Jewishness and Zionism

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called "On Jewishness". In today's post, I want to venture into somewhat controversial territory again – I wish to describe the effect that the Jewish dominance of the intellectual scene has on Gentiles, and then turn to the vexed issue of Israeli-Palestinian relations. My reason for doing so is to uncover a type of madness in the Left as well as the Right, that cuts across the political spectrum, an insanity that has worsened under the Trump presidency. It's an issue that no-one seems prepared to talk openly about and so someone has to. Hopefully, I will present these issues without offending anyone, or only offending people who are unwilling to think critically about the issues.

We live in a world where it is potentially offensive for a Gentile to opine on issues relating to Jewishness at all, so I need to say this. I am not anti-semitic. When I was a teenager, one of my favourite books was Kafka's The Trial; the Coen brothers are some of my favourite directors (second only to David Lynch); I love Neil Gaiman's work and Gaiman (although I didn't know this when I was fifteen) is Jewish. I am a fan of stand-up comedy and there have been many famous Jewish comedians, such as Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, Andy Kaufman, Sarah Silverman, and of course Jon Stewart. Bill Maher's mother is Jewish and so he could identify as Jewish if he chose although, in the past, he has seemed to me to identify more strongly with the Irish side of his family. At my pub quiz yesterday, I found out that Harrison Ford's mother is Jewish which means Ford could also identify as Jewish if he chose to – this came as a complete surprise to me because Ford doesn't look Jewish at all.

As this introductory section indicates, there are lots of people in the public eye who are Jewish, or who have Jewish descent. In the world of literature this skewing is less apparent, but in the world of philosophy and theory it sometimes seems that there are more Jews than Gentiles producing important work. This is the case even though it is estimated that there are only seven million Jews living, for instance, in the US. Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Althusser, Derrida, Chomsky, Pinker, and Butler, among many, many others are Jewish. The host of Majority Report, Sam Seder, is Jewish and Sam Harris's mother is Jewish. A day or two ago, I saw on CNN Fareed Zakaria interviewing a Standford neuroscience professor about how we're neurologically wired to divide the world into 'us' and 'them' groups – inevitably, of course, this professor turned out to be Jewish.

Given the enormous influence Jewish intellectuals, who tend to be leftist and often radical, have over the intellectual scene, we might look for an explanation. There is an argument from evolutionary psychology that Jews simply tend to be cleverer than other ethnic groups. The argument, if I remember it correctly, is that in the couple of millennia after the diaspora, Ashkenazi Jews, who were consigned to ghettos in European cities, survived by taking on jobs such as money-lending and legal work; selective pressure acted upon the Jewish population, making them genetically more intelligent than Gentiles. This argument resembles in some ways another argument from evolutionary psychology, that during the centuries when slavery existed in the United States, white slave-owners deliberately bred intelligence out of their black slaves, treating them like domesticated animals, and that consequently African-Americans are genetically stupider than white Americans. I find both arguments abhorrent. One of my core beliefs, a belief so foundational I never even question it, is that intelligence and success is the result of complex cultural factors, even luck, rather than DNA. Intelligence isn't genetic. It seems to me that the current fashion among theorists to embrace evolutionary biology is pernicious and possibly evil, a reappearance of eugenic ideas we associate with the Nazis. I will return to this idea later in the post.

How can we explain Jewish success without attributing it to some kind of hereditary cluster of intelligence genes? We can talk about upbringing, nurture rather than nature. Consider Jewish comedians. It is possible, even likely, that Jon Stewart watched Woody Allen films when he was young, and consequently decided  as a result that comedy was a viable occupation for a young Jewish kid. Likewise, other Jewish kids, aware of the strong intellectual tradition already in place among Jews, decided that philosophy was a viable vocation over, say, police work or basketball. People choose which jobs they want to pursue, and role modelling plays a strong part in these decisions. There is a long history of argumentation and disputation in the Jewish community, and this also plays a role. Furthermore, although this sounds like a stereotype, I believe it true that Jewish parents push their children extremely hard to succeed academically, that Jewish kids are steered, if not towards stand-up comedy and philosophy, then towards professions like the law, banking or medicine. Another ingredient is what modern Marxists call 'cultural capital'. In the Hollywood film industry, getting ahead often involves networking, having the right friends, and if a Jewish kid has a Jewish uncle in an important position, he or she is more likely to get the job. This sounds like a conspiracy theory but it is a simple truth about the way the world works. In the entertainment industry, as so often in life, it isn't what you know but who you know that makes the difference.

