Those who know David Horowitz only as a fierce critic of leftist delusions and a champion of democratic freedom may be surprised to discover that he is also the author of three volumes of memoirs laced with philosophical reflections. Yet a book such as A Point in Time, which joins the earlier volumes The End of Time and A Cracking of the Heart, complements beautifully Horowitz’s other work, which focuses more practically on contemporary ideologies and the pernicious policies they create. Politics, after all, is ultimately about ideas — about human nature, the goods states should pursue, and the limits of the possible given the brevity of a human life subjected to unforeseen change and suffering. Thus, conversations about policy must start first with those underlying ideas and ideals.
A Point in Time is one such conversation, subtly interwoven with Horowitz’s reflections on his own memories of loss, sickness, and anticipations of death, and deepened with perceptive explorations of timeless classics of philosophy and fiction, such as Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, that have addressed many of these same issues. The result is a melancholy yet hopeful story of one man’s search for order, meaning, and redemption in a world seemingly devoid of all three.
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Central to the book is the recognition that, as creatures who naturally seek order and meaning, humans have been left adrift by the decline of faith and thus prey to modernity’s bloody pseudo-religions that promise a future redemption on earth to be delivered by the new god, “history.” Horowitz’s memories of his father, a faithful member of the American Communist Party, recall how that utopian creed and its failures darkened his family’s life: “Much later it occurred to me that my father’s inattention to primal needs was the other side of his passion for worlds that did not exist. . . . He never suspected that a fantasy so remote from the life directly in front of him might actually be the source of his isolation and gloom.” Yet the wages of this failure have been much more destructive, because the drive for perfection and redemption in this world, as Dostoevsky understood and brilliantly showed in his novels, ultimately justifies unthinkable horrors: “The passion to create a new world,” Horowitz says while concluding his meditation on Dostoevsky’s Devils, “is really a passion to destroy the old one, transforming the love of humanity into a hatred for the human beings who stand in its way.”
The great sin of such utopian ideologies, then, is their scorn for the imperfect, complex world of the here and now, of suffering and loss, in which all humans must live and find meaning. This simple fact is what gives philosophical heft to Horowitz’s own thoughts about the loss, sickness, and disappointments of his life, for such stories are where we find the meaning of our brief lives. Part of that narrative comprises the conversations we have with other minds whose own life stories have been recorded in their writings. For Horowitz, the Meditations, with their counsel to distance oneself emotionally from the shifting changes and losses of human existence, seemed a tempting antidote to the dread of death. Yet the cold comfort of Marcus Aurelius and Stoic apatheia cannot tell us “how one gets through a single earthly day.” Thus, in the end, the emperor’s advice will not provide the meaning and reconciliation we all crave, for it ignores “the sensual pull of the tangible world; the hunger for the life we taste, as opposed to the one we merely think about. The desire for this life, regardless of how much we get of it.” Meaning cannot be deferred to an imagined future or experienced only in the mind, but must be found now, even if only in the pleasure of a walk with faithful dogs, or the fragile beauty of a horse, or the transient vistas of the Santa Maria Valley.
A Point in Time explores further this conflict between the sensuous world of “beauty that must die” and the transcendent realm, with its “stories without end,” that undergirds our existence and makes possible our ideals of order, beauty, and love. Even the Stoic Roman emperor, like the figures on Keats’s urn “all breathing human passion far above,” ultimately must admit, “There are certainly gods, and they take care of the world.” Horowitz wrestles with this assertion, using the words of Dostoevsky’s novels and memoirs to refute the atheist delusion that humans are the real gods, able to reshape the world according to their dreams. Yet Horowitz is too honest simply to call for a return to traditional religion. After quoting a letter from Mozart near the end of his life, in which the composer professes his love of God, Horowitz sadly remarks, “I wish the faith of this great and gifted young man were mine as well. I wish I could place my trust in the hands of a Creator. I wish I could look on my life and the lives of my children and all I have loved and see them as preludes to a better world. But, try as I might, I cannot.”
It is a testimony to Mr. Horowitz that he has the humility to open his soul and express, as the did the Preacher, the apparent emptiness of human endeavor. Would that he would also come to the Preacher's conclusion.
