I admit that sometimes my essays have become a little loose. Rather than write a post on one theme I have for a while often tried to discuss a number of different topics in a single post, an aesthetic defect. This post will perhaps be like that. There are a number of different thoughts that have occurred to me since my last post and I wish to present these thoughts, niggles, even though there may not be a common theme. If there is a theme, it concerns the way we make sense of the world based on what is reported in the media and what information we can find on the Internet. Of course, the major event that has occurred since my last post is the barbaric attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel's barbaric response and like everyone else I want to venture some opinions on it. I shall discuss the niggles first and the current conflict in the second half of the essay.
The first niggle concerns an error that I might have made myself. A theme of the previous essay was that there are two traditions within philosophy, one constructive and the other destructive. I borrowed the terms Richard Rorty used in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature to describe them, "systematising" and "therapeutic". In the essay, I argued that Postmodernism, a destructive form of philosophy, had perished and the systematising tradition was again in vogue. I did qualify this statement by saying that I hadn't surveyed every philosophy department in the anglophone world but nevertheless this theme ran through the essay. I have realised, of course, that this view runs counter to the perception of American universities that the right-wing media and Bill Maher, for instance, often present. These cultural commentators often describe universities, usually in the past Berkeley but in the last couple of weeks Harvard as well, as indoctrinating their students in woke Postmodernism. I suspect that the truth is far more complex. In English departments, a lecturer will usually have completed his or her Doctorate on one particular author and will then go on to teach that author although he or she may subsequently pick up other topics. This is probably true of Philosophy lecturers as well– they are all specialists. It may be that general courses giving overviews of whole fields are not taught. This makes it difficult to determine if there is a prevailing paradigm within philosophy at the moment and what it is.
A second niggle. One of my concerns, as may be apparent, is with the proper use of the English language. Something that I've noticed recently is a small change many speakers, such as CNN presenters and even BBC presenters, have introduced into their speech. They say things like, "How barbaric of an attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians." What is the preposition "of" doing in this sentence? You should simply say "barbaric an attack". This peculiar innovation in grammar started in America and seems to have spread to Britain. I have, however, not noticed any New Zealanders I know introducing an extraneous "of" into their conversation between the adjective and the article. I dislike this recent sloppiness. I know that language changes all the time but it is the moral duty of anyone interested in clear communication to try to hold change back. The pedants are the preservers of the English language. In a wonderful essay called "Authority and American Usage", David Foster Wallace defends prescriptivism over descriptivism when it comes to the meaning and use of words, an essay which I think has profound philosophical implications. It is important to try to stick to the rules. So I think if anyone out there is so sufficiently impressed by the talking heads that they think it grammatically correct to insert the preposition "of" into such sentences, I want you to know that the presenters are getting it wrong.
A third niggle. For many years I have noticed how often talking heads in particular use (and abuse) the term "deconstruct" and for many years this has really bothered me. I've wanted to talk about this for a long time. The word "deconstruct" was coined by Jacque Derrida in 1967 in the book Of Grammatology. Derrida argued that texts (and philosophical arguments) are built around binary oppositions in which one term has priority over the other: for example Plato set up a binary between spoken speech and writing and argued that writing is pernicious because it is detrimental to memory. This implies that "oral speech" is better than (prior to) "writing". Deconstruction involves inverting the binaries in a text or argument and then showing how the two terms cannot exist without each other. Derrida himself performed this operation on Plato. I think deconstruction is a really useful interpretive strategy and I myself deconstructed Neil Gaiman's comic book A Game of You in several posts way back in 2017. I do not now think Derrida's underlying theory is correct though – Derrida draws inspiration from Saussure and I am unsure if language is a system of differences as Saussure claims. There is a great mystery associated with the nature of concepts (signifieds) because although words are consciously available to us, the concepts associated with particular words are not really accessible. To expatiate on this would take me to far afield. My main point is that since 1967, deconstruction entered the English language through Humanities departments. It took on a vaguer meaning: to deconstruct a text meant to show it had meanings other than the ones intended by the author. Nowadays people use the word "deconstruct" simply as a synonym for "analyse" or "critique". I know I'm being pedantic again but it bothers me when people use words that they don't understand.
