David Horowitz: Points in Time–Review by David Solway

By David Solway

Originally published at PJMedia.com

One of the more difficult problems a reviewer faces when dealing with a Horowitz book is how not to go on indefinitely, for each new release takes its place in a qualifying continuum compelling awareness of the whole. In other words, Horowitz has reached the point in time in his career when, as T.S. Eliot said about literature in general in his seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a new work involves “the presence of the past.” “The existing monuments,” Eliot writes, “form an ideal order…which is modified by the introduction of the new (or nearly new).” The new not only reconfigures the present but alters our perception of the past as well.

At the level of Horowitz’s “individual talent,” we might propose, analogically speaking, after the publication of a veritable library shelf of books and pamphlets, that he is not only a writer but a literature, that is, he now constitutes his own tradition which each new production both adds to and revises. We know Horowitz as a committed political commentator anatomizing the left’s ideological control of the media, the electoral process, the common discourse and the classroom. From Radical Son to The Politics of Bad Faith to Unholy Alliance to The Professors to Indoctrination U to One-Party Classroom, and, indeed, abibliography that spans more than 40 years and approximately the same number of books, including over a dozen which he co-authored, Horowitz has established himself as one of the major political authors of the era.

With the publication of his latest offering, A Point in Time, the third in a meditative trilogy following upon The End of Time and A Cracking of the Heart, the perspective has begun to shift. These are intensely personal volumes, lamentations on mortality, the inevitable dissipations of time, the futility of the quest for meaning and coherence, the losses that afflict us every step of the way on our journey toward the mausoleum that closes on every human purpose. But the lien between the personal and the political is clear. Reviewing A Point in Time in National Review Online, Bruce Thornton also remarks on the complementarity between the “the three volumes of memoirs laced with philosophical reflections” and “Horowitz’s other work, which focuses more practically on contemporary ideologies and the pernicious policies they create.”

Connecting to this earlier work, A Point in Time exposes how the redemptive quest of the “social redeemers” for an earthly paradise leads not to “the kingdom of freedom but the totalitarian state.” The kingdom of freedom is predicated on the assumption of a world beyond this one and a divinity without whom moral conduct has no guarantor. Right action is based upon individual choice to accept the existence of a moral domain that precludes the shedding of blood to attain a collective utopia. At the same time, this higher reality remains just that, an assumption, not an incontestable truth, rendering us — if I may quote Martin Heidegger, an otherwise unlikely authority — unbehaust, unhoused, roofless, insecure. Such is the human situation.

The question that Horowitz confronts is how best to come to terms with our condition, for “if the world is to be redeemed it will be one individual at a time,” certainly not one collective movement after another. But we must be prepared for the fact that the voyage on which we embark will be tempestuous, erratic, and not a little preposterous. “And what is the alternative?” he ruefully asks. Horowitz would probably agree that we are like the characters in the absurd Edward Lear poem, who “went to sea in a sieve.” The answer, if there is one, is to accept without cynicism or despair, so far as we can, the fragile adequacy of the narratives we construct to give shape and continuity to our lives, while avoiding the temptation to enlist in violent collective schemes of auto-transformation. It is, citing Peter Wood in his prefatory attestation to A Point in Time, to espouse “the fictions we cannot wholly believe or wholly escape.” This is what Horowitz has done in spades, determined “to embrace my own circular horizon and accept it.”