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From Yale via New York City: A Second Evening With Commentary

By Dan Gelernter

 

On Wednesday May 17, 2006, I was honored to attend the second annual Podhoretz Lecture, hosted by Commentary – “the most distinguished magazine in the country.” * I was especially gratified to make the guest list two years in a row (though I had some help this time – my father, David Gelernter, was giving the lecture).

The dinner was held at the Union League Club, 38 East 37 Street on Park Avenue. The invitation said “business dress,” though it would be a good, conservative move to make next year’s event black-tie.

Our driver, perhaps a little too expert, got us to the club about ten minutes before the 6 o’clock reception time, and so my father and I decided to fight a desperate stalling action and stroll around outside for a bit. (My mother and younger brother were unfortunately unable to attend). We met Mrs. Maud Kozodoy on the street (wife of Commentary’s editor Neal Kozodoy) and she promised not to tell anyone that we were loitering.

At about six, we finally gave in and walked back to the Union League’s awning. The entryway has a large revolving door, wood with brass trimmings, flanked by a regular push-open door on each side (one of which bore a little plaque to remind us that the “use of cell phones is prohibited inside”). The lobby is a split level – go down a half-flight of stairs to check your briefcase; go up a half-flight to an elevator landing with the Commentary reception on one side, and a billiards room on the other. (I had never seen an honest to goodness New York billiards room before, so we had to take a peek. The balls at the first table seemed somewhat under-sized, and the author remains unsure as to what could account for this discrepancy).

Right outside the billiards room is a pair of phone booths that do their best to hide the men’s lounge tucked in between them. I found the bathrooms to be quite well equipped (each with a bottle of Listerine) and even the Forbes building with its heated soap dispensers doesn’t approach the Union League Club in terms of paper towel fluffiness.

We decided to look for the club’s collection of toy soldiers, which was said to exist somewhere around the third floor. We made our best guess with the elevator buttons and chose floor 3M [on the advice of a fellow who had just come from a Yale ’49 reunion and who, we quickly discovered, was to some degree inebriated]. We ended up exiting the elevator onto a balcony that overlooked the room we’d been aiming for. The balcony had bookshelves on three of the four walls, and this library would have been worth investigating, had not little cast iron barricades prevented our doing so.

It was just a quick promenade on the library floor before we returned to the level whence we came. We met Lawrence Kadish, who reminded me that I’d written a piece on last year’s Podhoretz Lecture (which I published on my former blog, "Republican Dan"). This is one of the main reasons that I am now writing this instead of sleeping, which is what any reasonable fellow in my position (college student) should really be doing.

Mr. Kadish asked me if I knew Ohm’s Law. Since I had just finished my freshman year at Yale I was working hard to remove formulas from my head and thus take the greatest advantage of summer vacation. Nevertheless, it’s a simple formula (doesn’t even involve calculus!). V = IR. That is, the voltage is equal to the current times the resistance. Mr. Kadish was in reality trying to figure out how to organize his office, replacing secretaries with light bulbs in his analogy: “if you have two 100 Watt bulbs in series and you replace one of the 100W bulbs with a 200W, what will happen?” The answer is that the higher wattage bulb will glow more dimly. This would seem to suggest that a high-powered executive should have his phone calls filtered through dim bulbs, unless of course his goal is to receive as few calls as possible (a reasonable approach) in which case high wattage secretaries would be the answer. You don’t want to connect your office in parallel because then you’ll have to answer every call.

As I write this I have just returned from performing the Kadish Light Bulb Experiment in my basement: I took two old lamps that I thought likely to remain unused, cut the electrical plug off of the first and snipped one of the two wires in the chord of the second. I stripped the wires and attached the two lamp chords together with little plastic screw-on connecters, so that if the remaining chord plug were put into an outlet, the current would have to go through both light sockets (a series connection). I then grabbed two 40 Watt bulbs and one 75 (a good approximation of the rare 80W bulb). With two 40 W bulbs in the lamps, each glows at equal brightness (and at what seemed like 20 W – half power). Replacing one of the 40 W bulbs with the 75, and switching on the light again, the 40 W glows more brightly than before and the 75 W glows almost not at all. If you want to examine why this is so, you need one more basic law, which relates Power, P, to Voltage, V, Current, I, and Resistance, R: P = IV = I2R = V2/R. In order to solve this problem, we first figure out how the resistance of the bulb relates to the wattage. (Incandescent bulbs do not have constant resistance, though for the sake of our experiment, it is convenient to pretend that they do.) Imagine that we plug a single lamp into a 120 V outlet. P = V2/R, and V is constant, so if you want to make P higher, you need to make the resistance lower. So the high wattage bulb should have about half the resistance of the low wattage bulb. We know that the current has to be the same everywhere along a series circuit, and so if we now plug both lamps in, the value I is the same for both lamps. Since P = I2R in this case the bulb with the higher resistance wins. Thus a higher wattage bulb will glow more dimly in series with a lower wattage bulb. Ta da! (You can also do this problem using Kirchoff’s loop law, but the solution above happens to be the simplest).

