George Orwell once wrote that “contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present.” If it seems so, it is only because events that happened years apart are “telescoped together” in hindsight, and because “very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.”
My generation, having been born on the cusp of what some call our “holiday from history,” does not know the meaning of this. We were born at the end of history, in 1989.
Of course we were young, and only slowly becoming aware of the world beyond the cul-desac. But I remember the bombs over Belgrade, the Lewinsky scandal (how could any appropriately inquisitive 9-year-old forget?), and the starting lineup of the ’98 Yankees.
Then everything seems to fade away until that day in September, when my middle school classmates started getting called to go home on the P.A. system. I am from Rockland County, about an hour north of New York City, but I went to a middle school with 2,400 kids, and not everyone’s parents came home that night.
My mother let me finish the day at school. On the bus ride home I was sitting next to my best friend and next-door neighbor, a devout Muslim boy from Pakistan. At that point, we still didn’t know the details. But I remember him sighing and saying to me, “It was probably Arabs.” I shrugged it off, but he was right. My family met me at the top of the driveway. History had returned.
Like everyone else, I wanted to know why this had happened. Why “they” hated us. But I had a special interest in the Middle East.
Baghdadi Days
My grandmother had come to the United States from Iraq in the 1950s. During her childhood, she says, the Jews and Arabs of Baghdad were “like brothers,” but in 1941, a pro-Nazi coup overthrew the British-backed monarchy and initiated a pogrom that killed hundreds of Jews. Some years later, her father was arrested and thrown in jail by the new
authorities. He had received a letter from a family member in Tel Aviv, and he was accused of spying for the new Jewish state. To buy his freedom and his family’s safety, he had to give up his hundreds of acres of land, mostly farmland, and leave Iraq.
My grandparents and two uncles came to the United States, and my mother was born. Twenty-five years later she met my father, an immigrant from Israel with Iraqi parents, through a connection in the then large Iraqi community in New York.
After 9/11 and the War on Terror, politics became too interesting to ignore. And I had an interest, if only because the United States was the kind of country where the son of a kibbutznik and the daughter of an Iraqi exile could work hard, start a family, and, maybe, get a house out in Hackensack. I hadn’t learned to be cynical yet. I didn’t have a bohemian bone in my body.
My interest in world affairs might have stemmed in part from a typical teenage boy’s fascination with war, but I also felt a genuine sense of patriotism. I began subscribing to The New Republic when I was 15, along with Military History. I read the Koran and wrote a term paper senior year on Islam and the Crusades.
What Went Wrong
When I came to Harvard, I was sure I would study international relations and figure everything out. What Went Wrong? was the title of a book I read the summer before matriculating. I took courses in political Islam, American foreign policy, and a seminar on 9/11. I did what most Harvard students do when they aren’t sure what to make of the 3,000 courses in the catalogue: I took whatever seemed “relevant” to current events.
For the most part, that was not really a bad decision. I did figure a lot out. The conclusion I came to was that “they” really did “hate us for our freedom,” as our cowboy-in-chief had so crudely put it in the aftermath of the attacks. They were enemies of liberalism. And most liberals I met didn’t seem to care.
Even so, I found myself at a well-known liberal think tank the summer after sophomore year of college. I thought of myself as a “moderate,” and I didn’t really care much for “domestic issues” anyway. I researched foreign aid in fragile states. It was a good internship and a good summer. But I determined that perhaps I was not as “moderate” as I thought I was. If that was the Left, poring over survey results and sighing that Americans still liked the “free market” after the financial crisis, then maybe the Right was right.
When I came back to Harvard junior year, I resolved to take more classes in political philosophy. I had never learned Arabic anyway, so my plans to
become the next Kissinger now looked poorly laid. I took a seminar on conservative political thought in the spring. There I learned that “conservative political thought” was not necessarily an oxymoron, as liberals since John Stuart Mill have branded it. A putatively open-minded moderate like me at least had to grapple with it.
This past summer, I tried to decide whether I would write my thesis on neoconservative political thought or Tocqueville. I read Irving Kristol’s Autobiography of an Idea, and began to uncover the world of the New York Intellectuals, which eventually led me back to Tocqueville. Now I found that I really was just as interested in “domestic issues” as foreign policy. And most of all I began to see how they might be connected.
Boiled Little Rabbits
Orwell, the democratic socialist, tried to reconcile his patriotism with his left-wing views. But I am not sure that he succeeded. He ended his essay by calling the intellectuals of the Left “boiled little rabbits” who could not understand the “spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues,” for which “no substitute has been found.”
Although I cannot endorse such incivility, I cannot help but think that as long our rallying cry is race, class, and gender instead of God, family, and country, we will always see the essential public virtues through a distorted prism. From the vaunted viewpoint of the asocial socialist-with his peculiar mix of condescension and self-righteous compassion-religion, love, and patriotism will ever appear to be low superstition, selfishness, and chauvinism.
I met a lot of smart left-wingers at Harvard, but I think none as wise as Orwell, who saw some value in the traditional trifecta. If I may quote my favorite left-winger once more: “I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing” than be like “the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.”
Alexander Sherbany ‘11 is a former Managing Editor
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