Paul Eidelberg
Year after year opinion polls indicate that 80-90 percent of the public in Israel regards the Knesset, hence Israeli politicians, as “corrupt.” What is primarily meant by “corrupt” is that Knesset Members are primarily animated by personal and narrow partisan interests rather than the public interest or the common good. David Ben-Gurion said as much in his Personal Memoirs where he deplored the lack of constituency elections in Israel, where Members of the Knesset are not individually accountable to the voters. Just think of the current break-up of the Labor Party. Who does Labor’s erstwhile chairman Ehud Barak now represent by forming the new Independent Party? A cute piece of self-aggrandizement! What a mockery of Proportional Representation, Israel’s inept mode of electing MKs.
But even a well-designed mode of election such as preferential voting, which would mitigate corruption, is not a substitute for virtue. And that is primarily what is most lacking in Israel—and of course elsewhere—namely, the lack of virtue in politicians. Remember when 29 MKs hopped over to rival parties before the 1999 elections?
If the Knesset is a virtual cesspool, as many citizens think, what is the cause of this despicable state of affairs? Do MKs succumb to self-aggrandizement only upon becoming members of Israel’s parliament? Haven’t they been habituated to good behavior in their childhood and subsequently by their education in the public schools and colleges of their country?
Ponder this: Plato’s Republic is first and foremost a book on education, perhaps the greatest ever written. The purpose of education is to cultivate good character, above all the cardinal virtues of moderation, justice, courage, and wisdom. Leaving aside Israel’s religious academies, do the public schools and colleges in Israel cultivate the moral as well as the intellectual virtue?.
It was not only the Lubavitcher Rebbe that warned religious youth not to study the social sciences and humanities in the colleges and universities of America, since these academic disciplines are permeated by moral relativism, a doctrine ensconced in Israeli universities. The late professor Allan Bloom exposed this pernicious doctrine in his book The Closing of the American Mind.
This is not merely an academic issue. Relativism erodes national identity and wholehearted dedication to a nation’s cause. This makes relativism a public issue which can’t be obscured by the mantra of “academic freedom.” Given this morally neutral doctrine, there are no rational grounds for preferring a regime of liberty to one of tyranny. In fact, a publication of the American Council of Learned Societies entitled Speaking for the Humanities maintains that democracy cannot be justified as a system of government inherently superior to totalitarianism; it is simply an “ideological commitment” that the West has chosen to make.
We need to emphasize the fact that universities more or less depend on governmental support, hence on the taxes of citizens. Academics have no right to use their classrooms as platforms for propaganda—the pedagogy of Arab academics. They have no right to subvert the primary purpose of a university, which is to foster rational discussion and civilized debate in the pursuit of truth. Allow me to repeat part of a previous report of mine on Caroline Glick’s experience at Tel Aviv University.
Ms. Glick addressed some 150 political science students at TA University where she spoke of her experience as an embedded reporter with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division during the Iraq war. Any person not corrupted by relativism would favor, as she did, the U.S. over the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Yet the general attitude of her audience was expressed by a student who asked, “Who are you to make moral judgments?”
Now ponder this exchange between Glick and a student who spoke with a heavy Russian accent:
Student: “How can you say that democracy is better than dictatorial rule?”
Glick: “Because it is better to be free than to be a slave.”
Student: “How can you support America when the U.S. is a totalitarian state?”
Glick: “Did you learn that in Russia?”
Student: “No, here.”
Glick: “Here at Tel Aviv University?”
Student: “Yes, that is what my professors say.”
Ms. Glick spoke at five liberal—i.e. secular—Israeli universities. She learned that all are dominated by moral relativists who indoctrinate their students and ban “politically incorrect” publications. The deadly consequences are clear: “A survey carried out by the left-wing Israel Democracy Institute on Israeli attitudes toward the state [indicates that] … a mere 58% of Israelis are proud of being Israeli, whereas 97% of Americans and Poles are proud of their national identity.” Ms. Glick concludes: “Is it possible that our academic tyrants have something to do with the inability of 42% of Israelis to take pride in who they are?”
But this lack of a strong sense of national identity clearly underlies the government’s long-running policy of “territory for peace” and its ignominious desire to negotiate with Arab terrorists who have murdered and maimed some ten thousand Jews. What does this tell us about the leaders of this government? Simply this: they lack virtue.
Alas, I am beginning to feel almost like Nietzsche did back in the 1870s, when he recommended that most universities in Germany be closed down. Perhaps some of their multicultural counterparts in Israel and America should be transformed into domiciles for the homeless?
