On anti-semitism as "incurable disease," politics without philosophy, and the proliferation of pariah-hood

The refusal to think philosophically may have its costs. Let me say here at the outset that, like most of the essays on this site, this one is part of a work in progress that aims and claims less to advertise or promote some thought that I consider correct enough to advocate, having demonstrated its truth and usefulness, than as a set of attempts to think through a set of problems.

In a recent public lecture, a prominent rabbi at one of the more liberal congregations in my city discussed the question of anti-semitism today. His arguments were all a drawing of conclusions from the evidence of historical or literary fact. Many texts in the Jewish Bible, he informed us, point to the centrality in Judaism of the idea of a Jewish state. Judaism, therefore, is inconceivable without positing the desirability of that state. This is a point I am prepared to grant. But the other inference from accumulated fact I found problematic, and, since it is not obvious to all who consider the matter, I want to say. He presented Theodor Herzl, the founder. of modern Zionism, as having come to the recognition as a consequence of reflecting on the Dreyfus Affair and the sad state of official tolerance of Jews limited to the privatization of their religiously-based ethical values under the demand for assimilation to the shared norms of a secular bourgeois liberal republican social order first in France and then, still an incomplete achievement in Herzl’s fin-de-siècle Europe, which apparently could not do enough to undo the anti-semitism that was now migrating from Christian exclusivity to the more irrational forms linked to modern European nationalism. We know what Herzl’s response was: a nationalism of our own. Based on similar public political values and institutions, but in a cultural lifeworld that is somehow Jewish in character because it will be overwhelmingly composed of Jewish souls as its citizens. What might be articulated as a critique of the ethical poverty in some sense of post-Enlightenment secular bourgeois European society in the age of the modern Western European empires, was instead ascribed, and this insight attributed to Herzl himself, to the seemingly irrational notion that anti-semitism is an “incurable disease” and therefore inevitable. The rabbi pointed out that even in countries like Belgium, different peoples do not get along all that well.

Of course, one country today remains the counter-model of ethnic nationalist particularism, and this state, which certainly has its problems, is the United States. In fact, a question that can be interestingly posed about the culture of this country is whether it is insufficiently constituted on broad inclusive lines based on the liberal and republican values that are said to lie at its founding, or whether the solution to our problems is to grant more space to identity politics, or to cultural particularities. Not asking them to conform to a broad standard but inviting them instead to cultivate their own particularities to the maximum, in a nation that somehow understands itself as the sum of all such things. The two possibilities here can be said broadly to be those of the two models given the world by the great 18th centuries revolutions, those of the United States and France. Whether France or the United States is a better country in terms of its political constitution is a problem that perhaps is as difficult as it is interesting, or even unsolvable, though it is remarkable that the more social democratic tendencies of Western European countries today have their attractions for many Americans and observers of our scene, and they probably do have something to do with the more universalistic foundation of these societies.

That question aside, and its consequences for the state of Israel, whose underlying nationalist character may owe as much to the climate of late-nineteenth century European nationalisms as to the more liberal republican societies that understand the polity as constituted by political principles rather than a common ethnos, these questions I will leave aside for now except to observe that there is also something deeply problematic about the notion that anti-semitism, either in Europe today or the world as a whole, is inevitable and can only be resolved through an exodus. Jews should understand that the polity that they can best want to belong to is their very own, realizing Biblical ambitions of a prophetic realization of universal justice.

My question is what is the meaning of the claim that anti-semitism is, as this rabbi put it, an “incurable disease”? First, does it not give Hitler a posthumous victory, since it was German National Socialism and its machinery of mass killing during the war alone that could truly inscribe indelibly in the modern political conscience of Europe, Jewry, and the world, the notion that the Europeans and the Jews are not just different or (more truly) divergent, that is, capable of differing and doing so sometimes, as separate, and essentially separate, and needing to be kept separate or separated?

