Anyone who ever saw the great Midge Decter in action knows just what it means to describe a person as a force for good in the world. And what a force.
I didn’t know her well personally. I spent time with her on only a small handful of occasions. But Decter, who died today at the age of 94, sure left an impression.
She was, for one thing, a powerful and penetrating writer. Her essays could see right to the core of the failures of the modern left — often long before those failures become apparent as a practical matter to everyone with eyes to see. Her early collections, The Liberated Woman and The New Chastity, from the early 1970s, are full of insights that our society would take decades to grasp, but which Decter could see in real time because she took the radicals’ unseriousness seriously and understood where their moral recklessness would lead. Liberal Parents, Radical Children, written in the mid-’70s, reached even deeper, recognizing the complicated ways in which the parents of the Baby Boomers were responsible for what most troubled them about their children.
The need to take responsibility for what was breaking down in our society was a theme to which she would recur for decades — refusing to let Americans get away with blaming the degradation of our culture on anyone but ourselves.
For me, perhaps the most powerful articulation of the point came in an extraordinary essay that was my first exposure to Decter — a piece called “A Jew in Anti-Christian America,” published in First Things in 1995, when I was a college freshman. It’s not her greatest or most lasting piece of writing, but it combines autobiography, social analysis, and startling insight in her characteristic “force for good” style. You should read it today. In it she argues, among other things, that the radicalism she had warned of in the ’70s had evolved into a combination of arrogance and nihilism that she described as the philosophy of “why not?” and “so what?” As she put it:
In any case, these two questions—”Why not?” and “So what?”—would in the end prove to be among the most lasting legacies of our escape from the bounded, and limiting, view of life that had been our natural birthright, Jews and Christians, separately and together. Obviously, neither serious Judaism nor real Christianity can cohere with a sense of life that has banished all need for prayer, humility, and submission—three things that depend precisely on the recognition of human frailty and finitude. “Why not?” in its arrogance and “So what?” in its nihilism were thus to set the stage for a kind of nationwide drama of moral paralysis.
Many people who are shocked and repelled by the decadence that has so widely overtaken Western societies are now prepared to join the theorists who have traced our troubles all the way back to the Enlightenment. Theirs is a view of things that can be, and indeed has been, most persuasively argued, but it seems to me at once too convenient and too iniquitously ungrateful for either a Jew or a Christian to entertain. For Jews, certainly, the Enlightenment was the beginning of the hope, if not at all times and all places the reality, of liberty—a hope that it would be criminal for people like me to dare to make light of. And I would presume to say that the same is true for Christians: freedom of choice has after all been given to us by God, as have the mighty and humane benefits of science and technology. This is, let us remember, His universe, constituted as He has seen fit to constitute it and offering itself up to our scrutiny and management as He has chosen to offer it.
The same goes for the currently far too careless animadversions against humanism on the part of many conservatives. We are after all the heirs of giants who have lived on earth through the ages, many of whose ideas we may reject but whose genius and whose arts, be they of thought and language or of color and representation, both inspire and civilize us. Surely it was not meant for us to cut ourselves off from such an inheritance. So rather than calling on ancient and modern history—illuminating as they may be—to provide us with the source of our present threatening condition, let us just in all simplemindedness agree to recognize that our deepest troubles are of our very own making. They do not stem from enlightenment or from humanism; they are the troubles of our very own, very contemporary, self-generated atheism, the atheism, precisely, of “Why not?” and “So what?”
This was a kind of philosophical digression in what was largely an autobiographical essay, but as such it’s beautifully characteristic of the way Decter’s writing often worked: She drew deep wisdom from the life of our society, and even from her own life, in ways that made that wisdom relatable and therefore persuasive without making it any less deep.
Her fantastic memoir, An Old Wife’s Tale, published in 2001, was the epitome of this form. Full of humor and biting wit, the book is ultimately about why the instincts of the common American are worth defending against their radical foes. Yet it is also a window into the soul of a most uncommon American.
But for all the power of her writing, Decter was a force because she was more than a writer. She had a strong prejudice in favor of action, and a real knack for it too. She formed the Committee for the Free World in 1981 to keep up pressure on policy-makers to remain focused on opposing the Soviet Union. She became involved in boards, committees, and organizing efforts on a range of issues at home and abroad and in each case brought to bear her rare combination of iron commitment to a cause and shrewd capacity for coalition-building.
I got to see her in action on this front a couple of times in the early 2000s, and will never forget the example she offered. There was no one like her in these settings — clear and forceful, full of humor but focused intently on the morally serious purpose at hand.
Those who knew her better personally, and especially the family she adored so fiercely, will have much more to say in the days to come, I’m sure. But having known her only from an admiring distance, I am compelled in some small way to voice my gratitude for what she gave our country. She never for a moment stopped fighting for America. We were awfully lucky to have her.
May her memory be a blessing, as her life so surely was.
R.I.P.