In 1996, David
Horowitz published Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, which became the
most noted autobiography of political conversion since Whittaker Chambers’ Witness
nearly half a century earlier. Like Horowitz himself, the book became and remains
a conservative classic.
The founder of the
David Horowitz Freedom Center passed his 80th birthday earlier this
year and has just released a less political and more meditative autobiographical
follow-up to that iconic work: Mortality and Faith: Reflections on a Journey
Through Time. This book collects three* of Horowitz’s previous observations on life,
death and meaning, titled The End of Time (published in 2005),
A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in
This Life and the Next (2011), and the arrestingly-titled You’re
Going to Be Dead One Day: A Love Story (2015), together with a short concluding chapter fittingly called
“Staying Alive.” As Horowitz puts
it in the new book’s preface, Mortality
and Faith explores the beliefs which we embrace to answer the
existential questions of our lives, and how we are impacted by those answers.
Readers who are familiar
only with David Horowitz the political firebrand, the political general who preaches
a take-no-prisoners
strategy to combatting his former comrades on the left, may be surprised to
discover that he is capable also of a disarming sensitivity, vulnerability, and
personal honesty. He does not flinch from self-criticism nor engage in
self-mythologizing, which is refreshing for a public figure, particularly in
the arena of politics. Every page of Mortality and Faith is redolent of a
battle-scarred wisdom, earnestness, and humility earned from trials and
tribulations both public and private.
Though one gets
the impression he might have wished otherwise, a belief in God is not a
sustaining or consoling worldview for Horowitz. He freely confesses that his philosophy
of life and death stem from a melancholic agnosticism. In You’re Going to be
Dead One Day he declared that “All
questions about death begin with observations that only a religious faith can
answer. I have no such faith,” he says, “and therefore my posing of these
questions is without a hope that life eternal awaits us where all will become
clear.”
I was fortunate enough to survive this round in a war we are all destined
lose, but it changed the way I looked at myself and the world. It caused me to
step back and take in our human predicament, and to think about how we address
it. The book I then began to write about these matters was different in both
substance and tone from the other books I had written.
Like The End
of Time, it’s sequel (if you will) A Point in Time – Book II in Mortality and Faith – is part
memoir and part reflection, “a summing
up of what I have learned over the course of a lifetime.” It draws upon philosophical
sources from Marcus Aurelius to Fyodor Dostoyevsky to examine the “no-win
situation” of our mortality, to wrestle with the fact that our lives are
meaningless and that, like Shelley’s crumbled Ozymandias, one day all our works
and fame, if we have earned any, will be forgotten. To deal with this sobering
reality of our “irrelevance,” to uphold our frail human existence, Horowitz
posits that the best way to make sense of our lives is “by inhabiting stories
that have no end,” and by living inside them. Those stories can sometimes be
lies; for example, ones such as those his hardcore Communist parents told
themselves about a glorious collectivist future awaiting mankind.
Book III, You’re
Going to be Dead One Day, is curiously subtitled, “A Love Story.” That story belongs to Horowitz and his wife
April, whose ceaseless devotion, optimism, zest for life and spiritual faith have
sustained Horowitz far beyond what otherwise likely would have been his
allotted years on earth. Her influence and support shaped a meaning for his
life despite his absence of faith:
I have lived my life as though my actions meant something and everything
would add up in the end. Without thinking about it, I have had a conviction so
deep it might have been encoded in my genes – that while there may not be
providence in the fall of a sparrow, as Hamlet supposed, there is nonetheless a
purpose to our ends. Thought I cannot articulate it, this purpose causes me to
conduct myself as though my wife, not I, were right.
The final chapter of Mortality and Faith,
“Staying Alive,” centers on Horowitz’s struggle with an aggressive resurgence in
2015 of the prostate cancer he had lived with successfully for 14 years. And
yet he devotes a significant portion of the book’s closing to a testimonial to
his friend Eddie Snider, founder of the hockey champion Philadelphia Flyers and
the owner of a far-flung sporting empire. Snider played a major supporting role
in the story of Horowitz’s more recent victory over cancer, all while Snider battled
cancer himself, to which he tragically succumbed in 2016. Horowitz details numerous
examples of Snider’s kindness, generosity and selflessness, characteristics
recognized by all who knew him. “It caused me to wonder,” Horowitz marveled,
“how a man who was such a world conqueror and visionary could be this kind of
man as well – one who felt, and was able to take in, the needs of others who
were not instrumental to his plans. Eddie had done so to such a degree that I
felt shame when I thought about it, because I had tried all my life to be
someone like that but had fallen so short of his mark.”
For a man who had expressed many times the
belief that our lives are ultimately transitory and meaningless in the grand
sweep of things (Mortality and Faith itself begins with a Kafka
epigraph: “The meaning of life is that it stops”), Snider’s selfless, dignified
example left Horowitz deeply “impressed
by Eddie’s advice that if you are productive for others you will feel good
about yourself” – and thus your life will have meant something to those
touched by it. “I had lived long enough to know that it is the life we
encounter directly that sustains us, and the people we are close to,” Horowitz
concludes. “On this front, I could not have felt more fulfilled or happier.”
Mortality and Faith bears witness to a truth that can be embraced
by young and old, believers and non-believers, conservatives and liberals: in
the face of life’s many – sometimes Herculean – trials, the best way to infuse
our lives with meaning “is not to be daunted by the darkness, but to press on,”
and to measure our impact in the world not by the faux immortality of
renown but by the light we bring to those around us.
* A fourth personal work, A Cracking of
the Heart published in 2009, was Horowitz’s heartbreaking elegy for his late
daughter Sarah, a volume not packaged with the others in Mortality and Faith
because it was less a portrait of his life than hers.
From American Thinker, 6/16/19