"That's just antisemitism": on right opinion versus dangerous thinking

Possible book title:
From intellectual comfort food to alibis for genocide: How liberal Judaism became right-wing

Chapter: “Anti-semitism explains everything”

Perhaps it starts with a certain will to think, not to be confused with a (simpler) will to power. This will to think may be "radical" in wanting to question things as they are, and angry in, perhaps almost intuitively, opposing them. A certain conservative "moderation" will be constitutively allergic to just that possibility, which is precisely what it must try to sanction or prevent. To want to understand, critically, the way things are because there are things you see and experience that seem to you unjust, that is, not as they should be, this will naturally encounter the risks of criticizing wrongly. The American "liberal" mode, based in the nihilistic democracy of the market, of reactive and comforting thought will reflexively oppose taking any risk in the process of thinking.

Though it may be comfortable with simplistic hatreds. Antisemites have those, and so do many people in the "moderate" center. Those who accuse others of hating them probably hate them precisely for this, and they may exaggerate their own victimization in the process; such as the way of many "victim" types who start wars, from Hitler to Milosevic and beyond. There are plenty of such people in Israel and in the Jewish world today. This comes to light as an outrage because Jews have so often opposed what it seems monstrously incongruous to then simultaneously propose.

The model of the conservative liberal Jewish thinker today is reactive. This model is nurtured in the American media, and is not specific to Jews, though quite specific to our contemporary market democracy. The reactive model involves people attacking others by calling them out for some kind of excess. The calling out is almost always moral. There are people on the left as well as the right who play this game. One popular form it takes is to find some famous intellectual, usually either on the left or provocative enough to have followers on the left -- and that of course is what is important, and then show that this thinker had dirty hands as a person: crime, scandal, moral outrage. There is never too much righteous indignation to go around and be used to call out anyone who seems to stand out.

So this reactive thinking is conformist and uninventive. Indeed, it is not interested in any kind of critical thinking that is experimental, that takes risks, and so that has any true intellectual courage.

Instead, there is lots of intellectual-moral blackmail. If you say this, you're that. And that's a no-no.

Now much of the official Jewish world operates this way. It must be opposed, and opposing it, as with anything, means taking risks. Of course, the first thing they do will be to call you out as an antisemite. This works well in America because among the unpardonable sins in the American polity is any form of prejudice. After all, the Holocaust happened because Hitler was an angry man who could not love and welcome his neighbors by being nice and polite in the manner of country club suburban protestants. Right? Actually, that's mistaken. The Holocaust did not happen because of unruly, disobedient, angry people with a misguided radicalism; it was highly organized, mostly calm, methodical, exercising German coldness and self-control. The contemporary reflexive critics of antisemitism do not understand what the Holocaust was about or why it happened, and they don't want to. If anything remotely like it happens again, it will probably happen mostly to some other people, for the former victims have fortified themselves now, and the critics of yesterday's genocides will be blind to today's, deliberately blind to be sure.

In the early 80s, a punk zine I read published a terrific banner statement: "Would you rather be wrong or boring?" Should thinking take risks or just try to "feel correct" and win another battle for whatever leader you work for?

If someone says, "That's just antisemitism," that means they don't want you to go there; the work in question has been put on the Index.  “That’s just X” always means, I know I am against (or for) it, and since that’s all that matters, I’m not interested.  (Really? It seems to me if you’re really not interested in something, you won’t be bothered by it, because you probably won’t even notice it. What is not interesting is innocuous, not of negative but of no value; what is not only dangerous but presumably wrong is as interesting as an enemy’s reasons, which are usually valid, rarely bland, and never just boring). It’s as if ideas are not to be investigated, studied, their aporias, contradictions, inadequacies and imperfections sought so that they can be improved on, or their particular faults identified so that we know why we’re rejecting them if they are, but also what precisely is interesting about these thoughts with these particular errors.   People who say this sort of thing would not bother to read anything that comes anywhere near to crossing a line between the permitted and the forbidden. Their own writings stay wholly within the permitted and relentlessly oppose the forbidden. Aren't they comforting to read? 