The fourth niggle also involves language. I really dislike the relatively recent overuse of the word "impact". American journalists often ask questions like, "How did this impact you?" and CNN has a site called "Impact Your World", a title that strikes me as gibberish. Most of the time you can simply replace the word "impact" with "affect" and not only does the sentence have the same meaning, it doesn't conjure up connotations of people as cars caroming off each other. Even worse is the recent adoption of the incredibly ugly word "impactful", an example of the way Americans are constantly turning nouns into verbs and verbs into adjectives.
The niggles I have discussed are general ones involving language but I also get annoyed when supposed experts make stupid mistakes. I occasionally watch Lawrence Krauss's podcast on Youtube. Krauss has taught physics at several universities, including Yale, knew Richard Feynman and considers himself a friend of Noam Chomsky. It is tempting to regard him as an expert. He often interviews really interesting people but has an irritating way of talking constantly about himself rather than letting the guest talk. Recently I saw an interview he did with Robert Sapolsky who I thought was really interesting – I have ordered Sapolsky's book Determined from my local bookshop. But during the interview Krauss made a stupid mistake. He said the Second Law of Thermodynamics is absolute, inviolable, that the entropy of a macroscopic system can never decrease. This is wrong. I know my suggesting Krauss said something really may seem an extreme claim but let me explain.
Suppose you have a box separated by a membrane into two compartments, with all the gas on one side of the membrane. You then pierce or otherwise remove the membrane. The gas will then almost certainly expand to fill the box more or less evenly. This is the Second Law in action – but note that I said "almost certainly". All the gas molecules are moving around randomly and so could theoretically all end up again in one half of the box if only briefly, although the probability of this occurring is miniscule. Now consider another thought experiment. The box, sans membrane, now only contains one gas molecule. The probability of it ending up in the right side of the box is 1/2. If there are two molecules the probability of them both being in the right side of the box at some specific time is 1/4 (the probability of them both ending up up in the right side of the box at any time at all would of course be much higher). Suppose the box is 1 metre cubed – at normal atmospheric pressure, the number of molecules in the box would be around 10 to the 23rd power (if the Internet has it right). The probability that all the gas molecules would at some specific time be all in the right side is 1/2 to the power of 10 itself raised to the 23rd power. If this did occur, it would be a massive apparent violation of the Second Law but it is possible. Admittedly the probability of such an event occurring is so small it is tempting to say it is impossible – but it is not absolutely impossible. The Second Law is a statistical law rather than a hard law. It simply says that entropy in macroscopic systems overwhelmingly tends to stay the same or increase, not that it can never decrease.
Although I am discussing niggles, there is an interesting aspect of thermodynamics that I think worth pursuing, worth a digression, an aspect that straddles the borderline between physics and philosophy. In the above example, we considered two possible macrostates: the first being when the gas is all in in the right side of the box and the second being when the gas is evenly distributed throughout the box. For each of these two macrostates, there are a vast number of microstates, a microstate being an exact description of where each molecule is and its momentum. It is because there are vastly more possible microstates associated with the second macrostate than the first and because we can assume each microstate is equally probable that the second macrostate is the one that will come to dominate. However the issue here is that I do not think there is any clear definition of the term 'macrostate'. Thermodynamics was invented in the nineteenth century and originally concerned gases (and such gaseous concepts as pressure, temperature, and volume) and then heat engines. As time has gone by, there has been a tendency to extend the notion of entropy to everything, to explain the passage of time itself in terms of the Second Law. I have done this myself. Consider however the following question: what is the entropy of an egg? In order to determine the entropy of an egg we would have to count all the possible molecular compositions, microstates, that what we are calling an egg can take while still being an egg. The entropy is simply (assuming that each configuration is equally possible) the logarithm of this number (according to Boltzmann). But you and I might disagree about the definition of this term 'egg' and come up with different numbers (although we might agree that after an egg falls on the floor, the smashed egg has greater entropy than it did when it was intact). Consider now the following little fable. Bob sends Jane a telegram in Morse code that translates as Shelly's Ozymandius but Jane does not know Morse code and consequently puts the message into the conceptual bin "random collection of dots and dashes", a macrostate with very high entropy. Clyde then sees the message and, knowing Morse code, recognises it as Shelly's Ozymandius and assigns it a very low entropy because there is only a single sequence of dots and dashes that can be decoded into this poem. For Jane the macrostate is "random collection of dots and dashes" while for Clyde it is "Ozymandius in Morse code". Jane and Clyde have different notions of the macrostate that the message belongs to and consequently calculate its entropy quite differently; there seems no clear way to establish which of them is correct. It seems that thermodynamics depends on the way human beings conceptualise and categorise physical systems, on human meaning making, a counterintuitive thought.
