Elephant in the Room
Some Concluding Thoughts
Reflecting on the fact that this is my last column, I was tempted to try my hand at writing something of a masterpiece. Like a siren, this column had been calling out for me to attempt a grand reflection, either of my own work, that of my fellow columnists, or of something even more general. It would be nice, I thought to myself, to end the semester with a bang—to write something that might leave a lasting mark and affect the discourse of our little Harvard world. But the profound thought that such a column requires eludes me, and besides, I don’t think I am competent enough a writer to accomplish such a magnificent task. Instead, I found my head filled with a number of observations—columns waiting to be born, if you will—and I thought I would use this opportunity to share them.
First, my writing coincides with Hanukkah, perhaps the most visible Jewish holiday here in America. But this is strange, because Hanukkah is, from a traditional Jewish perspective, not a major holiday. It pales in comparison to Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Passover, Sukkos, and a host of others. So why is Hanukkah always one of the first things associated with Jews in the public imagination? The answer turns out to be, in part, that American Jews used Hanukkah to assimilate into America. Because of its calendrical proximity to one of America’s most celebrated holidays, Christmas, American Jews promoted and even added to the holiday to associate it with Christmas. For example, the institution of gift giving, which American Jews used to associate with Purim, was shifted to Hanukkah. (Although it is a long standing custom to give children gelt, or money, on Hanukkah, gifts seem to be something altogether different.)
Loving the West
Both in the cries of my peers who have taken to activism, and in the conversations I hear and take part in daily, criticizing “the West” seems to be much in vogue. To anyone on Harvard’s campus—or, I suspect, on most campuses—or anyone who has viewed the Ivy League Snapchat story over the past couple of days, or anyone who has read a college newspaper, a sometimes vague and sometimes sharp anti-Western sentiment is palpable.
The charges against the West are plain and severe: sexism, racism, homophobia, and all the evils they precipitate. Both to signal our disapproval of these wrongs, and to prevent them from taking hold of new generations, I have heard suggestions ranging from universities mandating classes in women and gender, African and African-American, Latin American, and East Asian studies, to deemphasizing the importance of the Western canon. In the next couple of paragraphs, I want to argue against both the sentiments and the suggestions attached to them. The West and its canon contain deep truths, beauties, and insights that would be lost if not studied. And the complaints leveled against those texts, I believe, are incoherent.
God and Man at Harvard
A few weeks ago, my friends and I were joined at dinner by a tutor in our House. As conversations tend to do, ours drifted from topic to topic until it somehow settled on religion. The tutor expressed strongly anti-religious views: Religion’s claims are not only false, but contrary to reason; it engenders fanaticism; it causes people to behave in irrational and dangerous ways. To make matters worse, all these things are obvious, and religious people are too blinded by their myths to see the plain truth.
I was shocked to hear someone I had always considered thoughtful and intelligent level these reductive charges against religion, and with such a lack of nuance. (I want to make it clear that his remarks caused no offense, that he spoke without malice, that the conversation which followed was civil, and that he somewhat moderated his views.) But as we spoke, it became obvious that he held pernicious assumptions about all religions and all religious people. I wondered what would happen if he made analogously bad assumptions and generalizations about something else, like race, class, gender identity, or sexual orientation. That conversation left me with a keen awareness that, for some reason, many people here at Harvard view religion as peculiarly bad, dangerous, or silly.
'What’s Love Got To Do With It?'
If I were not such a big Tina Turner fan, this piece could have just as easily been titled, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Or, if I wanted to alert the headline glancers as to what this column was really about, “What Conservatives Talk About When We Talk About Marriage Redefinition.”
Contrary to what many had predicted, this summer’s historic Supreme Court decision on gay marriage did not put the issue to rest, as evidenced by the controversy earlier this year surrounding a Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, who refused to issue a marriage certificate to a same-sex couple. Because the issue continues to pop up in the news, and because I still hear many of my friends discuss it, I think it is a good moment to adumbrate what I believe are the two strongest conservative arguments both for and against gay marriage. In doing so, I hope to accomplish two things: one, to show my liberal friends that it is possible for a conservative to oppose gay marriage on non-religious grounds, and to do so without being a bigot, and two, to show my conservative friends that there is a genuinely conservative argument to be made in favor of gay marriage.
Guns to God
“Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.”—2 Timothy 3:12
Suppose there is a mass shooting somewhere in the United States and, before firing on his victims, the gunman asks them a question: what’s your religion? If they say that they are Muslim, he shoots them in the head, but if they are an atheist or profess faith in another religion, he shoots them in the leg.