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Were Rousseau’s Children Victims of His Moral Theory?

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Yes, it’s true: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher of compassion, fierce defender of the weak against the strong, the man who never tired of talking about equality and justice and virtue, who wrote a long book (Emile) about just the right way to raise children, sent all his own children to the Paris Foundling Hospital immediately upon birth.  He never knew or even saw them.  Rousseau’s admirers sometimes write as if there might be some doubt about this (e.g., Riley 2001, 6).  But not usually.  More commonly the fact is accepted without question (e.g., Cohen, 1953, 13; Bertram, 2012, 4; Edmonds and Eidinow, 2006; Kelly, 2001, 315).  Indeed it’s hard to see what doubt there could be when Rousseau refers repeatedly to it in his Confessions (1953, 320–22, 332–35, 387, 437, 515–16, 549, and possibly 583–84).  As Cohen (1953, 13) points out, several of the people Rousseau claims to have confessed the secret to were still alive when the Confessions were published, and if it weren’t true, some of them surely would have said so.

Now, being no fan of Rousseau’s brand of social thought, I admit that I am not sorry to find evidence of his hypocrisy.  I’m inclined to smile along with Deirdre McCloskey: “A house ‘filled with domestic cares and the noise of children’ would make a poor place for discoursing on social justice and the raising of children.  Thus on five occasions did Jean-Jacques Rousseau act, that great pre-Romantic teacher of good behavior in love and education” (2006, 114).  But being also at present the teacher of a class on Critical Thinking, my conscience is pricked with the thought that this is ad hominem.  Rousseau’s hypocrisy does not make his social and moral theories false.

My own thought when I learned of this episode in Rousseau’s life was, “if Rousseau had spent less time cultivating his conscience and more time cultivating his character, maybe he wouldn’t have done that!”  That is, it struck me that Rousseau’s actions in this case illustrate a fundamental problem with his conscience-centered morality and thus are philosophically relevant after all.

To judge from the statements of the Savoyard Vicar, which are confirmed repeatedly by statements made in Rousseau’s own voice in the Confessions, conscience is the lone pillar of Rousseau’s moral view.  Rousseau espouses a form of moral sense theory that makes conscience the sole and infallible oracle of right and wrong.  Rousseau’s moral view can be summarized in eight points.  (a) “All the morality of our acts is in the judgment that we ourselves pass on them” (1975, 259).  This seems to be a statement of subjectivism, though how far to take it is questionable.  The same Savoyard Vicar who makes this statement also believes that God rewards the virtuous and punishes the wicked after the death of the body.  Still, if there is any other basis of right and wrong, Rousseau gives no hint of it.  (b) The “judgment” in question is a matter of feeling, not reason or cognition.  “[W]e feel before we know, and just as we do not learn to will our own good and avoid what is harmful to us, but receive that will from nature, love of good and hatred of evil are as natural to us as self-love” (1975, 262–3).  (c) Our moral feelings are the product of an innate faculty called conscience.  It is the inner voice of right and wrong.  It not only allows us to recognize the good, it motivates us to love and pursue it.  It is to the soul what passions and instincts are to the body (1975, 258–9).  (d) Conscience is infallible (1975, 264).  (e) The judgments of conscience are universal; that is, essentially the same across persons and cultures (1975, 261–2).  (f) Although infallible, conscience can be misled by false information or sophistical reasoning.  The Savoyard Vicar doesn’t discuss this point, but it is clear and important in the Confessions (see for example 1953, 190–1, 218–9).  The same point is made concerning the general will in The Social Contract: the general will is infallibly good but not necessarily very wise (II.iii, vii).  It can be misled.  For Rousseau, the general will is to the body politic what the conscience is to the individual.  (g) The voice of conscience can be ignored or denied (1975, 264).  Indeed this happens all too often, usually from personal interest.  When we are disinterested in a case, the voice of conscience is typically clear and easy to discern; when our personal interests are engaged, our passions compete with conscience and frequently overwhelm it.  (h) A person whose conscience is misled is not morally culpable.  It is not a moral requirement that one be wise or smart.  But it is morally wrong to deny or ignore one’s conscience.  Moral goodness consists in listening to and following the voice of one’s conscience.  This is a matter of degree.  One can be more or less guilty, depending on the degree of temptation, the seriousness of the moral issue, one’s level of strength and personal development, and so forth.  Again the Vicar doesn’t go into these details, but the many moral judgments passed in the Confessions make this clear.

The Savoyard Vicar summarizes the view:

Conscience!  Conscience!  Divine instinct, immortal and celestial voice!  You are the sure guide of a being who is ignorant and limited, but intelligent and free.  You are the infallible judge of good and evil; it is through you that man resembles God; it is to you that he owes the excellence of his nature and the morality of his acts.  Aside from you, I feel nothing in me that raises me above the level of the beasts, except the sad privilege of wandering from error to error by means of understanding without rules and reason without principles. (1975, 264)

We can see also how this moral view supports Rousseau’s famous thesis that we are born good and corrupted by society.  Conscience, the guide and motive force of our inmost soul, is inborn.  Unfortunately it is “timid” (1975, 264) and retires in the face of the raging passions stirred up by our personal concerns and the competitive pressures we are subject to in the world of affairs.  When we allow this to happen, it is due to our own weakness.  Nevertheless, that we allow it to happen is the rule, not the exception.

Now, what’s wrong with all this?  I believe there are several things wrong with it, but here I want to emphasize one in particular, which is that it is largely content free.  What does the voice of conscience say?  How do we know when we are hearing the voice of conscience and when we are hearing the voice of passion, prejudice, tradition, etc.?  Rousseau provides no criterion or even any discussion.  He seems to think it’s just obvious.  But of course it is not.  It is not even obvious—not to mention plausible—that a Rousseauan innate faculty of conscience exists in the first place.  Note the difference between Rousseau and the Scottish moral sense theories of David Hume and Adam Smith.  Hume and Smith, each in his own way, provide a specific psychological mechanism by which moral feelings (and hence judgments) arise from other, relatively uncontroversial, nonmoral feelings.  Thus they give us both a reason to believe that the sort of moral feelings they describe really exist and a guide to the content of those feelings.  Rousseau gives us neither.

He does supply some examples to give us an idea of what conscience dictates (1975, 258–60).  Conscience approves of compassion, kind acts, friendship, clemency, magnanimity, and Cato the Younger.  It disapproves of seeking our own good at the expense of others, malicious acts, insensitivity, violence, suffering, and Caesar.  But for the most part he describes the deliverances of conscience in terms that are already moral: conscience approves of goodness, virtue, heroic deeds, sweetness, the noble, justice, etc., and disapproves of wickedness, crimes, injustice, viciousness, depravity, etc.  Unless we already know good from bad, this hardly helps.

But of course, he thinks we do already know!  That’s the theory of conscience.  Perhaps, anticipating G. E. Moore, Rousseau would say that the good, right, etc.—in general, moral approval—is sui generis and irreducible.  We know it when we see it, or rather when we feel it, thanks to our innate faculty of conscience.  There is nothing more to be said.  We cannot identify the good in any other terms (such as flourishing, desire satisfaction, living in accordance with nature, etc.) or supply any standard by which to assess it.  If we would know the good, we must cultivate our “exquisite feelings” (1975, 259) and “tender emotions” (1975, 260), not deny or suppress them.

Moral development on this view is a matter of uncovering and encouraging these exquisite and tender feelings, and this in turn is primarily a matter of ceasing to deny and suppress them.  The feelings are natural; they are there.  But they are “timid” and driven underground by the passions, corruptions, artificialities, and concerns whipped up by society and its pressures.  To recover our innate goodness and cultivate our conscience depends on returning to nature and its simplicity.  This is quite different from a traditional view of moral development as requiring that one master some set of substantive principles and acquire the habit—the strengths of character—of following them.

If Rousseau’s basic moral precept and advice is to cultivate one’s tender and exquisite feelings, then no one can say he didn’t practice what he preached.  The Confessions consists almost entirely of the history of Rousseau’s feelings.  Every episode is described principally in terms of how Rousseau felt about it, the feelings that motivated his own actions and the feelings that resulted.  The feelings are often intense, sometimes all-consuming.  Rousseau’s thoughts on the other hand take a decided second place.  And if one approaches the Confessions expecting something like an intellectual autobiography, one will be disappointed.

The point of the Confessions is not exactly to justify Rousseau and defend his reputation—well, not before Book IX anyway—but it is to reveal Rousseau’s soul to the reader in such a way as to make clear that Rousseau is a good man.  Notwithstanding a few bad moments, Rousseau believed that “I am on the whole the best of men” (1953, 479), and he proposed to demonstrate this by presenting an account of his life that would be as complete and truthful as he could make it, with respect to both his actions and their motivations.  It is evident that a key component of this project of displaying the goodness of his soul is to tell the history of his exquisite and tender feelings.  By showing what “tender feelings” underlay his every action, his actions are rendered, if not always quite good, at least not viciously motivated.

We see the exculpatory power of tender feelings repeatedly in the Confessions, not just in Rousseau’s own case but in the cases of other people he loves and is determined to think well of.  His father, whom he refuses to criticize, effectively abandoned him at the age of ten and never supported him thereafter, although he could have done so.  Indeed, Rousseau effectively supported his father through an inheritance from his mother (who died of puerperal fever nine days after he was born), money that belonged to Jean-Jacques but which was at the disposal of his father as long Jean-Jacques wasn’t around to collect it.  Hence, according to Rousseau (1953, 61), his father’s neglect.  But his father wasn’t bad.  On the contrary, he was good, affectionate, and “a man of scrupulous integrity, and possessed of that strength of mind that makes for true virtue.”  How does this evaluation square with his father’s actual behavior?  Evidently the idea is that his father meant well—his tender feelings never wavered—but unconsciously (“obscurely without his being conscious of it”) his self-interest in the money influenced his behavior.  Thus he could remain good in his heart even though his actions were not what they should have been.

