Where that sense of being rooted in a particular people becomes lost, so too does all national strength.
Harvard historian Berl Septimus coined the lovely phrase “philosophically informed anti-rationalism” to describe the position of Rabbi Meir Abulafia (the Ramah) in his Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: The Career and Controversies of Ramah. The Ramah was a moderate opponent of Maimonidean rationalism in the debates that divided some of the greatest of the Rishonim during the Rambam’s lifetime and for a period thereafter.
I wish I could find an equally lovely phrase to describe my own position but I cannot do better than “elite-trained anti-elitism.” While grateful for the education I received and the friendships I made — some of which persist to this day — despite the strains of my double migration to Torah Judaism and political conservatism I have come to view the widely held beliefs of most of my old friends as dangerous to national (any nation’s) survival.
The children of Enlightenment rationalism have a tendency to see the world and its inhabitants as abstractions rather than in all their complexity and difference. They imagine that everything would be neat and tidy if only the best and brightest were left free to work things out among themselves without being bothered by the hoi polloi.
The EU with its impotent parliament and rule by 28 commissioners is an expression of that progressive impulse — “a classical utopian project a monument to the vanity of intellectuals” in the formulation of the late Margaret Thatcher.
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