In the introduction to this post, I said that I wanted to talk about the effect a perceived Jewish dominance within the philosophical field and the entertainment industry has on Gentiles (where I am using the word Gentile to refer to anyone who isn't Jewish). Many people who become dimly aware of this Jewish hegemony (for want of a better word), but who don't critically enquire into its causes, can end up believing in a Jewish conspiracy a la "the protocols of Zion". Other Gentiles however take the exact opposite tack – many, often liberal, react to it by forming the secret wish to be Jewish. I have felt the same way myself, and I have often intuited signs of the same wish in others, often in those close to me. This strange tension, a world of Gentiles who want to be Jewish and Jews who, because of their opposition to Israel, don't want to be, is explored in the novel The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson.

I might digress for a moment to make a possibly interesting observation. The Matrix is a very Jewish film. The secret settlement of those who have escaped the Matrix is called "Zion" and the myth among the escapees of a chosen one who will appear to save them is simply the Jewish myth of a Messiah yet to arrive.

This brings me to my second topic: Israel. I cannot stress the following point strongly enough. It is possible to oppose Israeli policies without being antisemitic. This should be obvious but it isn't. I have had trouble tracking down the source of this info but, as I understand it, a few years ago the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) defined antisemitism in such a way as to suggest that any criticism of Israel was antisemitic; the UK Labour Party refused to accept this definition, resulting in an enormous schism in the party and controversy in the media. The leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has been embroiled in charges of antisemitism in part, I understand, because he supports Palestinian self-determination. I don't know enough to wade into this issue in British politics but this example is a representative example of a tendency of some Zionists to characterise all critics of Israel as Jew-haters (and those Jews, like Noam Chomsky, who venture to criticise Israel as "self-hating"). The issue of Israeli-Palestinian relations is often presented in black-and-white terms, that you are either for Israel or against it. Sam Harris, for instance, who is something of an apologist for Israel, argues that the choice people have is between supporting Israel or supporting Hamas with its avowed goal of destroying the State of Israel and establishing an Islamic State. This is a false dichotomy; one can criticise Israel without seeking its dissolution. Can't we have something in-between? A solution that works for both Jews and Palestinians? The best solution is for the Israeli and Palestinian territories to merge, forming a multi-ethnic, democratic, secular state, like pretty much every other state in the world, in which Palestinians and Israelis (together with the other Arabs and Christians who live in the region) have equal citizenship rights and are treated the same under the law. I hope I am not altogether misrepresenting Chomsky when I say that this is his preferred solution. A second more feasible if less utopian answer is the 'two-state solution', something the UN has argued for since 1974, in which Israel and Palestine exist side by side as two sovereign nations. Many Palestinians support this proposal, although only if the countries return to their pre-1967 borders. Whatever the solution, it necessarily involves giving Palestinians greater self-determination and rights. To support Israel, as Harris does, is a vote for the status quo, for the current mess, for everlasting occupation of the Palestinian Territories. It seems Harris, and the Israeli Right as led by Netanyahu, really want the Palestinians to somehow just simply disappear.

As the previous paragraph suggests, I tend to side with the Palestinians. The reporting I have read and documentaries I have seen over the years have suggested to me that these people, in a way stateless, live under unbearable conditions. For every Palestinian kid photographed throwing stones and splashed over the World section of the newspaper during an Intifada (there hasn't been one for a while), there's a Palestinian kid shot by an Israeli soldier. The daily mistreatment of Palestinians doesn't often make the news. What does is the building of illegal but tolerated Orthodox Jewish settlements on land which should be Palestinian – problematic not least because the Gaza Strip is the most densely populated area on Earth. Last year, under the leadership of Netanyahu, the Knesset passed legislation saying “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it”. Arabic, formerly an official language, was stripped of this status; Hebrew became the the sole official language. I include a link to interesting article written by an Israeli Arab which talks about how the system in Israel legally discriminates against minorities (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/13/netanyahu-israel-palestinian).

