The Secret Knowledge

by David Mamet

  Further, one, in paying the government to relieve him of a feeling of social responsibility, might not be bothered to question what in fact constituted a minority, and whether, in fact, such minority contracts were actually benefiting the minority so enshrined, or were being subverted to shell corporations and straw men.73

  In the waning days of my belief in “Social Justice” I discovered, in short, that I was not living my life according to the principles I professed, that I disbelieved both in the probity and in the mechanical operations of those groups soliciting first my vote and then my money in the name of Justice, and that so did everyone I knew. Those of us untroubled by this disparity, I saw, called ourselves “Liberals.” The others were known as Conservatives.

  28

  SOME PERSONAL HISTORY

  My family always put a large premium on the ability to communicate. This is unsurprising as we had, on both sides, and for thousands of years, been stateless wanderers.

  My people, the Jews, in addition to being despised as stateless,74 have also been, intermittently, prized for the skills that statelessness created. We have had to acquire knowledge, which is the one possession which cannot be confiscated at the border. We have had to learn languages quickly and we have, for millennia, not only honed those skills through cultural endorsement, but selected for them in our breeding.

  Those who could master languages could, in our periodic dislocations, survive; those who could not would be deprived of the opportunity to reproduce.

  Our cultural ratification of the mastery of Torah, thus, not only spiritually but as a matter of day-to-day existence, fulfilled God’s promise: that the Torah would be a Tree of Life to those who held fast to it. For the Torah is written in Hebrew, the Talmud in Aramaic, and the Talmudic commentaries by Rashi in their own alphabet; the Chasidic masters taught in Yiddish; and the Talmud Hocham, the person learned in Talmud, is devoted to making connections between one part of the scripture and another, between one language and another, between one idea and another. He is celebrated for his ability to discover and cogently express his comparisons—regularizing the apparently disparate, and finding ambiguity in the supposedly unquestionable: vide, the success of the Jew.

  The Jews’ survival mechanism enabled us not only to survive but to thrive. For the expansion of world trade required not only interpreters but middlemen and merchants, whose bonds transcended the national, who shared not only a common language but a moral system, who, as they were strangers everywhere, had no recourse other than allegiance to their particular sovereign, and whose business probity would be beyond question. Why beyond question? Because, as Jews, our lives were subject to the mere whim of the native population—why would they, who could “kill us for the sport,” hesitate to do so at the suspicion of malfeasance?

  The paradigm of Joseph, who was second only to Pharaoh, is repeated over and over again not only in the Western World but in Arabia, where, intermittently, the most trusted advisors, ministers, and doctors were the Jews.

  See President-Elect Obama, whose first appointment was the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a Jew; see Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who discovered in late middle age that she was Jewish; see Kissinger in his relation to President Nixon. Disraeli, most trusted prime minister to Queen Victoria; Lord Beaverbrook, that is Max Aitken, closest ally of Churchill, and so on. The observable fact is, shockingly, that the world trusts the Jews.

  The great American phrase has it: “He beat him like a redheaded stepson.” We Jews have been, since antiquity, the redheaded stepson of the world, which is to say, the Designated Victim. Having no country, we were a convenient object of loathing. Now, having a country, we retain our historical position in the world’s eyes as “usurpers”—as if it were possible to house anyone otherwise than on land to which someone must have had some previous claim. (The State of Israel was, in the main, purchased, at exorbitant rates, from the Turks, it was created as a British mandate ratified by the League of Nations, its existence as a State later ratified by the United Nations. It has existed by universally acknowledged right of self-defense. It has been under attack continually since its inception, and, time and again, it has vanquished its attackers, pushed them back, and then returned to them the lands from which they attacked.75 And yet, uniquely, in the history of the world, there are supposedly good-willed souls shrieking that its existence is a crime.) Well, the world distrusts foreigners, and however helpful a servant may be, he will pay for his acceptance when the silver teaspoon disappears; for his master-employer-host, will then react against his own supposed “generosity.”

  So my people learn languages, which, historically, include the languages of law, medicine, finance, and the arts.

  Our ability to master tongues is seen in the standup comic, who, like me, is essentially a societally supported smart aleck, and in his unemployed brother. This no-good brother is known as the Luftmensch, which means the fellow who lives on air. The Luftmensch survives through his ability to manipulate language, to be sufficiently charming, entertaining, and diverting to slip through life without doing a goddamn thing. This person was, in my father’s language, known as a “bum.” Growing up, I always believed that this was to be my place in the organization.

  I could talk a great game, but as far as anyone (myself included) knew, I never did anything.

  I loathed school. I never opened a schoolbook, I failed every test given to me (I was sent back from second to first grade, and was enrolled in remedial reading classes). It never occurred to me to point out the books that occupied all my leisure time, and suggest that perhaps they left me little time for Dick and Jane (“Oh Dick, see Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Jane, see Spot run,” et cetera).

