The Year

Sentimental Reflections

In hoc signo vinces

I have mixed feelings about this past year. On the one hand, it was a wonderful and exciting one for me: my book was published and I was very pleased with the reception. To write something that others find illuminating at all is deeply gratifying and the entire point of this vocation. But the book’s vision is, of course, not an altogether happy one. It’s been strange to observe how the synthesis foreshadowed in the book has become manifest. One metaphor I used in the book was crystallization: the arrangement of elements into a single structure. It’s all there today: populism, nationalism, anarcho-capitalism, a tech-billionaire demagogue, a fragmented media landscape dominated by angry and alienated voices, folk-hero gangsterism, an old governing elite that’s out of touch and facing a crisis of legitimacy. It’s hard to count the book as a triumph when the world it portends is not the one I particularly care to inhabit.

This entire year was also dominated by news of the catastrophe in Gaza, which has been the biggest moral and intellectual challenge of my lifetime and has sometimes threatened to overwhelm my powers of judgment. I had no illusions about the regime in Israel and fully expected it to react in this manner. But by allowing and abetting the slaughter of Palestinians, the Western world can no longer seriously present itself as the defender of human rights and the opposite of the “authoritarian world.” Of course, critics will, with good reason, point out that this always has been mere pretense: the United States, while labeling itself the defender of freedom and democracy, was the motive force of unspeakable atrocities during the Cold War, not to mention the many crimes of imperialism carried out in the name of civilization. So, that universalism was perhaps always a false one. But Israel in particular represents a contradiction in the ideological armature of the “democratic” world. It was the creation of a post-war order that was supposed to replace brute force with international law and to do justice to the victims of genocide. Instead, it stands for the cruelly ironic failure and repudiation of that hope. Its present incarnation gives the lie to the notion that “Western Civilization” means much more than technologized barbarism. And it’s clear now that the state of Israel did not compensate for Hitler’s crimes so much as to ensure their reach extends into a new century.

At the end of his “Finest Hour” speech in 1940, Winston Churchill warned that if the Allies failed, the world would “sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” That image haunts me and sometimes I fear we are again falling into that new Dark Age illuminated by the “lights of perverted science." Perhaps that fall into the darkness appears less like a sudden cataclysm and more like a gradual dusk. Opposing that with another kind of light often feels like a difficult, if not impossible task.

The icon I chose for this newsletter depicts Dante holding up a book to the city of Florence. Without thinking too much about what it meant, I took it from the cover of a book called Renaissance Civic Humanism, but “Civic humanism” is not a bad way to describe the tradition I try to carry on with this newsletter. The concept originally came from the historian Hans Baron, a Jewish Weimar exile, who believed he discovered the emergence of a political and intellectual tendency in a period of crisis in the Florentine Republic. According to Baron, the Florentine humanists, faced with domination by the despotic Milanese, combined classical learning with a renewed spirit of civic engagement to defend their native freedoms. Of course, Baron was no doubt thinking also of the fate of Germany and the tendency of the German Jews to forego political life and prefer Bildung, artistic and intellectual cultivation, instead. Civic humanism is a solution of a sort, on the level of thought if not practice: a synthesis of Bildung and politics. This approach can probably never be the basis of mass politics, hence the title “Unpopular Front” is fitting.

I spent the early days of 2024 in Cologne, Germany, to research the bookstore my family once owned there and my cousin, Gottfried Ballin, who had worked there and been a member of an anti-Nazi resistance group, which led to his arrest, and conviction for treason, and ultimately, his murder in a concentration camp. I think it would be right to call him a civic humanist: as attested to in his letters from prisons and concentration camps, he was politically engaged but also literary. The political tendency he chose was idealistic and ineffectual: his dissident socialist group wanted to create a united front between the communists and social democrats but didn’t have nearly enough members to make this possible—another “unpopular front.” While I was working on the article about him, I was struggling with whether his political intervention was futile. But I think now that he was able to give testament and witness to his age and to write and transmit his spirit through his letters is a worthy legacy. A central part of the humanist tradition, reflected in the writing of Petrarch and Machiavelli, is the notion of a “conversation with the dead,” a kind of communing with the past through reading. That’s what Gottfried was continuing in prison and I’d like to think I’m attempting to do a version of the same. This communion of individuals across history suggests a type of interconnectedness that’s neither simply the atomized self-assertion of the marketplace nor, its obverse side, the indifferent massification of humanity that seems to be accelerating in the age of the internet. If nothing else, I’m glad to have the chance to be a link in a chain transmitting memory and tradition.

The other thing I thought about during that trip was the experience of loss and exile. The natural metaphor that came to me for the loss of the bookstore, which, in family memory, has an idyllic quality, was the destruction of the temple and the resulting diaspora. I found a quote from Heine that I liked but got cut from the final article for publication. Here’s how it originally read in the draft:

In the Philosophy of History, Hegel wrote, “The Temple of Zion is destroyed, the God-serving nation is scattered to the winds...Formerly the Land of Canaan and themselves as the people of God had been regarded by the Jews as that concrete and complete existence. But the basis of satisfaction is now lost, and thence arise the sense of misery…Here, then, misery is not the stupid immersion in a blind fate, but a boundless energy of longing.” And Heine wrote, “The Jews, who know the value of things, were well aware what they were doing when during the burning of the second Temple they abandoned the gold and the silver vessels of the candelabra and the lamps, even the breastplate of the High Priest with its great jewels and saved only the Bible. This was the true treasure.”

Who needs the store when you have the books?

As the temple burns, we should always seek to save the Book, because within it lies the redemption of mankind. Also, we can carry it with us.