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Normality is overrated




Dear Spengler,
Like many Jews of my generation (I was born in 1961), I was completely unprepared, psychologically, emotionally and in any other way, for the wave of anti-Semitism which has been sweeping the world these last three and a half years. I grew up in the United States and moved to Israel after completing high school, and I never had any first-hand experience with anti-Semitism (except for being cursed at once by a bunch of drunk rednecks riding in the back of a pickup truck in Maryland). So, unlike my parents' generation, who grew up having to cope with serious anti-Semitism (my father was in Dachau; my mother's family fled Berlin after Hitler came to power), I never had to, and the same is true of nearly all my contemporaries except those who grew up in the Soviet Union.

Yet these days, I can't open a newspaper or log on to the Internet without encountering numerous reports of either outright, often violent, anti-Semitism or of vicious anti-Semitism thinly veiled as anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism. It's very demoralizing. I take some comfort from your articles, which give me hope that we'll still be reading the Bible in Hebrew long after there's anyone left who can read Proust or Kant or Dante in the untranslated original. But I take no comfort at all from the realization that if those writers are read at all it will be in Arabic translation.

Do you have any advice on how to develop the emotional and psychological tools for coping with anti-Semitism?
Uzi Amit-Kohn
Jerusalem



Dear Uzi,
Not every day does a columnist at an Asian publication get a query from Jerusalem about anti-Semitism. Careful what you ask for.

My advice is: If you want everyone to feel sorry for you, move to sub-Saharan Africa and lose weight. If you want to stay Jewish, toughen up.

On occasion I eavesdrop on the Jewish debate on the subject, eg the February issue of Commentary, where several authorities contend that anti-Semitism stems from envy of Jewish success. There surely is some truth to this. In 1965, the same sort of envy murdered a million ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. No one, though, imagines that there is a world Chinese conspiracy. Something else must be at work. More than Jewish success, I surmise, other peoples envy Jewish immortality (What the Jews won't tell you, November 4, 2003). In the midst of a Great Extinction of peoples, you should expect this to get worse, not better.

Your best-known theologian of the past century was Franz Rosenzweig, who wrote:

"[The Jewish] people, because it trusts in its self-created eternity and in nothing else in the world, truly believes in its own eternity. The peoples of the world, however, must reckon with their own death, be it at a point in time ever so distant, just as every individual must reckon with his own death. The love of the peoples for their own ethnicity is sweet and pregnant with this presentiment of death. Love is only so sweet when its object is mortal; only the bitterness of death can evoke this ultimate sweetness. Thus the peoples of the world can foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains will lie under the heavens as it does today, but other people will live there; when their language will be entombed in the libraries and their laws and customs will have lost their living power." (Der Stern der Erloesung, Suhrkamp, p 338, my translation)

Hebrew is the only language spoken continuously for the past 3,000 years (and perhaps longer, but let us leave that to the philologists), and the Jews are the only people who have come down intact through history. Of the countless tribes and tongues extinguished by rapine and conquest, we know the names of only a small fraction. Only a fraction of that fraction has left behind a trace of their now-extinct language. An unfathomable amount of human striving has vanished into the mist - the fury of warriors, the devotion of priests, the passion of lovers, the anxiety of parents. Their unremembered lives have lost their significance. In vain we listen for echoes of this perished mass of humanity, for an Assyrian mother's lament over a dead child, for the clang of bronze at a Scythian battle, for the intonation of prayers to a Toltec idol now lodged in a museum. But the extinct peoples will not speak to us; their muteness horrifies us, warning that one day no one will remember us either. For the preponderance of humanity, Mephisto's gloat over the body of Faust applies with a vengeance:

Vorbei! ein dummes Wort. Warum vorbei? Vorbei und reines Nicht, vollkommnes Einerlei!
("It's over" - a stupid notion. Why"over"?"Over" and pure nothing, one and the same thing!)

As the German language fades, no one will remember Goethe's Mephisto, either.

The Jews, on the other hand, recall indignantly every injury over three and a half millennia. That is a luxury no other nation possesses. Everyone else forgot about all the past injuries after the men were killed, the women raped, and the children carried off as slaves. For most of humanity, things are getting more dangerous, not less. I replied as follows on July 8, 2003, to Eric Garrett of the World Conservation Union:


"Does Spengler know, for instance, that in the last century 2,000 distinct ethnic groups have gone extinct?" Eric Garrett asks in his June 12 riposte, A question of identity, to an earlier article of mine, Neo-cons in a religious bind.