Another person Rousseau loved and was determined to think good was Madame de Warens, whom he met shortly after running away from home at the age of 16 and with whom he lived during most of his twenties.  His senior by about fourteen years, she was a mother figure to Rousseau (he called her “Mamma”) and remained so even after she became his lover.  She was surely the most important person in his entire life.  He insists throughout the Confessions that her character was one of angelic purity and goodness.  Her M.O., at least during the period of her life that Rousseau describes, was to attach men who could do things for her to herself by sleeping with them, for as long as the arrangement was useful and no matter what other men were simultaneously in her life.  To this reader, it seems evident that Rousseau’s own relationship with her was not exceptional in this regard.  She informed Rousseau that they would have sex at about the time it became apparent that he might otherwise be seduced by other women.  Later, when he became sickly and incapable of doing much, she replaced him with another man.  Or perhaps “supplemented” would be more apt, since, although the other man took the primary position, she did not propose to withdraw her favors from Rousseau.  (He however declined to accept them anymore and soon moved away permanently to Paris.)  Rousseau himself does not regard her sexual behavior as morally appropriate.  How does he reconcile it with her goodness?  She had mistaken ideas.  “All her faults, I repeat, came from her lack of judgment, never from her passions” (1953, 190).  To be specific, she was led astray by her philosophy teacher!  In an attempt to seduce her, which succeeded, he plied her with sophistries and convinced her that sexual intercourse is intrinsically unimportant and that marital fidelity need be kept up only in appearance, not in reality.  Thus hers was a case of a misled conscience: innocent and good although mistaken.

These two cases set the pattern: wrongdoing can be compatible with goodness of heart if the wrongdoing can be put down to weakness, such as unconscious corruption in the case of Rousseau’s father and weakness of understanding in the case of Mme. de Warens.  This is the strategy Rousseau applies to himself as well.  He has, he says, every virtue but strength of character (1953, 261).  I do not mean that he completely lets himself off the hook for every wrongdoing.  He clearly blames himself (in a mild way) for certain acts, though not many.

To return at last to les enfants, what does Rousseau say about his actions in this regard?  He insists that at the time of the decision, he was morally untroubled (1953, 322).  The only reason he did not boast openly of his actions was to save the feelings of his mistress (the mother), who did not agree with the decision (1953, 333).  He claims he got the idea that abandoning one’s children at the Foundling Hospital was “the custom of the country” (1953, 322) from the ribald stories told by the “fundamentally decent” men at the dining establishment he frequented.  He regarded children as a considerable inconvenience, abandoning them was a socially acceptable way to relieve oneself of it, problem solved.  So like Mamma, his heart was good but he was misled.  He asks himself whether he might have been callous or lacking in humanity in abandoning his children, and answers: “No, I feel, and boldly declare—it is impossible.  Never for a moment in his life could Jean-Jacques have been a man without feelings or compassion, an unnatural father.  I may be been mistaken, but I could never be callous” (1953, 333).  He then alludes, in all seriousness, to reasons that persuaded him to abandon his children that were so powerful that they cannot be revealed, lest they corrupt other young men!  Some other reasons he does give in this passage include imagining himself as a guardian in Plato’s Republic who must turn over his children to the state and never know their identities, and the reflection that it would be better for them to be brought up “as honest people” (at the hands of an 18th century state orphanage) than with money, as would have happened if one of Rousseau’s aristocratic patrons had taken them in, as some offered to do.  A final reason was that he wanted to keep his children away from the influence of his mistress’s bad family (1953, 334, 387).  Whatever Rousseau’s all-powerful hidden reasons may have been, one has to agree that he could safely reveal these others.

Rousseau eventually developed a considerably bad conscience about the way he had disposed of his children.  He considered making a public confession of the fact at the start of Emile, but thought better of it.  (He does make a veiled allusion to it in that book, 1979, 49.)  Nevertheless, in spite of his later bad conscience, he insists that the action was innocently done at the time and with a good heart.  I believe this raises a serious existential challenge to Rousseau’s whole conscience-based moral view.  A baby at the Paris Foundling Hospital in these years had only a two thirds chance of surviving its first year and only a five percent chance of reaching maturity.  These are facts which Rousseau could have determined without much difficulty if he had felt motivated to bother (Johnson 1988, 21).  One can imagine the Dickensian conditions that must have prevailed in the place.  What is the use of a moral view that can’t tell a modern European he shouldn’t treat his kids that way, like so much garbage?  Less rhetorically, can it be true that we possess an innate, infallible oracle of right and wrong if Rousseau could not hear that oracle telling him it is wrong to dispose of his children in the way he did?  Rousseau, after all, was “the best of men” and “never for a moment in his life… without feelings or compassion.”  He must have been fully attuned to the voice of his conscience if anyone ever was.  Even without any explicit moral theory or moral code, his conscience would be there, according to his view, and he as a man of tender and exquisite feeling should have been in a position to hear it.  But by his own account, he didn’t.

His own account is that he honestly thought he was doing the very best for his kids, better than raising them himself and better than letting one of his aristocratic patrons take them in and better than any other avenue he might have pursued but didn’t.  But can conscience be supposed really to be so utterly detached from cognition as to accept without a murmur the idea that it is better for a child to be in an orphanage than in the home of his parents or on an aristocrat’s estate?  Can conscience really be so passive and accepting of what cognition says as not to at least raise concerns and push for a clear examination of conditions at the Foundling Hospital?  Conscience is supposed to at least be able warn against suffering and seeking one’s own interest at the expense of others.  Can it not be expected to recognize when these conditions are liable to be going on or at least to motivate cognition to make proper inquiries?  If it can, then Rousseau’s account of the case of his children is inadequate and we must suppose his conscience failed him.  In which case, we must be skeptical about the existence of such a thing as a Rousseauan conscience.  If it can’t, there is a serious theoretical problem of how conscience is supposed to provide the guidance it is supposed to provide.  If conscience cannot tell you the suffering of your children is morally important, what can it tell you?

Of course, really the best account of Rousseau’s actions in disposing of his children at the Foundling Hospital is that he callously eliminated them from his life because they interfered with the way he wanted to live it.  He doesn’t want to admit this, no doubt even to himself, and the story of his being misled is his form of denial.  In which case Rousseau might not after all have been the best of men, but at least his moral view might be saved.  His conscience did speak, but only timidly and was drowned out by the passions of self-interest.  But this solution will not do for reasons similar to the ones that scuttled the solution in terms of his being misled.  We can’t just say Rousseau was depraved so naturally he didn’t listen to his conscience.  He may not have been the best of men, but he was hardly depraved.  Surely he was a basically decent man and as full of tender feelings as he describes.  (No one could make that stuff up, or would want to, who wasn’t really of that character.)  He was in as good a position as anyone could reasonably be to hear and heed the voice of his conscience.  But he didn’t.  Although not depraved, and motivated by tender feelings, it seems he was morally somewhat rudderless.  So if we are still to believe in the existence of conscience in the Rousseauan sense, then as before we will have to radically reduce its supposed efficacy.  There seem to be two choices: either the voice of conscience speaks so softly as to be barely audible even on such questions as the fate of one’s children, or its content is so vague as to provide no real guidance, again even on such a question as Rousseau was facing.  Either choice seems hardly distinguishable from the skepticism they are being proposed to avoid.

We are driven to the conclusion that Rousseau’s own case raises serious doubts about the existence of an infallible, innate faculty of conscience that operates in something like the way Rousseau describes.  Rousseau would have done better, both in his moral philosophy and in his life, to cultivate substantive moral principles and the character to go with them than to wallow in exquisite and tender feelings with the idea that they are a sufficient guide to life.

There is one further point.  Rousseau’s theory of conscience is a poor source of moral guidance, but it is a rich source of excuses for moral failings.  Consistently in the Confessions, we see Rousseau excuse his own bad behavior and that of the people he loves on the claims that they were misled or at worst a bit weak.  Not coincidentally, his theory makes this easy to do.  Since the theory articulates no substantive principles a person is expected to follow or character they are expected to exhibit, and since a good heart is unobservable, it can always be claimed that a good heart is really present but let down by bad advice or weakness, and this is sufficient to make a person good according to the theory.  So the people Rousseau loves, like Rousseau’s father and Mme. de Warens, can be claimed to be pure and good despite their bad behavior, while the people Rousseau is on the outs with, like Denis Diderot and Friedrich Melchior Grimm, can be base and wicked.

It is tempting for a variety of reasons to believe that we just know by an innate faculty what is good.  But it is false.  The effect of holding that we have such a faculty in Rousseau’s case, and probably in any other, is to leave him with no standard of moral evaluation either in theory or in his own life.  It is thus to leave him without moral guidance.  It is tantamount to no moral view at all.

WORKS CITED

  • Bertram, Christopher.  2012.  “Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philoosphy.
  • Cohen, J. M.  1953.  “Introduction.”  In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, J. M. Cohen, translator, Penguin, pp. 7–14.
  • Edmonds, David, and John Eidinow.  2006.  “Enlightened Enemies.”  The Guardian, 28 April.
  • Johnson, Paul.  1988.  Intellectuals.  Harper & Row.
  • Kelly, Christopher.  2001.  “Rousseau’s Confessions.”  In Patrick Riley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, Cambridge U. P., pp. 302–328.
  • McCloskey, Deirdre N.  2006.  The Bourgeois Virtues.  University of Chicago Press.
  • Riley, Patrick.  2001.  “Introduction: Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”  In Patrick Riley (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, Cambridge U. P., pp. 1–7.
  • Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.  1979.  Emile, or On Education, Allan Bloom, translator, Basic Books.
  • ———.  1975.  The Creed of a Savoyard Priest, Lowell Bair, translator.  In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Essential Rousseau, New American Library.
  • ———.  1953.  The Confessions, J. M. Cohen, translator, Penguin.

New Bloggers at Policy of Truth

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I’m happy to announce that I’ll be adding two new bloggers to Policy of Truth. Both are old friends of mine, and both have made cameo appearances here in the recent past.

David Potts teaches philosophy at the City College of San Francisco. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Illinois-Chicago, where, on the philosophy side, he worked with David Hilbert. Though his “official” areas of specialization are epistemology and philosophy of mind, his first post here will be on Rousseau (which should be posted in a day or two). He’s guest-posted here previously on the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect. Note: Readers are strictly advised to avoid puns involving David’s last name and the acronym for this blog. (I’m probably the only person here who was ever tempted to flout that advice in the first place.)

Michael Young has taught philosophy at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, and has done graduate work in philosophy at Brown University. Though he’s “officially” interested in issues in meta-ethics and moral psychology, his first post here will be a contribution to the “Rethinking Rights” series I mentioned awhile back (that post should go up mid-week, a few days after David’s). Incidentally, our Michael Young, who blogs from Providence, Rhode Island, should be distinguished from the other Michael Young, who blogs from Beirut.  They turn out to be as different as Rhode Island is from Lebanon.

