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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
Foreign from the historic campus of Hillsdale.
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Scott Bertram
College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good.
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
The true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country. I think there's very few people that are satisfied with the current system. The question of what to do about it is a challenging one. I do offer some ideas in the closing chapters, but essentially they boil down to dial back the top down managerial list control that tends to treat every patient exactly the same.
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Scott Bertram
This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast network. That was Dr. Aaron Cheriotti, author of the new book Making the How to Heal Modern Medicine. We'll talk in depth with him on today's program. And later on, Dr. Bill McClay from Hillsdale's History department. He'll talk with us about his latest book, jewish Roots of American Liberty. First, we're joined by Dr. Aaron Cheriotti. He is a physician specializing in psychiatry, also director of the program in bioethics technology and flourishing at the Ethics and Public Policy cent and author of the new book Making the How to Heal Modern Medicine. Aaron, thanks so much for joining us.
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
Great to be with you, Scott. Thanks for having me.
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Scott Bertram
Enjoyed the book. And a little surprised at the beginning when we find out that, I don't know, how would I say it, medicine wasn't necessarily a passion for you. You weren't locked into being a doctor when you were growing up. How do you think that perspective perhaps changes the way you think about and perhaps analyze what's happening in that industry?
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
So I've always been, I think, a little bit of both an insider and an outsider to medicine. As you said, I didn't sort of grow up with a stethoscope in my crib. You know, coming from a family of doctors and knowing from the time I was in high school that I wanted to be a physician, it was sort of there in the back of my mind. But I fell in love with philosophy as an undergraduate, actually as I was studying pre medical sciences and ended up combining my pre med degree with a philosophy degree. Strongly considered going to graduate student school in philosophy. And my wife at the time, well, my current wife, who was at the time my fiance, I should say, suggested that if I did philosophy, I could only do philosophy, whereas if I did medicine, I could study medical ethics and do both medicine and philosophy. And that was actually really wise advice because that's exactly how my career has shaken out And I sort of said, okay, well, I'll apply to med school and if I get in, I will go. Which is a strange way to pick a career path. I got into a couple of good schools, including Georgetown. We fell in love with D.C. and ended up going to Georgetown. But I always felt like something of a field anthropologist taking notes on the natives. And I think that comes through in the book, when I describe my training in medicine, that it's a strange culture, the culture of a hospital, the culture of medical training. And. And I always, while I was absorbed in it, obviously, and trying to survive it, I was also observing it and taking field notes, if you will, which became grist for the mill, which became essentially eventually this book called Making the Cut.
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Scott Bertram
And you say early, somewhere along the way, medicine got sick. And the rest of the book sort of dives into the topic. But right at the beginning you say that one of the problems is that the highest aim is efficiency, efficiency when it very likely should be something else. When do we see that change? When do you see that change?
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
I think it's been gradual. It's been building probably for a couple of decades, but I would say it's accelerated since around 2015. That's where I really started to see a lot more top down managerialist control in medicine. And it matters little whether that control is coming from the government in the form of Medicare mandates, or it's coming from large corporations that are swallowing up private practices into larger and larger healthcare conglomerates. In either model, you're getting top down control of medicine, a kind of homogenizing tendency that treats every patient as a kind of interchangeable part rather than a unique individual. And that undermines what I take to be central in medicine, which is the doctor patient relationship, which allows for personalized and individualized medical care and shifts to what I call in the book turnstile medicine. And by turnstile medicine, I mean the sort of people moving engineering machinery that you see at a theme park like Disneyland, which is designed to move the maximum number of people through the maximum number of rides or food lines as possible during the day. It's a kind of people moving machinery. Very often our clinics and hospitals are operating on that model where you sort of get. You feel like you're getting processed by an industrial system where whatever chief complaint you went in to talk to your doctor about takes a back seat and the doctor is staring at a computer screen, oftentimes asking you a series of screening questions dictated by bureaucrats elsewhere that have very little to do with what you came to get help with. And I think patients don't like this. A lot of patients kind of intuit and experience this. Doctors certainly hate it. I describe in the opening chapter how doctors are leaving the profession in droves or are retiring early, which is a very serious issue. Obviously, if there's a shortage of physicians to care for the patients, then know that's going to be very troubling in terms of healthcare delivery. So I think there's very few people that are satisfied with the current system. The question of what to do about it is a challenging one. I do offer some ideas in the closing chapters, but essentially they boil down to the need for decentralizing control, the need to dial back the top down managerialist control that tends to treat every patient exactly the same and almost, I would say, even punish patients that don't behave according to the rubrics. I'll give you a concrete example of this. The Affordable Care act has bundled payments for things like hip replacements. So Medicare says every hip replacement. We're going to reimburse the hospital the exact same amount from the beginning to the end of the hospitalization. We're not going to parse it out into individualized components of the treatment anymore. And what that does is basically force hospitals to try to move people through the system as quickly as possible. There's a buzzword that hospital administrators love. They call it throughput. Right? Get them in, get them through the surgical operating room and get them discharged as quickly as possible. Well, if you're an outlier in that system, for whatever reason, your wound healing is going more slowly, or you have some complications from your hip replacement surgery that are causing you to be hospitalized longer than the average person, you end up being sort of resented by the system. You end up costing the hospital money and you end up basically, you end up basically sometimes being shoved through the system, even if that's not the best thing for your care. So that's one kind of simple and concrete example of the way that systemic factors, not necessarily bad actors. I think most physicians are well meaning people that genuinely want to help people. But we're very often working within a system that disincentivizes old fashioned individualized medical care.
