Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Up from tribalism

I, for one, am happy to see the Pope in Jerusalem. James Carroll's Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews keeps coming to mind. Tribalism was once universal, and Europe's rabble was mired in tribalism for far too long. But it also took its elites (in Rome, Berlin, Paris, etc.) a very long time to rise above it. One can say that it took the Holocaust.