The Secret Knowledge (23 page)

All healthy people have a conscience; those born without it are known as psychopaths, and treated, for all our philosophic sophistication, as monsters.

“Don't you
care
?”

Well. I am a Jew, and I am an American, and I am a new-minted Conservative. I care about Justice and suffering, and wonder, as has every sentient being in history, about the disparity in society of wealth and happiness, and about the seemingly inevitable corruption of our representatives, and about the imperfection and apparent injustice of many of our laws.

The revelation, of my latter years, is that
all
good people care, but that they may be, legitimately, divided as to the means to address and the potential to understand and to correct disparity, sorrow, and injustice.

I have come to see that disparity is inevitable—that there will always be rich and poor—but that disparity need be neither permanent nor systemic, and that programs designed to impose equality of result, though perhaps beautiful in prospect, have weakened every society in which they have been practiced, and lead, eventually, to dictatorship and tyranny. The record shows that those same corrupt or corruptible, which it so say, human, individuals we call “the government,” will, as their power to tax and spend increases, become or pave the way for the accession of monsters.

Government programs of confiscation and redistribution are called the War on Poverty, or the New Deal, or Hope and Change, but that these programs are given lofty names ensures neither that their intentions are lofty, nor that even, if so, they will or
could
lead to lofty results.
⁶⁹
A clearheaded review of these caring governmental subsidies, whether called welfare, or aid to Africa, or farm subsidies, reveals waste, subvention, and corruption, and tends to the enervation and the ultimate destruction both of the recipients and eventually of those taxed to provide the officeholders with the mantle of “sympathy.”
⁷⁰

What is “social justice”? It is not merely an oxymoron. It is, inherently, the notion that there is a supergovernmental, superlegal responsibility upon the right-thinking to implement their visions.

But “society” cannot implement visions. It will develop along its own lines, the inherent ethos of the time bringing about, unpredictably, change, according to unfathomable laws, which, when adjudicated according to precedent, become the written laws of the land.
⁷¹

The great advances in Justice which have made our country not only great but good are essentially the broadening of its definitions of those worthy of protection. This is the attempt to find justice through equality of opportunity. This is antithetical to that equality of result beloved of the Left; one might have one or the other, but they each are the other's negation, and one must choose.

I recognized that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to “social justice,” which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of
equality of opportunity
; and, further, that so did everyone I knew. Many, I saw, were prepared to pay more taxes, as a form of Charity, which is to say, to hand off to the Government the choice of programs and recipients of their hard-earned money, but
no
one was prepared to be on the short end of the failed Government programs,
however
well-intentioned. (For example—one might endorse a program giving to minorities preference in award of government contracts; but, as a business owner, one would fight to get the best possible job under the best possible terms regardless of such a program, and would, in fact, work by all legal and, perhaps by semi–or illegal means to subvert any program that enforced upon the proprietor a bad business decision.)
⁷²

Further, one, in paying the government to relieve him of a feeling of social responsibility, might not be bothered to question what in fact
constituted
a minority, and whether, in fact, such minority contracts were actually benefiting the minority so enshrined, or were being subverted to shell corporations and straw men.
⁷³

In the waning days of my belief in “Social Justice” I discovered, in short, that I was not living my life according to the principles I professed, that I disbelieved both in the probity and in the mechanical operations of those groups soliciting first my vote and then my money in the name of Justice, and that so did everyone I knew. Those of us untroubled by this disparity, I saw, called ourselves “Liberals.” The others were known as Conservatives.

My family always put a large premium on the ability to communicate. This is unsurprising as we had, on both sides, and for thousands of years, been stateless wanderers.

My people, the Jews, in addition to being despised as stateless,
⁷⁴
have also been, intermittently, prized for the skills that statelessness created. We have had to acquire knowledge, which is the one possession which cannot be confiscated at the border. We have had to learn languages quickly and we have, for millennia, not only honed those skills through cultural endorsement, but selected for them in our breeding.

Those who could master languages could, in our periodic dislocations, survive; those who could not would be deprived of the opportunity to reproduce.

Our cultural ratification of the mastery of Torah, thus, not only spiritually but as a matter of day-to-day existence, fulfilled God's promise: that the Torah would be a Tree of Life to those who held fast to it. For the Torah is written in Hebrew, the Talmud in Aramaic, and the Talmudic commentaries by Rashi in their own alphabet; the Chasidic masters taught in Yiddish; and the Talmud Hocham, the person learned in Talmud, is devoted to making connections between one part of the scripture and another, between one language and another, between one
idea
and another. He is celebrated for his ability to discover and cogently express his comparisons—regularizing the apparently disparate, and finding ambiguity in the supposedly unquestionable:
vide,
the success of the Jew.

The Jews' survival mechanism enabled us not only to survive but to thrive. For the expansion of world trade required not only interpreters but middlemen and merchants, whose bonds transcended the national, who shared not only a common language but a moral system, who, as they were strangers everywhere, had no recourse other than allegiance to their particular sovereign, and whose business probity would be beyond question. Why beyond question? Because, as Jews, our lives were subject to the mere
whim
of the native population—why would they, who could “kill us for the sport,” hesitate to do so at the suspicion of malfeasance?

The paradigm of Joseph, who was second only to Pharaoh, is repeated over and over again not only in the Western World but in Arabia, where, intermittently, the most trusted advisors, ministers, and doctors were the Jews.

See President-Elect Obama, whose
first
appointment was the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a Jew; see Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who discovered in late middle age that she was Jewish; see Kissinger in his relation to President Nixon. Disraeli, most trusted prime minister to Queen Victoria; Lord Beaverbrook, that is Max Aitken, closest ally of Churchill, and so on. The observable fact is, shockingly, that the world
trusts
the Jews.

The great American phrase has it: “He beat him like a redheaded stepson.” We Jews have been, since antiquity, the redheaded stepson of the world, which is to say, the Designated Victim. Having no country, we were a convenient object of loathing. Now, having a country, we retain our historical position in the world's eyes as “usurpers”—as if it were possible to house anyone otherwise than on land to which
someone
must have had some previous claim. (The State of Israel was, in the main, purchased, at exorbitant rates, from the Turks, it was created as a British mandate ratified by the League of Nations, its existence as a State later ratified by the United Nations. It has existed by universally acknowledged right of self-defense. It has been under attack continually since its inception, and, time and again, it has vanquished its attackers, pushed them back, and then
returned to them the lands from which they attacked
.
⁷⁵
And yet, uniquely, in the history of the world, there are supposedly good-willed souls shrieking that its existence is a crime.) Well, the world distrusts foreigners, and however helpful a servant may be, he will pay for his acceptance when the silver teaspoon disappears; for his master-employer-host, will then react against his own supposed “generosity.”

So my people learn languages, which, historically, include the languages of law, medicine, finance, and the arts.

Our ability to master tongues is seen in the standup comic, who, like me, is essentially a societally supported smart aleck, and in his unemployed brother. This no-good brother is known as the Luftmensch, which means the fellow who lives on air. The Luftmensch survives through his ability to manipulate language, to be sufficiently charming, entertaining, and diverting to slip through life without doing a goddamn thing. This person was, in my father's language, known as a “bum.” Growing up, I always believed that this was to be my place in the organization.

I could talk a great game, but as far as anyone (myself included) knew, I never did anything.

I loathed school. I never opened a schoolbook, I failed every test given to me (I was sent back from second to first grade, and was enrolled in remedial reading classes). It never occurred to me to point out the books that occupied all my leisure time, and suggest that perhaps they left me little time for Dick and Jane (“Oh Dick, see Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Jane, see Spot run,” et cetera).