An Israeli Looks at Gaza | Robert Wright & Russ Roberts

1:51 How Israelis think about civilian casualties in Gaza
20:47 Is the war spawning a new generation of terrorists?
34:39 Explaining versus justifying bad behavior
49:39 Can Hamas and other extremist groups be moderated?
1:03:12 Is the world biased against Israel?
1:14:45 Cognitive biases that inflame tribal tensions
1:26:09 The “river to the sea” Rorschach test
1:41:03 On the precipice of World War III?

In listening to this conversation I was reminded of a recent post, Jews and the historical imaginary of half the world’s peoples, where I was talking about the fact that Jews were banned from England between 1290 and sometime late in the 16th century and yet anti-Semitism flourished in that period.

The fact that there were no Jews in Shakespeare’s England was thus no impediment to writing a play about a Jew, one who was a moneylender. Shakespeare had the cultural imaginary of Jews to draw upon and, in so doing, he gave it new force and energy. His moneylender was named “Shylock,” a name which has since served as a token and touchstone for usury.

Jews began returning to England in the middle of the seventeenth century, during the rule of Oliver Cromwell.

As for the Jews in the cultural imaginary, that exploded in Germany and Austria in the middle of the previous century. Those reverberations remain with us to this day.

Miriam Lipschutz Yevick was Jewish

Obviously, her name proclaims it. That’s not what I mean. Not long after I’d started reading her memoire, A Testament for Ariela, I was struck: This is the most Jewish book I’ve ever read. It took me awhile to figure out what I was responding to.

The book is very obviously by a Jewish woman who is telling about her life. Her name, “Miriam,” is obviously Jewish, and so with “Lipschutz Yevick.” The second paragraph mentions “the Nazi invasion of Belgium and Holland,” there are Yiddish phrases all over the place, a section on the Seder, a description of the family’s flight from Europe in 1940, all this is obviously Jewish. But that’s not what I was responding to.

As a contrast, consider a Woody Allen movie. Allen is self-consciously Jewish navigating his way in a world of Gentiles. He has the double-consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois first ascribed to African Americans in essay published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1897: “Strivings of the Negro People.” Allen is always trying to figure out what it means to be Jewish for Gentiles and what it means to be Jewish for himself.

There’s none of this double-consciousness in A Testament for Ariela. Here we have a grandmother reflecting on her life for her granddaughter. Incidentally, both are Jewish. That’s the water in which they’re swimming. To extend the metaphor, Allen is a Jewish fish swimming in a pool (he thinks is) owned by Gentile fish, some of whom, however, think it’s run by a conspiracy of Jewish fish. Yevick is a (Jewish) fish swimming in an ocean full of fish of all kinds. The Nazis, for example, are just fish. Big nasty and dangerous fish, to be sure, but just fish. It’s not their ocean, nor does it belong to any other fishes. It’s just the ocean.

This lack of double-consciousness, in turn, helps me understand something I’d found puzzling. Yevick is keenly aware of the fact that being a woman has hindered her career as a mathematician. When she got her PhD, 1947, there were very few women in the academic world. There weren’t many Jews, either. Maybe a few places, like New York’s City College, were different, and some of the larger state universities, a few in private schools, but for the most part Jews were discriminated against – see the story of one of my teachers, Earl Wasserman. But Yevick never talked about antisemitism in the academy. I couldn’t figure out why.

Now I know, or at least I think I do. She wanted to avoid (potentially crippling) double-consciousness. She wanted to speak in a single voice, strong and clear, Jewish.

I wonder if that’s why she said nothing about her work on holographic logic in the 1970s. She certainly recognized its importance, and continued to write about it for the rest of her life – see, for example, a passage in her 2003 tribute to Agnes Berger [1]. Here and there in Testament she alludes to her ideas that she had yet to develop. Though I don’t know what she was thinking about, I can imagine that she might have been thinking about developing that work further.

She must have been disappointed that it had not found much of an audience. I rather doubt that that disregard had much to do with being either a woman or Jewish. No, she was ahead of her time, which is what I had in mind with my recent article about her in 3 Quarks Daily [2]. Perhaps this disappointment was simply too painful to dwell on, or too distracting.