Garrett's organization, the World Conservation Union, is devoted to preserving fragile cultures. As a matter of fact, I reported in this space that in the next decade, yet another 2,000 distinct ethnic groups would go extinct (Live and let die, April 13, 2002). Ignore the endangered Ewoks for a moment, Mr Garrett, and explain why the imperial peoples of the past two centuries - Germans, Japanese, French, Italians, Russians, and so forth - have elected to disappear, through failure to reproduce (Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8, 2003).

If (as Emerson said)"the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation", what sort of desperation overpowers whole peoples who fear with good reason for their continuity on Earth? While you worry that the world some day will read Dante in Arabic translation (as once it read Aristotle), the Islamic world labors under an dreadful sense of its own fragility. Consider the case of Nigeria's polio epidemic:

ABUJA, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Nigeria is to test samples of the polio vaccine next month in the hope of resolving a dispute with Muslim authorities which has helped spread the crippling disease to children across Africa. Three predominantly Muslim states in northern Nigeria stopped immunizations in November because Islamic authorities suspect the vaccines of spreading infertility - which they believe is part of an American conspiracy to depopulate Africa's most populous nation."A meeting has been scheduled in two weeks' time with all the states that are opposed to the immunization program," Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo told Reuters."There are serious suspicions of a conspiracy by the US government to depopulate Nigeria, among other developing countries," he told Reuters."Unless a joint examination is undertaken, suspicions will linger and people will not be forthcoming."

As of February 26, the boycott continued in some Nigerian states, at the behest of the state governors. Nigerian Muslims see their existence at risk, but project this risk onto an hallucinated American plan to eradicate them. In consequence of this paranoid delusion they take steps that in fact endanger their physical existence.

There are many reasons for Arabs to hate Jews: the unwanted Jewish presence in the Dar al Islam, Jewish success, Jewish precedence (the Koran claims to supersede the Jewish scriptures). There is yet another reason to hate the Jews, namely their apparent immortality. How can the Arabs (or the Germans, or whoever) fancy themselves the eternal people so long as the Jews hold prior claim to this status?

Paranoia infuses much of what anti-Semites say about the Jews, for reasons I addressed elsewhere (It's not the end of the world - it's the end of you, February 3). More than anything else human beings want their lives to be significant. The unbearable truth is that the lives of most people who ever lived are insignificant; those of many people who live today threaten to become so. ("I feel so insignificant," said the ant with Woody Allen's voice in Antz."That's a breakthrough," said the ant psychiatrist."You are insignificant.") Paranoia inverts this horrifying sense of insignificance. To the paranoid, everything is significant. Powerful forces conspire against him. He imagines himself to be a figure of great importance. Threaten his protective illusion and he may try to kill you. What he cannot bear is the notion that he truly is insignificant.

To cope with anti-Semitism, try putting yourself in the place of someone who has to cope with cultural extinction. Your problem, Uzi, is that you wish to live in an orderly and stable world. The actual world is disorderly and unstable. For most of the world's people modernity is a mortal challenge; for some of them it is a death knell. Where old cultures happily meld with the new, the Chinese for example, anti-Semitism is unknown. Translations of anti-Semitic tracts still circulate in Japan, however, where an old culture still regards the outside world with foreboding.

Understandably, today's Jews for the most part have no desire to be a Chosen People, a Light unto the Nations, the bearer of revelation until that Day when all peoples shall recognize one God with one Name, as observant Jews intone in their thrice-daily ablutions. They want normality, that is, to get on with their lives and savor the success they have achieved in every field of endeavor. Mortality weighs lightly upon peoples who adapt easily to changing circumstances, but it haunts the waking nightmares of those peoples who cannot.

Normality is overrated. The normal condition of the nations of the world is to vanish beyond memory. If you want to remain an exception, you have to be a hero.
Spengler

<ul> ~ Ask Spengler</ul>

-->insbesondere:

... I surmise, other peoples envy Jewish immortality (What the Jews won't tell you, November 4, 2003). In the midst of a Great Extinction of peoples....


...Ignore the endangered Ewoks for a moment, Mr Garrett, and explain why the imperial peoples of the past two centuries - Germans, Japanese, French, Italians, Russians, and so forth - have elected to disappear, through failure to reproduce (Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8, 2003).

Und doch wird auch hier besonders Brisantes ausgelassen.

-->SPENGLER
Why Europe chooses extinction
By Spengler

Demographics is destiny. Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do. Back in 1348 Europe suffered the Black Death, a combination of bubonic plague and likely a form of mad cow disease, observes American Enterprise Institute scholar Ben Wattenberg."The plague reduced the estimated European population by about a third. In the next 50 years, Europe's population will relive - in slow motion - that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050 and more as the decades roll on."