More troubling still perhaps is the metaphor of disease and one that is incurable. An incurable disease kills the patient eventually. If Europe was sick of anti-semitism and that disease had no cure, then Europe itself would die, at least if the disease struck close enough to the heart of its culture and thought and forms of life. It certainly did. And Hitler and his party could be said to have destroyed German culture, though certainly it did not so completely. Many survivors and refugees went elsewhere, and ideas in texts and artworks have a notorious tendency to escape bounds anyway.

What the rabbi meant is: their society, that of Europe (though in fact it was ‘ours’ as well as theirs, even if it was theirs more fundamentally, since Jews were a minority, even in intellectual life where they had so much influence, even more in the years since Herzl); they it were sick with a disease that killed us.

I think medical metaphors of social and political evil should be resisted. Indeed, they have a long history of use by fascists, and the Nazis in particular. German National Socialism was a society devoted to ideas of health and purity. Further, not only the metaphorically sick persons that Jews were taken to be — incurably, it was thought — but also literally handicapped and “mentally ill” persons, along with homosexuals, were made victims of the Nazi state’s ethical and ethnic cleansing.

What do those several classes of victims, superficially quite distinct, have in common (in the way in which they are thought of when these classifications are in use)? If we understood this question better, we would have to start to think of identities as something other than a matter of blood and genetics or other metaphors of the natural. (By the way, just as Elizabeth Warren cannot be partly Native American by virtue of a set of genes in her genetic code, so too Jewishness has nothing biological in it; a Jewish child born to a Jewish mother (and/or father, depending on whose criteria you accept) is Jewish because and if raised by them; if her baby is exchanged at the hospital for another born from a gentile mother, the gentile’s progeny in this case will be a Jew, and the Jew’s a gentile, barring other events. Jews were never considered a race by themselves or most anyone until the social Darwinism that Nazism took up). I think that the categories of the Jew, the mentally ill, and homosexuality in the thinking of the Nazi state do have something in common. They are all figures of lack or impropriety (or abnormality), and of a somehow fallible or weak tie-in of the subjectivity of a person or personality type, that in fact reveal positive traits that Jewish thinking and Judaism in particular are capable of thinking as qualities to be affirmed.

Personally, I find it interesting to note that in my generation many people, myself included, who might find themselves being treated somehow as pariahs, could easily be thought of in any of these three terms, and interchangeably. From a Christian point of view that does specifically include some fuller understanding of Judaism, it might well seem that Jews are simply lacking and sick. Certainly, in my generation the Jews in America, and also in France and much of Europe, became widely figures of the admirable rather than the lacking. At the same time, I remember at a Protestant private high school in New England in the 70s, people who thought me an oddball seemed quite eager to entertain the presumptions that I must be either gay or mentally ill. In the 70s gayness was rapidly becoming acceptable, though my experience was that people attributed this in ignorance and on the basis of superficial personality traits, and it was the new form of deviance in the sense that you could be hated for it or perhaps granted some curious and special appreciation that obviously betrayed a great deal of anxiety on the part of persons trying to cope with their own narrow sense of the tolerably normal. I recall later at the university a man in my student cooperative house who didn’t like me, but who smiled one day when he saw me come back with a female companion. I was both pleased that he might not hate me and puzzled at the apparent condition and its superficiality.

More intractable was the accusation of mental illness, but it too was based on nothing really. People in my generation would call someone mentally ill on the flimsiest of grounds. All it meant was that they found you somehow abnormal. The use of the concept of pariah-hood seems if anything to have increased, along with a medical system that evidently needs to call lots of people crazy so as to keep them under control and on highly profitable medications. Dissenting from this, I have a better idea: affirm that you are both rebellious as you should be (if you are very young) and an artist by vocation. I can easily construct a theory of the artist type which in its ways makes many of us titular citizens of some wonderful sociocultural sub-national grouping, with a real and robust identity to boot. Shall we do this?

