Two Things 2/12/24
Education tempers campus radicalism. Christian unity tempers excess.
Coffee this Friday, Feb. 16, at the usual time and place.
(1) Which river? What sea?: Thanks to the Colson Center’s The Point commentary today, I learned of this WSJ opinion piece, a few months old, by UC Berkeley poli-sci prof Ron Hassner. Hassner surveyed 250 college students who say they support the genocidal slogan “From the river to the sea”:
But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.
The good news is that education—real education—seems to help:
Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, [a Latino engineering student from a southern university] downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view….
In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.
(2) Christendom’s what-if: Tom Holland’s magisterial book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World has anchored many of our discussions, at coffee and beyond. The book is barely over three years old, but one has a sense that we will all be “downstream” of it—drinking of its insights, shaped by its currents—for decades. Fresh critiques are thus welcome. Here’s one over at The Public Discourse from The Witherspoon Institute’s John Doherty. (Thanks again to Kirk Cherry for the pointer.) Doherty’s conclusory section, on how unity within Christendom could have avoided the excesses of the various traditions, is the most insightful:
Holland’s account also raises the question whether the rupture of the different elements of Christian civilization had something to do with divisions within the Church proper. Holland praises Pope Gregory VII for distinguishing the realm of the state from that of the Church, and for holding public institutions to universal moral standards. But he also notes that Gregory’s zeal could be excessive, and eventually led to the medieval papacy’s claim … that it was good for civil authorities to prosecute heresy at the Church’s direction. Was Gregory more prone to such excesses because he was one of the first popes not to reign in formal communion with the Eastern patriarchal bishops, who had separated from Rome just twenty years before his pontificate? Had the medieval popes had to keep more in mind the authority and judgments of their Greek-speaking brethren, they might have asserted their own authority with more caution.
Moreover, had the East, with its instinctive reverence for God’s transcendent authority over men’s lives, remained in communion with the West, the West’s confidence in reason might not have rushed so quickly into secularism, nor its love of human dignity and freedom devolved into today’s identity politics and moral anarchy. On the other hand, if Eastern Christianity had remained anchored to the papacy, it might have been able to defend itself from the Byzantine and Russian emperors who turned the Church into an arm of the state. This “caesaropapism”—the inverse of papal theocracy—persists to this day in parts of Eastern Europe, sapping the Church of evangelical energy and leading it to acquiesce in the reigning autocrat’s policies, no matter how brutal.
Hope to see you Friday.