On the stupidity of debate (and why we're all Israeli and Palestinian)
Try and you will fail. This has been your self-talk since the 7th of October. You’ve been hand over mouth, ducking the toxic topic exactly like the Kibbutz victims couldn’t at each bullet and blast. Tempted, perhaps, to intercede on behalf of the other side, to question or ask to clarify, to sequence past dealings (Carter, Sharon, the PLO, the many accords), to admit wrong or correct: try and I’ll fail, you muttered. You can relate, I’m sure of it. Unless you belong in the minority who, without irony or despair, take to our millennium’s new global squares to post things (and you are excepted too if a bonafide pundit is what you are, in which case I congratulate your being here, borrowing from your book-reading time), you'd do well to avoid denial.
Yet even the postings of those who post things arrive rather flaccidly. Flaccidly they land no matter that carried within are sober words of humanity. With futility they come across no matter that they’re expressions of solidarity for both sides, or the just side, as the case may be—the provoked side or the outgunned side; no matter if they are admonitions about moral equivalence, erections of human shields as hardened justification, or softenings of the erect defense, or the right to defend from aggressors, the right to resist occupation, the precise delineation of good from evil sliced all the way through by the sharp blade of moral clarity, the clarification that there are no two sides, reminders that there exists a most moral army, the pretension that public relations is what the other side does, the terrorism of F-15s, the terrorism of the young man bred to hate Jews, the fog of war and its profiteers. Enough, you’ll say: spare us this tiresome list and get on with it.
Flaccid and sterile and at bottom futile are the best our brilliant architects of the social web can do. Don’t misunderstand: the constraints here have little to do with gaps in their ability or will or good intentions. These platforms are limited by us, the people; we, the primates, who are in turn ruled by inter-generational Jewish trauma, decades-long Arab humiliation, and, for the rest of us, fear—deep, shameful fear—of blackmail by one or other orthodoxy demanding our silence (or that we fall in line) in return for leaving intact our membership, so precarious each of us is as participant in something we can’t bear to lose (a job, a social circle, the love of an old friend).
Where blackmail is a factor, a risk, debate becomes utterly stupid. Where blackmail extracts a price, nuance is anti-haggling, negotiation against yourself, raising the costs you will pay. Under absolute rule, there is no such thing as blackmail; dictatorships lay out prohibitions in law and, at any rate, dole out punishment by state violence. The threat in these cases is explicit, and it hardly needs mentioning. Not so in your case: What you, in the haven of your rule-of-law society, have been feeling in the discoursal aftermath of 10/7: this needs some mentioning; this feeling is whimpering for a minute or so of attention. This is a reality that affects all manner of affiliations in Western democracies, which should know better (though here the atmospheric pressure tends to disfavor one direction of outlook, a persisting phenomenon best left for the right scientists to explain).
You’ll be shocked to know that none of this is an internet-only phenomenon. The specter of blackmail can be felt in traditional media outlets and in (non-media) conversational spaces. In your real life, where you talk about what you watch and read. Or what you listen to in podcasts.
Mr. Sam Harris, whom I’ve consumed more or less since he first emerged, and whose anti-religion and -god writings brought me insight and, circa 2006, to Hitchens (more on the Hitch below), has a podcast. On November 7, 2023, he read an essay on an episode called “The Bright Line Between Good and Evil.” Sam’s orientation here silently assumes the legitimacy of debate. This is not so stupid, in his case: He is his own platform, so the blackmail calculus doesn’t really apply to him.
Sam’s take, however, does show the generic stupidity of debates. In his role as a pro-Israel defender in the broader debate about this particular conflict, he doubles down. Critics of Israeli defense policies get it wrong not simply because Israel is doing right by its citizens, but also because the side it is fighting is incorrigible evil itself. One is free to criticize Israel, but not without first acknowledging it is fighting a unique enemy. The positions of the critic of Israeli political and military strategy are not exactly to be ignored, merely cleansed with the moral dictum that one kind of violence is inherently worse and more dangerous than the other. Thus the objective of defeating “religious certainty” of a certain Islamic strand becomes so grand, so essential to human civilization, that criticism of Israeli policies becomes, in practice and by definition, pro-evil and anti-civilization. This is a coy and nuanced doubling down that, on the way to restating the conclusion his side had already assumed, poses arguments (the danger of Jihadism) and grants concessions (historical context may be important, if tentatively) that taken alone no reasonable person would disagree with. Doubling down, indeed, is in the very nature of debating.
As for me, since you ask as kindly as you do, I’ve been in the throes of a dizzying, headless, amnesia-inducing—or, to be a dash less theatrical, memory-antagonizing—juvenilely-ecstatic tour de programme, a syllabus of Christopher Eric Hitchens put together by impulse, delivered by eCommerce, boundary-conditioned by my oppressive dearth of unaccounted for time. It is a good syllabus, I can tell you that. It is modern. Its subjects are not to be studied in predefined spaces or times. It is dynamic: it wavers insouciantly between the fixed authority of print and the knock-out blows of audio-video.
The fruits of this spastic, pop-up academe are there to be tasted, and here I shall offer you the nibble of a lifetime: Debates are stupid because they’re regressive. They are hardeners. They make contraction pass for truth; they make showmen and audience alike trade expansive understanding for tight, holdable positions; they put words to dispositions, always preexisting, and then dissipate into Q&A and call it done. This master of debates, trained and practiced with seemingly indefatigable knowledge (“It all seems instantly, neurologically available: everything he’s ever read, everyone he’s ever met, every story he’s ever heard”), quarreled and seduced effortlessly and then again, and in its sum, I wonder here with you with one eyebrow raised, does there lie any clear, net gain? I mean to ask: What has Mr. Hitchens to show for all of his gallant debating, on paper and on stage? Has he any converted devotees of reason to point to? Has the cause of justice become fatter on account of his calorific disputations? Did an evening’s turn of phrase, packed with his swagger and verve, pouring fury on the former president force a Clinton-voter into regret, or on the Saint of Calcutta turn a devotee to a Catholic skeptic? You should know: I wonder loudly here as a fan, as a humanist comrade of his. The data is somewhere, one would hope, for the empirically-minded to mine (and, rest assured, this pub’s editorial board stands ready to hear from and be corrected by them).
