifted from perceiving their enemy as absolutely evil to perceiving him as possessing some justice on his side, however limited. Israel remains a categorical foe, and see Israelis as interlopers robbing another people of their national home. Even Palestinian moderates share this basic view of Israel: it is an evil, but an evil too well entrenched to remove. Israel does not have even a modicum of justice on its side, only brute force, they believe.

 

Thus, any Palestinian leader who seeks peace with Israel falls into the “Chamberlain trap,” finding himself undermined by the perception among his own people that he is accommodating evil rather than pursuing justice.

 

This analysis has become a key plank of Netanyahu’s policy toward the Palestinians, and has led to some of his most misunderstood speeches and demands. It is the reason he never fails to discuss the millennia-old Jewish attachment to the land of Israel in his speeches before a United Nations General Assembly that could care less.

 

The Palestinians don’t need to become Zionists, Netanyahu believes, but they need to perceive that Jewish demands, too, are rooted in justice. Only then will their domestic constituencies and political systems be capable of engaging in peacemaking.

 

It is a mistake to view Netanyahu’s Bar-Ilan 2 speech as indicating he is withdrawing, even in tone, from the peace talks. In fact, the renewed urgency of his demand for recognition — which he believes to be critical to peacemaking — might suggest that the talks are, at long last, getting serious.


PM Netanyahu speech at Bar Ilan University, October 6, 2013. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Also at Prime Minister’s Office, The Times of Israel. Video at YouTube.

California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude. By Joel Kotkin.

California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude. By Joel Kotkin. JoelKotkin.com, October 5, 2013. Also at The Daily Beast, New Geography.

Kotkin:

California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a century, for both better and worse, California has defined progress, not only for America but for the world.

 

As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates,  the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as  the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.

 

At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.

 

Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one recent report. Nor are things expected to get better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey, most Californians expect their incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.

 

Some of these trends can be found nationwide, but they have become pronounced and are metastasizing more quickly in the Golden State. As late as the 80s, the state was about as egalitarian as the rest of the country. Now, for the first time in decades, the middle class is a minority, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

 

The Role of the Tech Oligarchs.

 

California produces more new billionaires than any place this side of oligarchic Russia or crony capitalist China. By some estimates the Golden State is home to one out of every nine of the world’s billionaires. In 2011 the state was home to 90 billionaires, 20 more than second place New York and more than twice as many as booming Texas.

 

The state’s digital oligarchy, surely without intention, is increasingly driving the state’s lurch towards feudalism. Silicon Valley’s wealth reflects the fortunes of a handful of companies that dominate an information economy that itself is increasingly oligopolistic.  In contrast to the traditionally conservative or libertarian ethos of the entrepreneurial class, the oligarchy is increasingly allied with the nominally populist Democratic Party and its regulatory agenda. Along with the public sector, Hollywood, and their media claque, they present California as “the spiritual inspiration” for modern “progressives” across the country.

 

Through their embrace of and financial support for the state’s regulatory regime, the oligarchs have made job creation in non tech-businesses—manufacturing, energy, agriculture—increasingly difficult through “green energy” initiatives that are also sure to boost already high utility costs. One critic, state Democratic Senator Roderick Wright from heavily minority Inglewood, compares the state’s regulatory regime to the “vig” or high interest charged by the Mafia, calling it a major reason for disinvestment in many industries. 

Yet even in Silicon Valley, the expansion of prosperity has been extraordinarily limited. Due to enormous losses suffered in the current tech bubble, tech job creation in Silicon Valley has barely reached its 2000 level. In contrast, previous tech booms, such as the one in the 90s, doubled the ranks of the tech community. Some, like UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, advance the dubious claim that those jobs are more stable than those created in Texas. But even if we concede that point for the moment,  the Valley’s growth primarily benefits its denizens but not most Californians. Since the recession, California remains down something like 500,000 jobs, a 3.5 percent loss, while its Lone Star rival has boosted its employment by a remarkable 931,000, a gain of more than 9 percent.

 

Much of this has to do with the changing nature of California’s increasingly elite—driven economy. Back in the 80s and even the 90s, the state’s tech sector produced industrial jobs that sparked prosperity not only in places like Palo Alto, but also in the more hardscrabble areas in San Jose and even inland cities such as Sacramento. The once huge California aerospace industry, centered in Los Angeles, employed hundreds of thousands, not only engineers but skilled technicians, assemblers, and administrators.