Returning from that extensive digression to the Commentary dinner, my father and I went in to the great, wood-paneled and green-carpeted reception hall and took our little cards with the table numbers on them. We noticed that my grandparents, also invited to the dinner, had not yet shown up. I glanced at the table numbers and noted with some frustration that we’d all been put at different tables – my father at table 15, his parents at table 17, and I myself was out in the tenement district: table 27.

We met Neal Kozodoy just inside the door, and of course Norman Podhoretz, both of whom were ready to go into a good conversational huddle with my dad. They seemed glad to see me (though perhaps not as glad I was to see them). We also said hello to Eliana Johnson, a graduating Yale senior who is the daughter of Powerline blogger Scott Johnson. My father was the subject of an extensive project she did for John Gaddis’ biography seminar. To me she was a friendly and familiar face from Yale in a room that was awash with people of I knew of but was not acquainted with. (I later saw another Yalie at the reception and met more at dinner).

My father and I milled around the reception hall, which was already well packed. Twin bars governed the ends of the room. We chose the end of the room where William Buckley Jr. was standing and my father got a glass of tonic water. There was an unfortunate age gap between me and the glass of port I would have liked (since I’m only 19 and the drinking age is officially 21). My grandparents presently arrived, glad to see us, and very proud.

Then began the inevitable and recurring cycle whereby pairs of people would stroll up to my dad, introduce themselves, and offer a bit of praise or a comment on this topic or that. Then dad would introduce them to me, and presently they’d toddle off and the next set would show up. I finally had a big surprise when someone whose name I managed to miss twice – if he reads this I’d sure appreciate his re-identifying himself – came over to introduce himself to me (!) with the opener, “You’re Republican Dan, right?” (This was my official soubriquet in high school, and was the name of the blog I ran before switching to my new one, “Critical Mass.”) How had he heard of me? He’d read my piece about the dinner last year. Yet another good reason for my writing one now.

At 7 o’clock, the four-tone dinner bell let everyone know that he was expected to find his way upstairs to the dining room. There was a small battalion of cheerful event-coordinators who would come up to clusters of people and try to get them moving (they remind one of the caterer in the Spencer Tracy movie Father of the Bride who’s constantly trying to get everyone to “circulate”). In the final analysis, though, it was the closure of the bars that seemed to get people going.

Someone came up and told me that I would be able to sit at my father’s table, provided I dashed up right away and reserved a place. It was for this reason that I forwent the elevator and walked up a convenient 376 flights of stairs to where the dining room was located. It seemed to be a different room from last year’s dining hall, but it’s hard to imagine how they can fit so many huge spaces into one building. There were around 30 ten or eleven-man tables. My father’s was right in the middle, my grandparent’s was right in front of the lectern. What had been scheduled to be my table was just a short walk away.

Davi Bernstein, Commentary employee and Yale ’03 alum whom I happen to know through the “facebook,” came up to me and let me know that they’d worked out the seating situation: Henry Kissinger was to be at my father’s table, but he only had time to toast Norman Podhoretz before getting back on a plane. Mr. Bernstein suggested that I sit at the one table until Mr. Kissinger left, and afterwards move to my father’s table and occupy the Kissinger seat.

This turned out to be quite a fine arrangement, as it turned out that the table I had been assigned, despite it’s being locationally challenged, was well peopled. Yale was represented there by Mr. Bernstein and some current students as well. Davi reminded me as we sat down to the salad that I had poked fun at it in my last year’s piece. Though the salad itself remained unchanged, the surrounding gourmets seemed to find it highly appetizing, and so the only explanation I can offer is that all these people have been equipped with very easy-going or accommodating taste buds.

As I was industriously working my way through the salad, I was given respite in form of Henry Kissinger. He took the podium to say a few words about his great affection for Norman Podhoretz. Speaking in his wry, accented manner, he began, pausing in between each statement, “I have known Norman Podhoretz for a long time… He attacked me from the left… He attacked me from the right… Then we became great friends, and he attacked me from the front.” At this point, Kissinger could have launched into the “Charge of the Light Brigade.” He chose, rather, to expound on Norman Podhoretz’s virtues. Since they are many, and since, as Mr. Kissinger pointed out, they are prophet-like, Kissinger simply did his best. Following his fine short speech he returned to his table, and I returned to my salad.

