The Ordeal of Civility

...Most businessmen have a well-thought-out philosophy guiding them in conducting the affairs of their businesses...

...We may dismiss his absurd notion that when the Ostjuden came to New York City they set up a "Lower Side system...

...So the foundation decided to pursue the point made by Hayek in his booklet The Intellectuals in Socialism, or for those who prefer autobiography to theory, by Beatrice Webb in her book Our Partnership...

...They are, for the most part, dragged in out of time and place of national origin...

...teachers, preachers, journalists, lecturers, publicists, newswriters and commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, artists, and all others who disseminate ideas...

...There are those whose feelings about politicians are more adamant than what I've expressed...

...Fewer have been as thorough in conceiving a philosophy on charitable contributions, and this, I think, has serious consequences for businessmen...

...Cuddihy is not so insensitive as to include the Third Reich in his catalogue of Reichs...

...He speaks in slurs, as when he says Hannah Arendt's "perverse" dissent from the Supreme Court's "desegregation" decision of 1954 was colored by her "European Jewish background...

...But in The Ordeal of Civility, we are submerged in an "id-Yid" parallel which, when it is not offensive, is downright silly...

...They examine this [Western] world in dismay, with wonder, anger, and punitive objectivity...

...Actually, Freud borrowed the term from The Book of the It, by George Groddeck, who, in turn, attributed the concept to Nietzsche...

...This is a position that I have come to share with my associates, first at the Koch Foundation and later at the Institute for Humane Studies...

...He (the anti-Semite) is "a sadist with a pure heart," Sartre writes...

...Cuddihy's eccentric foray into alien ideologies...

...Served up some 15 times while our author analyzes Sigmund Freud on a couch of rusty nails, we are told—with giant and humorless chutzpah—that "the id of the 'Yid' is hid under the lid of Western decorum...

...They did not try to reform politicians...

...by George H. Pearson (—The Business of America (This essay has been adapted from a speech given by Mr...

...Here is a socialism (to start from Cuddihy's vantage point) without Engels, Liebknecht (the elder), Bebel, Kautsky, Liebknecht (Karl), Plekhanov, Lenin, Stalin—and Norman Thomas...

...We learn that, like the "lachrymose" Ostjuden (East European Jews), Jewish intellectuals all bewail their plight at being unable to fit into the dominant culture of the West with its elaborate codes of politeness, civility, and morals...

...Thus he is able to talk of Marx's "scientific socialism," at the same time depriving Marx's co-discoverer of the common doctrine—Friedrich Engels—of a place among the socialist elect...

...For some, it is what we now have...

...that he wanted "a world without Jews," as one translation of his essay on the "Jewish Question" is titled...

...It is my conviction that Levi-Strauss was thrown into this non-kosher Mulligan stew of a book only because the hyphenated anthropologist wrote a work on The Origin of Table Manners which, for all the wrong reasons, Cuddihy thinks is a masterpiece...

...To call this nonsense would be generous...

...One: Mapu's novel was written in Hebrew which then had fewer Jewish readers than there are readers today of Gaelic novels...

...If I could afford enough time on television and the services of skilled advertising experts, I could probably win any key issue, political or otherwise...

...I should like to share some of my thoughts and experiences on this matter in the hopes that they might be helpful...

...But, ironically, it is my observation that it is easier to raise money for political The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 25...

...And three: Jews have been reading "fiction" as long as the goyim—probably longer...

...Fortunately for our author, he is convinced that his readers will not read him too carefully...

...I am not conservative in wanting to preserve what we now have—what we have is government intervention...

...But for sheer High Chutzpah, I offer the Professor's submergence into what he calls "Jewish literature...

...to say that it is silly would be underestimating the author's capacity for arrogance...

...But what we now have is an interventionist society...

...something about "Jews and Blacks and the Cold War at the Top...

...And it is against this exclusion—this objection to being identified as a "pariah people," as Max Weber called The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity by John Murray Cuddihy Basic Books $11.95 them—that they set about inflicting on Western civilization not only Marxism, or "scientific socialism," but also "psychoanalysis" and "Zionism...

...The Webbs knew that the way to influence politicians was indirectly...