It’s one candidate; another might be being on the left. Unfortunately in that case, it seems to have been taken over by subnational identities of mere group membership and no clear ethical valence, which now are thought to lie at the basis of what one can be or be identified with political. I am a left-wing bohemian writer and therefore artist who believes in art. How about that for an identity? All that it lacks is any clear ideas or systematic way of living and working proper to the, justified and worthwhile enough certainly, posture of social alienation disposing oneself, the artist, to criticize the society or aspects of it and cultivate in images of beauty or the otherwise attractive or interesting, some ethos or sensibility that is something of an improvement. You could imagine that there is a trend that has this character, and the people engaged in it are a kind of historical avant-garde.

The idea of the left that Marxism gave us was one idea of such an avant-garde, this artistic posture would be or is another, and both owe something to the way Judaism’s long-exiled people have thought of themselves, but are distinguishable from it, and also much thinner, since they are condemned by necessity to draw the lineaments of a new or insurgent identity or personality from sources much closer to the mainstream than those of a robust religion with its rituals, holidays, and particular code of laws. I suggest that all these analogous and shared properties are perfectly credible to affirm or pursue, and appropriate to the way the world is today. I would note only that if you think you are both Jewish and an artist today with these kinds of responsibilities and motivations, or a man or woman “of the left,” that in some sense you have a plural identity, which can be a problem or not one. Certainly today’s world is one of hybrid, fluid, and mobile identities; categories of subjects and objects simply are not as solid and exclusive as they once were, though that is not to the say that they don’t exist or aren’t important. We could also imagine along lines such as these that the world will be seeing new religions or other social and cultural formations. Suppose for example that history shows eventually that the world we live in today is a pre-revolutionary one with strong tendencies moving in partly new directions that simply cannot yet be defined. If this is true, the shifts will occur across and within existing institutions and social forms including the extant religions, and I think arguably that is happening.

Jewishness is a bit more complicated, but it must be admitted that in much of our society it remains something of a figure of otherness. One that is usually but not necessarily tolerated. In fact, I do think that there is some exchangeability among all of these categories of social deviance and the corresponding and consequent identity options, and I think this is a very interesting fact. Only one of them is also a religion, unless we construct some new one from within our political and artistic subcultures, which might be entertaining, and might even be thought of as now happening.

I think that is a quite credible hypothesis, and the main reason to doubt it is probably changes in philosophical theology in the major religions, changes that some of us might hope will eventually trickle down to masses or more ordinary worshippers. I don’t know, it’s a thought. Let me note that the Nazis did not much like artists either, and famously staged among its earliest doings, art exhibits declaring modernist art works to be “degenerate,” unhealthy. The Nazi regime was one of normality, propriety, and health. The key to grasping its meaning from a Jewish standpoint, among others, must lie partly in this, and in grasping what is the particular reason why such an ethos would seize most particularly on the Jewish people as its targets. If we understood this better, Jews would understand Judaism and its possibilities better and in more interesting and fruitful ways, Christians would both admire and identify with them more and be less inclined to antipathies, and European culture would at least retain much of the interest it has had in the troubled hundred years or so just passed. My hypothesis might be that Jewishness was and is a constructible way of thinking and being that the European mind will be — I am tempted almost to say healthier, but how about, more consistent and better realized - if it understands this set of possibilities as an aspect of its own mentality and understands it in the best way. It would be audacious indeed to try to define this, but it seems to me that if there is or can be a Jewish philosophy, it would obviously have to be in part a philosophical theory of Jewishness, and so it would rise to this audacity as a challenge. It would not be something that could be either instituted or identified and rejected, and it must be said that it was essentially Christianity that attempted in its inadequate way to do both of these things. Perhaps not all concepts wrongly limit the potentialities of the objects that they appear to reference, or they do so in widely varying degrees of exclusion and limitation.

