The Balkans as Philosophy

  

                                The Balkans as Philosophy

The world turns but usually ends up at the same spot.

The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin turned an obscure fragment by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus (“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) into an intellectual’s cocktail-party game. In a famous essay, published as a book in 1953, Berlin suggested that the world is divided between hedgehogs and foxes—between those who believe in One Big Thing (one all-sufficient super-explanation), and those who are content with a more modest, irrational and even incoherent idea of history’s unfolding. Karl Marx was a supreme hedgehog: Everything, for him, was about the conflict of economic classes. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a restlessly improvising fox.

It was said in the era of Joe McCarthy that he and his followers saw a communist under every bed. The single-minded ideology of critical race theory sees racism in every white face—a racism systemic, pervasive, inescapable, damning. All white people are racists. The doctrine devolves to the crudest form of what might be called racial Calvinism: Americans are predestined—saved or damned, depending on the color of their skin. This doctrine merely reverses the theory of white supremacy, which damned black people—and consigned them to oppressive segregation—because of the color of their skin.

So critical race theory, protesting the old injustice, embraces its lie. This is not progress but revenge. The motive is not justice but payback, lex talionis—an understandable, if Balkan, impulse. Beware a hedgehog claiming the immunities of an innocent victim. Beware when victimhood is his One Big Thing.

The victim wants revenge, and who is more justified in committing any crime or injustice than a blameless victim acting in historic retaliation? Virtue, feeling vengeful and tasting power, grows manic—dogmatic, dangerous. Critical race theory ends by fostering the evil it professes to combat—racism and the hatred that comes with it. “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return,” W.H. Auden wrote. The 20th century taught the lesson over and over again, but it seems to be wasted on the 21st.

The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr (younger brother of Reinhold) explained the fallacy thus: “There is no greater barrier to understanding than the assumption that the standpoint which we happen to occupy is a universal one.” It is an error embedded in human nature.

When Niebuhr wrote that line, in a 1937 book called “The Kingdom of God in America,” he was arguing against the Marxist hedgehogs’ economic interpretation of the Constitution—their claim that the Founders were nothing more than capitalists protecting their own interests. (No simple coincidence with today's radicals.) Niebuhr meant that it is an error to assume that one’s own particular fixation (whether it be money or race or class or religion or environment or animal rights or transgenderism or whatever) is the One Big Thing. The hedgehog’s most profound character defects are moral vanity and self-righteousness—his fatal, paradoxical intolerance.
(most is from morrow in the wsj)

A subplot is that artistic quality that hopes to define the elements of life. The artist would rather be the loner, the insightful genius, observing from outside the nature of man. It may be a true and Christian concern. But it is certainly self-regarding.