  The habit, inculcated at school and at home, of thinking myself a failure persisted through my school career, and, of course, it is to this ingrained assumption that I, in moments of despair, confusion, or indeed, boredom, default.

  For, Common Wisdom (and what are the schools if not forcing houses for such?) can never be phenomenological; it must always be operational. The schools and the media must exist, that is, to disseminate and to inculcate and endorse only that “knowledge” already approved by the mass. This is neither a risible nor an unimportant function, as society must, to function, share attitudes and information likely to induce cohesion, but these studies bored me to death.

  As a kid I loved comic books. My favorites were, unsurprisingly, the adolescent male fantasies: Superman, Batman, and so on.76 I never was a fan of the Archie comics, which were a lighthearted (that is, to me, worthless) look at essentially harmless juvenile hijinks. But one aspect of the Archie comics intrigued me. He was bracketed by two young women: blonde-haired Betty, who loved him, and black-haired Veronica, whom he loved but who scorned his advances. A close examination, however, revealed that, aside from the color of their hair, they were the same girl.

  I have tried to apply this insight to many situations in life, and have found that it often answered. We subdue feelings of powerlessness with the illusion of choice; addicted to cigarettes, we are convinced that we are Camel rather than Lucky people; Coke rather than Pepsi people, Democrats rather than Republicans,77 and so on. These staunch loyalties, in addition to gratifying our feelings of perceptiveness, are the placeholders for those doctrinal differences, which once plagued the Christian West.

  I knew, though I could not articulate, that while the schools existed to inculcate habit, they had and could have no interest in the dissemination of knowledge. This is not to say that schools did and do not spread information, of course they do, both good and bad, but this information, reducible in its benign form to the three Rs, can be learned as easily or more easily outside of school, where it is less apt to be tainted by the spurious though amusing doctrines which of late have come to characterize our Education System.

  School bored me. And I was so sunk in the shame of my failure there that it took many years’ distance to see that school bo
red most everybody. As an autodidact, know-nothing, or “enthusiast,” and as one self-deprived of the benefit of “common knowledge,” I was inspired to create that unified theory of existence which, in its wholesale appearance is called philosophy and in its retail, drama.

  Darwin tells us there must be variation in order to create balance. Balance cannot exist without variation.

  Socialism suggests a state of balance, which, once having been established, will never alter.

  This is the dream of the return to the Garden of Eden, of a rejection of the current, unfortunate struggle which, in total, is called: civilization.

  Darwin writes, in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: “We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate.”

  The elections of 2008 were characterized by vicious, indeed vitriolic, feelings and expressions of rage on either side, each side thinking the other on the brink of destroying the world.

  The fervor, verging on panic, of each side might be attributable directly to the question of climate change; each side, that is, sensing a diminution of resources, expounding its own strategy for species survival; and each side accusing the other of concern not for the survival of the species, but only of its own moiety. The Left claims that it must save the world as the climate is changing, the Right that it must save the world from the Left’s irrational and foolish fears, e.g., of climate change.

  Both the Left and the Right are, whatever they appear to be addressing, and however they cloak it as a concern for values, or civil rights, or tradition, are each essentially concerned, finally, with a scarcity of resources. The Left sees the earth polluted, wild lands disappearing (indeed, having already disappeared), species extinction, vanishment of fossil fuels, and it counsels that the sky is falling, and that any who cannot see it are, each day, and in all their endeavors and acts, worsening the problem.

  The Right shares this concern about resources and productivity, but counsels increased exploration and exploitation, free capital to fund innovation, and a stronger defense against those outsiders who would appropriate those resources which are ours. (Those resources the Left asserts belong not to us, but to “the world, and future generations.”)

  Now, no adherent of either view is going to live his life in congruity with all, or even most of the precepts he believes himself to endorse. For while he espouses them, his life, day to day, whether on the Left or Right, is lived pretty much the same as that of his ideological opponent—utilizing or conserving more or less the same amount of goods, and “ruining the world” or “living out his life,” using the same amount of water, air, and oil. The hatred occasioned by the late election then must conceal a deeper sense of impending change.

  This ideological division, after the election, has deepened. The Left, seeing its pet fear of climate change debunked78, has moved on to health care—maintaining its ineluctable eschatology and, as usual, merely relabeling it.79 The fear of the Right, based upon the preelection behavior and pronouncements of then Senator Obama, was of devolution of America into a Socialist State. This fear, unfortunately, has not been dispelled, but ratified by his behavior as President. The hotheads on the Right want those on the Left sequestered as fools and madmen, and those on the Left want their counterparts on the Right killed.