A regime of ethnic or ethical cleansing will be one that insists on a propriety that excludes all lack. Lack now can be punished, or it can also be “treated,” which gives the utility of medical models. If Hitler and his followers thought of Jews and Jewish culture as like a cancer in the body politics of Europe, would it be useful or helpful to think, in contrast and opposition tot his, that European culture was dying of its own disease and that either or was or included a Jew-hatred that was intractable, such that as long as it persisted, the sick soul and body of Europe would only get sicker? Much could be said in meditating on this thought, and the possibility that the forms of domination that were part of capitalist modernity as well as the militarism that defined Europe since antiquity and through the middle ages such that the continent for many centuries was a place most corners of which had known frequent wars and massacres. Much could be said also about the role of Christianity in thus, either in terms of whatever might be thought to lie at its essence, or of some potentialities that were part of its dominant trends, but that it itself, like Europe itself, or some aspects of its historical culture, might be able to survive?

One does of course want to pose and answer the question, what is antisemitism at its root and essence, and what causes it? By not giving any philosophical answers to this question (or posing it philosophical terms), only anecdotal historical evidence remains, and the evidence is, to be sure, great enough in quantity to suggest that a world without antisemitism is today as remote still as is one without rape, murder, bullying, hatreds, etc. But I want to end by posing a question that focuses more tightly on the question of incurable disease. But first, a step back: to think of social problems with metaphors of illness is perhaps a gesture not so different from thinking of social identities as biological. And of course, Nazism did precisely that, or rather, some of the nationalist thinking that arose in Europe in the half century after Darwin, supposed that social and personality traits are biological. This meant that the first time, Jews could be defined as a race. And the events that comprised the Shoah were a systematic degradation of the persons subjected to it that attempted to prove that the human spirit can be reduced, with sufficient violence, especially if well-organized with all of the resources of modern technology and bureaucracy, to a level of the most abject animality.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called attention systematically to the thought that much in our societies today is either a continuing legacy of, or simply has much in common with, fascism and Nazism. This thought is less surprising, if no less scandalous, if one follows Max Horkheimer’s maxim that whoever will not speak of capitalism cannot speak of fascism. One thing is still with us, and it may be more a matter of rhetoric, that is, of things people will often say, without necessarily any actions being correlated with these thoughts, and this is that there are people so inflicted with what might be called an “illness” that it, and they, must be declared incurable. That is what the Nazis thought of the “Jewish problem.” Once biology and medicine replaced the Christian church, demands for conversion no longer seemed credible; as Hilberg pointed out, that left first exclusion and then extermination. But the biological metaphor allows this, and for the simple reason that a disease may only damage a part of the body, or it can kill the organism entirely. And so diseases are either to be treated or acknowledged as destined to kill the body of the host.

What then of the “mentally ill”? The ascription of this status both lies behind and stands above particular diagnoses. It is not the same thing to call someone neurotic or to call them mentally ill. Woody Allen once could fashion a persona for himself as interminably neurotic, and in part because this destiny was linked to the traumas of anti-semitism, which he provocatively suggested may be felt nowhere more acutely than in New York City, which in the time of his youth was about 25% Jewish (it is now about half that, largely due to suburban white flight and the geographic mobility of the professional class). No one wants to be called “mentally ill.” What is to be done with such people? Or maybe we should ask what can be and sometimes is done? They can be tossed away. They could be eliminated. They could be sent to prisons, and kept their without any legal judgment being pronounced in their regard, but only a medical one that attributes to them a dangerous or harmful potentiality, which is indifferently being cause or effect of some kind of trauma. The metaphorical qualities of discourses about social problems should always be suspected. And we should ask how they might be used.

The Nazis subjected those they deemed “mentally ill” to the same fate as the Jews: elimination. They had no use for anyone who could be thought to stand outside their ideas of a hygienically imagined social order. Too bad for those truly at sick in their souls somehow that, R. D. Laing and some other hippy gurus of yesteryear notwithstanding— or simply cultural romanticism (which was one of the roots of anti-liberal nationalisms and fascisms), that being crazy is not a religion. The closest we have to that is something a lot closer than is generally recognized: it would be the artist and his or her experiences and works as lying at the soul of some new religion.

But the Jews, also being a nation, could escape such thinking. And in the holy land they can be as normal as they like, or their government can demand normality. There is very little in the Jewish world that can quite be called Nazism, though it would be horribly naive and ironically insulting to most Jews to say that fascism is not a capability of ours.

The rabbi went on to say other things consistent with this, which are surely no more blameworthy than the general tendency to think unphilosophically, by which I mean making claims backed by citations of either proof texts or factual evidence, and perhaps some accumulation of either or both of these, — he went on to say that regarding anti-semitism, you should consider that you know it when you see or feel it, and that “If it looks like duck and walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” These are gestures to an anti-intellectual reliance on intuition, as is the claim, which he also made, that identity is not really constructed in concepts but known through “the heart.”

I consider these cognitive gestures not so much antithetical to the truth of the matter as inadequate. If something that you fear can only be known, perhaps by anyone, as fearful because resembling other objects of fear to which it would appear to belong as members of a set or class, then you have fears that are no doubt well-founded but irrational all the same. You won’t really know what counts as an object falling under the concept and what does not. The duck-resemblance idea is that of a set of objects not defined but exemplified by some or some subtypes of its members. This is credible in logic and epistemology today, and is a view often associated with Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance.” I put such notions on the same level as those who say that Jewish culture is ultimately an inheritance that may be considered as if biological, which would mean (and some people do argue this) that Jewish identity is either literally in the genetic code (but this is nonsense) or can be treated as if it were (metaphorically). These irrationalist ideas should be more resisted.

Further, antisemitism does need to be understood, and surely does have a meaning. How would we hope to prevent it otherwise? What can be said at least is that Christianity and Islam both had within them some exclusionary tendencies, and most societies, whether pagan and based on magic and myth, or modern and worldly but refusing something like transcendence, and something like lack, as it is manifest among other ways in figures of exile, or migration, diaspora, and cultural hybridity; and tied to notions of social order that are exclusionary because of the way in which they are inclusive. What needs to be grasped and understood clearly, and not vaguely or approximately, or with some unsatisfiable curiosity that attributes inscrutability to the devil or the enemies of the good and the good state, - there is something in Jewish identity and its understanding of its people’s relationship to God and world that Jews and non-Jews alike should be understand in our increasingly if incompletely post-national world. To my thinking, Judaism is a religion of the alienated who tend to demur in the face of demands of social order and totality, wholeness, completion, or adequacy, and Christianity was mostly a religion that posited something like that condition but only as to be overcome, and it did indeed provide theories, stories, and rituals if not wide-scale social institutions that appeared to make possible that overcoming. It may be that ultimately the two religions agree about much but disagree about the achieved character of utopia, which Jews have always refused. Much of contemporary philosophy in the European world in particular (where a tradition of thinking about such things developed and remains today as robust as ever) seems to me to converge on a recognition of something like this. Much of this is obscured if too much is made of the idea of nation, though there is every reason to affirm and not deny that Judaism has generally constructed the relationship between immanence and transcendence, the secular and the sacred, and perhaps some other related oppositions, including particularism and universalism, and so nationalism and cosmopolitianism. Judaism has resources that German thought from Kant to Wittgenstein and Heidegger did not possess in quite the same way, to enable it to resist and differ from the more xenophobic and destructive consequences that other European nationalisms (for modern Zionism is part of the family of such; it cannot be sufficiently explained as merely the recovery of ancient values and projects, even if it is partly that). And these things are crucial. If we eschew a philosophical thinking for a merely literary and historical one, we will be left with merely sound conjectures with probabilistic verifiability at best, and we will not understand the problems of contemporary societies that no Jewish one can really lie wholly outside of, since in some important set of ways, we are part of a single world civilization, increasingly today, that the Jewish mind is a variant of and perspective on, not an alternative to. If there were an alternative, it would be a philosophy legislating the terms of a messianic age in which the world’s problems are largely solved, or, if not legislating enforceable principles, at least pointing a way. The alternative is to live with a set of concepts and categories that will be invoked whenever any situation is managed, and by the authorities attempting to do so, but which, allowing of no real clarity, will effectively be reduced to a familiar technological and bureaucratic nihilism. In that case, the Jews at most could hope to be a people like no other protected by a state like every other. That is not a paradox we can long live with, but a contradiction that identifies an impossibility and that I shall refrain from calling a disease. A technological and bureaucratic world system will very likely give rise to tendencies to reject its own principles as diseased forms of some possibility it would hope to cultivate within its well-guarded borders. I think the lessons of the history of both social and political conflicts and the most fruitful ideas is rather more difficult than any set of clean separations could allow. To not give Hitler posthumous victories, we might start by not thinking in too similar terms. Saying this calumniates no one, because few of history’s catastrophes are the product of mere sin or evil, which is to say a bad will or an unhealthy antipathy.

That Nazism was a psychological illness is an idea that has enjoyed true popularity including in psychological sciences and techniques. The leading thinkers of the 60s in the school of psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein, Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, were Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe who were explicitly concerned to cure the social world of hatreds by treating individuals with psychical diseases. Klein seemed to think that evil is the consequence of the thinking of people whose primitive psychology drives them to divide the world into good and evil. That theory is not at all without plausibility, but it would have more credibility if the characteristic ways of thinking about people who think about the world in this way did not themselves share them. But that everyone judges hypocritical is a Christian idea I think we should refuse. In the end, maybe evil itself is a metaphor. We can ask today whether an ethics or a politics has the use for it that our revulsion at a civilization’s barbarisms, massacres, and catastrophes might seem to suggest. It leads to ethics of war and policing.

Could Nietzsche was right that we should have done with good and evil and think of good and bad in its place, an ethics without a morality, without law? Is it consistent with this to follow Arendt in concluding that what we do want to call evil is best cured by thinking. An evil that is curable will be cured by thinking well and clearly. If it is not curable, we can love and hate, strive for the good and deplore the evil, but we need far less to think. And if we fear that we ourselves or others unlike us will fall victim to the violence and cruelty of those who are thoughtless, maybe it is worth considering if Hillel’s famous maxim, “What is hateful to you, do not do to others,” is a maxim not just of an ethics but of thinking. After all, if you want to avoid what is hateful to you, but you do it or allow it to be done to others, than what is hateful is well preserved, while only persons have been subtracted from the world of its doing or being done to. The choice, then, may well be between expanding the worlds of art and something like philosophy and not so much those of medicine and administration, and technology and labor, or getting things done. There is no political medicine just as there is no purely political will. Maybe both the political and the ethical, and the artistic and intellectual practices that develop these as modes of social life, are more uncertain than that.

My hypothesis is that the Jewish world has always had a unique set of ways of relating concepts like chaos and order, life and form, potentiality and actuality, immanence and transcendence, center and margin, norm and exception, alienation and belonging, creativity and labor, sacred and secular, the visible and the sayable. To put it this way is to think philosophically, but no exclusion is intended of more historical and literary ways of thinking, nor of their lying somehow at the basis or being of greater force or meaning. (The old question of poetry and philosophy, or history and theory, narrative and fact, has no resolution if one asks them to be arranged in a hierarchy.) Ultimately this may be a difference in understanding the temporality of becoming and being, which can be made precise by stating that a poiesis or bringing- and coming-forth lies at the root of world-making or creation, world-disclosing or revelation, and world-improving or redemption. A robust working out of these philosophical notions would extend to explaining most of what else remains peculiar to what must be called the world’s greatest and most influential religion.

And the anti-semites? Among other things, they have the wrong (folk) theories of how we human beings relate ourselves to and live in the world. Just as in antiquity notions of magic, myth, and other things proved inferior on the plane of thought. And as for the hatreds born of resentments and dissatisfactions, they too are perfectly explainable. In the end, they are far less the willed destruction of some monstrosity of creation that must only be itself destroyed, than they are the consequences of mistaken thinking. Some of them think the world can be cured of malaises attributable to people who suffer from them particularly. Such simple notions are still with us.