Breaking the Surface and
Searching for the Hidden Text
This portion of the essay has been written under the shadow of the
shootings at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
Rather than random acts of violence, this and others over the past
several months in particular, since the attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse
through a number of other terrorist events in the France, Morocco, Canada and
elsewhere, have confirmed (as though we needed confirmation) that these are not
random acts committed by single madmen or small clusters of deranged youths. Rather they form part of a world-wide scourge
of anti-Semitism. While not necessarily
orchestrated by a central command, such as Al-Qaida, the terrorist acts are
connected through the constant circulation of anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic and
anti-Jewish ideology, myth and discourse.
On occasion, to be sure, a demented soul, lashing about in search for a
shape to his or her rage, may be instigated by this kind of media-born
language; such a person may have only the most tangential attraction to
Jew-hating propaganda up to this point of personal collapse of
personality—perhaps triggered by a private crisis, such as the death of a
parent, the rejection by a spouse, or the loss of a job. More usually, such persons have long been
attracted by anti-Semitism and anti-Zionist ravings because they are so common
in the press, on television, in places of worship and in political
speeches. They provide long-term shaping
of inner feelings of helplessness and rage against society. Rarest of all perpetrators are professional
Jew-haters, rare only in the sense that they are agents of the violence, not
the framers of the social, political and religious movements behind them.
What is this madness? Today—not just
in our time, but this day, this hour, this minute—the insane murders make
videos of themselves and proclaim their intentions, their causes, their
reasons. Al-Qaida mass murderers do this
in a staged manner, with associates, flags, and oiften victims tied up before
them ready to be beheaded. The killer in
Toulouse last year and the Belgian museum shooter did this with a camera
strapped to himself and recorded his actions minute by minute as he killed his
victims. The eccentric and highly
personal motives of the random killer are one thing; those who tap into the
deep roots of anti-Semitism, or the delusionary language and imagery of
anti-Zionism, are another. The day of
the killing is one thing; the moment of madness an explosion of self into the
world through destruction of others. The
years, generations, centuries of visceral and aesthetic hatred of Jews is
another.
I have suggested that we analyse this insanity rationally in a way
similar to that used by writers when they quickly sketch out the plot of a
novel, set out the character of the persons they will display in scenes of argument
and violence, and interpret the meanings and implications of the allegorical
configuration of their art. The process is
long and painful, both for the writer and the interpreting midrashist, trying
to both trace back through the tangled web of the performance to the core
features of the motivating crisis, and then also to break apart that crisis
itself, to discover why something—usually some traumatic event, something repressed,
displaced by more acceptable scenarios—precipitates the explosion.
Writing, Rewriting and Unwriting the Crisis
Though often simplicity and
lucidity are placed at the head of features of style marking good writing,
whether fiction or philosophical or historical, these are not always
desirable. Reading is not always a
passive experience. At certain times and
for certain topics, a reader must not be flattered, smoothed or cajoled into
understanding. The world is not always
as it seems, persons do not represent themselves accurately or truthfully, and
the realities of human experience—including history—are too complex to be
rendered in a straightforward manner.
The very processes of reading, from recognition or identification of words,
as well as of the persons, places, events and ideas have to be challenged. The reader needs to be shocked, insulted,
thrown off balance, that is, asked to rethink fundamentals, examine closely
passions that are triggered off, and images smashed apart and then carefully
reassembled.
The mind, as it is created by the brain in the womb, at the mother’s
breast and in the cradle, does not emerge finally in an innocent form,
transparent to experiences, and co-extensive with the words, images, gestures
and contextual frames of reference that are assumed to be part of the natural
and the cultural worlds. As we have
tried to say in the first two parts of this essay, by the time
self-consciousness comes into being, the formations of personality and
collective identity have limited the size, volume, shape and atmosphere of the
mind—and in all its levels of pre-consciousness, cognitive awareness, and dreamlike
or trance formations. These
conditionings arise from natural circumstances, historical contingencies, social
pressures, individual ontology, and accidental trauma and disease. Nevertheless, nothing is absolutely
determined; things are not inscribed into the genetic code, but are expressed
in response to emotional and material events.
The mind, too, as a product of the brain’s neuronal growth has within
itself the capacity to resist, reject, and correct itself in vital components
of its cognitive and affective functions.
This capacity exists on both a conscious and unconscious level, and thus
more or less responds to the development of will, intellect and moral
forces.
The Analogy of Literary Style
I was recently reading through
an 1890 study of Balzac which had many of the chapters as pages from Honoré’s
sister Lorre and from a long essay by Théophile Gautier. In it there is a description of how Balzac
would drive his publishers crazy by his endless revisions: actually, he was
trying to do what is so much easier today with word processors—he would write
out a dozen or so pages by hand, send them to be set up in type, receive back
the proofs and start to make big changes and additions, with streams of
handwritten material shooting out all over the page and on to extra pages he
would glue to the long sheets of printed text; then back to the printers, and
when the new version arrived, he would do the whole thing again, maybe a dozen
times or more.