The idea that I have just advanced is not wholly original with me but is inspired by something Roger Penrose says in Cycles of Time although he does not explore this idea philosophically. It may be that information theory also approaches this idea, although I suspect not from a philosophical perspective. I should note that I have of necessity oversimplified somewhat. In reality not only is it hard to define a 'macrostate' it is also hard to define a 'microstate' because positions and momenta are continuous rather than discreet and so a gas in a box actually has an infinite number of microstates. To count the microstates involves a kind of 'course-graining'. Still I think it is an interesting thought.
I have another niggle with Lawrence Krauss. In the interview, in a Youtube clip, and probably elsewhere, he has argued that quantum mechanics is deterministic. His argument is that the wave function evolves deterministically. This is true, it does evolve deterministically – but only up until the point when someone performs a measurement. When a measurement is performed, the wave function changes and, according to conventional theory, this change is partly random. Although Krauss concedes that when we perform the measurement, according to conventional theory, the data we collect is somewhat random, he seems to be arguing that measurements lie outside quantum physics. I know I'm not an expert but everything I've read suggests that the measurement problem, or what is sometimes called wave function collapse, has been the central problem in quantum physics for a hundred years. The measurement problem spawned Everything, Everywhere, All At Once and all the recent Marvel films. It seems that Krauss is capriciously re-demarcating the boundaries of quantum physics in such a way as to put the measurement problem outside it. Perhaps he just doesn't want to think about the measurement problem. Krauss, like another physicist I follow, Sabine Hossenfelder, thinks the universe is deterministic and doesn't believe in free will, but neither has reconciled these prior metaphysical commitments with quantum physics. I myself am a determinist who doesn't believe in free will but my explanation is that some kind of mystical agency or perhaps élan vital determines where an electron ends up on a detector. But, then, perhaps I'm a crank.
This brings me to Sabine. I like her videos. Recently she relayed research that had found that the probability that a coin flipped will land same-side up is actually not quite 50%, a finding based on a study by a group of physicists who tossed a coin thousands of times. This is very relevant to issues to do with probability that I have discussed earlier this year in this blog. But Sabine also makes mistakes. Recently she argued that capitalism and science go together and used the trajectory from the discovery of penicillin to its mass manufacture as evidence of the way capitalism enables science. A number of Youtube videos have shown that the history of penicillin is more complex than Sabine suggests and in the early years involved public funds and state intervention. These clips can be found on Youtube. Another mistake I believe she made recently is that she said that all hidden variable interpretations of quantum physics are local. I do not feel on as firm ground here as I do when criticising Krauss but everything I've read suggests that the DeBroglie-Bohm pilot wave theory is both a hidden variable theory and non-local. Rather than mount an argument against Sabine myself, I refer the reader to the interesting and accessible Youtube video from PBS Spacetime called "Are Many Worlds & Pilot Wave THE SAME theory?", an introduction to the three main interpretations of quantum mechanics which can be understood with only a little background in physics (and a video which also shows how outside the mainstream Krauss is). This is not to say that people should stop watching Sabine but rather that they should take her video essays with a grain of salt as with other Youtube videos.
Readers may wonder if I am qualified to weigh in on quantum mechanics when I specialised originally in English literature. In 2005 I did a paper in second year physics and didn't get particularly good grades. However for a period of many years after I would read and re-read my physics textbook every night, particularly the chapters on quantum physics, in bed before going to sleep. Eventually the textbook fell apart. It reached the point where I had the chapters on quantum physics memorised and would go through them in my mind at night while lying in bed. I also often used to read popular expositions on physics such as the book by Penrose I mentioned above. Nowadays I am addicted to educational videos on Youtube as readers of this blog may have noticed. I may not be alone. There may be many autodidacts in the world who are constantly absorbing new information from Youtube and other online sites such as Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopaedia of the Philosophy. This is partly a good thing because knowledge is now increasingly accessible to anyone who can afford a computer and Internet connection, although it also threatens universities who have traditionally been the repositories and guardians of knowledge. Another downside is that there are so many people expressing views online that it can be hard arrive at the truth about matters. If you only watch the Darkhorse podcast and associated sites you may end up with a skewed view of the Covid vaccine, for instance. This may lead people to think that Youtube and other sites should somehow filter their content so that only verifiable truth floats to the top. The problem with such censorship is that it could lead people to think that contemporary views about matters such as, for instance, psychiatric disorders are correct when they simply aren't. The best approach is for viewers and readers to think critically about what they are digesting and to try to get their information from a wide variety of sources. This may not be a fully satisfactory solution. For instance, I often feel reading Wikipedia that it is authoritative and reliable but over the years have noticed a number of occasions when it has just been plain wrong.