But she did get one word in, and in a prominent place in the book, its penultimate paragraph. She is addressing Princeton students at a protest in 1970:

You will have to know in depth the nature of a dozen disciplines: medicine, education, architecture, city planning, transportation, food production, the generation of power, pricing mechanisms, local administration, government organization. You will have to read the world both in fictional and mathematical terms: with empathy, the imaginative projection of one’s own consciousness into another human being, and with logic and rational analysis and lucidity and precision. You may come to stand above your society and epoch as one who views an immense doll house, a miniature city: in every room, in every street, in every mind the activities proceed, locally purposeful but not consciously connected to the larger scheme and often collectively random and destructive.

That’s the antepenultimate paragraph. Here’s the penultimate paragraph:

Such a global knowledge can evoke that “holographic awareness” which transcends its interpretation in the mechanical language of recurrent programs. It “holds compact in one” that global vision which continuously reinterprets reality in terms of lived experience. Thus you will assert your superior humanity and do better than the computer.

References

[1] Memoir: To Agnes Berger (1916-2002) and Our Friendship, Newsletter, Association for Women in Mathematics, Volume 33, Number 1, January-February 2003, 7-10.

[2] Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates], 3 Quarks Daily, October 9, 2023, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/10/next-year-in-jerusalem-the-brilliant-ideas-and-radiant-legacy-of-miriam-lipschutz-yevick-in-relation-to-current-ai-debates.html.

What’s going on? Antisemitism is breaking out all over. Why?

The ostensible reason is Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 4 assault. I wonder, though. I suspect something more complex is going on. This is from today’s NYTimes:

But it’s not just Hollywood.

While the effect is pronounced in Hollywood, where there is a large Jewish presence, the entirety of liberal America has been similarly convulsed. On Capitol Hill, across college campuses and among progressive activist groups and philanthropies, a raw divide has emerged. On one side, there is ardent support for Israel. On the other is an energized faction who view the Palestinian cause as an extension of the racial and social justice movements that swept through the United States in the summer of 2020. And there are others, including Jewish people, calling for a cease-fire.

What’s going on? Let me ramble a bit.

When I look at the situation in-and-around Israel, it makes my head ache. It’s so complicated. If I were to live in the Middle East, it would be in Israel because it’s closest to my values. It seems to be a functioning democracy.

But I see the settlements on the West Bank, and I don’t like it. It’s wrong, it’s going to lead to trouble, I think. I don’t like the blockage of Gaza. Yes, I understand there’s a protective impulse, there needs to be a protective impulse. I don’t like Netanyahu and his government. There’s a lot not to like going on in Israel.

Then Hamas goes on a rampage on October 7. That’s wrong! I don’t have to think about it, it’s just wrong. Upon further reflection, still, and taking into account Israel’s retaliation (so far), it’s wrong. But I can see, that is, I am imagining that, for others, the retaliation tipped them the other way. They realize the situation is complicated, as do I, but for some reason or another, they tip the other way.

Why? Who knows? I don’t. But I don’t think it’s simply about Israel and Palestine and the Middle East. Remember, English people nurtured their antisemitism for three and a half centuries (between 1290 and the mid-17th century) when there were no Jews in England. That antisemitism was about the English psycho-cultural economy, not about Jews. There’s always that ethno-psychic internal component to these things. I suspect that this surprising (at least to some of us) eruption of antisemitism is more about that internal-component than it is about external events.

Let’s return to that New York Times article. Here’s how it ends:

And there are ways in which Hollywood’s Jewish community has recently begun to feel taken for granted.

Bitter feelings linger, for instance, over the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The museum opened in late 2021 with a focus on diversity and inclusion; exhibits highlighted the often-overlooked contributions that women and people of color made to the art form. But the Jewish immigrants who founded the studio system were barely mentioned. After complaints, including from Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media entrepreneur who had donated $50 million to the museum, curators scrambled to put together a new permanent exhibition on the Jewish founders. It has not yet opened.

In part because Jewish immigrants founded Hollywood as a way to escape the antisemitism they faced in more established industries, this current moment of agitation feels profound.

Beyond projection: We need to rethink human society, making evolutionary cultural dynamics primary

In my freshman year at Johns Hopkins I read an essay that Talcott Parsons published in 1947, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. It’s been on my mind ever since and I’ve blogged about it I don’t know how many times, e.g. TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

A full decade before Parsons, John Dollard published Caste and Class in a Southern Town, which “redirected the study of southern race relations in general and lynching in particular” by asking a simple question: Why do people need racism? The question implies that mistaken beliefs about others are symptoms of racism, not its cause. Racism has some useful function in the individual or collective lives of racists. What function could that be? Dollard’s answer was, in effect, to keep the peace.