That is how I learned to write, too.
In the “good old days” before computers, the university had a group of
secretaries in a so-called “work centre”.
I would bring in my badly typed text; they would retype it neatly, and I
would start to cross-out, add, and soon there would be as much or more
scribbled all around the margins, on the back of the sheets, and stapled new
sheets of handwritten changes. Then back
to the work centre. Because there was
usually at least a week before the clean text arrived, I was thinking of other
things, writing something else, and so clearing my mind of the original muddle;
and when I received the neat pages, I could see and think more clearly, and so
started to cross out, add, and shift around paragraphs. Because actually there were very few of us
using the service—and mostly the others were social scientists getting
tape-recorded interviews transcribed—the secretaries enjoyed working for me,
and sometimes an essay or chapter would go round and round 50 or 60 times
before it seemed ready to be sent off to an editor for publication. Nowadays, though almost all of this rewriting
is done by myself on the computer—a few of the last stages when editors send
back proofs before publication, but then I have to keep revisions to a minimum
so as not to upset page layouts and pagination—what I miss are (a) the days and
weeks of cooling down, (b) the pleasant shock of seeing my work in someone
else’s typewritten form, and (c) the not ignorant questions and comments by the
secretaries about what I was trying to say.
But as I have argued
elsewhere, this method of writing is also the method by which reading occurs,
and more than of published texts: it is also the way to understand rhetorical
moments in history, that is, those processed by the techniques of
persuasion—for good and evil purposes; to persuade through enhancing or
clarifying an argument or to move to action or to dissuade from taking steps
that have been begun out of emotional responses, and these processes of
convincing and rationalizing passionate states of mind may have negative rather
positive motives—to deceive, to substitute false or only partly true conceptions
of truth for the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
From
text to Non-text and Anti-Text
Therefore, just as one has to make several efforts to smooth out the
infelicities in grammar, syntax and style, so that what you write is finally
readable—with as much simplicity, lucidity and grace as possible commensurate
with the nature of your topic; so too, when reading both texts and events (that
is analysing and interpreting, and eventually applying your understanding to
the situation at hand) you need to watch out for bad motives, hidden agendas
and the sloppy thinking that lead to disaster.
In some cases, of course, the explicit nature of the bigotry, ignorance
and animosity appears right on the surface of the text. Then it is a matter of finding out why the
person or group expresses such negative feelings and to what extent they are
likely to take action on such noxious thoughts and feelings. That may be followed by steps taken to
rectify dysfunctional situations, ameliorate deep senses of rage and fear, and
thus avoid the worst consequences of the anti-social currents. More usually, however, the poisonous passions
only partly manifest in recognizable forms, with their true nature displaced to
less dangerous words, images and actions, or rationalized into a surface texture
of something more or less benign or even purportedly liberal, tolerant and
ingratiating; so that when verbal or physical violence does erupt, it may be
difficult for the outsider to determine who is victim and who victimizer—or
even with the aggressive person or persons perceived to be the unprovoked
object of the hatred, In fact, these days especially, with the capture of
supposedly moral and ethical discourses by bigots and fanatics, whole areas of
the world are misperceived, as though murderous terrorists were innocent
recipients of abuse and oppression. The
mass media are particularly vulnerable to these wrong-headed interpretations,
if not outrightly collusive in their perpetration.
The Reality of Madness
A good part of the madness rests
on the premise that (a) Israel is not perfect and so therefore has no right to
exist; (b) Israeli's existence stands as a slap in the face to those who
believe that they have the right, duty and spiritual backing to destroy all
that is not perfect; (c) the indicator of perfection must be therefore the
destruction of everything in the self and the community one belongs to that if
other, different, and reminds one that there are laws, principles, morals and
methods of determining how these can be achieved.
Let us look at these three points a little more carefully.
Israel is not perfect and so therefore has no right to exist. For
the past twenty years at least the left-leaning press and other media have
given disproportionate attention to Israel, not just to the neglect of scores
of nations where there are much worse problems than the seemingly intractable
Arab-Israeli conflict, but as though the whole instability of the Mideastern
region were due to the presence and existence of Israel, and therefore as
though the whole world teetered on the brink of imminent destruction because of
one tiny Jewish state in opposition to scores of hostile Arab and Muslim
countries that cannot countenance the very idea of a Jewish state. Therefore these post-modernist journalists and
politicians fear the explosive presence of a hostile Muslim population in their
midst and, because they deem the cause of that volatility to be something other
than their own failure to integrate these non-Europeans into their body
politic, and only give a little whisper of lip-service to the old notion of
discontent caused by poverty, lack of education and resentment of the
surrounding Christian culture, they seek to appease their discontented migrant
communities by agreeing with them that Israel is the cause of everybody’s
unhappiness—and so it would be better if Israel were wiped off the map of the
world, as well as the Jews everywhere they live.