I have been discussing niggling annoyances with the way language today is used in the media and the way 'truth' is presented on Youtube. I have just suggested that so long as you read widely and think critically a person can arrive at some reasonable understanding of the world. It is possible today for a person to 'do his own research' and have as good an understanding of a subject as a person who is recognised as an expert. For instance, although I rarely use Google Scholar, it is possible for a layperson to access a great deal of academic literature, the same literature read by the professorial class. In saying this I know I am running against the received wisdom of many, particularly on the Left, that we should 'trust the experts' and not venture opinions on subjects we lack first hand experience of or have done a doctorate on. This view of course emerged because of the Covid epidemic. There is an interesting issue here. The 'argument from authority' is considered a fallacy but we are encouraged to just accept everything experts say because somehow they have got themselves into positions where they can be regarded as experts. For instance, there is strong social pressure to regard psychiatrists as experts, something that can have highly deleterious effects on patients. In fact, many psychiatrists are incompetent and the whole of psychiatry is founded on false premises. One of the reasons for my recovery from the 'illness' I suffered was that I rejected the power psychiatrists have had over me. The people who experience mental illness are the real experts on their mental illnesses, not the doctors who treat them; certainly, I understand the mental illness I suffered better than the psychiatrist who currently treats me.
The notion of expertise is relevant to the academic teaching of philosophy. Sometimes famous philosophers have made arguments that just make no sense. For example, the modal argument for the existence of God, proposed by Alvin Plantinga, just doesn't work as I pointed out in the post "The Modal Ontological Argument". When the Sleeping Beauty problem was first publicly proposed by Adam Elgar, he defended the 'halver' position with an argument that is incoherent and relies on a confused notion of probability as I showed in the post "Time, Probability and Bad Science Part 2". It is not that I have opinions different from Plantinga and Elgar but rather that their arguments just don't make logical sense. The issue here is that Plantinga and Elgar are famous philosophers, supposed experts, and so students may not realise that they have been presented with dumb arguments. I sometimes wonder if philosophy lecturers deliberately teach bad philosophy to test the critical faculties of their students, to see if the students can spot the errors.
The theme that is emerging from this essay is the difficulty we have sifting truth from error on issues that have become part of the global conversation. On October 7, Hamas launched a terrorist attack on Israel that claimed 1400 Israeli lives, and took hostage around 220 people. Israel responded by sealing off the Gaza Strip so that food, water, medicine, and electricity couldn't get in, launched an aerial bombardment ostensibly intended to destroy Hamas militia but which has destroyed much of the civilian infrastructure, and has just over the last two or three days initiated a land invasion. Over nine thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been killed so far, at the time of writing, and, according to Defence for Children International, as of two days ago, over 40% of them are children. Since the invasion I have been compulsively watching CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. (I don't watch Fox.) Although I already had a little knowledge of the history of Israel and Palestine, my knowledge was very incomplete; I have since read a few articles on Wikipedia about the history and sought out online article and some Youtube videos concerning the conflict. One channel I have found on Youtube that is thoughtful and informative is the New York Times Podcast, which has involved Tom Friedman and Ezra Klein. Klein and Friedman are left-wing Jewish journalists based in New York who, while recognising the horrific nature of the attack by Hamas, also acknowledge the history of Palestinian oppression and dispossession and support a two-state solution. I recommend this channel. I would like to say something about the current conflict myself. I know I am not an expert and that this is a highly charged topic, that it may be risky to talk about it at all. Two or three days ago I read that a National Party MP here in New Zealand had got in trouble with our new Prime Minister for saying something about the conflict in a private email. But the Internet is awash with people expressing opinions and I feel that it might be important for me to say something.
