Like most people, I have read a lot about the often poisonous effects of “social media” on the popular mood and our shared discourse. But such “social media”as I have experienced is mainly second hand. We don’t have it or see it, except as reported in the news. And if there is anything more febrile than a tweet, it is a newspaper account of a tweet. I do get a great deal of email, though, much of which is political or commercial junk. My morning email included an arresting message from someone called Meghdad, a person (or bot) otherwise unknown to me.
Do you see and are you quiet?
Do you hear the cries of the oppressed people of Gaza and are you still silent?
Do you see the crushed bodies of thousands of children and women in Gaza and are you still silent?
Are you alive or just a moving corpse?
Do you have only one name for being human or do you also have human emotions?
If you have ears, if you have eyes, and if you have human emotions, why don't you shout and protest against the criminals who committed these crimes in support of your government?
The message, which I have reproduced in its entirety, was accompanied by several photographs, mainly of dead babies. It is on me, not Meghdad, that I looked at the photos. I didn’t have to do so; I chose to do so. They would wring tears from a serpent. But Meghdad’s tone still offended me. The idea that I, or anyone I knew, was silently indifferent to what was happening in Gaza confounded me, though I certainly expected there to be a diversity of opinion about just what that was, or is. I was startled that some college professors and many idealistic students could actually praise the barbarous criminality (including, incidentally, baby-murder and revolting sexual violence) of October 7. I am very far from an uncritical attitude towards Israel. Who can look at practically any photograph coming out of Gaza without distress? Though considerably reduced by infirmity I do make a claim to humanity and human emotions, and I do indeed have eyes and ears. In addition to these organs of sensory perception, I do have a mind, and unfortunately the mind I have tends sometimes to worry over troubling complexities at the expense of comforting and often deadly certainties. I shall not venture down the endless and tortured dead end path of WhatAboutism, even if honesty demands acknowledgement that what the “Arab-Israeli conflict” is mainly about has become What About?
What about, for starters, “the criminals who committed these crimes in support of your government”. I do believe the war is “criminal”, not just in the general sense that most wars are, but in ways specific to this one. But I see no other plausible interpretation of the phrase quoted than that in Meghdad’s opinion the Israeli Defense Forces are conducting a criminal war in support of the government of the United States of America! What I actually see with my eyes is the American President, his Secretary of State, and large sections of the American policy intelligentsia and opinion makers agonizing over a situation of mind-numbing complexity as they attempt, with a little success, to moderate Israeli military activity in a situation that has been fostered by bad actors since the days of the Pharaohs and continues to be exacerbated by bad actors today. I actually have great sympathy with and admiration for President Biden’s impossible efforts. There are some problems that are insoluble by loudly repeated dogmatism alone, such as all of them.
Years ago, when I made a serious attempt to "keep up”, I read several books by Arthur Schlesinger. Jr. (d. 2007). He is no longer frequently mentioned, but he was a prominent public intellectual of my youth and a notable luminary in the Kennedy galaxy. He was an old-fashioned liberal intellectual, a serious historian who moved easily between academia, active public service, and the research library, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to write another book—so it seemed from his enormous output. As a medievalist, I could never take the image of the Kennedy Administration as “Camelot” very seriously, but with Schlesinger—a balding egghead who looked like a 1950s rent-a-professor including the bow ties and tweed jackets—the idea was preposterous. Sir Bedevere? One Schlesinger book to which I had a complicated reaction appeared in 1991: The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. Its central point was stimulating, but I resisted it. It was that the “melting pot” theory of American immigration—e pluribus unum—forming a national unity out of a culturally diverse body of immigrants from all over the world—had come to an end. It was being replaced by a better goal—cultural diversity. In this vision our country could become a kind of demographic warehouse of a hundred mini-cultures. Well I was a college professor, and how can a college professor not be in favor of cultural diversity? Let a hundred flowers bloom.
But a version of the “multicultural” ideas he was talking about is now entrenching itself in our universities and among other thought leaders, sometimes with perilous consequences. It is setting Americans at each others’ throats. It has already seriously weakened the freedom of speech that should be the bedrock of our cultural exchanges. I fear it has already done permanent damage not just to the internal operations of our educational institutions but to their reputations in the eyes of the public they must serve and on which they must depend. If hating Jews or despising Muslims is your thing, maybe it’s “cultural,” part of an essential “identity” of “identity politics”. This New World is not so much the guarantor of new beginnings as the custodian of old grievances. But the world has a plateful of problems related to demographic, agricultural, and climate matters of fairly recent appearance without so carefully preserving and reanimating ancient ones. From the historical point of view there is something surprising, perhaps even amazing about the survival of the human race through its centuries of violent folly. The pathway of its continuing survival has been the intense application of innovation, adaptation, and perhaps above all cooperation, which depends on ethical intelligence. Will we still have that in sufficient quality and quantity? I won’t be here to watch, but I can hope.