In 200 years, French and German will be spoken exclusively in hell. What has brought about this collective suicide, which mocks all we thought we knew about the instinct for self-preservation? The chattering classes have nothing to say about the most unique and significant change in our times. Yet the great political and economic shifts of modern times are demographic in origin. Three examples suffice:

1) The great trans-Atlantic rift. Europeans are pacifists, not merely in the Persian Gulf, but on their own Balkans doorstep. If they cannot be bothered to reproduce, why should any European soldier sacrifice himself for future generations that never will be born?

2) The shift in global capital flows to the United States: old people lend money to young people. The aging populations of Europe and Japan lend money to younger people in the US.

3) The deflation danger. To illustrate, an economist of my acquaintance proposes a thought experiment. Suppose by a magic spell all the inhabitants of the United Kingdom instantaneously aged by 30 years. What would be the effect on the current account balance, the rate of interest, the price level and the exchange rate? (Answer at the end of this essay).

Little enough has been said about the"how" but almost nothing about the"why" of Europe's demographic suicide. Suicidal behavior is common among (for example) stone-age tribes who have encountered the modern world. One can extend this example to Tamil or Arab suicide bombers (SeeLive and Let Die, Asia Times Online, April 13, 2002). But the Europeans are the modern world. Have the Europeans taken to heart existentialism's complaint that man is alone in a chaotic universe in which life has no ultimate meeting, and that man responds to the anxiety about death by embracing death?

Detest as I might the whole existentialist tribe, there is a grain of truth here, and it bears on a parallel development, that is, the death of European Christianity. Fifty-three percent of Americans say that religion is very important in their lives, compared with 16 percent, 14 percent and 13 percent respectively of the British, French and Germans, according to a 1997 University of Michigan survey. Here I draw on the German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), an existentialist of sorts. Few Asians (including Jews) can make sense of Christianity's core doctrine, namely, original sin, handed down to all humans from Adam and Eve. Original sin motivates God's self-sacrifice on the cross to remove this stain from mankind; without it, Jesus was just an itinerant preacher with a knack for anecdotes.

All religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man's anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting,"I can't hear you!"). The pagans of old faced death with the confidence that their race would continue. But tribes and nations anticipate their own extinction just as individuals anticipate their own death, he added:"The love of the nations for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death." Each nation, he wrote, knows that some day other peoples will occupy their lands, and their language and culture will be interred in dusty books.

The early Christian Church encountered a great extinction of peoples and their cultures through the rise and fall of the Alexandrine and Roman empires. Who now remembers the Lusitani, the Illyrians, the Sicani, the Quadians, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, Pannonians and a thousand other tribes of Roman times? As nations faced extinction, individuals within these nations came face to face with their own mortality. Christianity offered an answer: the Church called individuals out of the nations and offered them salvation in the form of a life beyond the grave. The Gentiles (as the Church called them) embraced original sin, which to them simply meant the sin of having been born Gentile, that is, to a culture doomed to extinction. (The Jews, who think of themselves as an eternal people, were having none of it).

In one respect, Christianity was an enormous success. Its original heartland in the Near East, Asia Minor and Greece fell to Islam, but even while Arabs rode victorious over St Paul's missionary trail, the Church converted the barbarians of Europe. Christianity made possible the assimilation of thousands of doomed tribes into what became European nations. Something similar is at work in Africa, the only place in the world where Christianity enjoys rapid growth. Yet Christianity's weakness, Rosenzweig added, lay in the devil's bargain it made with the old paganism. Christianity's salvation lay beyond the grave, in the wispy ether of heavenly reward. Humans require something to hang on to this side of the grave. By providing the pagans with a humanized God (and a humanized mother of God and a host of saints), Christianity allowed the pagans to continue to worship their own image. Germans worship a blond Jesus, Spaniards worship a dark-haired Jesus, Mexicans worship the dark Virgin of Guadalupe, and so forth. The result, wrote Rosenzweig, is that Christians"are forever torn between Jesus and [the medieval pagan hero] Siegfried".

At the political level, Christianity sought to suppress Siegfried in favor of Christ through the device of the universal empire, the suppression of nationality by the aristocracy and Church. The lid kept blowing off the pot. Just when the Habsburgs brought the universal empire to its peak of power in 1519 under Charles V, controlling Austria, Spain and the Netherlands, Germany revolted under the banner of Reformation. There followed a century and a half of religious wars, culminating in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that wiped out more than half the population of Central Europe. France under Cardinal Richilieu (See The Sacred Heart of Darkness, Asia Times Online, February 11, 2003) gave a fatal twist to the Christian idea. Instead of universal empire, the French nation would be the standard-bearer for Christendom, such that French national interests stood in place of divine providence.