In the previous essay, written before October 7, I discussed rationality and irrationality. When a catastrophe occurs, we all seek to find a 'rational' explanation: religious people sometimes even blame natural disasters on social changes they consider sinful. Similarly we look for a rational explanation for what happened in Israel and is happening in Gaza. We might assume that the leaders of Hamas had rational motives. But if the leaders of Hamas were rational, they must have realised that their attack would trigger this enormous Israeli response. The initial event that led to the 2014 Gaza war in which over 2,125 Gazans were killed and nearly 11,000 wounded was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers; what happened on October 7 was orders of magnitudes worse. So if we assume that the leaders of Hamas were rational, in a very real sense we can hold Hamas responsible not only for the Israeli casualties but also for the killing, injuring and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza since October 7 because the leaders of Hamas should have anticipated how Israel would react. Because we look for rational motives, many commentators, including Friedman, have claimed, without real evidence, that Hamas launched the attack because Israel was negotiating a normalisation agreement with Egypt. It has been argued that Hamas, feeling that Palestinians were being abandoned by their traditional allies. sought to deliberately provoke a war in order to garner sympathy from the citizenry of other Muslim countries and trigger a wider war in the Middle East. This is similar to the argument often advanced that Al Qaeda carried out the 9/11 attacks in order to provoke a war between the West and the Muslim world. Such arguments assume that Hamas was behaving rationally but I do not think this is the case. It is likely that the militants who broke through the wall and rampaged through Southern Israel were driven by religious and nationalistic fanaticism and a hatred of Israelis, motivations that seem irrational to liberal Westerners because we tend to believe that rationality involves self-interest or disinterested consequentialism. Perhaps the militants thought God was on their side. In the episode "The Jewish Left is Trying to Hold Two Thoughts at Once", Klein and his fellow contributors go further, suggesting that the barbarity of the attack may not even have been intended by the Hamas leadership, that the militants who broke through, not realising it would be so easy to get past the fence into Israel, ran amok. It is possible that the primary aim of the Hamas leadership was not geopolitical as Friedman and others have suggested but simply to take hostages hoping for a prisoner swap. In fact, a week ago, Hamas offered to release all the hostages in return for the release of all Palestinians in Israeli prisons, an offer that the Israeli government rejected. Many of the Israeli casualties were at a music festival and so one might conclude that Hamas carried out the attack because they knew the festival was being held that day. But the fact that the attack occurred almost exactly on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war strongly suggests that this was the reason for the timing. That the festival was being held on the same day and therefore the attack so horrific might have been a terrible coincidence.
Although I have said that Hamas can in a very real sense be held responsible not only for the Israeli massacre but the deaths and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza since, in another very real sense very many people are responsible for it because very many people are complicit in creating the conditions in Gaza that inspired such hatred. It has been widely reported that Benjamin Netanyahu had an unofficial policy of deliberately bolstering Hamas because by creating disunity among Palestinians he hoped to make the dream of a Palestinian state an impossibility. Gaza has been under a blockade for sixteen years. The building of Jewish settler communities in the West Bank similarly was a deeply immoral project to pursue. There has been a lack of sympathy with the plight of ordinary Palestinians and the hatred of Palestinians by some commentators inside and outside Israel upsets me. Sam Harris has based his support for Israel on the fact that Hamas has the stated goal of eliminating Israel but a poll of Palestinians in Gaza carried out just before October 7, as reported by CNN, found that over half supported either a two-state solution or a single state in which Jews and Arabs had equal citizenship. (I note here that although this was reported on CNN, I have had difficulty finding the poll on the Internet. I also note, for the sake of balance, that the poll suggests a sizeable portion of the Gazan population does indeed support Hamas.) Bill Maher said recently that we should support Israel unconditionally because Israel shares Western values, such as endorsing LGBT rights and women's rights. This is a weak argument. I suspect that Maher is a kind of consequentialist like Sam Harris and should thus believe, as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill did, that we should try to aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. If this is true, the values people hold are either irrelevant or only indirectly relevant. There is a related point. Although the bulk of Israel's population is liberal, there is a segment of right-wing ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, a group excluded from military service for religious reasons, and it is this segment that drives the growth of settler villages in the West Bank and got the most right-wing government in Israel's history elected. There is a sentiment among this group that Israel should extend from the River Jordan to the sea because it was the land promised to them by God. In 1993, after the Oslo accord, some move towards a two-state solution seemed possible but the process was stymied partly by an attack on a Hebron mosque by an American Jewish settler and by the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by an Israeli settler who opposed the two-state solution. Harris and Maher are both vehemently anti-religious but are guilty of inconsistency because they both fail to call out Jewish religious extremism. Furthermore Harris and Maher are critical of Identity Politics but fail to see how coloured by Identity Politics their views on Israel and Palestine are.