 

This picture has changed over the past decade. California’s tech manufacturing sector has shrunk, and those employed in Silicon Valley are increasingly well-compensated programmers, engineers and marketers. There has been little growth in good-paying blue collar or even middle management jobs. Since 2001 state production of “middle skill” jobs—those that generally require two years of training after high-school—have grown roughly half as quickly as the national average and one-tenth as fast as similar jobs in arch-rival Texas.

 

“The job creation has changed,” says Leslie Parks, a long-time San Jose economic development official. “We used to be the whole food chain and create all sorts of middle class jobs. Now, increasingly, we don’t design the future—we just think about it. That makes some people rich, but not many.”

 

In the midst of the current Silicon Valley boom, incomes for local Hispanics and African-Americans, who together account for one third of the population, have actually declined—18 percent for blacks and 5 percent for Latinos between 2009 and 2011, prompting one local booster to admit that “Silicon Valley is two valleys. There is a valley of haves, and a valley of have-nots.”

 

The Geography of Inequality

 

Geography, caste, and land ownership increasingly distinguish California’s classes from one another. As Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and the wealthier suburbs in the Bay Area have enjoyed steady income growth during the current bubble, much of the state, notes economist Bill Watkins, endures Depression-like conditions, with stretches of poverty more reminiscent of a developing country than the epicenter of advanced capitalism.

 

Once you get outside the Bay Area, unemployment in many of the state’s largest counties—Sacramento, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Fresno, and Oakland—soars into the double digits. Indeed, among the 20 American cities with the highest unemployment rates, a remarkable 11 are in California, led by Merced’s mind-boggling 22 percent rate.

 

This amounts to what conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson has labeled “liberal apartheid,” a sharp divide between a well-heeled, mostly white and Asian population located along the California coast, and a largely poor, heavily Latino working class in the interior. But the class divide is also evident within  the large metro areas, despite their huge concentrations of affluent individuals. Los Angeles, for example, has the third highest rate of inequality of the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, and the Bay Area ranks seventh.

 

The current surge of California triumphalism, trumpeted mostly by the ruling Democrats and their eastern media allies, seems to ignore the reality faced by residents in many parts of the state. The current surge of wealth among the coastal elites, boosted by rises in property, stock, and other assets, has staved off a much feared state bankruptcy. Yet the the state’s more intractible problems cannot be addressed if growth remains restricted to a handful of favored areas and industries. This will become increasingly clear when, as is inevitable, the current tech and property boom fades, depriving the state of the taxes paid by high income individuals.

 

The gap between the oligarchic class and everyone else seems increasingly permanent. A critical component of assuring class mobility, California’s once widely admired public schools were recently ranked near the absolute bottom in the country. Think about this: despite the state’s huge tech sector, California eighth graders scored 47th out of the 51 states in science testing. No wonder Mark Zuckerberg and other oligarchs are so anxious to import “techno coolies” from abroad.

 

As in medieval times, land ownership, particularly along the coast, has become increasingly difficult for those not in the upper class. In 2012, four California markets—San Jose, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles—ranked as the most unaffordable relative to income in the nation. The impact of these prices falls particularly on the poor. According to the Center for Housing Policy and National Housing Conference, 39 percent of working households in the Los Angeles metropolitan area spend more than half their income on housing, as do 35 percent in the San Francisco metro area—both higher than 31 percent in the New York area and well above the national rate of 24 percent. This is likely to get much worse given that California median housing prices rose 31 percent in the year ending May 2013. In the Bay Area the increase was an amazing 43 percent.

 

Even skilled workers are affected by these prices. An analysis done for National Core, a major developer of low income housing, found that prices in such areas as Orange County are so high that even a biomedical engineer earning more than $100,000 a year could not afford to buy a home there. This, as well as the unbalanced economy, has weakened California’s hold on aspirational families, something that threatens the very dream that has attracted  millions to the state.

 

This is a far cry from the 50s and 60s, when California abounded in new owner-occupied single family homes. Historian Sam Bass Warner suggested that this constituted “the glory of Los Angeles and an expression of its design for living.” Yet today the L.A. home ownership rate, like that of New York, stands at about half the national average of 65 percent. This is particularly true among working class and minority households. Atlanta’s African-American home ownership rate is approximately 40 percent above that of San Jose or Los Angeles, and approximately 50 percent higher than San Francisco.