Israel seems to me a right-wing, even fascist state, and so it is ironic that it is supported by Jews around the world who tend to be liberal and left-wing. The madness of the current situation is exemplified by a fascinating factoid. I read a survey last year that found that only two countries in the world liked Donald Trump more than Barack Obama. One was Russia. The other was Israel. Netanyahu is currently campaigning for re-election and posters pasted across the cities of Israel show him and Trump together, demonstrating, I guess, that Israel has strong friends. In a Youtube clip, Slavoj Zizek talks about how Netanyahu has courted far-right, populist governments in Eastern Europe, exploiting what Zizek describes as "zionist antisemitism". Zionist antisemites don't mind Jews so long as the Jews "go back to where they came from" (i.e. Israel). Zizek cites the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik as an example of zionist antisemitism. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE6VWYwO-4Y)

This madness, the fundamental contradiction in the Jewish community on this issue, filters into the whole global culture as a result of the influence Jewish thinkers and performers have on the world. After Charlottesville, many in the media sought to portray Trump as a Nazi because he was supported by neo-Nazis – but Trump himself isn't antisemitic, even though the media wanted him to be. Yes, he is racist (against black people) but his adored son-in-law is a devout Jew and his daughter converted to Judaism. Breibart News, the far-right publication involved to some large extent in the election of Trump which is described by Wikipedia as advancing neo-Nazi ideas, was originally founded to be "unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel". Trump likes autocrats, likes Putin and seems to even like Kim Jong Un – he seems to want to align himself with other autocratic, populist leaders. And to some extent Netanyahu can be considered one of those.

On his show last week, Bill Maher defended Israel by saying in effect that, yes, the Palestinians are suffering but that they brought it on themselves. I fail to see how the Palestinians asked to be occupied and have their human rights taken away. I think Maher, like Harris, believes that the Palestinians want to destroy the Israeli state and so the occupation is justified. But if this was ever true, is it still true today? Is there not perhaps an appetite for a two-state solution among Left-leaning Israelites and moderate Palestinians? The arguments in support of Israel depend on a certain way of characterising Palestinians and Israel's neighbouring Middle Eastern countries, on the idea that Israel is fighting for its survival. But is this characterisation necessarily true? In order to find a solution to a social problem, we need to see the best in other people, recognise our shared humanity with those we disagree with on some matters or have had conflict with, enter into constructive dialogue. We need to find common ground. Northern Ireland shows that progress, peace processes, are possible – although the Israel-Palestine conflict is arguably much worse than the situation that existed in Northern Ireland. Yet it certainly doesn't help to deliberately inflame tensions as Netanyahu is doing by allowing the building of illegal settlements and by making the Israeli Arab minority into second-class citizens.

We are at a very worrying point in history and nobody seems willing to talk about it openly. First, as the Trump phenomenon and Breitbart News shows, there seems to be a bizarre alliance between neo-Nazis and Zionists. (Many American Evangelical Christians are also Zionists because they believe supporting Israel will hasten the Second Coming of Christ, but this isn't something I want to go into here.) Second, although the Jewish community presents itself as unified and cohesive, it is riven down the middle between Right-wingers and Left-wingers, between Trump supporters and Democrats. Third, the availability of biographical information about celebrities on the Internet means it has become far easier to learn who has Jewish heritage and who doesn't, with consequences I won't speculate on here. Lastly, all of this has coincided with the rise in popularity of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology in the universities. Although evolutionary psychology is championed by fundamentally decent people like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, I view it as inherently dangerous;  it licenses the fascist idea that some people were born intellectually superior to other people. All of this contributes to the schizoid nature of the political discourse today.