Something else I've noticed is that even when commentators concede that the establishment of some kind of Palestinian state might be just, they argue that the tactics that have been employed by Palestinian groups, such as for instance attempting to fire rockets into Israel, disqualify them from being morally defensible agents. They argue that if the Palestinians were engaging in non-violent resistance the way Indians under Gandhi did or the way civil rights protestors did in the Unites States in the 1950s and 1960s, the world would have more sympathy for them. An important early moment in the civil rights movement was when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955 and another important event was, of course, the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr in 1963. The question I want to raise is this: what forms of non-violent resistance were available to Palestinians? 20 per cent of Israelis are Arabs and can carry out strikes and marches but the Palestinians in Gaza can't somehow cross the perimeter fence and mount a peaceful march on Jerusalem waving banners and placards and calling for the Israeli government to enable them to form a Palestinian state. They are walled in. In the podcast by Ezra Klein, one of the contributors points out that Palestinian leaders who have sought to change the political situation through nonviolent protest and civil disobedience tend to be jailed. In 2018 and 2019, thousands of Gaza Palestinians would gather just inside the perimeter wall to protest on Fridays and sometimes on other days. a movement called the "Great March of Return". They were not calling for the destruction of Israel but rather for a lifting of the blockade and the right to return to lands seized from their forebears in 1947 and 1967. Although sometimes Palestinians would burn tyres, attempt to damage the fence, throw stones and Molotov cocktails, and send incendiary kites into Israel (kites that caused scrub fires but didn't threaten any Israeli lives), the protests were mainly peaceful. The Israeli military would gather on the other side of the fence and snipers would fire on the Palestinians through the gaps. According to the United Nations site "The Question of Palestine" one Israeli soldier was killed and seven injured during the protests. 214 Palestinians were killed, 46 of them children, and 36,100 were injured. Many of the injured required amputations. Yes, 214 Palestinian lives is quantitatively less than 1400 Israeli lives but it is still terrible and there should still have been a global outcry at the Israeli crackdown on this protest but, unlike what happened on October 7 this year, it was hardly covered by the media. Bill Maher recently said that he thinks part of the definition of the word 'liberal' involves support for Israel, but I think this is stupid: part of the accepted definition of 'liberal' involves the idea of universal human rights including the right to peaceably protest. Although the "Great March of Return" was not completely nonviolent, to crackdown on a mostly peaceful protest using lethal force is monstrously illiberal.
To be successful, nonviolent protest needs people sympathetic to it in the oppressor group and in other countries. One reason the US civil rights movement was successful is that African Americans had friends and allies who were white and a major reason the Apartheid regime in South Africa was dismantled in 1994 was the international pressure brought on the South African government to abandon this racist system. A very important event in New Zealand history is the 1981 Springbok tour when tens of thousands of New Zealanders protesting against Apartheid disrupted a number of matches between the All Blacks and the visiting South African rugby team; the tour had been permitted by the then government, under Robert Muldoon, even though there was an international boycott on South African sports games. However there has never been any effective organised internal or international pressure on the Israeli government to try to resolve the Palestinian question. This is discussed in the Ezra Klein podcast mentioned earlier. Since around 2001, there has been an international movement known as Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions which has tried to exert some pressure on the Israeli government and although a number of famous academics and artists have signed on, BDS has never become massively popular, I think at least partly because it has successfully been misrepresented as antisemitic by Israel. Incredibly, Israel actually has a law that allows people in other countries to be sued civilly if they call for a boycott of Israel. In 2018, two New Zealanders, one ethnically Jewish and the other ethnically Palestinian, wrote an open letter to Lorde urging her to cancel her Tel Aviv concert because of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians; Lorde thought about it, read up about it, and decided to cancel the performance. Subsequently the authors of the letter were sued by two Israeli teenagers in Israel claiming that the cancellation caused them mental distress, and fined 19,000 New Zealand dollars. Of course, the idea that two New Zealanders could be fined by an Israeli court for an opinion expressed in New Zealand is absurd and the fine was never paid. I did not pay close attention to this controversy at the time but I think I recall seeing that a New York rabbi had written a piece for a New York newspaper suggesting that Lorde's decision showed how antisemitism was growing among the youth. The fact that criticism of Israeli policies is often conflated with antisemitism means that we live in a world in which it seems that the only people permitted to criticise Israel are Jews like, for instance, Tom Friedman, Sam Seder, and Noam Chomsky.