 

This feudalizing trend is likely to worsen due to draconian land regulations that will put the remaining stock of single family houses ever further out of reach, something that seems related to a reduction in child-bearing in the state. As the “Ozzie and Harriet” model erodes, many Californians end up as modern day land serfs, renting and paying someone else’s mortgage. If they seek to start a family, their tendency is to look elsewhere, ironically even in places such as Oklahoma and Texas, places that once sent eager migrants to the Golden State.

 

Breaking Down the New Feudalism: The Emerging Class Structure

 

The emerging class structure of neo-feudalism, like its European and Asian antecedents, is far more complex than simply a matter of the gilded “them” and the broad “us.” To work as a system, as we can now see in California, we need to understand the broader, more divergent class structure that is emerging.

 

The Oligarchs: The swelling number of billionaires in the state, particularly in Silicon Valley, has enhanced power that is emerging into something like the old aristocratic French second estate. Through public advocacy and philanthropy, the oligarchs have tended to embrace California’s “green” agenda, with a very negative impact on traditional industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and construction. Like the aristocrats who saw all value in land, and dismissed other commerce as unworthy, they believe all value belongs to those who own the increasingly abstracted information revolution than has made them so fabulously rich.

 

The Clerisy: The Oligarchs may have the money, but by themselves they cannot control a huge state like California, much less America. Gentry domination requires allies with a broader social base and their own political power. In the Middle Ages, this role was played largely by the church; in today’s hyper-secular America, the job of shaping the masses has fallen to the government apparat, the professoriat, and the media, which together constitute our new Clerisy. The Clerisy generally defines societal priorities, defends “right-thinking” oligarchs, and chastises those, like traditional energy companies, that deviate from their theology.

 

The New Serfs: If current trends continue, the fastest growing class will be the permanently property-less. This group includes welfare recipients and other government dependents but also the far more numerous working poor. In the past, the working poor had reasonable aspirations for a better life, epitomized by property ownership or better prospects for their children. Now, with increasingly little prospect of advancement, California’s serfs depend on the Clerisy to produce benefits making their permanent impoverishment less gruesome. This sad result remains inevitable as long as the state’s economy bifurcates between a small high-wage, tech-oriented sector, and an expanding number of lower wage jobs in hospitality, health services, and personal service jobs. As a result, the working class, stunted in their drive to achieve the California dream, now represents the largest portion of domestic migrants out of the state.

 

The Yeomanry: In neo-feudalist California, the biggest losers tend to be the old private sector middle class. This includes largely small business owners, professionals, and skilled workers in traditional industries most targeted by regulatory shifts and higher taxes. Once catered to by both parties, the yeomanry have become increasingly irrelevant as California has evolved into a one-party state where the ruling Democrats have achieved a potentially permanent, sizable majority consisting largely of the clerisy and the serf class, and funded by the oligarchs. Unable to influence government and largely disdained by the clerisy, these middle income Californians are becoming a permanent outsider group, much like the old Third Estate in early medieval times, forced to pay ever higher taxes as well as soaring utility bills and required to follow regulations imposed by people who often have little use for their “middle class” suburban values.

 

The Political Implications of Neo-Feudalism

 

As Marx, among others, has suggested, class structures contain within them the seeds of their dissolution. In New York, a city that is arguably as feudal as anything in California, the  emergence of mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio reflected growing  antagonism—particularly among the remaining yeoman and serf class— towards the gentry urbanism epitomized by Mayor Michael “Luxury City” Bloomberg.

 

Yet except for occasional rumbling from the left, neo-feudalism likely represents the future. Certainly in California, Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit with the intellectual and political skills needed to oversee a neo-feudal society, remains all but unassailable politically. If Brown, or his policies, are to be contested, the challenge will likely come from left-wing activists who find his policies insufficiently supportive of the spending demanded by the clerisy and the serfs or insufficiently zealous in their pursuit of environmental purity.

 

The economy in California and elsewhere likely will determine the viability of neo-feudalism. If a weaker economy forces state and local government budget cutbacks, there could be a bruising conflict as the various classes fight over diminishing spoils. But it’s perhaps more likely that we will see enough slow growth so that Brown will be able to keep both the clerisy and the serfs sufficiently satisfied. If that is the case, the new feudal system could shape the evolution of the American class structure for decades to come.