Interesting intellectual description of an intellectual journey by David P Goldman, an incognito cultural commentator writing the Spengler column for Asia Times:
Why raise these issues under a pseudonym? There is a simple answer, and a less simple one. To inform a culture that it is going to die does not necessarily win friends, and what I needed to say would be hurtful to many readers. I needed to tell the Europeans that their post-national, secular dystopia was a death-trap whence no-one would get out alive.
So-called cultural Judaism repelled me; most of what passes for Jewish culture comes down to the mud that stuck to our boots as we fled one country after another. The Hebrew Bible and its commentaries over the centuries are the core of Jewish culture, with a handful of odd adjuncts, such as the novels of S Y Agnon or the last, devotional poems of Heine.
Both as classical musician and as a Germanist, I had better insight than most Jews into the lofty character of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. His writings on the spiritual riches of Western classical music were an inspiration to me almost thirty years ago, when it seemed possible that this most sublime of Western arts would die out for lack of interest. Ratzinger was kind enough to review and comment on the draft of one of my articles on music theory in the 1980s. There is a connection between Ratzinger’s insider’s grasp of music and his Fingerspitzengefuhl for Jewish theology – something I tried to express in an essay entitled “The Pope, the Musicians and the Jews.”
I was in, but not of, the world of rabbinical Judaism, of classical music, of cultural history, of conservative economics, of practical finance – I belonged everywhere and nowhere. I could address each of these spheres only ironically and aphoristically, in a voice that only could be anonymous – for anonymity allowed me to be in but not of all of them. As First Things editor Joseph Bottum observed to me, “Spengler’s” voice freed my style. Why not openly identify myself? Because my readers then would have jammed my thinking into the Procrustean bed of their prejudice.