In discussing the current war in Gaza, in trying to make sense of the ethics involved, it may seem that I have contradicted myself. I have said that in a very real sense Hamas can be held responsible not only for the events of October 7 but also for the subsequent death and misery in Gaza. I have also argued that Palestinian grievances against Israel are justified, have argued for a kind of collective responsibility because very many people inside and outside of Israel have been complicit in creating the conditions that impelled Hamas to launch its attack. The issue here is that the term 'responsibility' is hard to pin down, as implied in the previous essay. However, in presenting the Palestinian case so strongly, I am partly reacting to some of the rhetoric of people I follow. Bill Maher often says that people who criticise Israeli policy don't know their history. This is because in Bill Maher's mind the history of Israel has been one in which the Arab countries and Palestinians have always sought to wipe Israel off the map, have mounted multiple wars to do so, and have been successfully repelled every time. The truth though is more complex. The principle cause of the 1967 Six Day War was Egypt's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and it was Israel who made the first military move. During the war Israel captured a number of territories including Gaza and the Sinai peninsula. Egypt's aim in initiating the Yom Kippur war in 1973 was not to destroy Israel but to reclaim the Sinai peninsula. Of course the history is long and complex and I am only picking out details, but, even if the idea that the whole past history of Israel is one in which it has been defending itself against Muslim nations who want to destroy it were true, we live in 2023 now and the world can change. Before October 7 there seemed strong hope of a normalisation of Israeli relations with its neighbours and hopefully the current war shouldn't derail this. It is true that many Middle Eastern countries do not officially recognise Israel but in practice they now know Israel is here to stay. It is possible that if Palestinian aspirations were realised, either through a two-state solution or the formation of a single Israeli-Palestinian state, this would pave the way for formal recognition of Israel by the countries around it.
I can remember an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher from several years ago in which the political situation in Israel and Palestine came up. Maher, of course, defended Israel. A guest asked him "Have you ever been to Gaza?" The Gaza Strip has often been called the largest open air prison in the world and when the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, visited it in 2021, he described it as "Hell on earth". And this was before Israel started dropping bombs on it.
So, what should Israel and other countries be encouraged to do? Israel's stated war aim is to destroy Hamas but this seems to involve the suffering and deaths of many innocent Palestinian civilians including children. A number of American Jewish writers, artists, and academics wrote an open letter to Biden shortly before October 19 that says, in part, "We call on the US government to seek an immediate ceasefire and to use our resources towards providing aid ensuring the safe return of hostages and building a diplomatic path towards peace." I have been struggling in my own mind to work out the moral calculus. It seems that if a large terrorist attack occurs, the country attacked has a right to declare war on the organisation responsible. But by the same kind of logic the government of Israel should also be held responsible for the oppression of Palestinians and the deaths that occurred during, for instance, "The Great March of Return". Israel's right to defend itself should not also be a right to kill children. Perhaps Israel could have invaded without dropping bombs that have not always been well targeted and without cutting off food, fuel, electricity, and medicine from getting into the territory. I worry also about how the IDF will be able to discriminate between Hamas fighters and civilians on the ground during the invasion. Despite such concerns, a ceasefire may not be a realistic possibility. Setting aside such answerable questions, we also need to ask what political situation should obtain in Gaza when the war, perhaps with the surrender of Hamas, finally ends. Some in the Israeli government apparently favour the expulsion of Gaza Palestinians into Egypt, a policy which would be ethnic cleansing by definition, but it seem more likely that there will be another full scale Israeli military occupation. I would like to suggest an alternative, that some kind of UN agency or organisation, some international force that is sympathetic to the Palestinians, should take over the governance of Gaza, as happened in Bosnia. This UN agency would be an interim government that would exist only until a new state can be established.
