Have We Tired of Civilization?

    “Israel is pressed, it is a suffering country,” a sympathetic visitor says with a sigh. International organizations, the intellectual Left, and much of Europe are arrayed against it. American support is shaky. The Israelis are fighting for their existence, perhaps for liberal democracy itself, but “at this uneasy hour,” our pilgrim laments, “the civilized world seems tired of its civilization, and tired also of the Jews. It wants to hear no more about survival.” 

    The traveler was the literary Hall-of-Famer, Saul Bellow, the year 1975. A few months later, Bellow published a diary of his visit titled, To Jerusalem and Back (1976), his only full-dress performance of nonfiction. With everything going on in the Middle East, I recently felt the need to revisit this wonderful tract that I had first read so many years ago, by a master at the craft of writing. Bellow took a stand for civilization in that book and elsewhere, and his claim to lasting literary fame has suffered for it. But the link between Israel and civilization is real, and Bellow’s account of his journey to the Holy Land resonates today.

    In this book, as in Bellow’s novels, what strikes you first are the character sketches. On the flight eastward, Bellow sits next to “a young Hasid” (“his neck is thin, his blue eyes goggle, his under-lip extrudes”) who offers to pay him $15 a week, for life, to eat kosher. Bellow befriends a masseur, “both priest-like and boyish,” whose hands “have the strength that purity of purpose can give.” He marvels at how a scholar whom he knows, “a vegetarian, a pacifist, a Quaker—most odd, most unhappy, a quirky charmer,” could “fall in love with militant Islam.” Though Bellow’s run-ins with the likes of Yitzhak Rabin and Henry Kissinger may be of some political/historical interest, his portraits of humbler men are where his talent has always shined.

    To Jerusalem and Back is structured—if that’s the right word—around walks and conversations, drop-ins and dinners, stray thoughts and sense impressions. The book is unruly and disjointed. A review in the New York Times called it “spotty” as a travelogue: “a sharp if patched-together picture of contemporary Israel.” Sometimes, Bellow the tourist is a sedate creature: “The Valley of Jehoshaphat, with its tombs. A narrow road, and on the slopes acres and acres of stone.” Sometimes he almost seems to suffer from the syndrome for which his destination is famous: “The light of Jerusalem has purifying powers . . . I don’t forbid myself the reflection that light may be the outer garment of God.” In all events, the sights and sounds are just a backdrop. Bellow’s attention returns to politics—to the existential dread of an Israel unsettled by the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

    Some of the explicit foes have changed in the years since Bellow wrote (Egypt is out, for instance, while Iran is most certainly, in), but the fierce desire to destroy Israel abides. This cruel fact keeps Bellow’s meditations eerily up to date. His thoughts on the Middle East situation are as searching, as powerful, as fluent, and as worthwhile as ever. They are the brilliant thoughtful ramblings of his fictional antihero Herzog, stripped of the neurosis. Bellow climbs into the abyss of the Arab-Israeli conflict, sits with its quandaries, and, impressively, emerges with his cognitive bearing, moral compass, and grace intact.

    “The Jews,” Bellow writes, “because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right.” The Israeli subconscious is permeated with the matter of staving off annihilation. The world is not sympathetic. “Where Israel is concerned,” it “swells with moral consciousness.” Nobody really gives a damn about the refugees of Africa and Asia. They are neglected and forgotten; “...only the case of the Palestinians is left permanently open.” The Arab nations hold sway at the U.N. General Assembly and “could easily put through punitive resolutions.” The so-called international community holds Israel in contempt.

    Europe is no help. It is coming to believe “that capitalism is done for and that liberal democracy is perishing.” It is sliding toward austerity (what today we would call degrowth). In its managed decline, it embraces “Arab feudalism, Arab socialism, Chinese communism.” In France, Le Monde “supports terrorists. . . . A recent review of the autobiography of a fedayeen speaks of the Israelis as colonialists.” Israel’s military prowess is pesky: rescuing hostages from Third World fanatics upsets European plans “for a new international order.”

    Can Israel put its trust in U.S. support? America is a land of chaotic politics, distracted attention, and shaken confidence. It has “a passion for self-criticism,” Bellow notes. “We accuse ourselves of everything, are forever under horrible indictments, on trial, and raving out the most improbable confessions.” Most Americans know distressingly little of Israel. Few are aware, for example, that the Jews accepted the 1947 UN partition plan—a “two-state solution”—only to see the Arabs reject it and attack from all sides. If Congress supports Israel, the State Department does not. “America, God help us all, is not a comfortable country to rely upon,” Bellow writes.

    The leftist intelligentsia have fallen headlong for the Arab cause. They “discuss Palestine in Marxist-Leninist categories: finance, capital, colonialism, imperialism. Arab nationalists have only to call out the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist slogans to gain support.” For the linguist and literary critic Noam Chomsky, “the troubles of the Middle East” can be traced to “imperialist America.” For him, “the main enemy has its base in Washington,” whence, through the machinations of a “highly centralized state capitalism, all evils flow.” (Bellow offers, in a single sentence, a fit response to many Chomsky books: “I am reluctant to believe that this ‘state capitalism’ is as diabolical, conspiratorial, and all-powerful as Chomsky says it is.”) Chomsky hasn’t changed much all these years later. He’s still a jack-ass. 

