Radical Ick

I was recently sipping on chocolat chaud while visiting Paris, observing life leisurely unfurling in the charming Place des Vosges. I found myself contemplating a very difficult question. Like everything of consequence in French culture, that jewel of Western civilization, this question, too, takes a moment to unfold.

I consider myself a deeply conservative person, and I am a practicing Jew. Yet I’ve long admired the soixante-­huitards, the spirited young Marxists who, in May of 1968, launched Paris into turmoil to protest capitalism, consumerism, and imperialism. Earlier on the same recent visit that found me in the Place des Vosges, I had strolled down the Boulevard Saint-Michel with a dear friend who, decades ago, was one of the impassioned youths clashing with police in the streets of the Latin Quarter. His role in the resistance, he told me, was to pry loose the sidewalk’s cobblestones and hurl them at streetlights, as the uprisers favored the cover of ­darkness.

I listened to his stories with a comforting sense of satisfaction. Although I shared little of his worldview, I couldn’t help but feel admiration for my friend and his comrades. They were barely out of high school and yet willing to risk everything for their beliefs and for a shot at repairing their broken world. It was then that the difficult-to-unfold question began to haunt me: Why was it that I looked at the radicals of old with so much fondness, while their contemporary successors—the marauders waving the banners of Hamas and Hezbollah on college campuses—strike me as vile?

It wasn’t, I concluded, mere nostalgia. I was born nearly a decade after the smoke cleared in Paris, and although I enjoy the occasional Bob Dylan bootleg recording, I regard the events and mythology of the sixties as a very mixed bag.

I wondered, is my warm regard for one generation of radical and hostile rejects a mere aesthetic preference? Now I was getting closer. Music, fashion, film, books, art: The elements of the creative realm were crucial for the 1968 generation, understood not as mere styles and affectations but as our best and sharpest tools of ordering the world. The most striking scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s movie La Chinoise—a haunting and hilarious meditation on student radicals, presciently made in 1967, one year before the march on the Sorbonne—involves a little group of radicals excommunicating one of their own, a lanky and bespectacled fellow named Henri. His transgression? Daring to be moved by Nicholas Ray’s beautiful and bloody Johnny Guitar. In 1968, loving a film was properly understood as a meaningful, soulful act, a declaration of fundamental loyalties.

Our current campus communards, in marked contrast, have absolutely nothing to say about art and its transformational power. Whereas their elders made a point of showing their bodies—nudity was thought to be a bold act of unshackling oneself from social convention—today’s protesters make a point of covering their faces. When the radicals of old wanted to make a statement, they convened a “Be-In” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, inviting the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and other terrific acts because they fully believed in music’s power to change hearts and minds. The best their descendants can muster these days are crass and craven rhymes that do not rise above the childish: “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” and suchlike.

But questions of art and creativity, I realized, were the least of it. The main difference between today’s zealots and the radicals of old isn’t aesthetic or even moral. It is ontological.

As was the case for earlier revolutionaries, the angry young men and women of ’68 believed, having been raised on the knee of Father Marx, that we were all under the spell of false consciousness. A system of ideological and cultural distractions carefully devised and imposed by the ruling class prevented ordinary folks from perceiving the iniquities that oppressed them. The way to break the spell of false consciousness, they promised as they waved Mao’s Little Red Book around, was to return to the real: to the land, to manual labor, to the body.

Allow me to forgive the naifs of the 1960s the inanity of their half-formed ideas. If we will but allow them to share their utopian visions, we’ll learn about their dream of a bright new future in which all are free to make love because the flesh is no longer enslaved by religion. They’ll preach that all will be free to enjoy the fruits of their labor because labor will no longer be subordinate to capital. At the San Francisco Be-In, countercultural guru Timothy Leary urged, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” The ambition was to escape the alienation of modern life and get in touch with the earthy, the tactile, the sensual—the real.

Silly? Misguided? Potentially disastrous? You bet. But also touching in its sincerity and its desire to re-root modern life in something more tangible, more corporeal, more human. The battle cry of the old radicals was this: Get out of your head, out of your conformist roles and commercially constructed aspirations, and get back to the farm, to the handmade and self-built, to the gorgeous real world out there.

Today’s hellions are saying exactly the opposite. Get out of the real world, they beseech us, and get back into your own head. They fixate on abstractions and obfuscations and theories and half-truths, urging us to be perpetually disembodied. Their causes, disparate and disconnected as they may seem, are all assaults on the real. Each cell in the human body is gendered? They’ll contest this basic premise by arguing that gender is fluid, or a construct of the patriarchy, or an instrument of social control, and they’ll advocate mutilation as a cure and call it “gender-affirming care.” Sex is a sacred path to welcoming new human life? They’ll degrade it by turning it first into a series of cheap pornographic fetishes and then into a power struggle between men and women that ought to be policed or, better yet, altogether avoided. Jews are the indigenous people of the biblical Promised Land? They’ll call them colonizers and celebrate their rapists and beheaders as freedom fighters.

Whether today’s young radicals are squawking about foreign wars or domestic squabbles, they are always promoting the same grim and grotesque ­agenda: Nothing is true and everything is permitted, but only if we rid ourselves first of the burden of being ­embodied creatures. They seem horrified by the thought that we’re created beings, living for a finite period of time on a small planet. For the sixties cats, violence, if preached, was merely an unpleasant means to a beatific end; for today’s maniacs, it is an end in itself, the great cleansing force with which bodies are destroyed and death, the only comfort they know and seek, is made attainable.

To put the matter in religious terms, we may now understand why so many rabbis, priests, and other members of the clergy embraced the revolutionaries of yesteryear, and why so few do the same today. The Young Maoists who wished to bring heaven and earth a little bit closer by proposing a more equitable distribution of resources were moved by yearnings that believers can readily understand, though we may reject the radical prescriptions on offer and the presumption that political action can be messianic. But today’s young Hamasniks preach a very different message. For them, the path to redemption involves chemically castrating children on behalf of transgender liberation, or celebrating the destruction of a fetus on behalf of women’s liberation, or raping a Jewish teenager on behalf of Palestinian liberation. These ghouls share nothing of our morality and very little of our humanity. Their vision of the world strikes us, rightly, as negating, subverting, and inverting everything we hold sacred, first and foremost the notion that the Lord endowed us with both spirit and flesh and commanded us to take both seriously and keep both pure.

Let us not, then, look at the Tentifada, sprawled out on the quad and calling for the death of America and Israel and everything else, as the heirs to the radical tradition of the modern West. And let us not gaze at the kaffiyeh-clad mobs who block our streets shouting “From the river to the sea” as we might have at the long-haired flock chanting “Make love, not war.” Today’s brutes are made of toxic stuff, and their end goal isn’t tikkun olam, the beautiful if oft-abused Jewish term for healing the world. Rather, they are in rebellion against reality and aim for the world’s ultimate destruction. The fight against them, therefore, isn’t a partisan skirmish or a political affair; it’s a metaphysical contest, a war on behalf of the real that can only be fought—and won—with passion, clear-mindedness, and joy.

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine and the cohost of its popular podcast, Unorthodox.

Image by Jean-Luc Godard. Image cropped.