Today is a day I wish we had our email section up. Thanks for all the emails about John Derbyshire. I can’t believe we’re still talking about him, but I guess in some ways we’re not. We’re talking about what bigotry might or might not be, what the line is between free and fair, if obnoxious, speech, and words that are simply designed to wound or dismiss. This isn’t the first time I have wrestled with this, and I’m grateful for your input. Here are two letters that made me sit up and think some more. Here’s the first: “If Derbyshire won’t read Proust because he is gay, that is both callow and bigoted. But I think you go to far on the evidence presented in suggesting that he is an anti-Semite. My mother is German, and I think it would be folly to deny that there are German “ways of thinking.” And once one identifies those “ways of thinking,” it is fair comment to express one’s approval or disapproval of those “ways of thinking.” One can argue about the correctness of a generality about a cultural “way of thinking,” and one can also take issue with the value judgment one makes with respect to it. But the mere making of judgments of that kind with respect to any ethnic group or nationality should not expose one to opprobrium in my view.” I agree with that. But when that very thing has been done before – and to the same group of people on the same grounds – in order to demonize and exterminate them, I think you might be a little careful about the echoes of your arguments. Derbyshire seems to revel in them. William F. Buckley himself ruled Pat Buchanan out of bounds for similar reasons. Yet he publishes Derbyshire proudly.
DERBYSHIRE COUNTY II: The other email that got me thinking was more convincing to me. It speaks for itself: “You’re probably right about Derbyshire, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. The dialectical interplay of post-Emancipation Jewry and European anti-Semitism in the rise of the left is a perfectly legitimate topic of discussion and research. Furthermore, it is a time-worn cliché among Jewish leftists themselves that socialism is the modern avatar of the Jewish prophetic ideal dating back to Amos and Isaiah. Most traditional religious Jews like myself stoutly oppose that notion, but Derbyshire is in fairly respectable company. But I can’t imagine how anyone could fit the non-political esthete Marcel Proust and his densely camouflaged prose into this picture, despite his mother’s tenuous Jewish roots. He is surely spinning in his grave at the very idea. In any case, the greatest and most enduring product of Jewish ‘world-perfecting idealism’ is Christianity, for better or worse. To be consistent, Derbyshire should boycott all literature by people of Christian cultural origin, not just half-Christians like Proust. Derbyshire’s own works, sadly, would fall under the same proscription.” Precisely. Derbyshire sees evil in products of Judaism, only when he has already judged them to be evil. Christianity or Kantian moral philosophy, which have their roots in some part in the same Jewish tradition of “world-perfecting idealism”, are not deemed Jewish in origin by Derbyshire, or at least they are simply ignored in his argument. There’s something fishy about the lacuna, don’t you think?
AND THEN THERE’S THIS: Do the following statements seem evidence of bigotry to you? Perhaps each on its own, to a very generous reader, would not – but altogether? “The U.S.A. is a conservative-Republican nation tilted over to the left by black people, who are overwhelmingly socialist…Racial profiling is common sense, and good, fair police practice…Gay is not just as good as straight. It’s against nature, unhealthy and antisocial… The Jews are a race. They are, on average, much smarter than the rest of us. They got that way by practicing eugenics for 2,000 years. And it is not anti-Semitic to point any of this out.” The man doth protest too much methinks. Yep, it’s our hero of the right. You can read the full column here.
The Dish 