Welcome aboard, both of you–looking forward to your posting and comments.

Postcards from Abu Dis (7): Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem

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I went to Jerusalem’s semi-famous Museum on the Seam the other day (“MotS”). A couple of friends have asked for a report on what I saw there and how I liked it, so I thought I’d blog it.

Here’s the Museum’s self-description, from its website:

The Museum on the Seam is a socio-political contemporary art museum located in Jerusalem. The Museum in its unique way, presents art as a language with no boundaries in order to raise controversial social issues for public discussion. At the center of the changing exhibitions in the Museum stand the national, ethnic and economic seam lines in their local and universal contexts.

The Museum is committed to examining the social reality within our regional conflict, to advancing dialogue in the face of discord and to encouraging social responsibility that is based on what we all have in common rather than what keeps us apart.

It’s a relatively small place, three floors of museum plus a guillotine-equipped observation deck, housed in a building that played an important role in the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars. The wartime damage to the facade of the building is still visible, and constitutes part of MotS’s aesthetic-political appeal. The owners are obviously proud of the fact that the place manages to look both chic and bombed-out, and though the comparison isn’t exact, the vibe is a little bit like Manhattan after 9/11.

mots1

The Museum gets its name from its physical location–on the seam or borderline between largely Arab East Jerusalem and largely Jewish West Jerusalem, two halves of an “eternally undivided” city divided by one war, and fused together by another. Strictly speaking, MotS is located in West Jerusalem, but that’s only because it’s on the west side of Hel Handasa, the street that divides the city. So it’s at the eastern edge of West Jerusalem, across the street from the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, and next to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Mea She’arim.

Though the Museum is obviously well-named, I’m inclined to wonder whether anyone from either Sheikh Jarrah or Mea She’arim ever visits the place. As it happens, the only people in the Museum during my visit there were American tourists like me. There’s a kind of symbolism in that: East doesn’t seem to meet West in Jerusalem; the two keep their distance from one another, leaving Americans to fill the gap. I get the sense that for the most part, Americans visiting “Israel” tend to go as far East as is compatible with staying firmly in the West. In other words, they stay in Israel, and visit the West Bank, if only for Bethlehem. My visit to MotS reinforced that sense.

MotS is controversial by design, and there are at least two rival perspectives on it. Partisans of Israel sing its praises as a daring exercise in contemporary guerilla art. Partisans of the Palestinian cause regard it as an overhyped pseudo-radical exercise in Zionist apologetics and imperialist bullshit artistry. My own sensitive and deeply nuanced view sits somewhere in between those unsubtle extremes. In other words, I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to MotS, but ultimately sympathize with the Palestinian take on it. It shouldn’t surprise you that, as an American, I feel entitled to have it all.

I particularly liked four of the exhibits I saw, and through the wonders of the Internet, I can show you two and a half of them right here.

The first was this film, “Los Encargados,” by the Spanish artists Jorge Galindo and Santiago Sierra, which depicts a motorized protest up the Gran Via in Madrid, Spain in August 2012. It’s set to an old socialist worker’s anthem, and for me, that really did the trick (not because I’m a socialist, but because I liked the anthem).

The message is not exactly subtle–Spain’s leaders have betrayed the country’s working class–but aesthetically, it works, so I liked it. (Trigger warning: I’m really not that sophisticated or articulate about art, so this is the level of commentary you should expect for the rest of this post.)

This second film is a lot longer than the first (37 minutes), but frankly I think it’s a masterpiece, and I was riveted by it from beginning to end–despite knowing absolutely nothing about the issue it engages with, and having no idea how to pronounce the artist’s name. It’s Chto Delat’s “The Tower: A Songspiel,” in Russian, and it’s about a controversy concerning the (pardon me) erection of the Gazprom Tower in St. Petersburg. If you don’t have 37 minutes to spare, just watch the first two minutes. I don’t know about you, but I found it hilarious.

The depiction of the short-haired elite woman struck me, somewhat vaguely, as a parody of Ayn Rand–not so much a political parody (the woman’s views are not particularly Randian) as an aesthetic one. To be precise, it seems like the kind of parody you’d expect of someone who had heard of Rand but never read her (there’s no shortage of such people). But I still liked it.

I can’t show you the third film, William Kentridge’s 3-minute “Monument,” but here’s a description of it:

Monument is Kentridge’s second film in the series and explores his feelings of ambivalence about the privileges and comforts of the white South African society into which he was born. It was made from a basis of eleven drawings and is accompanied by music composed by Edward Jordan. Soho Eckstein, wealthy real estate developer, here assumes the guise of civic benefactor and erects a monument to the black South African work force, from whose labour his wealth is derived. The monument is a huge statue of an anonymous African workman. During the ceremony of unveiling the monument, in the first half of the film, the statue comes to life. Slowed by the enormous burden on his shoulders, he makes his way across the outskirts of the city, before disappearing into the distant landscape.

There’s a vague Rand connection here, too: the film managed to remind me of Rand’s essay “The Monument Builders” in The Virtue of Selfishness, and the film’s protagonist bears an obvious similarity to John Galt from Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. That said, I somehow doubt that Kentridge has ever heard of Rand, or that the average Randian has ever heard of him; same symbolism, different messages.

A fourth piece I liked was a bitter sculpture of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin by the Israeli artist Uri Lifshitz. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a version online. Since you really have to see it to appreciate its power–and it was powerful–I’ll leave my “commentary” on it at that.

I should add that the Museum’s staff was excruciatingly nice to me in that disarmingly earnest, half-apologetic way that I associate with a certain brand of Israeli leftist. Maybe it’s my American imagination on overdrive, but I felt as though the staff was saying, “We realize that the occupation is in its 48th year–and we apologize for that–but we hope you’ll like the Museum anyway.” Which I did (thanks). I  guess I should also mention that MotS is responsible for the “CoExist” meme you’ve probably seen, which combines symbols from the world’s religions to form an icon spelling that word. If the Museum had a slogan, it might be the one associated with Rodney King (of Los Angeles riots fame): “Can we all just get along?”

So that’s what I liked about MotS. But there were some things I didn’t like–really, one big thing with a variety of different aspects. In a way, this complaint is a response to the somewhat facile nature of the whole “CoExist” idea associated with MotS. There are reasons why coexistence is not as easy as putting a clever bumper sticker on your car.

To approach that problem, consider some of the hype in favor of MotS. The authors of Lonely Planet’s Israel and the Palestinian Territories are typical in their accolades for the place:

Conflict, prejudice, racism (and occasionally coexistence) are on display at the Museum on the Seam, a socio-political/contemporary art museum that pulls no punches. …

Do not mistake it for a museum about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the issues here are broad and far-reaching and the Middle East conflict is just one small piece of a larger puzzle. (2010 edition, pp. 130-31)

Well, that’s one–rather euphemistic–way of putting things. I think it’d be more accurate to say that the Museum does its best to avoid the Arab-Israeli conflict, and in so doing, pulls a lot of punches. You couldn’t guess, by walking through it, that MotS is on the seam of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, you couldn’t guess that the Museum is in Jerusalem, much less that it advertises its proximity to Arab East Jerusalem. Going by its contents, MotS could just as well be located in New York or Chicago as anywhere in Israel.

None of the artists featured in MotS are Palestinians. Neither are any members of the Museum’s administrative staff. With one exception, none of the exhibits had anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. The exception is the Uri Lifshitz sculpture I mentioned, but even there, Lifshitz depicts things entirely from an Israeli perspective. His approach reminds me of Ari Folman’s in the 2008 film Waltz with Bashir: the theme is the anguish, from an Israeli perspective, of Israel’s having fought the 1982 Lebanon War, not the anguish of being on the Palestinian or Lebanese receiving end of the Israeli invasion. I don’t begrudge Lifshitz his perspective on things (he was a paratrooper in the IDF), but the fact remains that the closest that MotS comes to engaging Palestinians is the artwork of an Israeli paratrooper lamenting the fact that he had to kill some.

Mariam Shahin, author of Palestine: A Guide, is harshly dismissive of MotS:

Israelis established the Museum of [sic] the Seam in the confiscated home of the Baramki family. The theme of the displays is the development of Jerusalem since 1948. Although the curators say the museum is designed to bring Arabs and Jews together from both sides of Jerusalem, the signs are only in Hebrew and English. (p. 337)

Though I sometimes find Shahin’s nationalist polemics wearing, and would dispute the accuracy of the second sentence, the first and third sentences of this excerpt are very much on point. Nowhere is MotS candid with the visitor about the complex and problematic history by which it claimed ownership of the building it calls its own (more on that below). And for a Museum that prides itself on bridging East and West Jerusalem, Shahin is right to suggest that it’s not exactly an Arab-friendly place. Shahin was writing in 2007, but things don’t seem to have changed that much since then: though a small handful of the signs are in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, the vast majority are only in Hebrew and English. You can see why the residents of Sheikh Jarrah are not exactly lining up to get in: even if you could cough up the 30 shekel entrance fee, you’d have no idea what was going on around you. No surprise that the only Arab in the whole place was the guy serving coffee in the café.

But all of that really pales in comparison with the property-rights issue, bitterly summarized by the Arab Israeli politician Awatef Sheikh in a 2011 piece in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “Jerusalem’s Museum on the Seam: Artful Dodging.” Reading the first paragraph, I was inclined to think that Sheikh was overdoing the polemics, but having worked my way to the end, I had to admit that he was painfully right.

The building which today houses the Museum on the Seam is, in fact, owned by the Baramki family. It was designed by Andoni Baramki, then a young Palestinian architect who designed many of Jerusalem’s houses. In 1934 he built it and rented it to two Palestinian families who were forcibly expelled from the house in 1948. The Baramki family lived in a rented house nearby and, like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, were forced to flee their homes in search of temporary safety during the violent spring of 1948. Denied return to their home, the Baramki family lived as refugees in Gaza before moving to the village of Birzeit, north of Ramallah, in 1953. Following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967, all members of the Baramki family with the exception of son Gabi—his parents, brother and sister- managed to obtain Jerusalem ID cards and live in East Jerusalem. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, contacted Dr. Gabi Baramki, who was 18 when his family fled Jerusalem in 1948. A former vice president of Birzeit University, he lives in Ramallah.