And yet, why would anyone find it interesting to affirm or denounce an idea, love or hate it as one can persons, buy or not buy it (or permit it to be sold), vote for or against it, etc., and yet all this time be talking about something you don’t even think is interesting at all?  What kind of resentment does that?  The unexaminable object of admiration is not worth enjoying; the unexamined resentment is not worth denouncing.  Should I, for example, as the film critic I also am, spend time denouncing bad films if that’s all I’m going to do?  And do we suppose that the censor himself sees all the forbidden artworks, reads the “bad” books, for no other reason than to insist that no one else read them?  One wonders about the secret pleasures of imperial censors of pornography.  Is the point then to uphold social inequality and domination by making sure that only special elites know the arguments of the theology, while the masses are told to love the gods of the state, and otherwise just shut up and go back to work?  The masters have their house intellectuals, eunuchs, slaves themselves, who dutifully inform the workers that this or that is “just X,” whatever X is, and it hardly matters, because it’s none of your concern anyway.  Unfortunately, good art critics are social critics, and it is our business to find simple things complex, obvious things unobvious, familiar ones strange, and in all of this to seek to get ourselves well and juicily into serious trouble.  We want to know about whatever we are talking about, what are the problems it brings to light for us, and that we can elaborate on for our readers?  We’re not problem-solvers so much as problematizers, which was always the highest calling of science and art.  Business people do solve problems, and players on the team of every game want to get the job done, but games model expertise and teach excellence, yet sports are not artworks precisely because they aim to succeed and win (and secure territory or make money) and not make an issue about what they are involved in, as if life were a problem, which it is, and not just something to do well or rightly and merely enjoy, which it is supposed to be but never is, quite. Scientists model situations by showing just what is problematic in them, and so they create problems, and that’s why when they solve problems they never only do that. And this is how business does not think, even if it is good at getting things done. So is warfare, and so goes a certain model of the Jew today, which Israel offers and American conservatives love. They may not “love dead Jews,” but they love fighting Jews, endless war, and don’t mind a lot of dead poor people who are in the way, and there are always many of them, from Vietnam to Iraq to Gaza, and from the slums of many cities to the refugees from so many wars, who can now be given emergency treatments just like sick people in America who can no longer do the work of the boring jobs they may well be excluded from. Technology does not think either, it employs people who do and uses them to make money… And if you are offended because of who you are and where you come from, why complain to me?  It’s not my job to give you reassurance, though that may be the newscaster’s job if it helps sell what the sponsors have got.  So, disgusted, you’re not buying what I’m saying.  But I don’t want my readers to buy anything, only to think.  And maybe try to change their world a bit, and ours.  Truths are the constructions of new meanings and possibilities of life, not right opinions.  You want to follow the right opinions, live comfortably in your enclave, and not be offended?  Then you must not be reading this; be honest, if you really were like that, you would have put this piece down a long time before getting to the end of the matter.  

Normative Jewish thought today is a discourse of the master. This discourse exaggerates real threats as it mobilizes historical memories. Its discourse of catastrophe is determined to master it at last. This can be done through wars aimed at conquest of territory. The discourse of mastery serves a colonial project, and it also serves the greater of global capitalism which is one of a creative destruction that in the end creates only more capitalist value, wealth, devastating ecologies, displacing populations, subjecting the entire world to surveillance and social control, total policing and endless war. Israel is part of that. That’s a problem. Like capitalism itself, it cannot be considered just an evil (fascism tends to thinks that, and of course its gestures of opposition always end up always end up being illusory), nor is it an unalloyed good; it is, certainly, a problem. It cannot endure. The Jewish state, as such, is less eternal than the planet’s habitable geography and cannot be more so than the capitalist state system. And then, too, places of refuge and safety, however comfortable, may wind up being not so different from the increasingly extensive global network of places of displacement or confinement. The Nazis relocated the Jews, Gypsies, and others, and then annihilated them. Is this what is now being repeated? The current situation in Gaza is an acute form of something that many millions of people around the world experience. And this situation is absolutely and unambiguously intolerable.

Amid this, I find some comfort in the thought that the discourse of the master may “work” (it is operative or functional), but it does not think. It sometimes works astonishingly - and horrifyingly - well, and then again, it doesn’t.