In a post from 2013, Blacks, Blues, and Soul Sickness: Lynching and Racism in the USofA, I quote him making an argument the anticipates Parsons’ 1947 argument. Dollard observes that social life is often frustrating, generating aggressive impulses which cannot be always be satisfied. In Dollard’s view this leads to

a generalized or “free-floating” aggression . . . [that] can be thought of as a tendency to kick, hit, scorn or derogate someone or something if one could only find out what. A second necessity is that of a permissive social pattern. This must exist in order to lift the in-group taboos on hostility. The permissive pattern isolates a group within the society which may be disliked. Usually it is a defenseless group. . . The third essential in race prejudice is that the object must be uniformly identifiable. [pp. 445-446]

In other words, white racists are using blacks as scapegoats for the accumulated frustrations they experience in daily life. Aggressive impulses are being displaced from their real objects, which are appropriate targets, to substitute objects, toward whom one can act aggressively.

Then just yesterday I quoted Stephen Greenblatt on how the English nourished antisemitism from 1290 through to the mid-17th century, a period when there were no Jews at all in England. This anxiety, anger, resentment, and hatred thus had to originate entirely within the socio-cultural dynamics of English society. It had nothing at all to do with interaction with real Jews.

There’s an obvious pattern here. I could multiply examples. You’ll find some of them in the articles I’ve linked.

But the psychodynamic imagery of projection, which was at the heart of Parson’s rather convoluted psychoanalytic account is not helpful. It seems to imply that one sees or senses something within oneself, right here, picks it up and then tosses it, that is, projects it, to someone else, over there. The process is not that deliberate and self-conscious. It just happens.

It’s more like a failure to differentiate in the first place, a failure nurtured by various cultural practices, including rituals and stories. For it is through those kinds of practices that the negative affect becomes attributed to other people and other groups. Ultimately, we’ve got to go back to infancy, which is after all, where Freud started, where the infant is unable to differentiate between ego and alter. How do cultural mechanisms shape those interactions?

It's turtles all the way down, that is, interpersonal interaction. That’s what I struggled to conceptualize in the special case of music in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, “Part I: Collective Dynamics,” pp. 23-90. And I started where one must start, with the brain. What is going on in the brains of people while they’re interacting?

That question was just barely an empirical one when I wrote the book, but it had become (almost) empirical. I was able to cite some early work by Uri Hasson. That early work has blossomed into an extensive area of research crossing many disciplinary lines. You can find some of that word by searching my blog on the name “Hasson,” and the tags, “coupling” and “synchrony”.

More later.

Jews and the historical imaginary of half the world’s peoples

Maybe it’s not (quite) half, perhaps a bit more. I don’t really know. But it’s a big chunk.

Historical imaginary? “Imaginary” as a noun showed up in the humanities sometime in the last half century or so when I wasn’t watching. Perhaps the usage can be traced back to Lacan? Anyhow, it’s something like the ongoing process and repository of fictive conceptualization that’s applied to events as they unfold and so shapes our apprehension of them. Historical? It just means that it stretches back in time.

The Israeli’s that Hamas slaughtered on October 7, 2023 were real people. But the slaughter has entanglements that stretch far beyond any real events in Israel and Palestine in the last 10, 20, 30, 50, or even 100 years. Those entanglements are anchored in that historical imaginary.

The reality of that historical imaginary was recently born to me as a mild shock while reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. That shock came near the beginning of Chapter 9: “Slaughter at the Scaffold.” Greenblatt works his way around to Marlow’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s response, The Merchant of Venice. While Shylock is not the title character, he is the center of the play. With those two plays in mind, Greenblatt observes that neither Marlow or Shakespeare “is ever likely to encountered a Jew.”

“Really,” I thought, “Really?”

