The grim symmetrical arrangement within which our narrow sliver of terrain is situated
There's nothing decent, let alone lovely, noble or even sensible, about it
Precipice is the writing activity into which I pour my heart. Please consider supporting it by upgrading to a paid subscription.
It’s an arrangement that has been taking shape for some time. In fact, it pretty much defines the narrow sliver which is the overarching preoccupation here at Precipice.
So we don’t need to go over the history of how it came to be. That’s what the archives are for. We can get right into two current examples - one on either side of the arrangement - that bring it into sharp relief.
The example on the left side is the inability - unwillingness? disinterest? - of Columbia University to meaningfully addresss the Jew-hatred the characterizes life on its campus these days:
A growing number of leaders and organizations have called on Columbia University and its president to protect students amid reports of antisemitic and offensive statements and actions on and near its campus, which has been the site this week of a pro-Palestinian encampment and protest.
The protest and encampment on campus has drawn attention to the right of free speech and the rights of students to feel safe from violence, with a campus rabbi recommending Jewish students return home for their own safety.
Early Monday, Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik said classes would be held virtually Monday, and said school leaders would be coming together to discuss a way to bring an end to “this crisis.”
In a statement to the university community, Shafik said she was “saddened” by the events on campus, and denounced antisemitic language, and intimidating and harassing behavior.
“The decibel of our disagreements has only increased in recent days. These tensions have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas,” she said. “We need a reset.”
Shafik's announcement followed mounting calls for action.
In a letter shared on social media Sunday, Chabad at Columbia said students have had offensive rhetoric hurled at them, including being told to “go back to Poland” and “stop killing children.”
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement Sunday that protesters in and around Columbia cross the line if they say violence should befall Jewish students.
“While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous — they have absolutely no place on any college campus, or anywhere in the United States of America,” he said.
“Echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations, especially in the wake of the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, is despicable," Bates continued, referring to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, where 1,200 were killed.
One prominent figure in the campus Jewish community is throwing in the towel:
In a letter to Jewish students earlier Sunday, rabbi Elie Buechler of the Columbia/Barnard Hillel and Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, recommended they return home and stay there, saying it was clear the university and city police “cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy.” Buechler declined requests for an interview.
The Columbia Jewish Alumni Association on Sunday sent a letter to Shafik noting the rabbi’s concerns and claiming that the environment on campus has been hostile for Jewish students, including those it claims have been “openly threatened and harassed.”
Alleging lax enforcement, the group urged Columbia to “enforce the university rules with regard to protests and harassment and restore order and safety on campus.”
I cite the foregoing not as an isolated situation, but as a concentrated example of something going on throughout our culture that has gained a horrifying legitimacy.
Then there is the rhetoric among the Trumpist / Neo-Trumpist right in our federal legislature:
The House of Representatives has passed legislation aiding three U.S. allies: Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, has called this “the warmonger wishlist pushed through by Speaker Johnson.”
In truth, it is Vladimir Putin who is the warmonger — the war-maker. The aggressor. Iran is a war-maker, an aggressor — on its own and through its proxies, such as Hamas. China threatens Taiwan.
The Ukrainians are fighting for their very right to exist. Israel’s right to exist is under attack. Taiwan’s right to exist is denied by the PRC, and Xi Jinping is eyeing Taiwan hungrily.
Don’t let the likes of Mike Lee call day night, and up down. I mean, they will do it — but they should not go unopposed, and uncorrected.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman from Georgia, called Speaker Mike Johnson “a traitor to our country.” When Greene is calling you a traitor — you must have done something right.
• A majority of Republicans in the House voted against aid to Ukraine (so Greene and other such Republicans can have that consolation). Previously, a majority of Republicans in the Senate had voted against aid to Ukraine. These included Lee, J. D. Vance, and Josh Hawley, naturally. But they also included Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham.
So you can see where the weight of the Republican Party is.
Now, a rejoinder to the overall picture presented by these two toxic bookends is that the majority of American citizens neither wish Israel destroyed and all Jews dead, nor react to Ukraine’s situation with icy indifference.
But they’re not without opinions, which ought to lead us to ask how those opinions are being formed. Among younger citizens, information is obtained via social media, where yesteryear’s journalistic standards are a mere quaint notion. Older Gen Xers and Boomers tend to rely on “journalistic” outlets based on confirmation bias.
That leads to the symmetry which is this posts’s subject playing out on the level of the public’s news consumption. The view of the lay of the land one gets from left-leaning outlets is going to be starkly different from that derived from the yay-hoo lens through which the Washington Times and Newsmax interpret any given day’s goings-on.
Yes, it was revealed, from 1968, when he editorialized on air about the Tet Offensive, through the rest of his career, that Walter Cronkite had never been the voice of objectivity we’d assumed him to be. But standards that were pretty well heeded meant that it took a while for a major journalist’s leanings to become apparent. (Cronkite had been plying his craft since the early 1940s.)
Thus we’re without any kind of universally recognized way of determining whether any phenomenon we encounter is appropriate or not, possessing some kind of merit or just downright nasty, and even impactful on national security. Some outlets will tell you one thing, and others the exact opposite.
The only way to ensure immunity from the ignorance to be found on either side of this symmetrical arrangement is to step onto the narrow sliver of terrain, where skills for cultivating real discernment are developed by consulting the thinkers from history who have looked at life’s big questions and engaged in serious debate about what makes life worth living and how a society should be organized so as to maximize human flourishing.
Don’t say you don’t have time for such consultation. You don’t have time not to. It’s very late in the day.
Eh, I won’t defend the echo chambers on right and left, but nor am I enamored with the golden era of gatekeeping and its patron saint, Walter Cronkite. Cronkite lied through his teeth on air about Barry Goldwater’s response to JFK’s assassination and also blamed “right-wing extremism” in Dallas, when the assassination was actually carried out by a literal communist. Cronkite was sympathetic to the Soviet Union himself, so he carried water for the left.
W. F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review explicitly as an alternative to the enforced groupthink of “vital center liberalism.” One of the reasons the right lost its mind is that the right had to develop an alternative media ecosystem because the established one was so bad. That in turn gave permission for the NPR’s of this world to become leftist propaganda outlets and the Washington Posts of the world to become anti-anti-Hamas.