...that the "importunate 'Yid' released from ghetto and shied is the model for Freud's coarse, importunate, id," exceeded in "id-Yiddishkeit" only by Karl Marx and almost matched by the third "Jewish giant" of our modernity—Claude Levi-Strauss...

...It's not for nothing" (Cuddihy writes that way...

...I refer to the "it's no accident" school of polemics...

...This is a rude disquisition on "free association," but Cuddihy is not himself anti-Jewish or even anti-Freud...

...that he tried desperately to disown his own Jewish past...

...This wonder, this anger, and the vindictive objectivity of the marginal nonmember are recidivist: they continue unabated into our own times...

...We did not think that political spending would be the most effective use of our income...

...Besides, we did not see politicians as setting the prevalent ideology, but rather as reflecting it...

...Saying it well is...

...So we looked for the point of leverage...

...Here we learn that in 1853 "there appeared a novel" (Mapu's The Love of Zion) which "constituted for its Jewish readers their 'first introduction to the very concept of literature as such.' But, in general, the idea of fiction has remained a stranger to the world of Yiddishkeit...

...Cuddihy also sees socialism in all its manifestations as a Jewish continuum ranging from "Marx, Lassalle, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Bernstein" to "Walter Lippmann...

...For the purpose of argument, let me assume that the goal of most businessmen is a free enterprise society, although I will not assume that all businessmen will agree on what a free enterprise society really is...

...Was it Mencken who said that changing politicians was analogous to changing madams in a house of ill repute...

...This story of the Webbs provides a unique lesson in the influence which a sound, methodical strategy can achieve...

...And no matter how much he tries, no matter what he believes, thinks, says—be he Liberal or Conservative, Rightist or Leftist—he will never grasp the Protestant Etiquette even if he is prepared to practice the Protestant Ethic: he will never be Patriot but Pariah...

...Louis...

...Thus, when the Hitlerian intellectual F.C...

...But our foundation did not consider that approach as being realistic for our very limited resources...

...My emphasis) In sum, what Cuddihy is telling us in his elaborate and often incoherent text, is that the Jew—in his "struggle with modernity"—is unable to cope with the civility society demands as a price for admission...

...In the words of one critic of this work, "The strongest impression left by Beatrice Webb's memoirs is that she and her husband owed the extent of their influence largely to, among other things, fully understanding and knowing how to make use of, the decisive position which the intellectuals occupy in shaping public opinion...

...But to give Cuddihy his due, we must let him tell it in his own way...

...But to elaborate his thesis Cuddihy indulges in homely Yiddish words and phrases, almost always misused or misunderstood...

...As the author closes in on his theme—stretching it at times to absurdity—we get a 12-page dissertation on Levi-Strauss...

...Unrecognizable names should not deflect the essence of his message...

...Pearson at the Discussion Club in St...

...that he formulated a socioeconomic doctrine which, he stated, "would make being a Jew impossible...

...What he prepares for, what he wishes is the death of the Jew...

...In this connection the overt—pure-at-heart—anti-Semite is more to be trusted...

...Acting on his own conception of what the "analytic situation" is all about, he resorts to the style made famous during the period of "socialist realism" under Stalin...

...all this Cuddihy sees as a sign that Marx was not an anti-Semite, that he was merely expressing his shtetlYiddish contempt for bourgeois society with its false values, etc...

...Nevertheless, to prove his evenhandedness we get a short "Ike and Mike" chapter titled "The Irish and the Jews" where he points to a couple of Irish Bowery derelicts to demonstrate his conviction that "all stereotypes are, more or less, accurate...

...Two: at least a dozen years before Mapu's 24 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1975 "novel" appeared, Israel Aksenfield's Dos Shtern-tichel (The Kerchief) was enthralling "Jewish readers" in the shtetlach of East Europe and wherever else Yiddish was spoken and read...

...They looked forward to the day when "hosts of young men, well-trained in Fabian economics and administrative lore would be crawling into the political arena...

...Instead, they tried to do in genteel society and became socialists, Zionists, and psychoanalysts...

...a "Tale of Two Hoffmans" (Judge Julius and Abbie), a parable so vulgar I spare the reader the details...