  Abortion, same-sex marriage, and birth control, whatever else they are, are a displacement of anxiety on the Left about the state of our civilization, as are offshore drilling and the right to own firearms (for example) to the Right; the Left frames its arguments around the essential goodness (barring the Right, Israel, and the Jews) of all humankind; the Right—around the race’s observable pursuit, as individuals and states, of its own ends, irrespective of its pronouncements (the Tragic View).

  The ascription to leaders of supernormal powers is a recurring aberration (called the Election Cycle) which entertains us, and licenses those thoughts, words, feeling, and actions usually kept in check, and it is perhaps no accident that the election cycle (formerly called “elections”) is growing and will continue to grow to be continuous, just as, to the preverbal mind, “The Woods are Burning.” The Left thinks the Right (America) is ruining the world. The Right thinks the Left is ruining the country. I endorse the latter view.

  29

  THE FAMILY

  The effective organ for the transmission of cultural information is the family. For, the children, though we know they are never listening, are always watching.

  Not only attitudes but mechanisms for social interaction are learned from earliest infancy: this is how a group operates, this is the role of the breadwinner(s), this is the role of the dependents, this is how a covenantal group conquers stress and oppression, this is how that group deals with questions of religion, race, national service, charity, injustice.

  If the family as a cohesive covenantal unit does not exist, attitudes toward these universal situations must be learned by the individual later in life, when he is both conscious of and burdened by his pressing personal needs—that is to say, when he is not supported by a family.

  He must, then, imbibe or acquire these attitudes mechanically, his consciousness affected by the lack of the surety of the home—where one learns, as a child, by observation not by consideration. He is, then, prey to his intellect. What does this mean? He must now trust his intelligence to choose between various courses of thought and allegiance: so he is likely to choose that course which flatters his intellect. But the intellect is an inadequate organ for working out the myriad interactions of a society.

  “Good ideas” go bad, and the intellect, rather than be affronted by its failure, will ascribe the reason elsewhere (e.g., the inevitable French “Nous sommes trahis” and the Liberal “The program itself was good—it had insufficient funding”).

  But the interactions of the family were not based upon reason, and so, not liable to casuistry. They were based upon the generationally bequeathed experience of previous families; experience so deep and ingrained that it could neither be absorbed nor parsed by reason. (“This is how one treats one’s wife, one’s husband; this is the correct way to express disapproval, the correct way to ask for help, for indulgence, forgiveness, solitude,” et cetera “in our community.” For the family exists to inculcate those laws which will aid the child in the wider world—the world as experienced by its parents and their parents. Do we truly want to give this function to the State?)

  Written rules and laws are only and can only be codifications of the unwritten rules which precede them. These unwritten codes of behavior have been worked out over millennia. The child learns them through constant observation, not through indoctrination. The child who has not been exposed or subject to these rules (treat your elders with respect, take care of your possessions, always defend your family members, do not bring bad companions into the house, never speak ill of or to your family, etc.) may come to think them arbitrary (cf. my generation of the sixties), and endeavor to create rules of his own, based upon his reason, which is and can only be (to a child) a conveniently self-excusatory name for his desires: copulate freely, do not marry, do not respect, but mistrust all authority, demand governmental support, base political choices upon feelings rather than experience, do not bother to learn a trade, et cetera.

  Curiously, the brightest (or, perhaps, the highest achievers) of our educational system go to the elite universities where intelligent young people are misled into the essential fallacy of Liberalism: that all society and human interaction is susceptible to human reason, and that tradition, patriotism, marriage, and similar institutions are arbitrary, and stand between the individual’s spontaneity and his ability to create a perfect world: that the individual’s reason is supreme, that he is, thus, God.80

  The child imbibes the lessons of civic virtue, religious devotion, marital behavior, restraint, self-esteem, and self-sufficiency in the home. If the home is destroyed, or its influe
nce negated or derided (as it was both by Welfare, and as it is in today’s Liberal Arts “education”), he is hard-pressed to come, through the force of his own reason, to a practicable ethical view of the world. His need for order, then, can easily be warped into the view that there is something wrong with “the world,” and that this dysfunctional world requires his participation in a grand new scheme to put things right. This scheme may be called Marxism, Socialism, Fascism, Cultural Revolution, or “change.” It is attractive not to the supposed “victims” of the old order, the poor, the “colonialized,” the “oppressed,” but to the deracinated affluent.

  “Family Values” is, unfortunately, a vacuous term, implying an affinity of understanding. This affinity actually exists (on the Right), but renders the term dismissible (or, indeed, risible) to the Left. A more universal term might, simply, be: “family.” To learn the rules of a family is the first essential step toward learning the rules of a community.81

  30

  NATURALLY EVOLVED INSTITUTIONS

  We are hovering over spheres of thought barely accessible either to psychology or to philosophy. Such questions as these plumb the depth of our consciousness. Ritual is seriousness at its highest and holiest. Can it nevertheless be play?