Israel was founded in 1948. Before then there was a trickle of Jewish immigrants settling in Palestine, setting up kibbutzim and living alongside their Palestinian neighbours. I understand that Chomsky views this period in Jewish history very positively, and that the social organisation of these early communes influenced his later political beliefs. The establishment of a Jewish state however, in 1948, could be considered the last gasp of the old colonial system, a system in which Europeans in London or Brussels could decide which imperial power had governorship of which parcel of land by drawing lines on a map. The establishment of the state of Israel rather ignored the fact that people were already living there. Now, although Zionists argue that the current debate concerns the right of Israel to exist, that Palestinians and others constitute an existential threat to Israel, I think whether the establishment of Israel was a good thing or a bad thing is irrelevant. Israel has been around for seventy years and has a population of 8.7 million. Israel isn't going to disappear, and rational opponents of Israeli policy know this. The issue is, rather, what form will Israel take in the future? And what form will Palestine take?

The IHRA, in its definition of antisemitism, says that comparing Zionism to Nazism is antisemitic. It is also antisemitic to suggest that Jews have a 'double allegiance', that they are loyal not only to whichever country they live in, but also to Israel. With respect the first stipulation I turn to my friends Monty Python. In The Life of Brian, a scene was filmed in which Eric Idle played a Jew in a Nazi uniform declaring his desire for "an ethnically pure Jewish state". This scene didn't make it into the final cut, perhaps because in a film that was always going to be controversial, this was a step too far. Or perhaps because it wasn't funny enough. With respect to the second stipulation, a little while ago I found an essay on the Net, an essay that was considered, tempered, and I think objective, that pointed out that in Jewish schools in America, kids are taught to regard support for Israel as part of their Jewish identity. Unfortunately I can't remember where I found this essay but it seemed to be just stating facts. Overly strict definitions of antisemitism have a way of stifling debate. I have said before in this blog that sometimes I only work out what I am trying to say by saying it, and this is the point in the post where I articulate where my logic has led me. Although I tentatively raised the possibility of a two-state solution, I think that in the current climate this is not likely at all. Within Israel and within the US, the Jewish community has enormous money and clout and, from a Marxist perspective, it is not in their self-interest to support the oppressed. In Israel, this means not supporting the Palestinians. In the US, it means not voting Democrat. The madness in the US in its variety of forms is I think symptomatic of a seismic shift going on underground, a shift in which the Jewish community stops predominantly voting Democrat and starts voting Republican instead. Trump's vociferous support for Israel and Netanyahu is a shameless attempt to secure the Jewish vote, and it may just succeed. It is a shift that will leave traditional lefty Jews like George Soros, Bernie Sanders, and Barbara Streisand behind. Maher gets things wrong from time to time (who doesn't?) but when he said that Trump's election was a "slow motion right wing coup" I think this is what he was talking about.

Public Intellectuals

I can't remember when I first heard about Noam Chomsky. When I was a teenager, my brother took an interest in the book and subsequent documentary "Manufacturing Consent" and in the  years after I formed an impression of Chomsky as a lefty critic of capitalism and American imperialism, as well as being someone who had radically influenced the development of the field of linguistics. In 2011 or 2012 I borrowed "Year 501" from the library but, and this is painful for me to admit, was forced to return it before I finished it. In 2017 I came across Chomsky again when enrolled in a University course about Political Economy, watched "Manufacturing Consent" again, and read some supplementary literature about it. I have included the essay I wrote about his theory in this blog (it's the post called "Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent in 2018"). Since then I have become much more interested in Chomsky. There are numerous clips of him speaking at seminars, panel discussions, in interviews and debates available for everyone's delectation on Youtube. I can now say that I like Chomsky very much indeed. His greatest achievement, the theory of Universal Grammar, seems one of the most important contributions not only to linguistics but to science and philosophy of the twentieth century. He speaks knowledgeably and clearly not only about linguistics but about history, politics, philosophy, and science generally. His enormous erudition and surgical precision concerning important topics is always on display. Chomsky is a bona fide public intellectual.

