THE JEWISH CRITICISM OF GENTILE CULTURE: A REPRISE Do you remember, he asked me, what Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, once said to the municipality of Vienna when a subsidy for the natural sciences was asked for? “Science? That is what one Jew cribs from another.” That is what I say about Ideengeschichte, history of ideas. (Isaiah Berlin, reflecting on a conversation with Lewis Namier; in Efron 1994, 13) The material in the previous four chapters indicates that individuals who strongly identified as Jews have been the main motivating force behind several highly influential intellectual movements that have simultaneously subjected gentile culture to radical criticism and allowed for the continuity of Jewish identification. Together these movements comprise the intellectual and political left in this century, and they are the direct intellectual ancestors of current leftist intellectual and political movements, particularly postmodernism and multiculturalism. Collectively, these movements have called into question the fundamental moral, political, and economic foundations of Western society. A critical feature of these movements is that they have been, at least in the United States, top- down movements in the sense that they were originated and dominated by members of a highly intelligent and highly educated group. These movements have been advocated with great intellectual passion and moral fervor and with a very high level of theoretical sophistication. Each movement promised its own often overlapping and complementary version of utopia: a society composed of people with the same biological potential for accomplishment and able to be easily molded by culture into ideal citizens as imagined by a morally and intellectually superior elite; a classless society in which there would be no conflicts of interest and people would altruistically work for the good of the group; a society in which people would be free of neuroses and aggression toward outgroups and in tune with their biological urges; a multicultural paradise in which different racial and ethnic groups would live in harmony and cooperation —a utopian dream that also occupies center stage in the discussion of Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy in Chapter 7. Each of these utopias is profoundly problematic from an evolutionary perspective, a theme that will be returned to in Chapter 8. The originators of these movements were all vitally concerned with anti- Semitism, and all of the utopias envisioned by these intellectual and political

Kevin MacDonald The Culture of Critique