I have a strong sense that the two-state solution is no longer a live option. However we can pretend for a moment that some perfect solution is imaginable and realisable. In a perfect world I believe a single state containing both Jews and Arabs with equal rights should be created, a state that could be called Israel and Palestine interchangeably the same way New Zealanders sometimes refer to New Zealand as Aotearoa. This is the best end goal and also Chomsky's favoured position. In fact in 1946, when what we now call Israel and Palestine was simply known as Palestine and was ruled by the British, the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry made the following recommendation regarding it: "in order to dispose, once and for all, of the exclusive claims of Jews and Arabs to Palestine, we regard it as essential that a clear statement of principle should be made that Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine." This recommendation was rejected by the American government under Truman. The idea of a single state in which Jews and Arabs have equal citizenship rights may also seem an impossibility. It frightens some Israelis because it could mean that Jews would become a minority 'in their own country'. To such objections I would point to New Zealand history. Maori have for well over a century been the minority in their own country but they just deal with it. This solution may just too utopian to be practicable but the alternative is no possible solution at all and utter despair.
As I said above, this essay is partly a reaction to the rhetoric of people I follow on Youtube. Today I watched a little of Bill Maher's show, specifically the New Rules segment, in which he reiterated his argument that we should support Israel because it represents Western values. During the segment, he said that Israel had never seized Gaza but of course, as I pointed out above, it did, during the 1967 Six Day War. Sam Harris has a new podcast episode out called "The Infernal Logic of Jihad" which I am reluctant to listen to because I suspect I know his argument in advance. Harris has long maintained that there is something evil in Islam itself, that it is an evil idea that we should resist. He will almost certainly have argued that Islamic ideology is the root cause of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 and will disregard the fact of many decades of Palestinian oppression. (If I have falsely prejudged this episode and thus misrepresented you Sam, I apologise.) A moral problem with this argument is that although Harris has insisted that we should hate Islam rather than Muslims, it is easy to slip from a hatred of Islam to a hatred of Islamists – despite the fact that many Muslims are not fundamentalists and very very few Muslims are terrorists. A logical problem with his argument that Islamic terrorism arises from Islam itself is that the Koran specifically states that Jews and Christians are also "People of the Book" and should be respected and allowed to practice their own religions. The people Mohammed himself sought to conquer and convert were polytheists at a time when polytheism was common in the region. Anti-Jewish sentiment is not a natural part of Islam; it arose in the Middle East during the twentieth century as a result of the establishment of Israel. In the previous essay, "Rationality and Irrationality" I said that a problem with much philosophical argumentation is that it is untethered from reality. Similarly the arguments Maher and Harris make often strike me as empty rhetoric. I encourage fans of Maher and Harris who read this blog to also do their own research. A good place to start is with an essay I found this evening in the London Review of Books called "Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank".
This essay was written over a number days. It is based on my own research, that is, what I could gather from media outlets and sources online. Sometimes I have cited my sources and when I haven't, you can assume I found it on Wikipedia, so if there are serious mistakes Wikipedia can be blamed. I'll finish the essay by talking about Real Time with Bill Maher. I have watched Maher's show for a number of years because sometimes he says interesting things. But I am going to be critical of him here. Maher is ostensibly a Democrat and obviously intends his show to be a forum in which Republicans and Democrats can debate the important issues. For instance, he conducted a grovelling interview with the detestable Benjamin Netanyahu and recently interviewed Ron DeSantis, an interview I decided not to watch. The problem here is that Maher spends more time attacking the woke left than Republicans. Recently he disparaged higher education on the grounds that he thinks it is controlled by the woke left and another time quite recently blamed overregulation on the woke left. I would recommend that he make his show a true Democrat show by transforming it into a forum in which moderate and progressive Democrats can work towards common policy; at the moment, Real Time with Bill Maher is a gateway drug to Republicanism. I suspect that the main reasons Bill Maher is a Democrat are that he hates religion, likes marijuana, and has gay friends. And he understandably despises Donald Trump. If he were a real Democrat though he would spend more time discussing the real problems America has today, problems those outside it can so plainly see. These problems include over-incarceration, gun reform, and the lack of universal healthcare, the issues that John Oliver, who has more sympathy for the marginalised and oppressed than Maher, often focusses on. An alternative to this would be for Maher to admit he has become more conservative in his old age and come out as Never-Trumper Republican.