After 1967, when the family was able to cross over to the west side of the city, Gabi’s father, Andoni, fought for his right to his house. He went to the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property, presented the deeds to his house and his identification documents. According to Gabi, “My father, a 6’4″ tall man, stood in front of the Custodian and told him: ‘I’m Andoni Baramki and I want to return to my house.’ The Custodian looked back at him and replied: ‘you are absent.'” The family then turned to the court but received no justice there, either. “You will get your house when there is peace,” the judge told Gabi’s father. People often told Gabi that his father, a very well-known figure in Jerusalem, “stood in front of the house for hours looking at it the way Romeo used to look at Juliet.” Andoni Baramki was never allowed to set foot inside his house again. He died in 1972.

There seems to be a pattern here: just as MotS is the expropriated home of a “present absentee” Palestinian, so the forthcoming Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance is currently being built on top of the Mamilla Muslim Cemetary in violation of the property rights of the Palestinians whose family members are buried there. (For more on the Mamilla issue, see this article from Columbia Journalism Review, featuring my friend, Rawan Dajani.) The ethos seems to be: Injustice must be done so that good may come of it (and feed the insatiable desire for uplift characteristic of bien pensant American tourists).

tolerance

Given betrayals of this nature, it becomes hard to take Israeli liberals’ claims about the need for mutual understanding and tolerance at face value, and tempting to regard their brand of liberalism as a self-deceived charade. When they tell you that “art lacks boundaries,” I guess they really mean it: boundary violations, you might say, are part of the picture.

I hate to end on that downer note, but unfortunately, that’s the way Jerusalem is, at least in my limited experience. Every time you find something to feel good about, you find something bigger to feel bad about. And that was my ambivalent experience of MotS as well: the premise of the place seemed to be protest of injustices located at a safe remove built on injustice perpetrated nearby.

For me, the lesson is to disavow the smiley-faced, faith-based interpretations of this place one so often hears back home, of which Birthright Israel is perhaps the most nauseatingly delusional exemplification. In fact, Jerusalem is the scene of deep tragedy, worthy of a Sophocles or a Shakespeare, and built on tragic flaws that seem to reproduce themselves with every passing day. And while MotS was interesting and enjoyable–I’m glad I went–it wasn’t a catharsis. I’ll tell you if and when I have one. But don’t hold your breath.

Postscript, August 21, 2015: Here’s an interestingly if indirectly relevant item from The New York Times: Holland Cotter’s “What I Learned from a Disgraced Art Show on Harlem,” discussing the “Harlem on My Mind” art show at the Met in 1969, from the Times’s “Virgin Eyes” series.

(More) Unintended Lessons from Pakistan: Water, Theocracy, and Planning

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This is a brilliant piece on the Ramadan-related deaths in Karachi, now numbering around 1,000.

Karachi is known for killing its residents, but weather had never been its weapon of choice.

Besides illuminating the politics of water, Hanif manages to clarify two further issues: the lethal irrationality of the idea of an Islamic State empowered to dictate what people can eat and drink and when, and the unintended consequences of the absence of centralized urban planning in a rapidly-developing “Third World” city.

The first point ought to be an object lesson to those who think that an Islamic State was or is needed on the Indian subcontinent to keep the Muslims of the subcontinent safe from a “Hindu Raj”: there’s no Hindu Raj in Pakistan and yet Muslims are dying by the droves in Karachi, but not in Delhi, Agra, or Lucknow. Faisal Devji’s discussion of the logic of Pakistani nationalism (and the comparison back to Zionism) is brilliant:

The second point ought to be an object lesson to those under Hayek’s spell and in the grips of the belief that centralized government planning is a discredited socialist idea that “we” can easily dispense with:

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

How does Hayek know that? The claim is an instance of the very knowledge whose existence he denies: it’s a generalization involving a series of integrated claims, offered about rational economic orders and their epistemic determinants as such, not a series of dispersed bits of “frequently contradictory” claims possessed by separate individuals. In any case, Hayek never considers the possibility that there are times when an agent or entity needs to integrate the dispersed bits of knowledge that others possess, since knowledge in its integrated form sometimes has greater practical value than knowledge in dispersed and disintegrated form. What if riparian law is one of them?

Without government protection of the water supply, there’s not a natural drop of water to drink, and without government “planning,” there’s no government protection of the water supply. Even if you wanted to privatize all the water in Pakistan, you’d need to do it under the rule of law, ensuring at a minimum that the privatized water was safe to drink. And that would require reliance on the dreaded activity, “planning.” In addition, Pakistan has water disputes with India, disputes that require bilateral negotiations for their resolution–which requires yet more government planning.

I suppose you could wish this all away by invoking the hopes and dreams of “ideal theory,” but ideal theory has to make some contact with actually-existing reality in order to make a claim on our credence. As it stands, a great deal of it does neither.

James Stacey Taylor on Planning Boards and Property Rights

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James Stacey Taylor has a short, thoughtful response at BHL to an earlier post of mine here at PoT,which was itself a response to something he had written at BHL. I’ll respond here at PoT when I get the chance.

My thoughts on the subject of property and planning are somewhat in flux, as I try to process the implications of some planning- and property-relevant phenomena I’ve seen while traveling–in Pakistan in 2012, in Nicaragua last year, and most intensely of all, here in Israel and Palestine, where I am right now. I’m also trying to anticipate and think through issues I expect to encounter on an upcoming trip to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota this fall.

It’s an enormously complex task to get straight on all of that, especially if one approaches it from the direction of the libertarian literature on property rights. On the one hand, there’s a mismatch between that literature and the facts I’m trying to conceptualize. On the other hand, theorists more directly interested in places like Managua, the West Bank, or Pine Ridge make assumptions about property that I don’t share. So my brain is on overdrive, and hasn’t reached the terminus of the inquiry.

I suspect that I subscribe to a weaker, or at least less expansive conception of property rights than most libertarians do; what I’m working on is how exactly to distinguish the view I hold from pragmatic/progressivist conceptions of property and planning on the liberal left. I think there’s a distinction to be drawn, but I haven’t worked through all of the relevant complexity. I’ll comment when I’ve worked more of it out than I so far have. I’m grateful to Taylor for giving me the incentive to clarify my thoughts.

Postscript: I guess it’s a bit misleading to say that I’ll “respond” to Taylor when I get a chance, since Taylor and I are basically agreeing. What I meant was that I’ll offer some substantive reflections in response when I get a chance.

The only comment I’d make right now, based on a small handful of early comments at BHL, is that Taylor’s critics (and by implication mine) are begging the question against both of us by making tacit but wide-ranging assumptions about the nature of property rights. I won’t speak for Taylor, but I don’t see any intrinsic reason why the existence of planning boards must violate property rights. Property rights could, after all, themselves be sensitive to the need for (government) planning. Libertarians could insist on strong (probably deontic) conceptions of property rights that function as bulwarks against any and all forms of government “interference” (aka “regulation”), but I’m not aware of a successful defense of such a conception of property rights, and don’t find the idea plausible (or even coherent).

Postscript, June 27, 2015: This lecture by Rick Porter of Georgia Tech’s School of Building Construction is a nice primer on zoning and planning in the U.S. from a generally Objectivist/libertarian perspective, from the 2013 Atlas Society Conference; it helpfully reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of that (type of) position.

The lecture starts out well enough, discussing the legitimate basis of zoning in the need for rights-based protections (first 25 minutes or so), but then gets side-tracked in that favorite Randian pastime, the accumulation of ideological horror stories (25-35 minutes). I don’t disagree with what he says there, but it’s a missed opportunity for discussing the real underlying issues in a sustained way.

He ends, unfortunately, with a descent into Randian-libertarian utopianism, suggesting that if we privatize all infrastructure and convert zoning restrictions into private deed restrictions, our problems are resolved. But what goes undiscussed, despite the quick reference to Locke, is the fine-grained content of private property rights: what is it that you own when you own something, like a piece of real estate? Is your ownership right so strong that it precludes zoning laws that prevent your imposing boundary-crossing externalities on others? He’s essentially asked that question around 54:00, but either concedes the legitimacy of zoning in his answer, or appeals to “the market” in a way that doesn’t really answer the question asked (his answer swings between those two claims).

Porter objects to zoning law as “pre-emptive,” but so are the laws of assault and self-defense against assault in the criminal code: an assault is a threat of imminent harm that doesn’t require physical contact, and a right of self-defense gives the victim the right to retaliate before contact is made (and physical harm inflicted), precisely so as to avoid the harms in question. I think the analogy carries over to rights-violative externalities and zoning. The end of the lecture seems to concede that zoning has a legitimate purpose, if properly conceived, but the claim isn’t really developed in the lecture.

That said, I think the lecture is well worth watching, if only for making explicit the facts that need to be dealt with as a preface to a sustained inquiry into the topic.

Here’s the 2014 follow up lecture. I’m “bookmarking” it here for relevance; I haven’t watched it yet.

Postscript, June 28, 2015: Last postscript for now: It belatedly occurs to me that Ronald Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law and Economics III (October 1960) is the classic discussion of this topic, and well worth reading (or re-reading). Here’s a summary.

That said, I reject virtually every major assumption Coase makes in the article, even when I incidentally end up agreeing with this or that claim in it. Coase’s thesis (it’s not really a “theorem”) is often regarded as a critique of the legitimacy of rights-based planning, zoning, and regulation, but I don’t think it succeeds as one, and don’t think Coase thought it did, either. Robert Nozick’s discussion of “Prohibition, Compensation, and Risk” (chapter 4 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia) is in effect a philosopher’s attempt to improve on Coase, but I don’t think it succeeds, either. Nor, as I say in a different post, do I find Hayek’s arguments against “planning” coherent.

Given that, I’ve never quite understood the intensity and scope of the libertarian-Objectivist animus for “regulation.” The animus seems to stand or fall with the idea that all government regulation violates a ban on first-uses of force, but even apart from the conspicuous lack of an argument for the ban, along with the absence of an argument for its application to all government regulation, the principle needs more explication than it’s ever gotten: in order to grasp what the principle says, we need to know what counts as a first use of force, and the principle itself doesn’t tell us.

In any case, it’s not at all obvious to me that regulations designed to thwart (what their architects regard as) first-uses of force must themselves always be first-uses of force. They could be just what their architects say they are: non-rights-violative regulations designed to thwart rights violations. The examples Coase cites in his paper make clear that there is no shortage of potential candidates for regulation in the name of rights. If you reject his analysis, as I do, at least some of those potential candidates become actual ones, and ought to be regulated.

