Book Review
The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement
in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements
Kevin MacDonald
Long Beach, 1st Books Library, 2002
Reviewed by Dwight D. Murphey
This is one of the more important books of our time, and deserves
to be studied seriously by every student of modern life and by everyone
who cares about whether Western civilization continues its slide into oblivion.
Kevin MacDonald, professor of psychology at California State
University, Long Beach, examines honestly, dispassionately and courageously
the role that ethnically-conscious Jews have played during the past century
in the many movements that have made up what I and others have called "the
alienation of the intellectual" (against the mainstream of Western society).
MacDonald doesn't speak of "alienation," but instead of a "culture of critique,"
which is the same thing.
So great has that Jewish involvement been that it constitutes
a fact of major significance in understanding the alienation and its power.
In Chapter 11 of my book Understanding the Modern Predicament, I examined
several causes of the alienation. The discussion there is certainly
incomplete without adding the details of MacDonald's study. The role
of Jews in cultural alienation should be added as a major, and often central,
ingredient.
At the same time, it is important to notice that MacDonald is
giving a conscientious rendering of only one part of a much larger phenomenon.
His book in itself shows no awareness that the "intelligentsia" has been
alienated against the "bourgeoisie" for thousands of years -- for many
centuries on behalf of aristocratic values and then, beginning in the early
eighteenth century, on behalf of whatever allies it could recruit in an
ideological war against the man of industry and commerce, and indeed against
the entire way of life of an "individualist" society. What MacDonald
says informs us that a great many Jews, pursuing ethnically-conscious aims,
have been part of that more recent phase of the alienation (although he
speaks only to the twentieth century and does not include the eighteenth
and nineteenth). But, we must add: so have a great many non-Jews.
The alienation, and the ideological seeking of allies seriatum in all disaffected
or unassimilated groups, has been a much larger movement than one of "evolutionary
strategy on the part of Jews." It has encompassed the entire Left
and the anti-bourgeois Right, including fascism and Nazism and their progenitors,
and has claimed many fathers, gentile and Jew alike. (See Benda's
famous The Treason of the Intellectuals, where he tells of the flaming
anti-bourgeois thinking of the nineteenth century in Europe.)
MacDonald says he started out on his three-volume series analyzing
the history of Judaism "from an evolutionary perspective" as a scholar
without ethnic consciousness of his own. By the time he finished
the volume under review, which is the third and final volume, his scholarly
objectivity had taken on a normative extension. His studies revealed
to him the extent to which ethnically-conscious Jews had played a central
role in much of the most destructive activity of the modern age ("destructive"
if one uses the normative structure of the West and its interests as a
basis for judgment). He came to see the immense danger the West is
now in. Because of this, he developed an ethnic consciousness of
his own, at odds with that of the many Jews he was studying. This
introduces a valuational aspect into the book, which is otherwise purely
descriptive.
MacDonald is accordingly profoundly critical of a large number
of Jews who include many of the more prominent personalities in the intellectual
and political context of the past century. But any charge that he
is for that reason "anti-Semitic" misses the mark entirely. He is
discussing, as a scholar must, the facts of a phenomenon of untold significance
on the world stage; and that is legitimate no matter whom it criticizes.
Never does he depart from a reasoned analysis, based on fact, into a generalized
animus or into an expression of ethnic or religious prejudice. Predictably,
there are those who don't like it that he has studied what he has, but
the task is for them to refute it (if they will or can) by recourse to
an equally accomplished scholarship.
MacDonald is aware that he needs to go to extraordinary lengths
to make his lack of anti-Semitic prejudice clear to readers. He often
repeats disclaimers that in other contexts would hardly seem necessary:
that he is not positing that all Jews have been involved in the alienation,
even though many have; or that all Jews have been bad social scientists,
even though, again, many have been. And he thinks it important to
recognize that modern Judaism has not been monolithic, but instead has
featured much disagreement among Jews themselves.