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Scott Bertram
Aaron Cheriotti with us, his book Making the How to Heal Modern Medicine where you make the point that there are now non medical issues that have come to be defined in and treated as a medical problem. What do you have in mind when making the observation and what's the danger of conflating those things?
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
Yeah, so this is known as medicalization this is treating people of short stature as though being on the lower end of the bell curve of height is an illness. And therefore we need to give these people growth hormone. This is treating people with mild attentional difficulties as though they had adhd, which by the way, I think is a real phenomenon, but very often is over diagnosed. So it's the misuse and abuse of stimulants on college campuses would be an example of medicalization. I think perhaps the most egregious contemporary example of medicalization is the so called gender affirmative care. What I think more accurately should be called sex rejecting procedures. Taking physically healthy individuals that do have psychological difficulties, that are troubled by identity issues, by body perception issues, that are uncomfortable in their own skin and that are struggling with aspects of their sexuality and basically funneling them into a medical system where they're put on puberty blocking hormones, followed by cross sex hormones, followed very often by radical and irreversible surgical procedures that leave them permanently sterilized and cause a whole host of other chronic healthcare problems. So called gender medicine or gender affirmative care. What I think is more accurately termed sex rejecting procedures is an example of medicine gone seriously awry. And we now have plenty of data from the cast report in the UK, published by the UK's National Health Service, recent report from the Department of Health and Human Services also looking at psychological and physical outcomes of these procedures and basically showing that these are not correcting the underlying psychological issues that these people were originally presenting with. And instead they're causing a whole host of medical issues, including permanent sterility. And very often these are done to children too young to consent, too young to understand what it is that's being done to them. So I think that's a pretty egregious example of medicalization. But there's other examples I mention in the book of this tendency to pathologize things that are ordinary difficulties of living or just normal human variation.
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Scott Bertram
That's Dr. Aaron Cheriotti. More with him in just a moment as we continue to talk about his book Making the How to Heal Modern Medicine. If you enjoy this conversation, you'll likely enjoy our other conversations here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. And we know you're busy and might miss out on some of our episodes. Well, we make it easy for you to keep track of. Go to RadioHour Hillsdale. Edu, click the subscribe button in the upper right hand corner that will ask you to enter your email address because that's how you sign up for the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Email list. Once each week, we'll reach out and tell you there's a new episode available and preview who and what we'll be talking about. You can listen right from that email link. Radiohour hillsdale.edu we encourage you to subscribe to our email list. Click the subscribe button @radiohour hillsdale.edu we thank you in advance. Continuing with Dr. Aaron Cariotti. He's the author of the brand new book Making the How to heal modern medicine. Dr. Cariotti, a section in Making the Cut about improving the art of dying. You say when medicine impedes are dying, but without providing life with new light, the burden falls on patients to learn on their own to go gently. How might we rethink end of life issues?
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
So medicine needs to understand its limits. And the transhumanist movement and this sort of radical reconfiguring of aging movement is an attempt to use medicine and biotechnology essentially to help us live indefinitely, if not forever. I think it's a kind of religious aspiration that medicine can save us from death. I think it's a utopian fantasy and I think it undermines good medicine. Despite all the wonderful advances of modern medicine, the human mortality rate continues to hold steady at 100%.