All Europe caught the French disease, substituting the warrior Siegfried for the crucified God. Christianity's inner pagan ran amok. A second Thirty Years War (1914-1944) gave unlimited vent to Europe's pagan impulses and drowned them in blood. The unfortunate Rosenzweig, who saw the faultlines in Christian civilization so clearly, died hoping that Europe still would embrace its Jewish population as a counterweight against its destructive pagan self. It never occurred to him that Europe would choose destruction and take its Jews with it. Siegfried triumphed over Christ during World War I. No shred of credibility was left in the Christian idea of souls called out of the nations for salvation beyond the grave. In 1914 Europe's soldiers still fought under the illusion of a God that favored their nation. Germany fought World War II under the banner of revived paganism.

For today's Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter. The French know that Victor Hugo, Gauloise cigarettes, Chateau Lafitte and Impressionist painters one day will become a matter of antiquarian curiosity. The Germans know that no one but bored schoolboys will read Goethe two centuries hence, like Pindar. They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave. They have no passions except hatred born of envy. They hate America, a new kind of universality that succeeded where the old Christian empire failed. They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to Europe's morbid temporality. They will pass out of history unmourned even by themselves.

[Solution to the thought-experiment above: if the entire population of the UK instantaneously ages 30 years, it will spend less and save more for retirement. That is, demand will shift from present goods to future goods, that is, securities. The price level of present goods falls. The price of future goods rises, that is, the compensation for waiting for the future declines, and the rate of interest falls. The suddenly-aged population trades surplus present goods for future goods, that is, exports goods and purchases securities with the proceeds, shifting the current account balance to surplus. The exchange rate will rise. In other words, we have Japan.]

(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
Apr 8, 2003

-->
>Demographics is destiny.





Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do.


In the next 50 years, Europe's population will relive - in slow motion - that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050 and more as the decades roll on."



>In 200 years, French and German will be spoken exclusively in hell.




> What has brought about this collective suicide,




>Little enough has been said about the"how" but almost nothing about the"why" of Europe's demographic suicide.





>Have the Europeans taken to heart existentialism's complaint that man is alone in a chaotic universe in which life has no ultimate meeting, and that man responds to the anxiety about death by embracing death?



>Detest as I might the whole existentialist tribe, there is a grain of truth here, and it bears on a parallel development, that is, the death of European Christianity.


Original sin motivates God's self-sacrifice on the cross to remove this stain from mankind; without it, Jesus was just an itinerant preacher with a knack for anecdotes.



>All religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man's anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting,"I can't hear you!").


>The pagans of old faced death with the confidence that their race would continue. But tribes and nations anticipate their own extinction just as individuals anticipate their own death,



>As nations faced extinction, individuals within these nations came face to face with their own mortality. Christianity offered an answer: the Church called individuals out of the nations and offered them salvation in the form of a life beyond the grave. The Gentiles (as the Church called them) embraced original sin, which to them simply meant the sin of having been born Gentile, that is, to a culture doomed to extinction.


>In one respect, Christianity was an enormous success.



>Yet Christianity's weakness, Rosenzweig added, lay in the devil's bargain it made with the old paganism. Christianity's salvation lay beyond the grave, in the wispy ether of heavenly reward.

Humans require something to hang on to this side of the grave. By providing the pagans with a humanized God (and a humanized mother of God and a host of saints), Christianity allowed the pagans to continue to worship their own image. Germans worship a blond Jesus, Spaniards worship a dark-haired Jesus, Mexicans worship the dark Virgin of Guadalupe, and so forth. The result, wrote Rosenzweig, is that Christians"are forever torn between Jesus and [the medieval pagan hero] Siegfried".


>At the political level, Christianity sought to suppress Siegfried in favor of Christ through the device of the universal empire, the suppression of nationality by the aristocracy and Church.


>Christianity's inner pagan ran amok.


>A second Thirty Years War (1914-1944) gave unlimited vent to Europe's pagan impulses and drowned them in blood.

>In 1914 Europe's soldiers still fought under the illusion of a God that favored their nation. Germany fought World War II under the banner of revived paganism.


>For today's Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter.


>The French know that Victor Hugo, Gauloise cigarettes, Chateau Lafitte and Impressionist painters one day will become a matter of antiquarian curiosity.

>The Germans know that no one but bored schoolboys will read Goethe two centuries hence, like Pindar.

>They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave.

> They have no passions except hatred born of envy
They hate America, a new kind of universality that succeeded where the old Christian empire failed.
They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to Europe's morbid temporality. They will pass out of history unmourned even by themselves.