What is a public intellectual? A public intellectual is a person who takes an interest in important but abstract ideas, and communicates his or her views about them to a lay audience. The public who consume these disquisitions tend to be people who have studied but have left academia, or people who have no tertiary education at all but have an appetite for ideas. Unlike those intellectuals happily ensconced in universities who spend all their time talking to other scholars via the books they write, public intellectuals seek to explain their ideas in ordinary language in order to be understood as widely as possible. Public intellectual speak down as well as across. France has a long tradition of public intellectuals but these savants are less common in the United States and completely absent from New Zealand – the closest we have are those newspaper and magazine columnists who write about the scholarly books they read and the latest scientific research. Deborah Hill Cone, the columnist who resigned a couple of months back, could be described as one of those mob, the closest New Zealand comes to having a scene for public intellectuals to act in.

However, times they have a way of changing. Over the last five years (I'd guess), the role of 'public intellectual' has boomed. The culprit? The internet of course, and particularly Youtube. Fifteen years ago, Youtube was where you went if you wanted to watch really short clips of cats doing silly dumb things but, today, anything and everything is on Youtube – old episodes of Monty Python, every song ever written (including classical and operatic pieces), snatches from CNN and Fox News, talks explaining quantum physics and Euler's Identity... just about everything. And unlike Google, Youtube, employing complicated statistical algorithms, works out the stuff its users are interested in, and steers them towards those videos it has been decided you and those most like you most like. It is in this environment that public intellectuals increasingly thrive. Youtube has dozens, perhaps hundreds, of TED talks (one I can recommend is "The Science Delusion" presented by Richard Sheldrake). Want to know the views of Sam Harris on free will? Just search "Sam Harris" and "free will" and an apposite video will pop up. Of course, Youtube is not the only platform through which public intellectuals can get their views across – Sam Harris has a podcast. And, in a feedback circle, public intellectuals can exploit their fame by giving stand-up orations to large paying audiences, which in turn amplifies their internet presence.

I said that Chomsky is a bona fide public intellectual. I now want to turn our attention onto someone who is taken to be one also but isn't – Jordan Peterson.

Oddly, I discovered Jordan Peterson through Stephen Fry. For many years I have been interested in Fry, not because I was familiar with his work with Hugh Laurie (I wasn't) but because he is an intelligent openly gay man. I like Stephen Fry because he is proof that at this particular stage of human social evolution, gay men come out and so, consequently, if a man says he is straight, he wouldn't lie about it and should be taken at his word. (I hope this odd rationale makes sense.) Last year, I discovered that numerous skits from A Bit of Fry and Laurie had been uploaded to Youtube and I voraciously consumed them. Perhaps halfway through last year, I became curious about Fry's attitude to political correctness and searched "Stephen Fry" and "political correctness". What popped up was a debate on the topic between Michelle Goldberg and Michael Eric Dyson, on one team, and Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson, on the other. The moot was "What you call political correctness, I call progress". Fry and Peterson were arguing against the resolution. The debate was stupid – it seemed that all four orators had different ideas about what political correctness is. Fry's idea seemed the closest to mine: I think political correctness is the idea that we can control behaviour and attitudes by making rules about what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable speech. It was immediately evident that Fry and Peterson were strange bedfellows. Peterson is right-wing whereas Fry is a self-described "social justice warrior" who simply dislikes the idea that speech should be censored or that speakers should self-censor, and who is uncomfortable with modern PC terms like "cisgender" and "heteronormative". Peterson's argument didn't address my or Fry's understanding of political correctness at all. In fact, it was stupid to the point of incoherence. And yet, after watching this debate, Youtube's algorithms decided that I had an interest in Peterson; I didn't set out to find Peterson but, in a way, he found me. After watching the video of the debate, I was suddenly being pointed to lots of other online clips of Peterson fulminating against the Left and proffering muddled defences of religious sentiment, such as the video of Peterson debating Harris on religion. Obviously Peterson is the public intellectual du jour. 