(The preceding comments may well have re-invented the wheel. See Matt Zwolinski’s excellent discussion of the same issues in “Libertarianism and Pollution,” in the Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics. Differences of detail aside, I basically agree with the approach he takes.)

Postcards from Abu Dis (6): Lost and Found in Translation

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My political philosophy class is now deep into Book I of Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle is tough going in any language, but he’s a linguistic obstacle course if you’re going from Attic Greek to English to Arabic and back again. Every technical word in the Aristotelian lexicon requires a special explanation that threatens to run aground on the reefs of some linguistic-conceptual-cultural misunderstanding.

Just consider the first passage of the text:

Since we see that every city (polis) is some some sort of partnership (koinonia), and that every partnership is constituted for the sake of some good (for everyone does everything for the sake of what is held to be good), it is clear that all partnerships aim at some good, and that the partnership that is most authoritative (kurios) of all and embraces all the others does so particularly, and aims at the most authoritative good of all. This is what is called the city or the political partnership. (1252a1-5, tr. Carnes Lord)

Since every what is some sort of what, and is what for the sake of some good, what is it that’s supposed to be clear?

Mission Nearly Impossible: Try explaining this, one clause at a time, in English via Arabic translation to 30 hungry, dehydrated, and nicotine/caffeine-deprived students fasting for Ramadan. Then listen to the Arabic translation via your weak, misremembered college Arabic of thirty years ago in search of any red flags in the translation, and hope you can catch them without losing your place or pushing your translators over the edge.

So: Is our students learning? Na’am, inshallah (“yes, if God wills it”). 

I have two translators in the room, Sinan and Hadi, each of whom helps the other when one of them has trouble. They’ve have used the Arabic medina for “polis/city,” jamia for “koinonia/partnership,” and the adjectival form of “hukm” for “kurios/authoritative.” To add to the complexity, I prefer “association” to Carnes Lord’s use of “partnership.”

Sahih? (“Got that?”)

We spent most of the class explicating the Aristotelian idea of the polis/city, which had to be distinguished from “nation” (dawla), “country” (balad), “state” (also dawla), and “empire” (imbira’turia, obviously just an Arabization of “empire”). To avoid confusion, I decided to avoid “city-state” (medinat ad-daula) for polis, and decided to stick with “city,” adding a special explanation to the effect that an Aristotelian “city” isn’t a city in the modern sense–or even a city in the Palestinian sense. Medinat ad-daula is an intelligible phrase in Arabic, but I’m inclined to think that it would sound to students’ ears like an unintelligible paradox, prompting the predictable question:

Professor, how can a city be a state?

Well, it can’t, but “city-state” is not meant to suggest that a polis is a species of state; “city-state” is a term of art, and we already have too many of those floating around.

There is no easy way (that I know of) for distinguishing nations from states in Arabic (the same word translates both words), so it’s easy on purely linguistic grounds for Arabic speakers to think that every nation either is or requires a state, and vice versa.

Interestingly, I have a hunch that the average educated American–who has a working knowledge of American history but lacks a working knowledge of non-American nationalisms–might also have trouble seeing the distinction between “nation” and “state.” But I think that the latter difficulty arises from totally different sources than the Arabic-speakers’ difficulty. Both Arabs and Americans identify “nation” with “state,” but each has different conceptions of both concepts. In other words, they agree in identifying them, but disagree about what they’re identifying.

For Arabs, I think a “nation” is an ethnicity, and every ethnicity requires (or has the right to) a state. For Americans, by contrast, “nation” is to be identified with “state,” simply because the two words are synonyms; neither “nation” nor “state” is to be identified with any given ethnicity. Despite Woodrow Wilson’s inclusion of self-determination in the Fourteen Points, Americans have trouble grasping, much less sympathizing with, the idea of ethno-national self-determination. It sounds unAmerican. (Strictly speaking, the phrase “self-determination” doesn’t appear in the Fourteen Points, but a commitment to national self-determination is implicit in the second paragraph of the document.)

After giving what I think is the standard account of the nature of the polis in Aristotle, we talked about its possible exemplifications or approximations in the modern world.

To focus the conversation, I described the U.S. today as a counter-exemplification of the Aristotelian polis: in other words, I suggested that the U.S. provides a good (democratic) contrast to what Aristotle took the polis to be. In the U.S., we prize the freedom to do as we please with lives that we regard as essentially our own; we resent the idea that the nation has, or can dictate a single purpose to us, and have a very thin conception of “the common good” in the form of “the public interest,” which is sometimes (but pretty rarely) invoked to justify this or that policy, and plays little role in everyday political thought, discourse, or practice. Is that a controversial thing to say? Maybe, but it seems fairly obvious to me.

There didn’t turn out to be any literal exemplifications of the polis in the modern world. Among the closer approximations I came up with–and I know this is controversial–were Israel and Pakistan. Granted, both Israel and Pakistan are states, and as I’ve already said, the polis is not a state at all but a city. Further, being states, both Israel and Pakistan are much bigger than the political unit that Aristotle had in mind in his account of the polis. Given all of that, both Israel and Pakistan are obliged to rely on the use of force in a way that I don’t think is characteristic of an Aristotelian polis; put another way, each achieves an approximation (or illusion?) of being an Aristotelian koinonia by using the instrument of law to enforce a common conception of virtue in the service of a common good. Those are, I realize, large differences that distinguish both Israel and Pakistan from the Aristotelian polis.

But I still think that there’s something to the comparison. My point was that Israel and Pakistan each self-consciously conceives of itself as a political koinonia–a political association–with a common end, and a substantive conception of the common good. Citizenship in both countries is defined by allegiance to this robust conception (or supposedly robust conception) of the common good–the conception being supplied in the Israeli case by the idea of a Jewish State, and in the Pakistani case by the idea of an Islamic one. Each regime has a conception of virtue and the common good that it tries to inculcate through a public system of education, with the aim of getting citizens to identify their good with the state by identifying with its conception of virtue. And each is unapologetic about relying on the state to do so.

I have a feeling that my students were a little perturbed at hearing Aristotle compared with Israeli Zionism in one breath, and Israeli Zionism compared with Pakistani nationalism in the next. When I taught in Pakistan in 2012, students there were equally perturbed when I compared Pakistan with Israel. I guess all that’s left is to teach the same material in Israel, and I’ll have covered all of the relevant national bases.

Anyway, that’s when I decided to drop the real bomb. Neither Israel nor Pakistan is a good approximation of a polis, I suggested; they’re both too big and diverse to fit the bill. And both face the problem of how to deal with minority populations–a problem with no analogue in the case of an Aristotelian polis.

If you really want a good approximation of this polis, I suggested, you need to think smaller, and think of something closer by. I asked them if they could figure out what I meant. “Palestine?” someone asked. “No,” I said. “Just think of an Orthodox Israeli settlement.”

For a second, the class looked at me in blank incomprehension. But then, I think, they got it. I won’t elaborate, but I actually think that that comparison really does work: at some level, Israeli settlements really are like Aristotelian poleis. The biggest problem with the comparison is that the West Bank settlements are tied to Israel, which is a nation-state, and Israel is itself supported by the United States, which is a nation-state verging on an empire. But if you abstract the normative ideal of a Jewish settlement from its practical or logistical ties to Israel and the U.S., I’d say that settlements–which have a municipal governing structure–are a contemporary approximation of the Aristotelian polis. 

Incidentally, when I was a graduate student at Notre Dame, Alasdair MacIntyre used to use the example of the New England Town System as a “modern” approximation to the polis, but I no longer remember whether he was making a historical point about the structure of that system in colonial times, or making reference to the version of the system that exists today.

An unexpected linguistic stumbling block: At one point, I made passing reference to the “conceptual connection” between one thing and another, and both translators were momentarily stumped. It belatedly occurred to me that “conceptual connection” is a metaphor–possibly a dead metaphor, but still, idiomatically speaking a metaphor for purposes of translation. If you put the English word “connection” into Google’s translation device, you get 17 possibilities in Arabic, ranging over personal connections, computer-related connections, connections involving transportation hubs, and so on. If you put in “conceptual connection,” you get ittisal al maffahimi.

It sounds pretty impressive, but is it the right translation? Allah hu’ alim. God only knows. Let’s hope God’s Arabic is better than mine.

Postscript: An interesting paper I happened to encounter on this topic, Marco Allegra, “Citizenship in Palestine: A Fractured Geography,” Citizenship Studies 13:6 (2009).

On a more polemical note, consider Amos Oz’s claims, as described in a piece by Zachary Lockman:

Oz, in his wartime article for the New York Times, goes on at length about the romantic, idealistic and humanitarian character of the early Zionist settlers. They were pragmatic, politically aware, supremely self-analytical and egalitarian all at once, these men and women who by day drained the swamps of Palestine (to cite a popular Zionist image) and by night argued about social, political and ethical issues. The pre-state Jewish yishuv was not entirely idyllic, to be sure; there were some conflicts between the Labor Zionist leadership and the right-wing dissidents led by Begin. Despite this, Oz asserts, in many respects Israel was by 1948 “on its way to becoming a twentieth-century version of an Aristotelian Greek polis, characterized by the highest degree of individual involvement in public affairs.”

The Oz piece is Amos Oz, “Has Israel Altered Its Visions,” New York Times Magazine, July 11, 1982. For some reason, I haven’t been able to locate it in the Times’s archive.

Postcards from Abu Dis (5): More Miracles in the Holy Land?

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Ramadan just started a couple of days ago, and I’m already wiped out from fasting. The fast is just too long. It starts at 3:54 am and doesn’t end until 7:48 pm: no food, no drink, no coffee. No coffee….

Fasting used to be easier when I was a kid. Somehow, back then, I had the capacity to fast and then play basketball or go to track practice. When did I become such a soft and pathetic wimp?

The thing is, I had planned to go to Jerusalem today, but canceled those plans at the last minute, because, due to fasting-fatigue, I hadn’t gotten any work done over the last few days. So I stayed home today and finished some of that work instead, fighting the ravages of my confused metabolic system.

Originally, I’d planned to go Bab al Amoud (Damascus Gate) in the Old City. In fact, I was planning to take a bus that stops right there just around the time that this happened:

An Israeli border policeman was critically wounded in a stabbing attack at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem Sunday morning. The officer was stabbed in the neck, but managed to shoot the attacker before collapsing.

