Robert Greer Cohn

    Good, tough-loving parents and life’s early “hard knocks” along with kindness teach a kid self-reliance and a certain “tragic sense” (Lionel Trilling, referring to Keats and his “fortitude,” as well as Robert Frost), i.e. depth.
    Late civilization altogether with its endless gadgets, welfarism, and sentimental expectations has a spoiling effect:  the moral decline since World War II (seen by 80% of Americans in a solid survey), the reluctance to face real war’s casualties and sacrifices, the general spread as opposed to personal depth as manifested in sixty million obese adults and various materialistic obesities (homes, cars, possessions, electronics, gadgets, porn, entertainments, sterile sex).  Evasion, fakery, trickery, grade inflation, dishonesty, finger-pointing, steroids, ego-pretentiousness, cheating, became rampant.  Lowbrow populism degrades culture and manners, the faith-based, heartfelt tone of “golden oldie” movies is gone.
    Many caring folks know and deplore this drift: some move to the country, to New Zealand, ditch their TVs and cell-phones… Most just go along, as the Nazi German and Soviet Russian masses did.  Not a pretty picture of mankind from time to time: remember the “cities of the plain”?

    On “Jewish Genius”: true, the Jews got us started but (a) it is primarily a genius of the heart, as Goethe, Victor Hugo, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Erich Auerbach proclaimed, and (b) it became most impressive through Judeo-Christianity: the Christians, as Saint Paul stated in Romans, were like a branch grafted onto the original Judaic “olive tree,” i.e. adopted children of Abraham’s family-seed.  Some, like Charles Murray, in my experience, are proud of that heritage, and clearly “chosen,” while many Jews have dropped out and even turned against the beautiful spirit.

    One applauds Charles Murray’s generosity of spirit and serious scholarship in “Jewish Genius.”  But because intelligence is more measurable than spirit, he tends, in my view, to stress that excessively.  John Adams, Matthew Arnold, Erich Auerbach rightly put more emphasis on the Hebraic-Judaic contribution of “heart”:  transcendent, beautiful, focused morality (which Burckhardt deplored the lack of in pagan, including Greek, culture), poetic/musical depth of faith-based personality as in the stories of Joseph, Ruth, Tobit, the Psalms, the Sermon on the Mount, Paul’s words on love, Anne Frank’s…
    Who needs the kind of scheming intellect manifested comparably in modern Germany that gave us Auschwitz and goes with the fall of French, traditional, Judeo-Christian culture and our own moral decay  (seen by 80% in a recent poll) and the attendant military peril?  Who needs the hordes of clever, selfish Jews (and Gentiles) recalling the ones dancing around the Golden Calf and Babel?

    Sidney Hook was like a father to me.  My wife and I were the only people he invited to be with him and his wife, Anne, the night before he died in the hospital.
    He battled against communism and for the humanities, at Stanford, until his last breath.
    He called himself an atheist, but I knew better: walking with me on a nearby beach, he proclaimed, with shining eyes, “Vision is the great thing.”  Once he exclaimed “You are a Jeremiah” when he read something I wrote.  He proudly showed me a veritable love letter from a Christian group.
    Alan Besançon, the eminent historian, a staunch Catholic (married to a Sephardic wife), called him “an adorable man” when I visited him after Sidney’s death.
    Like many good Jews, from the beginning he dreamed of universalism.  Jesus and Paul were examples of that, but both firmly insisted on their Jewishness (“Salvation is of the Jews,” Mark, etc.).  That “absurd,” faith-based combination is very human and healthy, balanced.
    By the same token, the spiritual war on behalf of a rebirth of the humanities, particularly on our secularized, “politically correct”, engineering and social-engineering campuses, insists on inspired humanism, as Leonard (in his Treatise on Art), Botticelli late in his career, and Erasmus, altogether, did in his time.  Our Founders, Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Mann, Faulkner were in that mold.
    “Without inspiration, nothing happens” (Richard Wilbur, in a letter to me).

    The finest, most creative modern minds tend to have freethinking attitudes toward organized faith, including our prevailing Judeo-Christian religion, but maintain belief in its essential spirit.  Our Founders, for example, were often inclined to deism, which rejected literalism in its acceptance of biblical teaching but kept the belief in a personal God of (transcendent) morality.  Washington’s Farewell Address, like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, sounded that note, as did Jefferson in his Memorial, where he insisted that liberty was a (moral) gift of God and that a nation that forgot that was in spiritual trouble.
    From this viewpoint, they, like Goethe and Balzac, could accept individual atheism and private wayward sexual bents but not their public promulgation, especially to children.  That is indiscreet, selfish, and wrong.
    That was still the rule in my early years in Virginia and Canada, and it underlies the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gays in the armed services.