...The third possible course was to influence those Professor F.A...

...We were concerned about our money being lost in a sea of government funds and the more substantial disbursements of the much larger foundations...

...All rules—of syntax, of morality, or propriety —are to yield to the primary rule of saying whatever comes to mind...

...Actually, and despite his own pious self-assertion, Levi-Strauss' ethnology runs counter to Marx's and Engels', which was based on Lewis H. Morgan's optimistic, low-to-high assumption of unilinear evolution...

...Cuddihy probably means well...

...Investment in Ideas The Koch Foundation is a small family foundation with an annual disposable income of a few hundred thousand dollars...

...That's a system...

...only additional government intervention would be a socialist imposition on our free enterprise system, or a change from it...

...Cuddihy tells us that it is "no accident" that Wilhelm Reich, the orgonist (identified as "Reich I") and Charles "Greening" Reich (whom he describes as "Reich II") came to almostidentical conclusions, which I do not intend to burden the reader with, except to note that Dr...

...It's the author's tone and temper than needs final elucidation: "From Solomon Maimon to Norman Podhoretz, from Rahel Varnhagen to Cynthia Ozick, from Marx and Lassalle to Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, from Herzl to Freud to Harold Laski and Lionel Trilling, from Moses Mendelssohn to J. Robert Oppenheimer [may the Lord have mercy on us, the Rosenbergs are missing!] and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, and Reich I and II (Wilhelm and Charles)"—but blessedly not Reich III—"one dominating structure of an identical predicament and a shared fate imposes itself upon the consciousness and behavior of the Jewish intellectual in Galut...

...But meaning well is not enough...

...Hayek calls theintellectuals...

...One final remark: England has an honorable place for its eccentrics...

...I do not want to suggest that this kind of writing may give comfort to all home-grown Judenfresser—they don't need Cuddihy's intrusion into this stale dust to fortify their contempt...

...Preservation, in this case, means the preservation of an interventionist system...

...They set out not "to organize the unthinking person into a socialist society" but "to make the thinking people socialistic...

...He is only woefully mistaken in his assumptions and his understanding...

...Finally, he shows little understanding of any of the intellectual trends he writes about...

...we are informed, that Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked deals "with the ancient theme of Diaspora intellectuality...

...When we started we were quite concerned about how to spend those dollars effectively toward our goal...

...Hayek contends the prevalent ideology is set by the intellectuals...

...Nor did we feel we could change the world by informing or trying to persuade great numbers of people...

...plus a summary chapter titled "Modernity, Jewry, Christianity," in which we are exposed to more nonsense than should be allowed even an associate professor of sociology at one of New York's open-admission colleges (Hunter...

...Is that a nice way for a college boy to write...

...Wegg-Prosser wrote in the British Fascist Review his low estimate of the Jewish-Marxist conspiracy known as "scientific socialism," he blithely coopted Engels into the faith of Marx's grandfathers and called him a "Jewish capitalist...

...Emphasis in original...

...Anticipating the Tax Reform Act of 1969, we thought it would be frowned upon by the Internal Revenue Service...

...I do not think America is yet prepared for them...

...That is the Jew's "ordeal...

...One of the fresher insights that has attracted much innocent attention to Cuddihy's theme is his notion that "for intellectual Jews the price of admission to European secular culture was a costly conformity to the manners and social rites of the gentiles—a price so high that the most brilliant and original thinkers among the Jews refused to pay it...

...But (I think) they will not be too ungrateful...

...That Marx despised shtetl Jewry, the Jews of East Europe, whom he abused as the "filthiest of all races...

...We must re-establish a free enterprise society in order to have one...

...and that] echoes of Marx and Freud can be heard in Levi-Strauss' obsession with the raw, the coarse, the vulgar, the naked and their transformationmediation-sublimation into the cooked, the refined, and the clothed...

...Thus, in his "socioanalysis" of Freud we are enlightened on Cuddihy's analytic method: "As one enters the analytic situation one must check one's manners and morals at the door...

...If someone hadn't been so foolish as to translate Freud's German neuter es into the Latin id (instead of the English it), the world might have been spared much of Mr...