“When we arrived, we found a young man around 20 lying unconscious with a number of stab wounds to his upper body,” Magen David Adom paramedic Aharon Adler told Haaretz.”

“We immediately provided life-saving treatment and evacuated him to Shaare Zedek hospital in very serious condition.” The officer’s condition stabilized after undergoing surgery, the hospital said Sunday afternoon.

According to an Israel Police spokesperson, the perpetrator was an 18-year-old Palestinian who lives in the West Bank. He was evacuated to Hadasah, Ein Kerem hospital in critical condition.

Following the incident, security forces began combing the area with police helicopters.

As a friend of mine laconically put it: “It wasn’t a good day to go to Jerusalem.”

Mere coincidence? Or yet another survival-conducive miracle?

Well, survival-conducive for me, at any rate. Otherwise, too few miracles to go around.

The Most Racist Places in America: A Clarification

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In the midst of a discussion about race at BHL, some commenters have alluded to a now-famous paper identifying the most racist places in America, “Association between an Internet-Based Measure of Area Racism and Black Mortality,” published at PLOS One, by David H. Chae, et. al.

A discussion thread on the paper goes as follows (the second commenter is Jacob Levy, of McGill):

Theresa Klein • a day ago

Wasn’t there a map of racist tweets posted over at Marginal Revolution recently that showed that there was just as much racism in the North as in the South.

(The West however seemed to be much less racist, even states like Arizona, Idaho and Utah

jtlevy Mod Theresa Klein • a day ago

I think you mean this map of google searches:http://www.washingtonpost.com/… linked to here http://marginalrevolution.com/…

With a couple of exceptions (northern New Jersey, Rhode Island) this is approximately a map of the core of the slaveholding south plus the Appalachian belt that runs into PA and NY but where the Confederate flag is still a very, very common sight. (In PA, remember the old saying “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle.”)

While I agree that measures something relevant, I think something like this map of the history of lynchings has priority over it:http://all-that-is-interesting… . “Just as much racism” in people’s hearts, maybe, but not just as much terror and tyranny.

I’m obliged by a promise I made to Matt Zwolinski not to comment at BHL any more, but I’m free to comment on BHL here.

So, just a quick clarification: Levy has misread the map indicating the “couple of exceptions.” I can’t seem to reproduce the study’s map here, but it’s easily visible in the study, which you can find by clicking the very first link at the top of this post.

The exception in question is not “northern New Jersey” but southwestern New Jersey, which includes Mercer, Monmouth, Burlington, Ocean, Camden, Gloucester, Salem, Cumberland, and Cape May counties (I’ve listed all of the southern counties, including the most eastward, because all of them extend into the western half of the state). More colloquially, it includes the “Pine Barrens,” which cut across Burlington, Camden, and Atlantic counties (but are centered in Burlington).

countymap_temp.gif (288×515)

Though officially a Union/free state, New Jersey was deeply split about slavery before and during the Civil War. Geographically (though not as a matter of political fact) parts of south Jersey are below the Mason-Dixon line, at least in this sense:

The Mason-Dixon line does not technically run through New Jersey, but if the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland were extended due east, it would run south of Penns Grove, north of Hammonton and just below Barnegat.

Though it may be apocryphal, it’s part of state folklore that the southern half of New Jersey was split between Quaker abolitionists and pro-slavery Copperheads. But I don’t have a source for that claim, and don’t know know whether it’s true. As it happens, the southern part of the state polled most heavily for Lincoln.

In any case, within the (populated parts of the) Pine Barrens, attitudes remain highly sympathetic to Dixie to this day. (There used to be a Robert E. Lee Roundtable of New Jersey, but I don’t think it exists any longer.) You can, for instance, expect virtually any bar you enter and any pickup truck you see in the Pine Barrens to display a Confederate flag. The Pine Barrens is not part of the Appalachian Belt that Levy mentions (it’s flatland), but the Confederate flag is, in my experience, far more common there than it is in that Belt. (I say that despite having had an uncomfortable encounter with a white supremacist biker gang in a bar in Lancaster, PA.)

Here’s a nice blast from the past for you. As it happens, the preceding article discusses Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s in various parts of New Jersey, but focuses on the town of Hamilton, which is in the south-central part of the state, in Mercer County, near Trenton. (The article comes from a website devoted to Trenton-area history.)

So the real exception to Levy’s point is not northern or southern New Jersey, but Rhode Island. That said, RI is a rather large exception to his generalization, and could use an explanation of some kind.

Afterthought, June 21, 2015: The clarification I was making was narrowly factual and nit-picky, but as I think about it, I have to say that I find the entire exercise of identifying “the most racist places in America” a dubious one, including the attempt to do so by the methodology laid out in the paper under discussion. It’s not really clear what the phrase is supposed to mean, and the methodological caveats listed at the end of the paper don’t really clarify anything. It’s as though the most sophisticated methods of contemporary social science were being devoted to discovering the applicability of a predicate (“most racist place in America!”) drawn from the lexicon of a TV game show.

In general, it seems to me that discussions of this sort lend themselves to a lot of pseudo-empirical handwaving that’s sometimes hard to avoid, but is probably best avoided. For instance, over the last two decades, I’ve driven across Pennsylvania both east and west via both Route 80 and Route 76 about twenty times, stopping in various towns along the way. (Back when I was married, my wife and I spent our honeymoon in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, just outside of Scranton. A conclusive credential in this discussion, and a rare distinction no matter how you look at it.) Contrary to Levy, I wouldn’t say that the Confederate flag is “a very, very common sight” there. One sees it, to be sure, and encounters racially problematic attitudes to be sure, but “very, very common” is an exaggeration, at least as far as my experience is concerned.

Further, contrary to the saying he quotes, about Pennsylvania being “Alabama” sandwiched between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the study’s map indicates that there’s no difference between, say, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and central Pennsylvania, and also indicates that both Pennsylvanian cities are more racist than most of Alabama. Meanwhile, South Dakota turns out to racially benign, but given the terms of the study, that finding by definition cannot apply to racism against Native Americans, because what the study examines is Google searches involving the word “nigger” and its cognates. So if anti-Native racism in South Dakota turned out to be worse than anti-black racism in Pennsylvania, the study has no means of detecting or recording the fact.

All in all, the study raises more questions than it answers, and seems to me to involve a misdirection of attention. (To be fair, Levy wasn’t the one who brought it up.) 

Thinking about BDS (2): The Rhetoric of the Race Card

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Anti-Semitism is a real, sometimes insidious, and always vicious thing. I’ve argued now for more than a decade that it finds problematic (probably disproportionate) expression among Arabs and Muslims, and also among Israel’s more militant and dogmatic secular critics.* In the United States at least, things seem to have improved since I first started writing on the subject, but still, I see nothing to retract from the criticisms I’ve made over the years. Whatever the malfeasances of Israel’s defenders (and of Israel itself), Arabs, Muslims, and anti-Zionists have a fair bit of housecleaning to do as far as anti-Semitism is concerned. As one prominent Palestinian intellectual put it to me, it doesn’t help Palestinians for Europe to be re-infected by anti-Semitism, so that Jews once again feel the need to leave the Left Bank of the Seine for the West Bank of the Jordan.

The anti-BDS movement, however, has gone well beyond such claims. Their view is not merely that anti-Semitism is on the rise, that it is a bad thing, and that it finds problematic expression among Israel’s critics. That would just put anti-Semitism on par with anti-Arab racism or anti-Muslim bigotry, which is also real, insidious, and vicious, and finds problematic and disproportionate expression among militantly pro-Israeli Jews. On their view, BDS is an anti-Semitic movement as such, in “effect” if not in “intention.” To be associated with it is presumptively to be associated with anti-Semitism. To sympathize with it is to sympathize with anti-Semitism. To participate in it is to participate in anti-Semitism. To lead it just is “classic” anti-Semitism.

The ultimate goal here is to reverse the presumption of innocence that usually obtains when you deal with someone you don’t know very well: other things being equal, you assume that a stranger is morally innocent, even if their views are false, until (or unless) you discover clear evidence of culpability. What the anti-BDS movement wants is a state of affairs in which, without having to address the merits or demerits of BDS, it can play the race card against anyone associated with BDS. Doing so saves time, and purchases more bang for the buck: with a mere six syllables at your disposal, you obviate the need for argument, and wipe your opponents’ reputations permanently in the mud.

The arguments for views of this sort are scattered across the vehicles of the movement, and repeated ad nauseam, but in this post, I want to discuss not the arguments but the rhetoric of the anti-Semitism accusation as made by critics of BDS. (I’ll discuss the arguments in a later post.) There is a distinctive method and style to this rhetoric, and something to be learned from analyzing it.

As I’ve mentioned before, one version of this form of discourse is what might be called safe-space self-infantilization. It might with equal merit be called the appeal to post-non-traumatic-stress disorder, or self-dramatic-stress-disorder. The claim here is that hurt Jewish feelings, especially in college-age students, just entails the existence of real anti-Semitism, on the assumption that the effect could not possibly have arisen through any other cause. As a general principle: If people feel bad, their feeling bad underwrites whatever they believe about why they do. The same principle put in the first person singular: If you make me feel bad, and I come to believe that you’ve done so through racist intentions, then, if I can demonstrate that I feel really bad, you really are a racist. The worse I claim to feel, the more confirmation I have of any accusations I make of you.

What’s worth learning here is how a general discursive culture of sensitivity and caring can be exploited for sinister ends–and how difficult it can be to challenge its assumptions without being branded insensitive, uncaring, or worse. At a deeper epistemic level, what’s worth learning here is what happens when you erase the distinction between cognition and emotion so as to lose any sense of the difference between them. If there is no difference between cognition and emotion, or between appeals to cognition versus appeals to emotion, then there is no difference in principle between inferring your way to a conclusion and feeling your way to one. But in that case, it seems to me, there is no difference between persuading someone of  a conclusion via inference, and manipulating them into a conclusion via appeals to pity, guilt trips, ad hominem arguments, ad bacculum arguments, and the like.

What would such a caring, sensitive, but emotionally manipulative discourse look like? To get a sense of it, consider some passages from this May 9 report in The New York Times on BDS and the response to it by students who oppose BDS in defense of Israel.