These disclaimers, though valid in emphasizing the scope of what
he is saying, inevitably render something of a disservice. If ethnically-conscious
Jews have played and continue to play pivotal roles in the movements that
threaten Western civilization, that is a fact of vital concern. To
the extent that pointing out that not all Jews have been part of this detracts
from our grasp of its importance, that is unfortunate. But this is
no different from a great many other things in intellectual life: there
is the paradox that both the message and the qualifiers are important,
even though they in part cancel each other out, it least so far as rhetorical
force is concerned. We need not buy into all of the allegations that
have taken on mythical status about the Holocaust to realize that great
human tragedy can arise out of a failure to dull, by appropriate distinctions,
any message that is critical of Jews or of any other group of human beings.
The disclaimer that not all Jews have been alienated and radical
also should not obscure our understanding that a culture of alienation
did in fact predominate among American Jews through much of the century
following 1880. Nathan Glazer told us in his autobiographical Remembering
the Answers that "the East European Jews... became, in the course of the
great migration between 1880 and 1924, the dominant part of American Jewry."
Glazer spoke of a "Jewish ethnic culture" and admonished us that "we must
remember that a powerful strain in that culture, rivaling in its appeal
and significance for Jews the Jewish religion itself, was Jewish socialism,
in a score of variants." He said this was "a cultural background
in which socialism in one of its variants was as common as the almost universal
desire to send one's children to college." This tells us that the
predominant Jewish presence that came to exist in the United States through
the immigration was profoundly alien to erstwhile American values.
It rejected the fundamentals of the society into which it migrated.
This has had an incalculable impact on virtually all aspects of American
life.
MacDonald sees his three-volume project as a work of science
that applies an "evolutionary analysis." I, however, am not an anthropologist
or evolutionary scientist by training, so I find the significance of this
third book more in what it has to tell us about modern intellectual and
political life, not in that analysis. I venture little opinion about
the "evolutionary" thesis per se. What follows in this review will touch
upon the other facets.
Movements in Which Ethnically-Conscious Jews Have Been Pivotal
1. Freudianism. Sigmund Freud retained a strong Jewish
identity despite his rejection of religion. The psychoanalytical
system he developed towered over much twentieth century thought and has
only recently gone into decline. It has been called "the Jewish science"
because of the great weight of ethnically-conscious Jews in it. Freud's
theories sought a world "free of the neuroses produced by sexually repressive
Western civilization"; and Freud himself "viewed psychoanalysis as subverting
gentile culture."
Though widely honored as a form of science, Freudian psychology
was very much the opposite, a form of secular religion. "Unlike in
a real science, in psychoanalysis there is a continuing role for what one
might term the sacred texts of the movement." MacDonald quotes Paul
Churchland: "How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted
– on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in
the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the
major classes of mental illness... – is something that sociologists of
science and popular culture have yet to fully explain."
2. Boasian anthropology. Franz Boas, himself a socialist
and a Jew, was for four decades a professor of anthropology at Columbia
University. A stream of his students, many of them Jewish and others
not, "revolutionized American anthropology in the direction of radical
environmentalism." A central concept has been that "race is unimportant
in explaining human behavior." This is an important thesis that comports
fully with what MacDonald says throughout The Culture of Critique: that
ethnically-conscious Jews have devised a number of ways to dissolve the
West's (gentile) society's belief in itself, while inconsistently remaining
very much devoted to ethnicity themselves. (We see this today, in
an even broader application, under the ideology of "multiculturalism."
There, one finds an iron-clad taboo against any racial consciousness on
the part of Caucasians, but all other ethnic groups are encouraged to exalt
their own.)
3. The French structuralist movement. MacDonald tells
us this movement was not as a whole Jewish, but that Claude Levi-Strauss
"had a strong Jewish identity" and was described in F. Dosse "as ‘the common
father' of Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Jacques
Lucan."
4. Postmodernism. Foucault, one of Levi-Strauss's
apostles, is described as "the enormously influential postmodernist."
