What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the irrational nature of anti-Semitism, comparing it to senseless diseases.
Paul Johnson's quote draws attention to the incomprehensible and baseless nature of anti-Semitism, likening it to diseases that afflict humanity without logical explanation. Over centuries, this form of prejudice has persisted despite its lack of rationale, prompting the historian to reflect on why such hatred continues to exist and affect society in a manner similar to uncontrollable illnesses.
In practice
During a lecture on social justice, I might use this quote to illustrate the irrational nature of prejudice.
Indeed it is the protean ability of Western civilization to be self-critical and self-correcting - not only in producing wealth but over the whole range of human activities - that constitutes its most decisive superiority over any of its rivals.
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.
The image of the scientist who puts the pursuit of truth before anything else has been shattered and replaced by a man on the make or a quasi-religious enthusiast who wants to prove his case at any cost. Science is becoming the tool of campaigning warfare, in which truth is the first casualty.
If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience.
Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.
By now, everyone I know is one of seven strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Read World is the real world is The Real World is the read world. Itβs the same true story, even when it isnβt.
The synergetic integral of the totality of all principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans--in pure principle--we do not and never will know all the principles
Growing up on our estate, we were all different colours, but we were all really poor. I never really realised that black was a problem for some people.
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