LOS ANGELES — The debates can stretch from dusk to dawn, punctuated by tearful speeches and forceful shouting matches, with accusations of racism, colonialism and anti-Semitism. At dozens of college campuses across the country, student government councils are embracing resolutions calling on their administrations to divest from companies that enable what they see as Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. …

As the debates spill from undergraduate council to dorm room, students and college officials are grappling with where to draw the line between opposition to Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza — a position shared by many Jews — and hostility toward Jews. Opponents of divestment sometimes allude to the Holocaust.

“What bothers me is the shocking amnesia of people who look at the situation of American Jews right now and say, ‘You’re privileged, you don’t have a right to complain about discrimination,’ ” said Rachel Roberts, a freshman at Stanford who is on the board of the Jewish Student Association there. “To turn a blind eye to the sensitivities of someone’s cultural identity is to pretend that history didn’t happen.”

Actually, opponents of divestment don’t “sometimes” allude to the Holocaust. They allude to it a lot. Consider Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm’s Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel in this respect. The book’s index has twenty-five entries for “Holocaust (see also Shoah),” including four multi-page references. Naturally, there is an index entry for “Shoah (see also Holocaust),” as well. The index entry for “anti-Semitism” is four lines long, as is the coincidentally just-following entry for “anti-Zionism.” The rhetorical purpose of these allusions is clear: vaguely insinuate that BDS, being anti-Zionist, is “by definition” anti-Semitic (p. 77); then suggest that its version of anti-Semitism has something in common with the Nazi version, so that BDS either has something in common with Nazism or at least with Holocaust denial.

Here’s a logician’s summary of the fallacy involved (he’s making reference to an example from a different context, but the same principle applies):

This tactic is sometimes called “poisoning the well,” and it is obviously fallacious. The fact that someone might have a nonrational motive for supporting a position does not mean the position is false, and it certainly does not mean we can decide ahead of time that all his arguments for the position can be dismissed.

Well, none of this is obvious to the anti-BDS movement, which has come to rely on well-poisoning as a discursive way of life.

“Holocaust,” “Nazism,” and “anti-Semitism” are the nuclear weapons of moral discourse in the academy. Those with the power to deploy those terms and make them stick to other people’s reputations are the nuclear powers of the academic set. Unlike the actual nuclear powers of the military world, however, they’re not shy about pushing the button, and face little in the way of deterrence, so that every successful weapons launch encourages them to engage in another. The toxic consequence of their efforts–in many cases the intended consequence–is the empowerment of ignorant, opportunistic college students like Rachel Roberts who seem think that if you’re insensitive to someone’s presumed cultural identity you are denying history itself. The assumption seems to be that no aspect of history as it actually happened could conceivably involve an affront to anyone’s cultural identity.

Reading between the lines of Rachel Roberts’s assertion (“pretend that history never happened”), one hears the echoes of the most propagandistic features of contemporary Holocaust education: “never forget,” the Holocaust ed mantra asserts, without telling anyone what exactly to remember–except that the Holocaust was morally and metaphysically unique, and so too, presumably, was the solution to it in the form of the creation of the State of Israel. Predictably, the Rachel Roberts of the world infer that if they feel bad about whatever you’re saying about Israel, you’ve forgotten the Holocaust and are, by your words, letting (or making) it happen all over again.

It’s as though someone were to say:

Your defense of BDS makes me feel really bad. Really, really bad. In fact, I feel so bad right now that I kinda feel as though…you’re a Holocaust denier on par with David Irving. Only a Holocaust denier could make me feel this bad, so you must be one.

Well, if I were on the receiving end of that accusation, I would feel really bad, and I’d be tempted to respond in kind. Many do. But what seems obvious is that this “feeling-to-ascription” manuever is a desperate attempt to change the subject and shut down the conversation. The hypothetical person I’ve just quoted is not someone who wants to discuss BDS, the merits and demerits of Zionism, Israeli policy in Area C, or what practical measures to take to end the occupation. This is a person who realizes that the best bet for evasion is a conversation about the presumed dirty secrets of his or her interlocutor, secrets that can only be exposed–or manufactured–by enacting a pseudo-therapeutic drama in which the focus turns to the drama itself. As a matter of logic, an interlocutor who does that sort of thing cannot be reasoned with until he or she ceases and desists from doing it. There is no logical way to respond to an insinuation of racism based on someone’s feelings except to dismiss it and get back on topic.

To continue:

“There’s more poison in the rhetoric than we’ve ever felt before,” said Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, the executive director of Hillel at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked on college campuses for more than four decades. “There are so many students who now see Israel as part of the establishment they’re against. What’s alarming is this gets deeply embedded and there’s no longer room for real discussion.”

The word “felt” obviates the need to find a genuinely empirical way to test the generalization implicit in Seidler-Feller’s supposed observation. By contrast, it’s well-established that support for Israel practically defines the American foreign policy establishment today. How it’s poison to regard the Establishment as established is unclear to me.

Seidler-Feller’s claim is particularly bizarre coming from a person who has somehow managed to regard BDS as “deeply embedded.” The “embedding” metaphor is pretty unclear, but if it means anything at all, it has to mean that BDS is starting to become an establishment of some sort: to say that a view has become “deeply embedded” is to say that it’s become well-established in a given population. Put aside the empirical absurdity of the claim and suppose that it was true. If it was true, why would it leave no room for discussion? At any given time, it’s reasonable to expect that someone constitutes the Establishment. How does the sheer existence of an Establishment leave no room for real discussion? And why is it that when BDS regards the Israel lobby as the Establishment, that is anti-Semitic, but when critics of BDS regard BDS as subverting real discussion by “embedment,” no issue of bigotry arises at all, even by implication?

I may be pressing too hard on claims that were never supposed to make sense in the first place, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Seidler-Feller’s claims here are just a desperate defense of the status quo. If his views are part of the Establishment, it’s poison to oppose them, but if contrary views get “embedded” somewhere, well then, we’re all in discursive prison. I’m left wondering what Seidler-Feller thinks about the room for discussion that’s left to us after people throw around gratuitous insinuations of anti-Semitism in people one disagrees with, as he just has: in addition to the preceding claim about “poison,” Seidler-Feller has accused Omar Barghouti, the presumptive founder/leader of the BDS movement, of being a “classic anti-Semite.” Presumably, calling someone a “classic anti-Semite” gives us all the room for a “real discussion”–a discussion, at any rate, of who’s next on Seidler-Feller’s McCarthyite blacklist.

But let’s continue:

Sometimes, the specific aims of campus divestment campaigns can get lost in broader debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At Barnard College, which is one-third Jewish, a group called Students for Justice in Palestine put up a banner last year saying, “Stand for Justice, Stand for Palestine,” showing a map of the area with no internal border demarcating Israel. The banner was taken down the next morning after Jewish students complained that it made them feel threatened.

What I find interesting about this passage is that the complaining students didn’t complain that the map implied a falsehood, or was inaccurate, but that it “made them feel threatened.”  The claim seems to be that display of the map itself constitutes a threat.

This approach to things parallels the views of those in France who claim, with the authority of law, that the sight of a full niqab worn in public constitutes a threat by those who are “forced” to see it, which is why it must be banned, at least in public. The claim here is literally this: if Aisha is wearing a full niqab, and you see her wearing it, she might as well have come up to you and threatened you; the sight of the niqab is a threat on par with what Anglo-Saxon common law regards as assault: creating the apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact with a person (itself a remarkably broad formulation).

Accept the reasoning for a moment. In that case, shouldn’t any defender of the Palestinians cower in fear–or even call the police—every time defenders of Israel (or just ordinary folks) conflate the West Bank with Israel as, with “frightening” frequency, they do? How about a book that calls for the annexation by Israel of the West Bank? Should the display of such a book in, say, a bookstore window be regarded as a threat and legitimize a demand that it be taken down? What difference in traumatic intensity is there between displaying a map that treats Israel and Palestine as a single political entity, and displaying a book that prescribes treating Israel and Palestine as a single political entity? I don’t see any, but somehow, in the United States, the first is construed as an attack, while the second is construed as a polite topic for conversation.

This reminds me of an incident during my undergraduate days at Princeton. One day, someone invited Rabbi Meir Kahane to speak on campus, and Kahane made the case not just for the forcible transfer of the Arabs from Eretz Israel (which for him included the West Bank), but their mass slaughter if they didn’t accept second-class citizenship or leave voluntarily. (For a discussion of how Kahane came to be invited to Princeton, see Robert Friedman’s Zealots for Zion.)  That was regarded as a polite topic for conversation at Princeton in the late 1980s. Most of the audience laughed at Kahane’s jokes, applauded what he said, and was offended when Kahane was sharply taken to task in the Q&A. There were no cell phones in those days, but just try to imagine the absurdity of calling 911 from inside of McCosh Lecture Hall 50 and trying to assert to the police dispatcher that Kahane’s racist and anti-Arab diatribe was an act of assault under the criminal code requiring the immediate dispatch of police units, followed by his arrest, and his prosecution. What is more likely to happen–that the police would arrive and arrest him, or that they would arrive and arrest you for false report?

Anyway, let’s keep going.

At U.C.L.A. last month, hundreds of Jewish students waving Israeli flags and wearing shirts emblazoned with “We, the Zionists” gathered on the campus quad to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. Some said that while they had never hidden that they were Jewish, they felt uncomfortable voicing their support for Israel and often chose to stay out of debates around other current political issues. When the student government considered a divestment resolution, Jewish student leaders encouraged their peers to stay away from the meeting, saying their presence would offer legitimacy to a process they deemed inherently wrong.

“When there were marches about Ferguson, I went, but I stayed on the sidelines,” said Natalie Charney, a U.C.L.A. senior and the president of the Hillel Student Board, who had been made uneasy by the chants of “From Ferguson to Palestine,” which she saw as totally unrelated. “I wanted to be there, but part of what they are hating is central to who I am and what I stand for.”

The “discomfort” voiced here seems to me indistinguishable from group think, as is the encouragement to stay away from the debate. The failure to see any connections between Ferguson and Palestine betrays a failure of integration and imagination: how difficult is it to see the similarity between the systematic and racialized abuse of force by law enforcement officers in one place, and the same thing happening in another?** Never mind that this criticism comes from people who habitually criticize BDS for “singling out” Israel. So if critics of Israel focus on Israel, that’s “singling Israel out.” But if they link criticism of Israel to other political causes, they’re muddying the waters by bringing up “totally unrelated” topics. As for “part of what they are hating is central to who I am and what I stand for,” the claim raises an obvious question for Ms. Charney: what part of what they are protesting is central to what you “stand for,” and whatever it is, why is it that you’re going out of your way not to stand up for it?