MacDonald says "postmodernism has opted for complete relativism and the
lack of objective standards of any kind in the interests of preventing
any general theories of society or universally valid philosophical or moral
systems." This provokes a question on MacDonald's part: "Intellectually
one wonders how one could be a postmodernist and a committed Jew at the
same time." He says that "intellectual consistency would seem to
require that all personal identifications be subjected to the same deconstructing
logic." The same point applies with equal force to the thinking
of Jacques Derrida, "the premier philosopher of deconstruction," who "has
a complex and ambiguous Jewish identity." (We are reminded that the
important strategic role of relativisms of all kinds in the ideology of
the Left has long been to "do away with the other fellow's commitment to
what he believes," while at the same time asserting strong moral imperatives
of its own. See the section on "Relativism and Pragmatism" in Chapter 8
of my Liberalism in Contemporary America.)
5. Cultural pluralism. Horace Kallen was one of the
Jewish founders of the Menorah Society, which was on the radical left in
the 1930s. MacDonald speaks of Kallen as "the originator of cultural
pluralism as a model for the United States." Kallen articulated his
views in an article in The Nation in 1915 under the heading "Democracy
versus the melting pot," and further in a 1924 book Culture and Democracy
in the United States. The significance of Kallen's contribution becomes
clear when we recall that multiculturalism has since World War II become
the primary strategy of the American Left, which largely gave up seeking
an alliance with "the proletariat" and has sought alliances with all other
unassimilated or disaffected groups. This has been augmented enormously
by the wide-open immigration from the Third World that has occurred since
1965. I say "the American Left," but the same invasion from the Third
World is encouraged in Europe as well, and is radically changing the demographics
of the European societies.
6. The Frankfurt School. MacDonald informs us that the
first generation of the Frankfurt School consisted entirely of ethnically-conscious
Jews and that its Institute was financed by a Jewish millionaire, Felix
Weil. The thinkers identified with the School have included T. W.
Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Georg
Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci. (See Patrick Buchanan's excellent discussion
of these thinkers in Chapter 4 of his The Death of the West.) "Critical
theory," which has attracted so much attention in academia and has outlets
in several journals, stems from the Frankfurt School.
Fromm and Marcuse were eventually excluded from the group when
their views came to vary from the doctrine laid down by Adorno. Again,
we see the pattern of mental authoritarianism as distinct from free intellectual
inquiry. (I might add that this is not peculiarly a trait of ethnically-conscious
Jewish movements; on the right, Ayn Rand's "objectivist" movement and the
Austrian School of Economics both come to mind as movements that have long
reacted harshly to heretics.)
As with so much of the Left's thinking, the Frankfurt School's
ideas owed a great deal to Rousseau: that there is an underlying "natural"
human nature that is sound but that has long been warped out of shape by
the "authoritarianism" inherent in the various systems of "domination,"
including capitalism, that prevail within existing civilization. The effect
with Rousseau was to stand outside all of civilization critiquing it as
destructive. With the later Left, the effect has been to "pathologize"
the values and social constraints that make up the fabric most particularly
of bourgeois society.
The idea has been to sell bourgeois society on its own moral
depravity. MacDonald observes that this is also a matter of pathologizing
any gentile group allegiances. In place of those putatively depraved
constraints, the School advocated the radical "do your own thing" sort
of "individualism" that later became so popular within the New Left, while,
MacDonald says, "at the same time retaining their own powerful group allegiance
to Judaism."
7. Zionism. Little needs to be said about the ethnically-conscious
nature of this movement that pressed, beginning in the late nineteenth
century, for a Jewish national home and (over the objection of many Jews)
was the prime mover in the establishment of Israel. It is one of
the most important movements in the world today because it is, and long
has been, backed so unquestioningly by American policy, in large part but
not exclusively because of the extensive Jewish influence within the American
elite – and because this in turn has led to the face-off between much of
Islam and the United States.