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Scott Bertram
Right.
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
We're all going to die of something. So if medicine sees death as the last enemy to be conquered, then we're going to lose every time in the end. So medicine can't, I think and shouldn't I argue in the book, see death as the final enemy to be conquered. We should do what we can to extend life when reasonable, but we should also accept the limits of medicine when a person is irretrievably dying. And I think there's two ways that we can go wrong in dealing with death, which almost sound like opposites, but I argue in the book they're actually flip sides of the same coin. And the first way that we can go wrong is, is by trying to control the manner and circumstances of our death through doctor assisted suicide and euthanasia. And it's an attempt to conquer and master the one event in our life that most fully announces and reminds us of our lack of complete mastery, which is the fact that we're gonna, we're gonna die. So this fantasy that if I can only control how and when I die, then somehow I'm, I'm maintaining my autonomy by essentially by destroying my autonomy and by destroying my own life. And I think that's a serious mistake for medicine to embrace the euthanasia movement. But the opposite Extreme is what I would call therapeutic obstinacy, and that's life extending measures at all costs, leaving someone on the ventilator even when there's no chance of a meaningful medical or cognitive recovery, just to keep the physiological processes going and essentially not allowing the dying process to occur. Medicine not recognizing when it's reached the limits of the good that it can do for someone, and stepping aside and allowing natural death and continuing to provide good palliative care at the end of life, we don't. We might abandon curative efforts, but we don't. We never abandon care. We never abandon efforts to control pain, to control whatever agitation, air, hunger, shortness of breath, things of that nature should continue to be managed, of course, to give people a peaceful and comfortable death. But I actually argue that therapeutic obstinacy, keeping people alive at all costs and euthanasia are. While they may appear to be opposites, they're really flip sides of the same coin because both are attempts to control something that ultimately is not under our control. Both are a kind of medical or scientific hubris that doesn't humbly recognize the limits, the appropriate limits of medicine.
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Scott Bertram
Very interested in the section, and I imagine this was written before the more recent controversy because of publishing deadlines and such, but on organ donation and the opt in and some countries moving to an opt out setting for organ donation. And recently there has been this discussion after some stories in the New York Times and elsewhere. The New York Times actually had a story that said a push for transplant is actually putting donors at risk. Where is that line drawn? Where can organ harvestation begin? When can you actually make that happen? And now there are people I've seen say, yeah, I actually decided not to be an organ donor because I'm not comfortable with the way the doctors are handling this end of life issue. What's the problem with moving toward an opt out sort of set up for organ donation?
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
So I argue that the problem with opt out is that it suggests that the default or the sort of automatic presumption or assumption built into our society and built into the healthcare system is that my organs belong to someone else, right? And I have to affirmatively do something to make sure that they're not taken or harvested from me and I am in favor of organ donation if it's done ethically. But I argue in the book we always have to maintain the logic of the gift, right? That it's something given and not taken. And I think that's the central issue in the opt in, opt out debate. So I hope that we maintain the opt in system. You have to affirmatively do something to say, I'm going to be an organ donor, or to empower your surrogate decision maker to make that decision at the time. Right. When the time. When the time comes. Which is another appropriate way to do that, to put in an advanced directive. And you don't have to say, yes, you can automatically have my organs, or no, you can never have my organs. You can appoint, you know, a loving and trusted family member to make that judgment for you, to make sure that you're still getting good care at the end of life. What we want to avoid is any push against what the law calls the dead donor rule, that to harvest an unpaired organization, you can give one of your kidneys and still live. So that's a different issue. But to harvest your lungs, your heart, and your liver, you have to be dead first. And we can absolutely hold the line on that and make sure that people are not killed in the process of harvesting their organs, which is one of the major ethical issues that is of concern for people. As Miracle Max says in the Princess Bride, there's a difference between mostly dead and all dead. And we have to make sure that people are all dead, that that diagnosis of death is done accurately before we harvest their organs if people are going to maintain trust in the whole organ transplantation enterprise, which again, can be a good thing if it's done ethically. You're right. I did write that section of the book before the current controversies. But I'm very glad that the Department of Health and Human Services is taking a hard look at this now. And I'm dismayed, but also not surprised that they're uncovering some real problematic issues with the groups that are sort of responsible for the entire sort of organ harvesting process.