Continuing:

At U.C.L.A. this year, a Jewish student, Rachel Beyda, was questioned about her loyalties while she sought a position on the student Judicial Board. At Stanford, another Jewish student, Molly Horwitz, described a similar situation when she sought the endorsement of the Students of Color Coalition, which favors divestment, but disputed the claim that it had asked about her Jewish identity. Before declaring her candidacy, Ms. Horwitz felt compelled to remove pro-Israel references from her Facebook page before she ran for the student senate.

What happened in the Stanford case is (as the passage itself says) highly disputed, but if Israel really is what its defenders “stand for,” why the need to airbrush one’s support out of existence when one thinks that an election requires it?***  The deletion of one’s “stand” is not exactly a case of standing up for it.

More:

“Jewish students and their parents are intensely apprehensive and insecure about this movement,” said Mark Yudof, a former president of the University of California system. “I hear it all the time: Where can I send my kids that will be safe for them as Jews?”

I wonder if a former president of the University of California system can be counted on to know what an “equivocation” is. How “safe” is a university system in the hands of a man with mental processes of this caliber?

In general, this is the rhetorical space within which the supposed “arguments” against BDS operate in the United States. Those arguments would have no traction in a climate of opinion where rhetoric of this kind was regarded as unacceptable. They get traction in a climate of opinion in which well-poisoning and appeals to pity are generally taken for granted, up for grabs for those who best know how to exploit them.

It’s worth noting that while many of the people quoted in this article are students, not all of them are. They’re adults in positions of academic or quasi-academic authority. When people like that approach politics like this, they have to expect push-back–forceful push-back–from people on the other side. In particular, they have to be put on notice that fraudulent insinuations of anti-Semitism, like the ones discussed here, have to be treated as the fraud they are. In other words, if critics of BDS want to play the race card, they have to be put on notice that those of us on the receiving end intend to respond, not quite “in kind,” but in a manner that exposes the fraud, and puts responsibility for the discursive pollution involved on the people who created it. We have no obligation to sit back and accept their threats and attacks with equanimity–which is what they seem to expect of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and what they expect of the rest of us, as we survey the wreckage of a 48-year-old military occupation made with our support, in our name.

But “self-infantilization” is just one variation on a theme that has dozens of variations and dozens of exponents. There are–trust me–many, many more. So unfortunately, this post is just the first of what will have to be a sustained effort at criticism. Stay tuned.

*My writing on this subject is scattered all over the Internet and in somewhat obscure places. When I get back to the States, I’ll try to consolidate it all on this site for easy reference. Meanwhile, I’ve endorsed this book, and some of my comments on the subject are mentioned within it.

**In referring to “Ferguson,” I’m referring (as my links suggest) to the Justice Department’s exposure of systematically discriminatory practices engaged in by law enforcement and other agencies in the area, not to the details of the encounter between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson.

***A sincere question for experts in the ethics of voting: is it consistent with “the ethics of voting” to edit your Facebook page in the described way simply in order to win an election? Doesn’t doing so represent a defect of character that precludes voting for a candidate, even if it doesn’t have clear policy implications for the future?

Postscript, June 21, 2015: One doesn’t have to wait long for reality to provide confirmatory postscripts to a post like this. From an article in The New York Times, “Two Israeli Men Are Attacked, and One Killed, Near Settlement in the West Bank“:

Israeli leaders condemned the attack. “We will not accept a situation in which a young hiker has his life taken from him in the land of Israel because he is Jewish,” President Reuven Rivlin said in comments on his Facebook page. “The murderous attack that occurred today is another step in the quiet and serious escalation in acts of terrorism we have witnessed in recent months.”

So Dolev–between Bir Zeit and Ramallah, miles from the Israeli border–is in “the land of Israel”? How did that happen? In other words, how does a shooting allow the President of Israel to bypass final status negotiations and decide the fate of the West Bank?

But this is how the settlers, their supporters–and in certain moods, Israelis as such–habitually speak. If we should feel “threatened” by the advocacy of one-state solutions, then the shooter in this case had the right idea: he shot the people from whom he “felt” a threat. It’s not as though the presence of the settlers is like a map he can ask to have taken down by some care-bear administrator.

Continuing:

Israel’s education minister, Naftali Bennett, of the hawkish Jewish Home party, accused Palestinian society of promoting “murder and terror.”

“At a time when the world is busy boycotting Jews, the Palestinians are busy killing them,” he said in a statement.

You wonder why there is anti-Semitism among Palestinians? If a boycott of Israel (whatever its merits or demerits) is axiomatically equated with a boycott of Jews by the country’s “education minister,” unsophisticated people will naturally infer that the policies of the State of Israel, the Jewish State “in the land of Israel,” are themselves the policies of “the Jews.” If the victims of those policies hate the policies–because, often enough, they’re enforced at the point of a gun that’s pointed at the victims’ faces–there’s the lurking danger of hating the people who put the policies in place. If the architects and supporters of those policies insist on describing the policies as the policies of “the Jews,” they can’t really complain when the victims of those policies end up hating “the Jews.” They’re practically inviting that response.

I don’t dispute that the victims are mistaken, that they’re indulging in misinference, and that that misinference is in many cases culpable. Nor do I dispute  that Palestinians who equate the occupation with “the doings of the Jews” are enacting a logic that leads ultimately to war, death, and misery. What I insist on is this: If people like Bennett had any sincere interest in reducing anti-Semitism, they would stop cynically identifying “Israel” with “the Jews.” But it’s obvious that they have no such interest. What they have instead is a perceived interest in demagoguery, in the percolation of ethnic hatred, and in the imposition of the mailed fist as a response to the hatreds they themselves have stoked. They are morally complicitous in the phenomenon they claim to condemn. We need a discourse about Israel and Palestine in the United States that holds them accountable for it, not one that throws accusations of “anti-Semitism” around whenever the mood strikes.

Postcards from Abu Dis (4): A Land of Miracles

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So I decided today, in defiance of common sense, to walk from Abu Dis to Jerusalem. I mean, I can see the Mount of Olives from my kitchen window, so how hard could it be to get there? Seeing is believing. Kind friends showed me the way there en route to a nearby restaurant a few days ago, albeit from the comfort of their car. It all seemed simple enough. You take the short cut from Abu Dis to Eizariyah, take Route 417 down to the Khatib Bakery shop, take the road after it, and walk up the road to Har Hazeitim* Checkpoint and into Jerusalem. Easy!

You forget that the holy land is not just holy, but hilly. Yes, Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, but we tend to remember the sermon at the expense of the mount. And now I get why Jesus didn’t walk to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. I really get it: one mile of walking up a 45 degree slope in 80-something degree heat from Abu Dis to Eizariyah, and I begin to think that this whole “walk to Jerusalem” thing is a really bad idea. (I could at this point too easily resort to an “ass” joke, but I’ll spare you.)

So I get to the town of Eizariyah, and the time comes to put those directions to use. You know, the directions my friends gave me while driving through this town? So here I am on Route 417. Now, I seem to remember them saying that the turn-off to Har Hazeitim Checkpoint is after Khatib Sweets and Bakery on this road. Khatib Sweets. And Bakery. After it. It seemed so clear at the time.

I get to Khatib Sweets and Bakery, and wouldn’t you know it, there are two roads after it. Two roads diverged in Eizariyah after Khatib Bakery, and I–I cannot figure out what “after” means in this context. Right after? Somewhat after? Which has the better claim?

Whatever “after” means, I get it wrong: right direction, wrong turn-off, wrong destination. I end up at a checkpoint, all right. But it’s closed. And it’s not called “Har Hazeitim” (or, for that matter, Herzliyah).* I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s ugly as sin, covered with trash, and totally abandoned.

I keep walking a few miles up and down the hills of Eizariyah, feeling like death itself.  “Jesus,” I think. “Get me out of this.”

Lazarus_Bethany.JPG (2048×1536)

I look up. It’s the Tomb of Lazarus. I take a random left turn. Hey, there’s the bus stop. I pay the fare. It’s eight shekels. I have exact change. I get to Jerusalem.

Hallelujah.

*Postscript, June 17, 2015: Not only did a screw up my friends’ directions, but I got the name of the checkpoint wrong in the original post (I had originally written “Herzliyah Checkpoint”). I’ve fixed it now. Of course, for purposes of the post, this piece of revisionist history erases the fact that I not only misremembered my friends’ directions, but misremembered the name of the checkpoint that was central to the directions.

My friend Awad Mansour informs me that the abandoned “checkpoint” I describe in the post is actually a large gate that (years ago) used to be opened at times to allow schoolchildren back home from school in Jerusalem. Apparently, it’s been the scene of clashes with the Israeli army–including some particularly intense ones this past fall.

Incidentally, I’m glad I didn’t head toward the “Herzliyah checkpoint” (or more precisely the “Herzliyah Marina Checkpoint“), because unsurprisingly, it turns out to be in…well, Herzliyah, on the Mediterranean coast, on the other side of the country. I’m not sure what miracle would have helped me there–except, perhaps, the one that gave the scarecrow a brain in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Postscript, June 24, 2015: With the help of Wikipedia, a bit of OCD, and some help from my friends, I’ve figured out what I did wrong. See the yellow road that stretches somewhat horizonally across the page underneath the words “Abu Dis”? That’s not the road I took. But if you look at the “s” of “Abu Dis,” you’ll see a sort of vertical white road that heads to Eizariyah. That’s the “short cut” I mention in the post. If you take it to Route 417, there’s a roundabout there, probably not visible on this map. I got lost in those squiggly white lines (roads) and kept knocking into the purple thing (the wall). But see how only one of those roads crosses over the blue and white line into the city? That was the road not taken.

You can’t see Lazarus’s Tomb, but I walked down from it to Route 417 and walked over to the red sign with the horizontal white stripe through it. That’s the bus stop at the wall (in purple). The bus then takes 417 in the opposite direction, through Eizariyah, Jahalin, Ma’ale Adumim, to Route 1, and into the city via the checkpoint at Adumim Interchange (where we were ordered to stop and our documents were inspected). Whether the further route continued via Sawaneh, Wadi Joz, or Sheikh Jarrah, I don’t remember (will pay closer attention next time I go). But whichever it is, it’s a pretty circuitous route, and would obviously be much shorter if it went through the Mount of Olives via 417 heading northwest.

ILroute-417.png (1856×1298)