Thought of the Day - "Bari Weiss and The Fight for the West"

 Sixty years ago tomorrow President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Most of us remember where we were. I was in a college classroom, when I saw the American flag being lowered to half-mast. It seemed impossible that a young, attractive, vibrant President could be dead. Four of our Presidents have been assassinated, the first three within a traumatic thirty-six-year period: Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1881, and McKinley in 1901. 

 

On a cheerier note, we are two days from celebrating Thanksgiving, that special American holiday when the Pilgrims gave thanks to God for having survived their first winter and for the bounty of their harvest. We, too, owe thanks to God for the bounty that is ours, but more important to all those who came before that we might live freely in this exceptional nation.

 

I hope you are able to spend it with family and friends, for they are the glue that secures our civilization. Caroline and I will be at our daughter’s with her family, and with our younger son and his family – twelve in all.

 

Happy Thanksgiving! Sydney

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Bari Weiss and The Fight for the West”

November 21, 2023

 

“There is no place like this country. And there is no second America to run to if this one fails.”

                                                                                Bari Weiss (1984-)

                                                                                Speech, Federalist Society’s Barbara K. Olson’s Memorial Lecture

                                                                                November 13, 2023

 

Civilizations may be compared, but they are not comparable. Freedom, equal rights, rule of law, living standards, property rights vary considerably among cultures. None is perfect, as man is not perfect. But the West, as defined as Australasia, Europe, and North America[1], has provided the fairest system and the best opportunities for the aspirant, which is why so many have chosen to immigrate to those nations. The West traces its origins to classical Greece and ancient Rome. Judaism is often cited as the first monotheistic religion.[2] And Christianity was birthed in the eastern Mediterranean basin. Over a 2,300-year period, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, and others gave voice to the West’s culture. It was enhanced by the Enlightenment (1585-1815), with individuals like Shakespeare, Locke, Adam Smith, Rousseau and founding fathers of the United States: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Novelists like Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and scientists like Charles Darwin and Marie Curie added to its stature, as did artists like Michelangelo, Titian, and Rembrandt; and composers like Mozart and Beethoven. 

 

The West is not just a physical place. It was (and is) an idea – here in the United States it was (and is) an experiment in self-government, embedded in a melting pot of free people. Today, we who live in the West are beneficiaries of three thousand years of Western culture. We are fortunate to live in countries with the greatest individual freedom and the highest standards of living. We thank those who came before us, who fought and persevered for our liberties. Yet it has become popular, in recent times, to denigrate the West, to focus on its weaknesses, mistakes, and limitations, and not on its strengths and its slow move toward equality, justice, and fairness – to sublimate the individual to the group with which he or she identifies.

 

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Bari Weiss defends the West. She is remarkable – a journalist, writer, and editor, who describes herself as a “liberal uncomfortable with the excesses of left-wing culture...a left-leaning centrist.” However, Vanity Affairdescribed her as a provocateur and other publications claim she is a conservative. From my perspective, she is commonsensical.

 

She is the founder of The Free Press and hosts the podcast Honestly. She is young, a 2007 graduate of Columbia University, first hired as a Bartley Fellow that same year by The Wall Street Journal. The next year she became a Dorot Fellow in Jerusalem. She worked at The Wall Street Journal until 2017 when she was hired by The New York Times. In 2020 she penned a public resignation letter to the publisher, Mr. A.G. Sulzberger. She wrote of a new consensus having emerged in the press, “…especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

 

But it is her November 13 speech at the Federalist Society’s Barbara K. Olson’s Memorial Lecture that demands focus. Her subject was the fight for the West: “You Are the Last Line of Defense.”[3] The speech should be read in its entirety, but it is worth reviewing. She spoke of the “civilization war we are in” – including an ongoing war against Islamic terrorism. Barbara Olson, on American Airlines flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon, was murdered by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001. Twenty-two years later, on the morning of Shabbat, Hamas terrorists, in “a scene from the history of the Nazi Holocaust,” raped, mutilated, and butchered 1,200 Israelis. She drew attention to differences in reaction to the two events. Twenty-two years ago the world was horrified. On October 8, people took to the streets. They “rejoiced on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York.” “The social justice crowd,” she said, “– the crowd who has tried to convince us that words are violence – insisted that actual violence was actually a necessity.” She spoke of university presidents who, lucidly (and correctly) condemned George Floyd’s killing, now “offered silence or mealy-mouthed pablum about how the situation is tragic and ‘complex.’” 

 

She spoke of how antisemitism has moved “from the shameful fringe into the public square.” But, as she noted, it is not just about Jews: “It is an early warning system that society itself is breaking down.” She argued that we have lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil and that we have replaced ideas with identity, debate with denunciation, and “the rule of law with the fury of the mob.” She spoke of how this inverted worldview swallowed “all the crucial sense-making institutions of American life:” universities, media, cultural institutions, major corporations, high schools and elementary schools. It is a world view that “measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity.” Merit, hard work, aspiration, talent take a back seat to “unearned privilege.” In Gaza today, Israel and the Jews are “powerful and successful…, so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of color, so they are good.”

 

“So,” she asks, “what do we do?” Her answer: First, “we must recover our ability to look and discern.” We must distinguish between good and bad, between just and unjust. We must remember that it is “human beings – not cultures – [that] are created equal.” Second, the law must be enforced: “Everyone needs equal protection, not only of the law, but from forces of chaos and violence.” Third, double standards regarding free speech, especially at universities, must be eliminated. For too long, they have played favorites “based on the speech they prefer, and the racial group hierarchies they’ve established.” And fourth, she said you must “accept that you are the last line of defense and fight, fight, fight.” It is, she added, “time to defend our values – the values that have made this country the freest, most tolerant society in the history of the world – without hesitation or apology.

 

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Our democratic system is fragile. It is one that has, historically, welcomed criticism. However, there are those who, in the pursuit of personal power, would destroy what time, “blood, sweat, and tears,” and ideals have created. President Reagan used to warn that democracy was always one generation away from failing. On September 17, 1787, in response to a question by Elizabeth Willing Powel as to what the Constitutional Convention had created, the 81-year-old Benjamin Franklin, replied: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Our system of government, born in the Age of Enlightenment, is a political manifestation of Western civilization and its values. Threats to it by those ignorant of history are real, especially when those threats come draped in the language of social justice. We must respond affirmatively to Franklin’s assertion. Bari Weiss is doing her part to keep alive the ethics and standards that the West gifted us. We must do our part.  

 

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[1] In defining the West, some include western Russia, along with Central and South America. 

[2] Others claim the first monotheistic religion was Zoroastrianism in Persia.

[3] Her speech: https://www.thefp.com/p/you-are-the-last-line-of-defense