I don't pretend to be an expert on Jordan Peterson but he seems to me to be a shallow thinker, a rhetorician who enjoys the sound of his own voice and his own fame, a man whose views are confusing because they are confused. I'll pick out two examples of Peterson simply talking bullshit. Peterson seems to imagine there is a kind of leftish conspiracy, that the Left can be characterised as "Postmodern neo-Marxists". The equation between Postmodernism and Marxism is just plain wrong. Postmodernism can usefully be defined as a skepticism towards meta-narratives, and Marxism is just another meta-narrative to be skeptical about. A prominent methodology within Postmodernism is deconstruction and many have pointed out that one can deconstruct the left as easily as one can deconstruct the right. A famous essay on Postmodernity, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", argues, as the title suggests, that postmodernism is the natural philosophical foundation for neo-liberal capitalism. But Peterson's devoted right-wing followers lap up this sort of overly simplistic bullshit, that postmodernists have a Marxist agenda, regarding Peterson as a kind of heroic crusader fighting against an evil Left who want to take away people's guns and emasculate men. Probably this is because the right want someone perceived as smart on their side. (Peterson also argues for enforced monogamy and is a hero of the In-Cel movement.)

The second example of Peterson's empty rhetoric I found in a clip in which he is talking about income inequality. Peterson argues that the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest 1% is inevitable because life is like a game of Monopoly. But why should we accept this simile? Perhaps life is like a game of chess. Perhaps we are seeking to outmanoeuvre an invisible opponent who will always inevitably win. Or perhaps life is like football, that we are part of a team battling against another team. Or perhaps life is not like a game at all. Perhaps it is is a collaborative exercise. Perhaps we are like a bunch of villagers in tenth century England working together to build a cathedral. Yet Peterson's arguments depend on his audience uncritically accepting the analogies he proposes without justification, a sure sign of empty rhetoric.

Interestingly, if you look up Chomsky and Peterson on Youtube, you'll find bits from talks by Peterson juxtaposed with bits by Chomsky, as though Chomsky is replying to Peterson. Chomsky always comes across as the deeper thinker with the greater erudition.

So if Peterson is a fraud, why is he famous? In 2016, Peterson, a professor at a Toronto university, was involved in a controversy because he refused to use the pronouns preferred by transgender people. He even appeared in front of a Canadian senate committee arguing against a bill that would have made it illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of "gender expression". This controversy was the springboard that vaulted Peterson into the celebrity stratosphere. Peterson resembles another hero of the "intellectual dark web", Brett Weinstein, who also became famous as the result of a controversy – Weinstein had been the victim of student protests at Evergreen University in Washington State. Both Weinstein and Peterson are professors; both are vocal proponents of Darwinian explanations for human behaviour; both got in trouble with students and faculty because they objected to excessive political correctness. Peterson is a conservative and Weinstein is a progressive but both are alike in that they fell foul of what is perceived to be a far-Left culture on campus among both lecturers and students. This is what members of the "intellectual dark web" have in common – they are seen as renegades or apostates fighting against academia itself, which is construed as embracing a monolithic far-Left ideology, "postmodern neo-Marxist" to use Peterson's term. The public intellectuals who have become famous are always fighting against something. Harris is famous for fighting against religion, particularly Islam. Peterson is famous for fighting against "neo-Marxism". Chomsky, although he doesn't really belong in the "intellectual dark web", is famous for fighting against neo-liberalism and American imperialism. Youtube users like this belligerent attitude among their heroes – and once some professor or ostracised ex-professor becomes famous, he (it is almost always a 'him') immediately starts popping up among the recommendations that appear in Youtube's right-hand column, if the user has shown any interest in any other members of the "intellectual dark web".

It is possible, even probable, that the algorithms that send clips from Peterson my way direct other users to the "postmodern neo-Marxists" Peterson rails against. But I myself seldom get such recommendations.

The question then is: does being involved in a scandal qualify someone to be a bona fide public intellectual? Of course not. Chomsky has been involved in scandals but only after he had become famous. Chomsky has earned his status as the leading intellectual in the world through hard graft – he has written something like over a hundred books. Peterson and Weinstein are famous for being famous. In this they resemble Khloe Kardashian and Paris Hilton who became famous after sex tapes they were in were illicitly leaked onto the Internet. The result of the celebrity obsessed culture we live in is that we tend of confuse 'fame' (or 'notoriety') with genuine intellectual value. If I'm going to end this post anywhere, I might as well end it in the following way. Jordan Peterson is the Khloe Kardashian of the public intellectual scene. And, like Khloe, he is going to prove only a flash in the pan.