When dinner came it was fish (as it was last year) and this turned out to be quite good. The conversation at table 27 at least in part reminded me of the sort of conversation that happens back at school: you find out what college, major, and year your interlocutors are in, perhaps what classes they’ve taken, and then you proceed to forget everything. Following dinner I figured that although I had not been watching for Mr. Kissinger, he had probably departed, and went off in search of his seat. I happily found an empty chair next to my father. At his table were Mr. and Mrs. Hertog, Harvard Yiddish Professor Ruth Wisse, UN Ambassador John Bolton’s wife, and a couple whose names the dining hall’s wayward acoustics prevented me from hearing. I was pleased in particular to meet Mrs. Bolton – her daughter is a year ahead of me at Yale and, like myself, a member of the Tory Party of Yale’s Political Union.

The dessert was a tasty sorbet. I knew that its appearance indicated that the time for speeches was near, and so I quickly polished it off to avoid having it become a puddle (lessons from the year before). Presently, Neal Kozodoy went up to the lectern to introduce the featured event of the evening. He began by addressing two questions he said he’d heard a lot of that evening. The first was to ask if someone could turn up the volume of the speaker system. “The second was, ‘who are you?’” This elicited hearty audience laughter, and well-known Mr. Kozodoy went on to discuss my father – “Those of you who know him as a writer for Commentary, author of many books, an art critic, scholar, and philosopher, that is to say, those of who know him for what he does outside of his profession…” For indeed David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale. The introduction continued for a bit, until, at about 20 minutes to 9, my father was considered introduced, and the podium turned over to him.

David Gelernter began his talk by describing Norman Podhoretz as a man whose true field had been literary criticism, as opposed to political writing. “If there’d been a young critics draft, he would undoubtedly have been the number one draft choice the year he emerged from graduate school and would probably have wound up at Harvard – or whatever university had finished last the year before.” Norman Podhoretz fits Nietzsche’s description of “philosopher”: “This is a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes and dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from outside, from above and below, as if by his type of events and lightning bolts; who is perhaps a storm himself, pregnant and angry with lighting.”

Then some words about Commentary and Mr. Kozodoy: “Commentary and its writers have more breadth, depth, and throw-weight than any university department in the humanities or social science anywhere in the world – under the leadership of its dean, provost and president all in one, Neal Kozodoy…

“The luckiest break I ever got in my professional life was meeting up with Neal Kozodoy… I’ll never be able to thank Neal for all he’s done for me. But you can’t blame a fellow for trying.”

Professor Gelernter then proceeded to the main body of his talk, beginning with a quotation from psalms to which he was to return many times during the course of his lecture: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” He investigated the questions: “Do the religious lives of citizens matter to the nation as a whole, or to the spiritual health and physical safety of this great American city on a hill? Or is religion (on the contrary) a strictly private affair? Does it matter if the Lord keep the city?” He asserted that America is not a secular republic but a “biblical republic.”

He documented just a little of the evidence that biblical, puritan religion was exceptionally important in what the founders saw as the idea of America. For example: “The founding fathers were not biased against religion, they were biased in favor – especially of biblical religion. One glance at the proposed seal for the new Republic, designed in 1776 by a congressional committee of Adams, Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson makes that clear – it showed Israel crossing the Red Sea, with the divine pillar of fire and the motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

“Religious freedom is indeed, of course, a founding and guiding principle of this nation. But this noble idea is often misunderstood. Freedom doesn’t imply indifference. “I won’t interfere” doesn’t imply “I don’t care.”… The American public is not unconcerned whether you choose to be religious or an atheist; whether you choose a biblical religion or some other kind. Although it respects non-biblical religions (especially ones with their own scriptures) far more than it does atheism, it prefers biblical religion.”

“In sum: secularism is not a great American idea, and is not inherent in America’s founding documents or in the thought of America’s founding fathers. But something else is inherent in both, and is a great American idea. I’ll call it “democratic chivalry.” And Professor Gelernter explained chivalry as essentially a religious, Judeo-Christian, Biblical idea. A treatise on chivalry written in 1350 by Geoffrey de Charny states, “For the perfect model of knighthood one should look to Judas Maccabeus, who was worthy and hardy, handsome but without pride, ever honourable, a great fighter who died armed in God’s cause. He who can be likened to this noble knight will come to the highest honour in chivalry.”

“America took up this same large theme of chivalry; but American chivalry, unlike Europe’s, had nothing to do with aristocracy. It obligated all Americans.”