8. Promoting "the Holocaust." The elevation of "the
Holocaust" "to the level of the pivotal historico-cultural icon in Western
societies" has been a major phenomenon since the mid-1960s. Even
though totalitarian systems murdered tens of millions of human beings of
all ethnicities during the past century, the Holocaust accounts focus entirely
on the Jewish victims of Nazism, claiming that their experience was "unique."
It is not too much to say that the Holocaust has become the subject
of a gigantic cult. Thoroughly protected by the insistence upon "political
correctness" and by laws in major countries such as Germany, France and
Canada that don't allow any questioning of the officially-recognized version,
the cult's many voices condemn any dissent, no matter how scholarly, as
morally perverse. Funded by massive governmental support and media
contributions, the promotion has rightly come to be called "the Holocaust
industry." There is rarely a time when there is not a first-rate
movie, book or documentary before the public. Meanwhile, all those
who died in the Gulags or under Mao or Pol Pot lie, in effect, in unmarked
graves. Jewish victims have "survivors" who remember their relatives
with continued anguish; the Ukrainians whose families went through the
forced starvation of the winter of 1932-33 evidently do not. Or so
it would seem in the context of what can only be understood as a contrived
Jewish narcissism.
MacDonald identifies several purposes this decades-long propaganda
campaign has served: it was used to rally support for Israel after the
1967 and 1973 wars (just as it remains the great moral legitimator of Israel
and its actions today); it provides a rallying-point for Jewish identity;
it furnishes an antidote for anti-Semitism (and, what's even more to the
point, allows much that is not actually anti-Semitic to be condemned as
such); it makes possible a "victim" status even for those who are among
the wealthiest and most successful people in a society such as that of
the United States; and it fosters a "fortress mentality" that helps so
greatly to consolidate Jewish ethnic consciousness. All of these
are important, but I would have us notice especially the Holocaust cult's
role in legitimating Israel and the United States' unwavering support for
Israel. It is this more than anything else that has placed the United
States in the predicament it is now in in Iraq, Afghanistan and "the war
on terror."
9. The "New York Intellectuals." The Partisan Review
was the flagship journal of this predominantly Jewish movement. Many
well-known names were associated with it, including Susan Sontag, Saul
Bellow, Norman Mailer, Irving Howe, Edward Shils, David Riesman, Michael
Walzer and Lionel Trilling. In general, they were cultural elitists,
tended to idolize Trotsky, and had a special animus against rural America.
Parts of the New York Intellectuals gravitated into "neo-conservatism."
10. Neo-conservatism. MacDonald describes this as
"a Jewish movement," which seems well justified despite occasional objections
by some to the contrary. It arose from the fear of leftist anti-Semitism,
and actually traces its origins back to Stalin's Moscow show trials against
the major Bolsheviks in the 1930s. Intellectually, the neo-conservative
movement draws its inspiration from Leo Strauss rather than from, say,
Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk and other traditionalists. It has been
extremely influential in fashioning the foreign policy of President George
W. Bush. It urges the United States to pursue a grand policy of world-interventionism
and meliorism as distinct from pursuing specifically American national
interests, and is adamantly pro-Israel.
11. The New Left. MacDonald quotes Lipset to the
effect that the original impetus of the 1960s student protest movement
"almost necessarily began with the scions of the relatively well-to-do,
liberal-to-left, disproportionately Jewish intelligentsia." "Jews
constituted 80 percent of the students signing the petition to end ROTC
at Harvard and 30-50 percent of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)."
Much of the funding came from Jewish sources: "In the United States, foundations
such as the Stern Family Fund, the Rabinowitz Fund, and the Rubin Foundation
provided money for radical underground publications during the 1960s."
In Chapter 13 of my book Liberalism in Contemporary America,
I listed several factors that contributed to the demise of the New Left
after 1970 (although many residuals remain to this day). MacDonald
brings to light a fact that is very important in understanding that demise:
that most Jews abandoned the New Left after the 1967 Six-Day War to devote
themselves entirely to Israeli and other Jewish causes. When we consider
how important Jews were to the New Left, their withdrawal was necessarily
catastrophic to it.