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Scott Bertram
Dr. Aaron Cheriotti with us, his book Making the How to Heal Modern Medicine. You talked a bit earlier rough outline of some of the prescriptions. Toward the end of the book. The one question you ask that I think we should talk about is why is medicine today failing its brightest students? And why is it pushing seasoned doctors into early retirement? In short, why are we short? And why do we keep losing the number of doctors involved in the system?
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
Because it's getting harder and harder for doctors to exercise appropriate discretionary latitude in making decisions and making judgments on behalf of their patient, in tailoring their care to the individual patient in front of them, rather than treating every patient like a widget to be processed by an industrial system run by bureaucrats and managers who Never encounter the patient face to face. I think that's a distillation of the core problem. And there are other serious challenges in medicine as well. How do we finance it? How do we deliver care? How do we care for people that are uninsured or underinsured? I don't want to suggest that that's the only problem in medicine. But studies looking at physician burnout show that it's not long work hours. It's not the fact that it's a hard job or it's challenging. It's when doctors feel that they don't have meaningful relationships with their patients because other things are getting in the way of that. That's when they get burned out. Doctors are willing to put in long hours, they're willing to work hard. It's a self sacrificing profession. I think just by nature, nature of the work that you do, that is not what's driving people away from medicine. In fact, that draws many good, generous, self sacrificing people toward medicine. But if people feel that they can't deliver appropriate care to their patients because they're too controlled by these outside forces, that creates a moral crisis of conscience. And that is what ends up creating burnout and pushing people away from the profession or leading people to retire early or find a different career.
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Scott Bertram
When you look at five years ago and the reaction to Covid, and in some cases the COVID up, but in some cases the silencing of voices and opinions, and I tell you, the one thing that I hear from people more often than anything else around that time is when doctors said, stay home or you're gonna kill people. And then the next day said, except you can go out and protest. We encourage you to go out and protest because this is a good thing to do. What do you see as the short term and perhaps long term harm of having lived through that time period for modern medicine?
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
Well, I'll just use this as a moment to shamelessly plug my previous book, which is all about that question. It's called the New Abnormal the Rise of the Biomedical Security State. It's really, it's about what happened to us during COVID but also how those mechanisms that were rolled out during COVID are going to be used in the future. And those things were primarily about control. They were about surveillance, they were about gathering data on people for purposes of political control. They were not, as I argue in the book, the New Abnormal. They were not primarily about public health. I think that was a major shift, a major turning point. And the themes in making the cut are really in many respects a continuation of the kinds of problems that first, I wouldn't say first manifested during COVID but manifested and sort of exploded on the scene in a massively accelerated fashion. Right. Where public health really became about surveillance and control rather than about helping individuals and communities to flourish and to learn actually to care for themselves and to care for their own health and to take responsibility for their own health. And so I think, you know, Covid was a watershed event or rather a response to Covid. It was not the virus itself. It was our misguided public health policies in response to the virus that really accelerated trends that had been building for a couple of decades but now are a more permanent feature of our society and our social existence. All of this sort of done under the pretense of a state of emergency. And you mentioned kind of the ideology that influenced those policies as well. Right. You're allowed to go to certain forms of protest, but you're not allowed to go to church. And quite frankly, we see other ideologies taking over medical education. And that is also going to be a disincentive for serious students to go into medicine. When medicine is no longer about caring for individual patients along the traditional Hippocratic model and it becomes about being a social justice warrior or advancing some agenda related to climate change or gender ideology or abortion or what have you, that is going to draw activists and ideologues to the profession, people who are not actually serious about caring for patients. And it also, quite frankly, just detracts from good medical education because you're spending all kinds of time on issues that, regardless of what you think of them, wherever you stand, stand on those particular issues that I just rattled off. Climate change has nothing to do with the practice of medicine. People try to characterize it as a public health issue, but that's really a trope to detract time and attention in a very busy and very crammed curriculum away from the basics of medical education and toward things that really have nothing to do with being a physician.
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Scott Bertram
Dr. Aaron Cariotti, his brand new book is Making the Cut, how to Heal Modern Medicine. He's also director of program in Bioethics Technology and Flourishing at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. And his previous book, which you may have heard of a few minutes ago, the new abnormal. Dr. Aaron Cheriotti, thanks so much for joining us on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
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Dr. Aaron Cheriotti
Thanks, Scott.