Greenblatt goes on to explain (p. 258):

...in 1290, two hundred years before the momentous expulsion from Spain, the entire Jewish community of England had been expelled and forbidden on pain of death to return. The act of expulsion, in the reign of Edward I, was unprecedented; England was the first nation in medieval Christendom to rid itself by law of its entire Jewish population. There was no precipitating crisis, as far as is known, no state of emergency, not even any public explanation. No jurist seems to have thought it necessary to justify the deportations; no chronicler bothered to record the official reasons. Perhaps no one, Jew or Christian, thought reasons needed to be given. For decades the Jewish population in England had been in desperate trouble: accused of Host desecration and the ritual murder of Christian children, hated as moneylenders, reviled as Christ killers, beaten and lynched by mobs whipped into anti-Jewish frenzy by the incendiary sermons of itinerant friars.

There were no Jews in England in the late 16th century:

Yet in fact the Jews left traces far more difficult to eradicate than people, and the English brooded on these traces – stories circulated, reiterated, and elaborated – continually and virtually obsessively.

That’s the historical imaginary at work. It has a life of its own. This particular stream of the imaginary is about Jews but has only a fortuitous and contingent relationship to real Jews.

The fact that there were no Jews in Shakespeare’s England was thus no impediment to writing a play about a Jew, one who was a moneylender. Shakespeare had the cultural imaginary of Jews to draw upon and, in so doing, he gave it new force and energy. His moneylender was named “Shylock,” a name which has since served as a token and touchstone for usury.

Jews began returning to England in the middle of the seventeenth century, during the rule of Oliver Cromwell.

As for the Jews in the cultural imaginary, that exploded in Germany and Austria in the middle of the previous century. Those reverberations remain with us to this day.

Will they never dissolve, dissipate, and deliquesce into numinous spirit?

It’s Complicated 3: Social Manipulation in a Culture of Fear

danah boyd. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP 2014).

Let’s start with a footnote to Chapter 4, “Danger: Are Sexual Predators Lurking Everywhere?” (p. 232)

In The Culture of Fear, sociologist Barry Glassner provides a detailed account of how American society uses fear to regulate everyday practices. He points out that people are terrible at assessing risk; many fears are connected, not to risk, but to how the media shapes the public’s perception of key issues.

That’s it in a nutshell: “American society uses fear to regulate everyday practices.” But America is not exceptional in that regard. It’s a widespread socio-cultural practice and it’s at the heart of cultural mechanisms of social control.

Free-Form Fear

Here’s the paragraph to which that footnote is attached (p. 102):

From the advent of social media, it has been impossible to talk about teens’ engagement without addressing the topic of online safety and sexual predators. More than any other issue presented in this book, the topic of online safety generally—and sexual predators specifically—has played a significant role in configuring teens’ relation to mediated communication, adults’ attitudes toward teens’ participation, and policy discussions about social media regulation. Online safety is also a particularly complicated issue, in part because a culture of fear is omnipresent in American society, and no parent wants to take risks when it comes to their children’s safety. Statistics showing the improbability of harm fail to reassure those who are concerned. Even when highly publicized stories turn out to be fabrications, parents still imagine that somewhere, somehow, their child might fall victim to a nightmarish fate. They are afraid because terrible things do happen to children. And although those violations most commonly take place in known environments—home, school, place of worship, and so on—the internet introduces an unknown space that is harder to comprehend. Nothing feeds fear more than uncertainty.

A bit later (p. 106, emphasis mine):

Legal scholar Larry Lessig argues that four forces regulate social systems: market, law, social norms, and technology or architecture. Fear is often used in service of these forces. Companies sell fear to entice parents to buy products that will help them protect their children. Policymakers respond to fear by regulating children’s access to public spaces, even when doing so accomplishes little. The media broadcasts fears, creating and reinforcing fearful social norms. And technologies are built to assuage or reproduce parents’ fears. Given the cultural work done in the name of fear, it’s astounding that young people have as much freedom as they do.

Of course, there are real dangers out there. The existence of those real dangers lends plausibility to the hyped up dangers, and the hype, in turn, makes it difficult to deal with the real dangers in an intelligent way (p. 109):

Parental fear regarding sexual predators is understandable. No parent wants to imagine her or his child being harmed, and the potential cost of such a violation is unfathomable, regardless of how statistically improbable such an event might be. Combine this with the media’s magnification of the cultural mythos of the online sexual predator and it’s no wonder that countless parents become hyperprotective without considering the costs of their actions. But this distorted fear obscures the very real and costly risks that some youth do face. Untangling these issues requires stepping back and rethinking what we think we know regarding sexual predation.

In this situation, how do you draw a line between real danger and fantasized danger?