We are reminded of the continuing significance of the New Left
when MacDonald says "there is a growing realization that the countercultural
revolution of the 1960s is a watershed event in the history of the United
States."
12. Communism. I have left this to the last only
because I have wanted not to overshadow what MacDonald tells us about the
Jewish role in the more obviously "intellectual" movements; but, of course,
the central role that Jews played in early Soviet Communism and in the
post-World War II Communism within Poland and Hungary is of such striking
importance that it would be hard to overstate it. "The Soviet government
killed over 20 million of its own citizens, the vast majority in the first
25 years of its existence during the height of Jewish power." During
that period, "although individual Jews were caught up in the Bolshevik
violence, Jews were not targeted as a group," as were such ethnic populations
as "Ukrainians, Cossacks, Chechens, Crimean Tartars, Volga Germans, Moldavians,
Kalmyks, Karachai, Balkars, Ingush, Greeks, Bulgars, Crimean Armenians,
Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins."
Jews, MacDonald says, "were prominently involved in the Bolshevik
Revolution and formed an elite group in the Soviet Union well into the
post-World War II-era." He adds: "The Bolshevik revolution... had
a pronounced ethnic angle: To a very great extent, Jews and other non-Russians
ruled over the Russian people...."
Other Aspects of the Jewish Role
Many features need to be noted of the role Jews have played in
recent intellectual and political movements, even though they don't fit
exclusively into a discussion of any one of the individual movements.
1. The frequent abuse of science. We pride ourselves
on living in an "age of science," but in a great many areas a scientific
veneer is placed over intellectual efforts that fall far short on scientific
method. In fact, it is precisely the case that science's high reputation
attracts such imitators.
The abuse of science occurs much more broadly than just in the
Jewish intellectual movements MacDonald discusses. Much of the work
done within the social sciences in American universities must be considered,
at best, pseudo-scientific; and the environmentalist movement has unfortunately,
for the most part, chosen to thrive on the exaggerations an abuse of science
makes possible. But the predominantly Jewish movements MacDonald
discusses have certainly contributed to it. He writes of "the high
degree of internal group cohesion characteristic of the movements considered
in this volume" and says they took "the form of hermeneutic systems able
to accommodate any and all events into their interpretive schemas.
And although these movements sought the veneer of science, they inevitably
controverted the fundamental principles of science as an individualistic
inquiry into the natures of reality." At the root of it, there was
the "implicit theory... that intellectual activities of all types may at
bottom involve ethnic warfare."
2. "Jewish moral particularism." MacDonald speaks
of this as "a general feature of Jewish culture." It amounts to the
claim that Jews are "ontologically" exceptional, and shows up in a preoccupation
with Jewish interests to the exclusion of others. MacDonald says
"Jewish involvement with Bolshevism is perhaps the most egregious example
of Jewish moral particularism in all of history. The horrific consequences
of Bolshevism for millions of non-Jewish Soviet citizens do not seem to
have been an issue for Jewish leftists – a pattern that continues into
the present."
We see this moral narcissism in the claim that the Jewish experience
under the Nazis was "unique." This claim helps support the double
standard that the world intellectual and political elite has so long applied
to the Nazi and Marxist-Leninist totalitarian regimes.
The particularlism is seen, too, in the unconcern that Zionists
have had for more than a century toward the feelings of the Arabs.
Among many other things, this resulted in placing the Jewish national home
in Israel directly in the face of many years of Arab protestations.
As with most of the other characteristics of Jewish intellectual
culture, such "particularism" is not their exclusive possession.
It is probably not too much to say that most peoples see themselves as
the center of existence; and it is all-too-common to feel little empathy
toward others. The growth of a widening circle of empathy is a mark
of civilization, but humanity has only partly and episodically achieved
civilization, as I argued in the first third of my book Understanding the
Modern Predicament.
3. The strangling of dissent. I hesitated to use
so strong a word as "strangling," but anything less graphic falls short.