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Scott Bertram
Up next, Dr. Wilfred Maclay. He's the editor of a new book, Jewish Roots of American Liberty. We'll talk with him next. Hi, I'm Scott Bertram. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
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Hillsdale College Announcer
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Larry Arnn or Hugh Hewitt
Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being and we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune into a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast hillsdale. Eduardo that's podcast hillsdale edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio.
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Scott Bertram
Welcome back to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. I'm Scott Bertram. Be sure to check out the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio. We're joined by Dr. Wilfred Maclay, professor of History here at Hillsdale College. He's the Victor Davis Hanson Chair of Classical History and Western Civilization here. Also the author of Land of Hope previously and the new book Jewish Roots of American the Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Stories. Co author is rabbi Stuart Halpern. Dr. Maclay, thanks so much for joining us.
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Dr. Wilfred Maclay
Oh, it's always great to be with you, Scott.
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Scott Bertram
This is a book that you've edited, along with Rabbi Halpern, a few things that you've written and that he's written and others have contributed on the closeness of and the foundational character of the relationship between the American experience and the Jewish experience. You started on this even before the attacks in October a few years ago. How did this all come together?
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Dr. Wilfred Maclay
Well, it's an interesting story and the October 7th business was just incidental, but it ends up making the book very well timed. I think it really began. I've had a good working relationship for a long time with the Tikva Fund, which is a organization dedicated to the preservation, promulgation, development of Jewish ideas. I'm not myself Jewish. I don't know how many Maclays there are that are Jewish in the world, but I'm not one of them. But I've always had a very deep interest since my college days in Judaism. And at any rate, one thing led to another. And Yeshiva University, which is in New York, is the only Orthodox college university in the country, invited me, along with Rabbi Halpern, to put together a program for teachers in Jewish day schools about American history. How should they teach American history? And it's so interesting because, you know, the usual questions that you face with regard to religion and schooling. It's the other way around. Is sort of, why should we teach about religion in secular public schools? And I'd been constantly trying to answer that point. And now you have the. The Jewish day schools, where the question is, why should we include American history as part of our curriculum? So. And yet the answers end up being the same or being very similar. That there is. There is one of the reasons. One of the principal reasons that our country has been a bulwark and asylum for the Jewish people in the world is because of our history of commitment to religious liberty. So the background of all of that becomes part. And explaining why this became part of our national makeup becomes part of the way you teach American history in Jewish day schools. And so we had one conference that was very successful, over subscribed, and then we did a second one which got into some of the other sort of related areas, like how how did the Bible influence the founders? How did. How is. How are biblical influences in evidence in our foundational documents in our culture, Running through all sorts of things, the realm of ideas with literature, the sort of characteristic imagery, heroes. And we arrived at this collection of papers that had been done over the course of these two conferences that Stu and I both felt, you know, this is vuc. I think it's a very powerful book when you take it all together.
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Scott Bertram
Dr. Bill Maclay with us, the book Jewish Roots of American liberty. Dr. Maclay, tell us about the COVID of this book, which is quite striking and I'm sure has some deeper meaning.
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Dr. Wilfred Maclay
It has an illustration of the Exodus and actually the crossing of the Red Sea. And you have Moses holding up his staff, commanding the waters. You have Pharaoh who looks an awful lot like a medieval king, kind of, and his army being come swamped by the waters. And so why this? Well, because it's one way of saying the Exodus, the structure of the Exodus is very, very deep in American history. The Puritans saw themselves as following in the same path. They too, were coming out of a kind of slavery into a new Zion. And there are other examples in American history of that. But this particular illustration relates to after the country had been founded, and they began to start to furnish it in certain ways. And the question arose about the national seal, what would it look? And both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who actually agreed with one another about a lot of things, but we do not think of either man as being religious in the conventional, orthodox way. They both felt the seal should depict the Exodus, and they had very similar ideas about what the Exodus should look like and what it looks like as the illustration we see on the COVID of this book. And it even goes further than that. They both wanted to use a motto. Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. And Jefferson liked that slogan so much that he used it for his personal seal and the Exodus as well. I mean, this was something he very strongly felt that the Exodus symbolized, captured, encapsulated what America was in the history of the human race. That it was, we were an escape. The former conditions that saw, as he put it in one of his letters, some men are made to be ridden like horses by other men. That there is a natural superiority, a natural inferiority, a natural hierarchy built into the nature of man and the nature of human society. And that, no, it was certainly a feature of the Enlightenment, but it was also a feature of the Hebraic heritage, understood in this way that freedom was the right of all, that liberty, Liberty understood different ways by the ancient Hebrews than by Jefferson, perhaps, but still liberty.