Horowitz reminds me of Glaucon in the Republic in that just as Glaucon is in the grip of Thrasymachus' arguments but refuses to accept them because of his integrity, Horowitz is in the grip of one of clearest rational motives for religious faith but cannot still surrender to it. The difference is that Glaucon would be free of his spell but Horowitz would not. So perhaps its possible that Horowitz will find his way back to God in time. As Aquinas and Kierkegaard show in their distinctive ways, agnosticism is an important propaedeutic to faith.
David Horowitz is a zealot, the worse kind, that was formerly of the opposing belief and now has to be so fiercely and radical to the other extreme to "prove his bona fides."
In addition he's a die-hard Islamophobe who wants American Muslims, all of them, on "watch lists" (for starters) and wants us to nuke Iran for Israel.
If you *were* a history buff you would understand Horowitz's point that zealotry takes the form of imagining worlds that don't exist: the communist world of absolute material equality, the Nazi world of racial purity, the Muslim world of a strict submission to Allah.
These delusions are nightmares for the living world, producing bloody charnel houses of unspeakable magnitude.
Warning us of zealotry is quite the opposite of engaging in zealotry.
I'm indebted to Isaiah Berlin for introducing me to Vico and Sorel. Vico I can read in his -and my own-language. Just can't find originals as yet.
With Sorel I'm in the inferior position of having to rely on translation.
In his Reflections on Violence, Sorel is all over a subject I have an enormous interest in. He sources Renan a lot: 'what will come after?' he asks referring to the death of belief in God.
Sorel thought that people like my great grandfather External Link would bring salvation. Look closely, that's a Cross in his hands.
The worker, The Ethics of the Producer. That producer was made strong in his weakness by the Church and by no small measure.
But, his enthusiasm and the incredible work ethic he brought to the US, though marvelous, was not in service to the brotherhood of man. He worked for himself and for his family so that when he died he could whisper "I was not a failure!"
I think man is a naturally solitary creature. He's communal because he has to be, but that solitary disposition is what keeps him and the race moving forward because it doesn't really care to rest for very long.
The church of the Left is built on a foundation that is part indolence and part anti-patriotism.
Our Miners never were indolent and they never were anti-American.
Sorel was right to look to America as a kind of model of 'ordered anarchy,' but he was wrong to connect it to any kind of desire for an abstracted and permanent brotherhood.
I like David and admire his work. But there is something about intellectuals that keeps them separated from God; perhaps it is hubris. Some, like Hitchens, write very well and nothing is so prideful as the ability to write a shapely sentence. It is almost godlike in a way. The writer looks down from above and believes he sees what others cannot: human motivations and failings, how the past prefigures the present, how people make the right or wrong decisions. A lot of judgment goes on, much of it uncontradicted. Intellectuals create a world that is so coherent to them they cannot imagine any other. Boys take the greater part of their worldview from their fathers. Even if they reject it in later life, its influence is only diminished, not eradicated. To have an atheist as a father would be tough.
Life is about making critical evaluations, Banjo. Call it judging if it makes you feel better about not engaging your critical faculties. Almost feels "righteous" that way. Forget entirely that we are told to love God with all our MIND, not merely our soul, body, and strength. Hubris can accompany intellectualism, but at least it is superior to a pride in ignorance. (I hope my sentences weren't so finely crafted as to reek of pride.)
I really liked his book, "Radical Son." For those of you who may not have read it, he details his communist upbringing, life as a left wing "activist," and, to his great credit, his conversion and awakening to conservative thought. Because he is so familiar with the methods and philosophies of the extreme left, his scathing critique of it is all the more powerful and compelling.
I, too, have respect for David Horowitz. I read "Radical Son" and would recommend his powerful conversion from his communist background--red diaper baby, to his now conservative beliefs. I'm sorry for the loss of his daughter, Sarah. I'm sure her passing broke his heart.
We all face death marking the end of our earthly life. I am a concer survivor. My oncologist asked me recently, if you have religious beliefs why "worry" or something to that effect, about dying. I told him "This is all I know." Yes, I believe Jesus Christ is the Word made Flesh. I hope for the resurrection of life. But all I really know for sure is the NOW.
David, I visit your site frequently to investigate the strategies for rolling out the competing "millennial experiences" from the different worldviews. Some people like horror flicks, but I prefer the battles to "create a system in which the capacities of man can be fully developed" - everything from a "world state" to the "rule of God". I don't see anything in our system that can save us out of our system, but I don't "believe" I'm stuck. I "believe" someone is outside our system and wants to engage us. The "validation for my belief" is wrapped up in the engagement. I wish I could transfer such validation at my whim.
