On one level it’s more hysterical overreach in the face of people who merely argue that American children should learn basic literacy; but the sentence has a value-added something. “The pleasure of illiberal dependency” sounds not quite right as the opposite principle to “the pleasure of liberal autonomy.” What more easily rolls off the tongue is something like the rigors of illiberal dependency; for an ignorant, isolated, impoverished life of lockstep obedience to rabbis cannot – the writer would I guess say should not – be easy. (Hatam Sofer declared, “Everything new is forbidden by the Torah.”) You’re after a life which – with its strict rituals and rules and repressions – represents a daily rebuke of modernity’s shapeless hedonism.
Of course, the writer also intends sardonic irony, for we all know that the seeming pleasure of free — read deracinated — societies quickly turns to ashes as secular modernity’s inescapable meaninglessness and loneliness drives all of us outside of yeshivas to suicide. Indeed we are incessantly assured of the rich communal meaningful happy lives within fortress u-o; and yet Shaul Magid notes that these assurances, like a recent one by Liel Leibowitz in Tablet, are “purely speculative. [Leibowitz] has never lived in [an ultraorthodox community] (I have) and his judgment is a purely romantic, or more likely opportunistic, view of one gazing in from the outside.” Sounds as though Magid didn’t think his community was very happy.
Would you be happy if you were kept from learning anything about the world you share with all of us outside fortress u-o? To read the writer’s account of modern university education, for instance, is to try to wrap your head around a world where schools like Yeshiva, Touro, Brandeis, Baylor, Liberty, Ave Maria, Hillsdale College, and many other religiously serious institutions do not exist. ALL colleges corrupt, which is why your high schools need to aim for total illiteracy – the inability to sign your name on your SAT test:
[P]reventing college is the point. Ḥasidic parents are absolutely opposed to their eighteen-year-old sons or daughters attending college for the entirely rational reason that college consists of a complete immersion in a culture antithetical to Ḥasidism…
Come, come. The other reason – you fail to note it – is that the community makes sure eighteen year old girls are already arranged-married and knocked up, with no future to look forward to but more kids. How entirely rational.
September 16th, 2022 at 6:28PM
For obvious reasons, I rather like this essay. I am a “political philosopher.” Very fancy! But here is somewhat critical response that raises the right question: https://gideons.substack.com/p/a-stranger-among-us.
Also, Hillsdale and Brandeis are nonsectarian. And recent events at YU may well demonstrate the skeptics’ point – even a seriously-religious college upholds its religion only at the pleasure of the secular state, which reserves the right to decide which of its commitments are binding and which are optional.
September 16th, 2022 at 10:19PM
Thanks so much for the link to Noah Millman’s wonderful essay! ‘Hasidic groups themselves have increasingly assimilated into the oppositional paranoid fringe of American life, expressed, for example, in increasing opposition to vaccination.’ Yup.
And yes – I was impressed to see you turn up in the piece I quoted…
On the schools – I didn’t have in mind sectarian – only spiritually very serious.
The YU thing is really interesting, since after all it’s our very religious current Supreme Court that ruled against YU! You just can’t win.