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Scott Bertram
Dr. Maclay, the subtitle on this book is the Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story. What do you mean by that? What are you trying to get at in this book?
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Dr. Wilfred Maclay
The way in which Hebraic ideas, and you could say biblical ideas, ideas drawn from the Hebrew Bible, from what Christians call the Old Testament as a kind of almost like the understructure, the skeletal support of so much else, and certainly a crucial element in our makeup. There's a lot of different ways you can talk about that, because, you know, historians and others all argue, well, America's really a secular country. America's a light Enlightenment country. America's no Americans. America's a religious country. America's a Lockean country. Oh, no, it's a Republican country, you know, and everybody's got classical Republicanism. Everybody's got a little piece of the action. And none of those statements is categorically wrong. But certainly in the sort of blender of the American mind, this Jewish element, the biblical element plays an enormous role and that's part of what we wanted to get at. And one more thing we wanted to communicate to Jewish Americans and you know, to others as well, but that the Jewish heritage and the American heritage are not light years apart from one another. They're very, actually very close. So it's not a coincidence, it's not a feature of just nothing but good luck that Jews have found an affinity for and a home in America. There's every reason for that. And therefore there's every reason for Jews to be particularly grateful for what America has been for them and has become for them after a millennium millennially long history of tribulation.
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Scott Bertram
Bill McClay with us, the book Jewish Roots of American Liberty. That was a great summation of your essay why We Teach American History in Faith Based Schools. And the essays that follow that talk about how the Hebrew Bible directly, indirectly influenced the formulation of America's political institutions. Then there are more sections. The next section is on cultural influences on American life wrought by biblical figures and ideas. You have a second essay in this section on Nathaniel Hawthorne and his themes. How do you reflect?
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Dr. Wilfred Maclay
Well, Hawthorne is the kind of dark naysayer during the period of the greatest American optimism about literally the perfect ability of man. And Hawthorne, we read one of his things in our American Heritage course here at Hillsdale. But many of Hawthorne's short stories, stories are warnings and warnings against hubris, warnings against being, pretending, presuming to be as God, that I think of the Tower of Babel as much as the Garden of Eden as being themes that are very, very important to Hawthorne. And so that he has stories, oh, I, you know, like the Birthmark, which is the story of the man with the gorgeous wife who has one little bitty imperfection, the birthmark. And he ends up of course, destroying her in the process of trying to correct that one imperfection. And the story we read here is the Celestial Railroad has a similar kind of bend to it. He's a great believer in original sin, even if he necessarily call it that. His religious views were somewhat unorthodox, as most American writers, by the way, have been unorthodox or non orthodox. But the general judgment that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom transmuted into different keys. But it's still the same thing that this reminder over against the great and often very inspiring utopian figures of his time, like Emerson, like Thoreau, like Walt Whitman. Hawthorne Like Melville, the two of them are similar this way. They both are. Are, are warning us, are warning us, don't, don't, don't get too big for your britches. Don't forget who you are and what you are because it will be disastrous for you in the end. So they're this sort of voice saying, be still and know that I am God. They reflect some of those Hebraic tales of man trying to exceed his station.
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Scott Bertram
The next section in Jewish Roots of American Liberty is on the President's appreciation of Jewish contributions. You have the great presidential scholar Tevy Troy with an essay in here on what presidents have thought and said about the Bible. Would we present day Americans be surprised to read some of these comments that past presidents have said about the Bible?