“The words of the Bible are in America’s ear, on its mind, in its heart; they are the wallpaper and elevator music of American life. And sometimes – especially in hard times – the background becomes the foreground, and the Bible gets woven right into the stuff of American history.”

Professor Gelernter continued to discuss examples of the Bible’s intertwining with American history, and presently arrived at his last example: “The modern transitional president, John F Kennedy. Kennedy was the bridge between Eisenhower, hero of the Second World War, and LBJ, during whose administration America began to come apart at the seams.

“Secularist intellectuals run American culture today because of two simultaneous events between the late 1940s and the late ‘60s: the coup of the intellectuals; the breakout of the universities. In the coup, America’s left-leaning secularist intelligentsia took over American universities; henceforth intellectual (not social) bigshots would be faculty stars, and top colleges would recruit students with good intellectual and not social bloodlines. During the breakout of the universities, American colleges and graduate schools and (especially) professional schools came to dominate much of U.S. culture.

“JFK and his staff wrote a speech for him to deliver at lunch on November 22, 1963. Of course he didn’t live until lunch, and this speech was in a sense his last. Its very last line was a quotation from Psalms: from Psalm 127, verse 1. ‘Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’

“Kennedy never made the speech; he never quoted the verse; the secularists took over American culture instead. And ever since, Kennedy’s (so to speak) unspoken last words and that withheld verse have overhung the American landscape like a heavy cloud in a dry land. Today in our biblical drought, the cloud still hangs there.

“Kennedy kept a personal Bible in the bedside table on Air Force One; LBJ was sworn in using that Bible. But right after the swearing-in, the Bible disappeared. An unknown stranger asked for it at the Dallas airport, the judge who’d administered the oath turned it over – and as of 1967, when William Manchester published his semi-official book on the assassination, it had never been seen again.

“Which makes a perfect, ominous picture of the end of an age: the Biblical warning that is never delivered; the Bible that vanishes into the hands of a somebody no one seems to know, who was wandering around the field at Dallas. One can’t help thinking of verses from Job: ‘The Lord said unto Satan whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.’

“Years after the assassination, the Bible turned up somehow, and today it’s in the LBJ museum at the University of Texas. So this isn’t really the story of a missing Bible, it’s the story of a missing story. When the Bible was lost it was a big deal; when it was found, no one cared very much any more.

“Yet the Bible is still waiting for someone to pick it up and read out that missing verse from Psalms – the silence at the center of our noisy national life; the withheld verse; the verse Kennedy meant to read, before the culture war closed in.”

Professor Gelernter then underlined the current moral confusion of the American public and asked, “Why it is confused? The Bible has temporarily been dismissed from American public life. We no longer have the Bible on our minds. That might be part of the reason…

“Today’s secularists have left morality far behind, and foresee a society where human rights have replaced human duties; where only the state has obligations and the passive citizenry can relax and let the government take care of everything.

“But the secularists won’t succeed. Someday soon, someone will remind us that tolerance is American but secularism is not. That absolute religious freedom is American but contempt for religion is not. That religious doubt is American but religions indifference is not. That heated religious debate is American but cold academic disdain is not. That America is a biblical republic, with a unique tradition of democratic chivalry. And someone will take up that Bible that was lost and found, and read out the missing verse – or shout it out – and sounds of Bible will return full-flood to the sullen, cracked, dry earth of American public life – and we’ll say with the Song of Songs, ‘The winter is past… The flowers appear in the land.’ We’ll remember that ‘Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain’; and we’ll be proud once again of who we are.”

The speech was followed by a long standing ovation. It was around quarter after nine (a particularly obnoxious clock had insisted upon chiming every fifteen minutes and made it easy to keep track of the time). I hope the excerpts above will provide the reader with a rough idea of what my father was talking about. Nevertheless, I can’t pretend to be presenting his argument – I’m not. I expect that Commentary will publish a version of his speech that will take care of that.

After question time and words of thanks from Neal Kozodoy, my father finally got a chance to return to his table, whereupon he was immediately swamped by congratulators from all sides. There was a lot of handshaking involved once again, and we gradually made our way across the room, where we said some goodbyes and departed.

The drive back to New Haven was fast – we were home by 11:15. The discussion on the way back was mostly of great entertainers (and entertainment) from a great period. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, George Murphy (who managed to sneak in because we’d just watched Broadway Melody of 1940) George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein were all mentioned in the course of our talk. But we were tired, glad to get home, quick to fall asleep.


* According to my father’s remarks last year

Posted on Sunday, May 21, 2006 at 01:27PM by Registered Commenter- | Comments5 Comments | References315 References

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