MacDonald says that by the early 1940s "America had entered into an era
when it had become morally unacceptable to discuss Jewish interests at
all. We are still in that era." He could have gone back even
earlier, since he quotes Madison Grant's complaint written in 1921 that
"it is well-nigh impossible to publish in the American newspapers any reflection
upon certain religions or races which are hysterically sensitive even when
mentioned by name."
On September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh gave his famous speech
in Des Moines that, though anti-Semitic only in the tortured sense that
anything that is critical of particular Jews is per se anti-Semitic, was
highly critical of the role Jews in the media, films and government were
playing in leading the United States into World War II. Whatever
one thinks about whether the United States should have become a party to
that war (and most Americans today take it for granted that we should have,
but a strong majority felt just the opposite before Pearl Harbor), Lindbergh
was discussing forthrightly and courageously a matter of the greatest importance
to the American people. The result?: "Lindbergh's speech was greeted
with a torrent of abuse and hatred unparalleled for a mainstream figure
in American history. Overnight Lindbergh went from cultural hero
to moral pariah."
Under the rubric of "abolishing hate," "Jewish organizations
have taken the lead in attempting to censor the Internet." MacDonald
tells how "the Simon Wiesenthal Center distributes a compact disc titled
‘Digital Hate 2001' that lists over 3000 ‘hate sites on the Internet.'"
(To have some idea of how far the concept of "hate" is stretched to include
legitimate inquiry, we should recall that my own monograph on the history
of lynching has been barred from Canada on the pretext that it encourages
hate.)
The strangling of ideas appears in many contexts, but one of
the most significant is pointed to by MacDonald when he says, in the context
of the post-September 11 world, that "we are bogged down in a war with
no realizable endgame largely because of influence of the Jewish community
over one area of our foreign policy and because of how effectively any
mention of the role of Israel in creating friction between the U.S. and
the Arab world – indeed the entire Muslim world – is muzzled simply by
the cry of anti-Semitism."
4. Long-standing dominance within the American media.
MacDonald supplies detail about how greatly the American media are in Jewish
hands. "The largest media company in the world was recently formed
by the merger of America on Line and Time Warner. Gerald M. Levin...
is the chief executive officer... The second largest media company is the
Walt Disney Company, headed by Michael Eisner... The third largest media
company is Viacom, Inc., headed by Sumner Redstone, who is also Jewish."
This isn't all; he continues by recounting the Jewish control of film studios,
music groups, television companies, newspapers and newsmagazines.
This dominance goes back a long time. "In a booklet
published in 1936, the editors of Fortune magazine concluded that the main
sources of Jewish influence on the media were their control of the two
major radio networks and the Hollywood movie studios... They suggested
that ‘at the very most, half of the opinion-making and taste-influencing
paraphernalia in America is in Jewish hands.'" MacDonald follows
this by much greater detail from that period.
5. Social, economic, political prominence. "While
constituting approximately 2.4 percent of the population of the United
States," MacDonald says, "Jews represent half of the top one hundred Wall
Street executives and about 40 percent of admissions to Ivy League colleges.
Lipset and Raab (1995) note that Jews contribute between one-quarter and
one-third of all political contributions in the United States, including
one-half of Democratic Party contributions and one-fourth of Republican
contributions."
What MacDonald is describing is, in his own words, a people who
have high intelligence, ambition, persistence, willingness to work, and
ability to organize cohesively. Taken in themselves, these are eminently
desirable traits. For reasons MacDonald has discussed, however, the
result has been a culture of alienation toward the West.
What now is most needed is for MacDonald to study Western gentile
society to analyze why it has, by contrast, been so effete. "The
fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are
underlings." MacDonald wavers between an anticipation that eventually
"the European-derived peoples of the United States will become increasingly
unified," on the one hand, and on the other "the distinct possibility that
in the long run European Americans will be fragmented, politically powerless,
and without an effective group identity at all." I am pessimistic
enough to think that the prospects of these two opposites are not equally
balanced.