- [38:43]
Dr. Wilfred Maclay
Oh yeah, I think we would. And I don't think people will be surprised that Coolidge did, or Reagan, but they might be surprised that Franklin Roosevelt, how actually much more frankly. And Christian. Not Jewish but Christian, but biblical. Many of Franklin Roosevelt's pronouncements were. And his use of religious language, again, some of this is more Christian than. If you look at his first inaugural address. He talks about the election of his party. He compares it to the chasing of the money changers out of the temple. And so are we to conclude that he is Jesus? Come again? I mean it's pretty racy stuff but, but it does presume the audience, it will be, will not be unreceptive to that kind of comparison. And the prayer for D Day that Roosevelt is this beautiful prayer and Tevy talks about it in his piece is a very good example of how willing, in times of genuineness, I mean that was a genuine kind of critical crossroads moment. Would that invasion succeed or not? And it was the most enormous, still remains the most enormous amphibious invasion in all of military history. And Roosevelt's prayer was very deeply biblical and unashamed of its religious overtones. So yeah, I think we would be surprised. I think there's a sort of notion that with a few rare exceptions like William Jennings Bryan, who of course was never elected president but ran three times and came close, the presidents didn't talk that way, they didn't use it. And so when George W. Bush came along and actually before him, people forget Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter openly presented himself to the nation as a born again Christian, which a lot of people say, what's that? I have no idea what that is. They didn't know anything about the south or about evangelicalism. And now people know a lot more about it. But George W. Bush I think on the Republican side brought, brought that back. And people, those who are listening, who are old enough to remember that period, the press ended to be scandalized, and I think they actually were scandalized because they didn't know anymore that part of it wasn't part of their education to know about religion. So when George Bush used a phrase in one of his big addresses that there's wonder, working power in the American people or something, he's referring to a Protestant hymn that, you know, much of his audience knows, but the people who knew me. What's this wonder, working power stuff? So it's not a new thing that you find? Well, the new thing is to find less religious discourse coming from the Oval Office than we had before Trump. You're not going to see much of that from him. He sort of sidelines that to other people. He offloads it to JD Vance or a few other people, but he doesn't do a lot of that himself.
- [42:12]
Scott Bertram
Dr. Bill Maclay with us, his book Jewish Roots of American Liberty. He edits it alongside Rabbi Stuart Halpern. Another rabbi writes in the book, in the fourth part, the meaning of Jewish history for Americans, Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik says the fate of Jews and the fate of the United States is now clearly bound together as never before. Now there are people who wish that not to be true and want to drive us apart. Why do you think perhaps that we are even closer now than we were in past decades or century?
- [42:41]
Dr. Wilfred Maclay
Because in many ways the United States and Israel, and which I think for most Jews, the fate of Jewry, of the Jewish people and the fate of Israel are seen as being bound together. Not everybody and even not all Jews, you know, there are different views about these things, but I think by and large the fate of those three things, the Jewish people, the Jewish nation and the United States of America are seen not just as a political alliance, although that's certainly part of it, but culturally that as Europe sort of sinks, you know, we're all very concerned about the Europe's sort of loss of its sense of itself. This is partly the immigration migrant issue, but that's really, in a way a symptom more than it is a cause, at least in my view, that, that Angela Merkel of Germany would not have said, let's let in a million Syrian refugees or whatever a year, we can do it. She wouldn't have said that if Germany in particular hadn't been laboring for quite a few decades now with no end in sight, in a sense of profound guilt over its past and a sense that this almost beyond redemption and that weakness, that sense of inability to stand is more and more characteristic of the west in general. France is awful of guilt about their colonial experiences. England, the United Kingdom as well. But they all have immigration problems that are going to overwhelm them if they don't get a handle on them themselves. And so the weakness of the west has made the United States into more and more the last best hope, if I may coin a phrase, of the West's persistence and perpetuation. So I think, and I think Israel, if you look at the way things line up in the world, you look at the way that the opponents of Israel tend to be the opponents of the west, they're pretty clear lines being drawn, it seems to me. And I think those who would like the United States to sort of either ease out of its obligations in that part of the world or end them abruptly are badly mistaken. I think that in many ways, Israel is carrying the weight for us, in many ways.
- [45:26]
Scott Bertram
Dr. Wilfred Maclay is co editor, along with Rabbi Stuart Halpern, of the new book Jewish Roots of American the Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story. He's also Victor Davis Hanson, chair of Classical History and Western Civilization and professor of history here at Hillsdale College. Dr. Maclay, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
- [45:49]
Dr. Wilfred Maclay
Scott it's a pleasure always and an.
- [45:51]
Scott Bertram
Honor that will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to Dr. Aaron Cariotti, his book is Making the Cut, and Dr. Bill McClay from Hillsdale College, co editor of Jewish Roots of American Liberty. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews or listen anytime to the podcast. Find it at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I'm Scott Bertram, and this has been the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.