All this can be justified in the eyes of the educated, sophisticated and
cosmopolitan media because they discover that Israel occasionally makes mistakes,
has pockets of prejudice and narrow-mindedness, and has not created a perfectly harmonious and
fair society; in other words, that it is, in many respects, what the Zionist
founders wished to create, a nation-state like all others. But added to this, in order to avoid having
to deal with the fact that Israelis contribute disproportionately to the
world’s sum of scientific and cultural knowledge every year and maintain their
basic sense of justice, law and social equity better than most, despite the
constant harassment of their neighbours, these post-modernist journalists and
academics ask Israel to hold to a higher standard than anyone else: why? Because it is supposed that Jews claim to be
a peculiar chosen people in some idealistic form that can never be found in any
documents they purport to cite or paraphrase, thus misreading the Hebrew Bible,
which is not a history of a people always good in the eyes of God but of a
nation constantly admonished to correct its faults and to show compassion to others
who cannot even envision such a moral standard.
Because, too, it is assumed that Jews in founding the State of Israel
were serving the colonialist and imperialist purposes of the Great Powers and
not, as was actually the case, constantly at odds with those big states and
often in conflict with them, so that Israel was created out of a movement for
national liberation—as well as out of the ashes of the Holocaust.
Israeli's existence stands as a slap in the face to those who believe
that they have the right, duty and spiritual backing to destroy all that is not
perfect. All that is said about the wickedness of Israel
was said for thousands of years before there was such a sovereign entity, but
it was said about Jews—the Jewish nation in Exile and Dispersion. And even before there were arguments
concocted to justify those assertions on the grounds of failing to recognize
and believe in a Christian saviour who purportedly fulfilled all their
prophetic promises and provided a new testament of salvation or, in another
instance, before there were charges that Jews misrepresented themselves as the
Chosen People, manipulated their sacred history so as to exclude those tribes
who really deserved the favours of God, and who therefore always and
constitutionally behave in a perfidious and duplicitous manner, the essential
hatred was present. It may have arisen
for intellectual reasons, that the defining quality of Jewish mentality and
personality resides in a distrust of hierarchical authority, requires knowledge
and understanding manifested in just and equitable actions, and is therefore
sceptical, querulous and disrespectful of all kinds of vested power in
individuals and institutions. Jews ask
too many questions. They don’t believe
something just because it is commanded from kings, priests and generals. They disagree with everyone, even themselves
most of the time, but recognize proper forms of disagreement and reject those
propounded arbitrarily and deceitfully or out of bombastic ignorance. While never claiming to be perfect, the Jews
do not like others to make such claims, and are consequently not easily
bamboozled; and if they are, then not for long.
Those peoples who respect authority for its monopoly of power, who need
some sort of Leviathan to maintain social order, and prefer hierarchical systems
of knowledge cannot abide such questioning, mockery and stiff-necked
pride. To do so would force them to
question their own right to authority, their need for obedience and their
distancing of faith from legal debates.
It would undermine their belief in a supernal force of spiritual love
and the efficacy of sacrifice and suffering.
The indicator of perfection must be therefore the destruction of
everything in the self and the community one belongs to that if other,
different, and reminds one that there are laws, principles, morals and methods
of determining how these can be achieved. To maintain a belief in perfect
Love and absolute Truth, the nations of the world impose strict limits on what
can be thought, believed, felt and known, designating certain persons as more
authoritative than others, instating state and ecclesiastical bodies to monitor
obedience and punish disobedience, and providing individual illusions and
public dreams in compensation. Such
state-entities require at once the presence of a second-class, semi-excluded
other to manifest the ever-likely supreme pain of sinful disobedience—a people
who can be publically humiliated, expelled or executed from time to time to
remind the rest of the society what lies in store and how absolute is the
hierarchical power of the rulers; and, at the same time, these historically
designed others are scapegoats, clearly marked “poison sacks” into which each
individual’s and the collective body’s anxieties and fears of being filthy,
impure, uncomfortably restless and suicidal can be ritually poured out through
word and action.
Though absurd, irrational and illogical, the methods of anti-Semitic
thinking pretend to be historically rational.
The more there are such ravings and rantings, the more the notion is
confirmed—how could so many people be wrong for so long. If Jews have been despised, feared, and
persecuted for so many centuries, there must be some justification to it
all. The more Jews complain and
"whine", recall past persecutions, the more they show themselves to
be different, other, not part of the majority culture. Whoever feels guilty for all this has to deny
the guilt, shift it on to the victims.
Since the language of liberalism and tolerance has been hijacked by the
post-modernists, they have to become blind to their support for fanatics, extremists,
terrorists and other insane people: one feeds into the other. A form of cannibalism.
How can this be confronted, prevented, understood in a curative manner?