    Israel is not without sin; no state is. Bellow was, and is attuned to the nation’s flaws, and he underscores its failures to ease Palestinian suffering. (He dwells on Israeli injustices enough, in fact, that he has been accused of being “infused” with “anti-Zionist prejudice.”) There are no easy answers, and Bellow does not pretend otherwise. Surveying the scene, “one is infected with disorder”; all paths toward coexistence are “full of difficulty, vexation, heartbreak.” But Bellow is not afraid to call out the root problem: The Arabs refuse to allow Jews, “hitherto a subject community under Islam, to exercise political sovereignty in an area regarded as part of the Muslim domain.” Arab grievances must be heard; ignoring them is an obstacle to peace. But “the Arabs see themselves returning in blood and fire, and the Israelis will not agree to bleed and burn.”

    “In this unlovely dreamland,” Bellow observes, “the Zionists planted orchards, sowed fields, and built a thriving society.” More than that, they built a country that is democratic and free. Israel “alone represents freedom in the Middle East.” The Israelis don’t flinch at such propositions. Their way of life is “far from enviable, yet there is a clear purpose in it.” The West, by contrast, is rudderless. The “democratic nations” appear “to have forgotten what they are about.” Their connection “with the civilization that formed them is growing loose and queer,” and they “are curiously lethargic about their freedom.” The cause of Israel is nothing less than the cause of Western civilization. But the West is sick. “Many exult over its approaching death. Tired of old evils, they long for ‘the new thing’ and will not be happy until they’ve had it.”

    Almost half a century later, Bellow still reads like a man with his finger on the pulse of the UN, the International Criminal Court, France, and the United States. If you didn't know any better, you would swear that this little book was written a few weeks ago. The Biden administration’s mixed messages since the October 7, 2023, attacks confirm that, as Bellow said, “the Israelis have to cope not only with their enemies but with difficult friends.” Needling Israel to make unilateral concessions; pressing Israel to defend itself with less resolve and vigor; lecturing Israel, often disingenuously, about what’s best for it—these are American political perennials.

    “If you want everyone to love you,” acknowledges Bellow, “don’t discuss Israeli politics.” Then as now, the university Left, in particular, reacted poorly to pro-Israel sentiment. But since Bellow’s day, scorn has devolved into hatred. Defending Israel has long been met with the anti-intellectual cries of colonialism, imperialism, and racism (or, more recently, “Islamophobia”), but the unchecked anti-Semitism seen on American campuses today, especially at the most elite schools, is something new and disturbing.

    Though Bellow did not live to confront this barbarism, he saw it approaching. He had tried to steer clear of politics. He had also tried to uphold civilization, however, and in the 1960s, trying to uphold civilization became a political act. Here is Bellow on the counterculture: “As Marie Antoinette played with sheep…so the kids of Haight-Ashbury require from the civilization that produced them the freedom and happiness of primitives.” In his meticulous two-volume biography of Bellow, Zachery Leader concludes that “the events of the late 1960s drew Bellow closer to the worldview of the Kristols”—that is, Irving and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb: To a large degree, founders of the neo-conservative movement here in the United States.

    Bellow never saw himself as a conservative and bristled at being called one. In hindsight, though, it’s hard to understand him, in later life, as anything else. He may not have joined the Right, but as liberals, and subsequently progressives, lost touch with the civilization that formed them, he accepted being left by the Left. He encouraged Allan Bloom to compose a great and prescient book, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), then wrote a foreword that, like the volume itself, constituted a withering indictment of contemporary culture. He denounced the “flimsiness” and “trashiness” of “our modern talk about ‘values,’” the “fiery posturing’s” of “‘activist’ writers” such as Gore Vidal, and the universities’ turn toward a “participatory role in society.” (He privately called universities “anti-free-speech centers.” Sound familiar?)

    Earlier, there was Bellow’s novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), a protest over urban crime and decay that predated Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) by nearly two decades. Later, there was Bellow’s notorious remark about the Zulus’ lacking a Tolstoy. Bellow was not proud of that statement, but he was willing to defend it. “I know a taboo when I see one,” he commented in 1994. “Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo.” [the emphasis is mine] Truer words were never spoken...trust me. And this is Bellow, the year before, on coming to America as a child: “The country took us over. It was a country then, not a collection of cultures.” The same essay (“Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” collected in a book titled It All Adds Up) alludes to the crisis of the West and criticizes the anti-Americanism of the educated.

    A quarter century ago, the writer and literary critic Martin Amis asserted: “In 1989 temporary fluctuations—going under the name of Political Correctness—had rigged up Saul Bellow as a figure of the right.” That reference to “temporary fluctuations” was naïve from the day Amis set it down. Political correctness is entrenched in elite circles, and Bellow’s legacy has paid the price.

    Ironically, he began as the trailblazing outsider. Bellow was the immigrant Jew who, in 1953, dared to let his fictional counterpart, Augie March, introduce himself—“without apology or hyphenation,” per an admiring Philip Roth—as “an American, Chicago born.” Yet today, Bellow comes off, in the words of one critical observer, as “too right-wing, too cranky and Eurocentric.” His reputation is “damaged,” and “the jury is still out on whether it will ever recover.” His plight is compounded by the literary establishment’s turn against white (a term that now emphatically includes him), heterosexual males. That Bellow confronted hard questions with honesty and subtlety is no redemption. Christopher Hitchens could criticize Bellow’s position on Israel—he once scolded the great man, at length and in his own home, on the subject—while still applauding his stand for civilization and civility. Hitchens recognized that Bellow never appealed to the foul or bigoted (which should be an aspiration for anyone who puts pen to paper). But Hitchens, too, is an intellectual from a bygone age.

    Anti-Semitism is, of course, just one form of modern progressive tolerance. Like the others, it is a manifestation of the Left’s resentment of success, doubts about liberalism, and disdain for Western traditions. But it is more than that, too. In To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow ponders whether “there is something in the Jews that arouses an insanity among other peoples.” One measure of civilization is the degree to which a society goes the other way.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com