Debates, this age-old business of pitting two cases against the other to uncover the correct one, don’t settle big questions. They do not illuminate. The best they do is provoke the curious. They don’t provoke or awaken curiosity itself; they provoke, I assert, the already-curious. Hitchens did this uniquely and with inimitable flair. If curiosity is innate, it is more or less empty. It’s the cylindrical tube of a cement truck, in need of guiding hands to place the chute in a desired direction, where its mouth is to be fixed to the cavity that needs the mix. It is then that the curious herself begins the pouring; once provoked, the stuff will gush out in response to the search for facts, angles, reasons, subpoints, until it hardens into understanding. Except human understanding should never harden (lest we disappoint Bertrand Russell), and so this is where the metaphor fails.
In the same essay, Sam entreats us to take ideas seriously: “But you have to understand that the people who butchered over 1400 innocent men, women, and children in Israel on October 7th were practicing their religion, sincerely.” My difficulty is in finding it impossible to ignore the debating Sam that takes over his otherwise judicious, principled voice (in the same piece and elsewhere). The debating Sam is not exactly concerned with separating the haplessly governed from the administratively worked from the ideologically mobilized from the ideologue rulers. He is reluctant to separate people from ideologies: that which is nefarious in extremist Islam automatically extends to its citizenry, and the remedy for nefarious ideas (eradication) becomes the remedy for its adherents and their unlucky kin. He may not be spelling out this last point (and we can be thankful for this), but his debating teammates take this logic and, as the saying goes, run with it (and have). The span of “adherents” can be wide indeed: the true followers, their occasional sympathizers, and the rest who are served up as collateral. If the other side suggests that while extremist ideology is unchangeable, people react to circumstances and respond to incentives, the debating Sam will privilege their eschatological incentives over political conditions of dehumanization—the former is what drives home his point. The debating Sam is all too happy to ignore political contributions to lamentable acts. If some Gazans rejoiced—distastefully, deplorably—in the killing and capture of innocent Israelis, did they really do so because their religion demands of them wicked disregard of neighbors? Are we really to believe that dispossession, choicelessness, hopelessness have had no role?
But I’m nearing the territory of hypocrisy if I’m engaging with Sam’s points as if I can change minds. This tendency I’ve just displayed suggests another essential trait of debates: Not only can they be stupid, when they are personally costly and because they are generically truth-resistant, so also they are unavoidable. The right conditions, the right big questions, awaken the Israeli or Palestinian—that is to say, the human—in us, imploring us to take sides.
To progress beyond the debate is neither to reject both sides, nor to accept opposite claims as valid. This much should be obvious. Progress certainly does not reside in picking either of the two sides, packaged as they come in every glimmery clash or encounter. It’s more basic than that: it is to affirm that the same thing, with the same ultimate aims, animates both sides. It’s a human thing, and as thinking primates we all share it as the Israelis and Palestinians do.
Don’t roll your eyes too soon, for here is my eye-roll-prevention tactic: Upon locating this basic commonness, one can then move to extend one’s arm and index finger toward the asymmetries and judge. And judge hard. The illiberalism of the Islam proffered by Hamas is inferior to the democratic openness practiced and cultivated by Israel’s civic society (however imperfectly). The harsher terrorism the IDF commits is correlated with its incomparable modern means. The near-medieval methods available to Hamas and Islamic Jihad are what dictate their fighting choices, not the other way around; if these same militant methods were all the Israelis had to avail themselves of, they would likely do so, with little hesitation, and find justifications for their doing so in terrestrial and transterrestrial ends. All the while, the purchase of fascistic ideology cannot be neglected—the original text of the Hamas charter is there for you to read as a test of your integrity (or, at least, read about). A culture that safeguards individual freedom and free-thinking over the honor of the collective, the latter concretized by practices of intra-familial honor-preserving murder and forced draping of persons by dint of the genital draw at birth, is decidedly the better one in that one respect. That this kind of back-and-forth grading will not accommodate clean accounting to declare a winner is the point; instead, our human principles should be clarified in the exercise.
I’m writing on a topic with a dry bite that many, perhaps you yourself, will find discomfiting, made worse at a time in which anti-Jewish hatred is real and rising, anti-Arab and -Muslim hatred is real and rising, divisions are more pronounced, more real, and rising ever more. It is in the very nature of debate (as I’ve narrowly construed it) to draw on these charged predispositions and harden us further into our sides. To call debates stupid is not to say they’re never exhilarating or even useful. But if we’re to trust my humble interpretation, they create an unavoidable pull that we ought to recognize and counter with humanity, outdo with curiosity.
While I wait for my own copy of his editing duet with Edward Said, Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, the hours poured over YouTube (required by my syllabus!) present a Hitch with no ambiguity as to which side of this endless debate he was on: On the pre-1967 border. So, there (voila, as the man himself liked to say), we’ll end with that.
Books hyperlinked, ordered by force of recommendation:
Bertrand Russell, What I Believe
Nathan Thrall, The Only Language They Understand. (Excerpt)
Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
Sam Harris, Free Will
Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian
Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Emily Tamkin, Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Christopher Hitchens, Edward W. Said, Janet L Abu-Lughod, et al., Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question
Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits
Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation