Walter Russell Mead describes in his latest essay on the decline of the blue social model how 30 years ago he viewed the modern welfare state as the summit of human achievement. Today he rejoices that the blue model has proven itself to be economically unsustainable on the grounds that it has exacted too high a price in human potential.

In 19^th-century largely rural America he argues people saw themselves primarily in terms of their function as producers. In 20^th-century America the “emphasis [is] on consumption rather than production as the defining characteristic of the good life.” The result in Mead’s judgment is a society of “people rich in stuff but poor in soul … a society of bored couch potatoes seeking artificial stimulus and excitement.”

Like most of us Mead has no great desire to hitch up his mule and go plow the back forty. But he cannot escape the fact that a harder life produced more serious thoughtful people. On the family farm children were part of the family economic unit from early childhood and took on greater responsibility as they grew older. Families didn’t just work together; they planned together. Farm kids sat with their parents each year to decide which crops to plant. When they bought shoes or other store-bought goods they knew exactly how much work planning and anxious calculation went into the money they brought to the store.

Today by contrast children are shielded from the great secret of adult life: how much time is spent thinking and worrying about one’s finances. Children are not expected or asked to contribute to the family economic unit in any way. The period of being shielded from any serious exposure to the world of work grows ever longer. Adolescence now officially extends to 26 under Obamacare. As a consequence “young people often spend a quarter century primarily as critics of a life they know very little about ” writes Mead.

On one level Mead’s critique of modern consumer society would seem to have little to do with Torah society. There are few couch potatoes among us (though Internet is a threat in this regard.) And while conspicuous consumption is not unknown mastery of Torah and chesed activities are more admired than a lavish Pesach vacation or an expertise in expensive wines.

But along with the blessings of modern affluence — including the ability to provide a long-term Torah education to our children — there is room to ask whether the hardships of the not-so-distant past did not bring forth more serious Jews. One hundred years ago every yeshivah student was known by the name of the town from which he came because it could be assumed that only one or two from that place would be found in yeshivah. Those who did not go to yeshivah were apprenticing or working by 13 or so.

Every yeshivah student was acutely conscious of what life awaited him if he did not succeed in yeshivah. Not that life in yeshivah was easy. When Rabbi Leib Gurwicz left for Yeshivas Mir his father took him to the border never expecting to see him again and he gave him his overcoat to keep him warm at night when sleeping in the beis medrash. Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer’s sister sent him sugar cubes to be put into his hot water on those days when there was no home at which to eat teg. (He refused to use them without first receiving assurances that her husband had approved the expenditure.) When Rav Shach was studying in Slabodka and his pants became too worn on the outside he turned them inside out and wore them that way.

The Kovno Kollel the largest if not only kollel in Lithuania had around ten members at a time and they were limited to five years. At the end of the five years the members were expected to take rabbinical position and also to do some fundraising for the kollel. Today every young couple expects as a matter of course five years of support.

That so many parents can make possible long-term learning is a blessing. And parents will continue to try to provide whatever they can and sometimes more than they can for their children — seminary in Israel kollel support etc. Just as Professor Mead has no desire to hitch up his mule and resume plowing the land so do we have no desire to return to the days when yeshivah bochurim regularly went without food for a day or had only one pair of clothes or slept on wooden benches.

But no one would claim that the Torah produced today is greater in quality than that of Europe. There is no reversing the iron law of life that the more one sacrifices for something the dearer it becomes in his eyes. In our efforts to protect our children from all life’s difficulties and fear of denying them anything they may want we may be doing them more harm than good.

Are These Not Jewish Children?

My friend Rabbi Ron Yitzchok Eisenman sent out a “Short Vort” on the occasion of the 80^th yahrtzeit of Rav Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld the legendary leader of the Eidah HaChareidis which in my opinion every Torah Jew needs to read.

The story he found noteworthy is recorded in Al Chomosayich Yerushalayim the biography of longtime Agudah leader Rabbi Moshe Blau. Rabbi Blau related that one Tu B’Shvat he left the old Shaare Zedek hospital together with Rav Sonnenfeld. From a distance he saw a very large mixed group of teenagers parading in honor of Tu B’Shvat each group carrying a Zionist flag at the fore.

Knowing that the sight of a mixed group of immodestly dressed teenagers would cause Rabbi Sonnenfeld pain Rabbi Blau suggested that they go back inside the hospital. “No” Rav Sonnefeld replied. And then he asked “Are these not Jewish children?”

As the group passed singing their workmen’s songs and forcing all in their path to the side of the road Rabbi Blau noticed Rav Sonnenfeld murmuring something to himself. He leaned forward to listen and heard the Rav reciting the verses from Tehillim: “Yosef Hashem aleichem aleichem v’al bneichem. Bruchim atem la’Hashem oseh shamayim va’aretz — May Hashem add upon you upon you and your children. Blessed are you to Hashem the Creator of heaven and earth” (Tehillim 115:14–15).

None of us presume I trust to be more fervent in our opposition to Zionism than Rav Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld or more zealous in our concern for tzniyus but neither caused him to forget that the teenagers in front of him were also “Jewish children ” the descendants of Avraham Yitzchak and Yaakov.

Fairness for Some

We are all in debt to Duke professor Stanley Fish for an unusually frank and robust defense of the practice of the New York Times and much of the liberal left. For weeks the mainstream media has been in an uproar about some ugly comments made by right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh about a female Georgetown law student.

A number of right-wing bloggers noted that left-wing icons like Bill Maher and Ed Schultz had used even uglier more vulgar language about women of whom they disapproved without those same critics uttering a peep. A similar double standard applies with respect to charges of “racism.” Critics of President Obama are routinely accused of racism for objecting to the president’s policies even where his race is never discussed while liberal commentators are given a pass for some openly racist slurs — “Uncle Tom ” “minstrel show” — and not so subtle insinuations of mental deficiency against blacks of whom they disapprove such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Fish who is nothing if not iconoclastic is nonplussed by the charge of hypocrisy and does not think any liberal should be intimidated by it. For him the distinction is clear: “Shultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?”

As a description of the modus operandi of the left Fish is dead on. Examples of left-wing double standards are rampant. Those who oppose the government forcing religious institutions to purchase contraceptives for employees are accused of waging “a war on women.” But the same brave feminist warriors have nothing absolutely nothing to say about the real oppression of women in Muslim societies — denial of medical care honor killings female mutilation and forced child brides.

Similarly Israel is held to an impossible standard with respect to collateral civilian casualties inflicted while going after terrorists who are deliberately targeting Israel’s civilian population. But the slaughter by the Syrian government of more than 8000 of its own citizens barely merits a yawn from those same critics of Israel.

Fish’s chiddush however is to offer a philosophical defense of the credo of a community organizer. “Good” and “bad” he explains are the crucial moral distinctions; fair and unfair less so. And so any double standard can be justified; it all depends on whether the actor is “good” or “bad.”

Conservatives are often accused of having poisoned political debate and of a lack of civility. But nothing poisons public debate more than politicizing every judgment as Fish bids us to do in terms of who wins and who loses. That is just the opposite of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s definition of an intellectual as one “who can admit when someone else has made a point in a debate.”

And on philosophical grounds I have another problem with Fish. If there are no neutral standards to apply to actions and the judgment of actions depends solely on whose ox is gored how will those eager partisans eventually be able to tell who are the good guys — i.e. the “defenders of truth and justice” — and who are the miscreants who deserve to be pilloried whenever possible?