Reflections on Political Science and Political Journalism
by Prof. Paul Eidelberg
There are two basic types of political science, normative or prescriptive, and normless or descriptive. Aristotle’s political science is both normative and descriptive. His paramount concern, what is the best regime, is inseparable from his Nicomachean Ethics, an in-depth analysis of the moral virtues or of how should man live.
Aristotle studied about 150 regimes and classified them according to whether they were ruled by the one, the few, or the many. He divided them into two groups: kingship, aristocracy, and republic on the one hand, and their opposites, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy on the other. The good regimes were those whose rulers ruled in the interest of the ruled. The bad were those in which the rulers ruled in their own interests.
Aristotle regarded kingship the best regime in theory—not a utopia, but what reasonable men would reasonably wish for. Since the citizens of such a regime would have to be of fairly good moral and intellectual character, it’s very rare, but it provides a standard by which to reform and improve an existing regime. But as sober political scientist, Aristotle devotes much space his Politics to the best regime in practice, a more attainable which he called a “polity,” for which term I have substituted “republic.”
A polity or republic is middle class regime. It combines democracy and oligarchy. This it does in many different ways, for example, (1) by prescribing diverse modes of electing the members of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government; (2) by varying the size or membership of these branches; and (3) by assigning to their members different terms of office. No political scientist equals Aristotle in comprehensiveness. What Machiavelli knows of political science can be put on a postage stamp compared to Aristotelian political science, if only because of its comprehensive ethics, to which one should add Aristotle’s Rhetoric—the first treatise of its kind.
Although Machiavelli, contrary to what has been said of him, is not a moral relativist, he prepared the ground for a morally neutral or “value-free” political science; indeed, he turned political science on its head. As Leo Strauss saw, the great Florentine was the first political scientist to regard democracy—more precisely, a commercial democracy—as the best regime. To avoid his bad reputation, most contemporary political scientists prefer to be known as “political realists.” They are the milk-and-toast Machiavellians who become the advisers of democracy’s foreign policy elites—the Brzezinskis in America, the Harkabis in Israel—yes, moral relativists. The former “cozied” up with the USSR, the latter with the PLO. They pursued a “morally free” or “ideologically neutral” foreign policy
For Aristotle and for classical political science in general, there is no such thing as a morally neutral political science. The reason is this. Politics involves the controversial; it’s concerned with preservation and change: how to make things better, and how to prevent things from becoming worse. This can’t be morally neutral. A morally neutral political science would be trivial; and if purveyed as “descriptive,” it would be misleading, because what the political scientist chooses to describe or talk about is based on (unstated) “criteria of importance.” Criteria of importance can’t be morally neutral without being utterly trivial: like correlating how a politician votes and whether his left or right foot is the first to enter the assembly.
The basic considerations set forth above enable us to judge the character of political journalism. Political journalism can’t be morally neutral without being trivial or irrelevant to the question of what is good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust. This kind of journalism is often displayed by the BBC and the Guardian, which propagate the adage “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”—a vulgar display of moral relativism or moral equivalence. This is the prevailing doctrine of the American State Department and the long-standing U.S. policy of “even-handed diplomacy” vis-à-vis Israel and the PLO. It is sanctified by The New York Times, frequently by The Washington Post, and other so-called liberal newspapers that side with illiberal terrorist organizations committed to Israel’s destruction. “Moral reversal” may better describe the mentality of the mandarins of these sheltered media.
Their value-free journalists remind us of the cop Joe Friday: “just the facts ma’am.” This value-free or worth-less political journalism avoids the most interesting and profound questions of classical political science, which we associated with Aristotle. No wonder. Such questions are beyond the scope or intellectual competence of most political journalists. Besides, and with all due respect, political journalism must be superficial if the journalist is not to go too far above the intellect of most readers of the daily newspaper. Nor is this all.
Just as the typical reader may not be equal to the intellectual level of political science, so the political scientist may not be equal to the intellectual level of those who fashioned the basic principles of his discipline. Few political scientists have really plumbed the depths of Machiavelli, or would even designate him, as did the renowned Leo Strauss, “the philosopher of evil.” And even here Strauss preferred reticence; for Machiavelli, the godfather of countless semi-educated politicians in the West, prepared the ground, as mentioned, for the university-bred doctrine of moral relativism which is rendering the West incapable of confronting the moral absolutism of Islam.
Prof. Paul Eidelberg is President of The Israel-America Renaissance Institute and retired professor of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University.
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