A BOOK REVIEW: By Paul Merkley.
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Howard Rotberg, The Ideological Path to Submission (Mantua books, Brantford Ontario, www.mantuabooks.com),2017.)
Here is a book that is unlikely to be noticed either by journals generated within the academic establishment or by the magazines and newspapers. But it is one that demands the attention of serious Christian intellectuals. As a regular contributor to this Tyndale University website I recommend it highly.
Rotberg takes university-certified intellectuals into areas of reflection that are largely closed from public consideration on account of political correctness – but also, more basically, because they demand painful thought.
In earlier essays and in his book, Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed¸ Rotberg he elaborated a theory of remarkable simplicity but which proves to have endless applications. This is that everything that has gone wrong in our public policy and our politics and everything that is responsible for the low estate of our culture traces to the tyranny of “tolerism.” “Toleration” – the determination never to acknowledge degrees of worthiness among ideas, principles or modes of behaviour — has become the ultimate virtue. People who do have well-grounded loyalties to principles keep their heads low, for the sake of avoiding the appearance of standing in the way of values that are incompatible with that tradition.
Rotberg shudders at the nearly-complete absence of loyalty among our literate elites to any of the values that originally informed our Judaeo-Christian culture. As political correctness keeps drawing in the perimeters of what deserves to be discussed, thoughts of the least moral weight rise to the top. A vast public awaits moral direction from those least able to give it. Meanwhile, the most carefully-considered philosophies, those that emerge from Departments of Philosophy, have lost all connection with real life. These have been in freefall for at least a century — linguistic philosophy giving way through various styles of logic-chopping, through structuralism, deconstructionism, and now post-deconstructionalism – as if that could mean anything at all! Thread-bare and transient theories about human nature have ultimately filled up the vacuum created by banishment of history and the philosophical legacy from our past. People who do not feel obliged to join in praise of these pseudo-philosophies are simply put out of the intellectual arena – written off as fundamentalists.
As illustrative of the range of Rotberg’s insights I offer this striking observation:
Many of us spend our lives in the pursuit of money, fame and pleasure. The real pleasures are more than momentary fun, more than drug or alcohol, or sexually-induced highs, and consist of a deep enjoyment of living a good and meaningful life in loving relationships, in doing good for others, and promoting liberal freedoms as a constitutional right for every man women and child.
Within that context of a meaningful life, and meaningful love, there is lots of room for fun, but fun is not the ultimate goal… However I fear that we are making fun the ultimate measure of our lives. Moreover, if we appear in the West to be focused only on fun, those Islamists who enjoy jihad more than fun can easily surmise that they have good chance of winning, and making a worldwide caliphate when their opposition is too busy having fun to take up arms in defense of their own liberty.
Rotberg has learned the hard way that what is most worth saying has least prospect of being given the time of day in learned circles or among cultural elites. The son of a survivor of the Holocaust, he has no patience for the light-hearted spirit in which most intellectual inquiry is conducted today. He is not a willful provoker, but because he is devoted to frank expression, he will offend legions of people who have greater access than he has to the journals of opinion. Let’s say, then, that he is a gadfly — as Socrates said of himself.
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The Bayview Review 