Thoughts on fascism, Judaism, and philosophy

Hypothesis: The officially empowered extreme right uses violence partly to provoke the left. If people on the left say we hate this fascism, then they can use it against us, by calling us out on hatred.

This has the consequence that since civility has lost all credibility (the political center is dead), its rationale now is less moral than prudential.

To destroy the public sphere in order to create a functioning authoritarian capitalism that is neither democratic nor liberal, except on paper, and in ideologies fewer and fewer people can believe, is the principal work of "conservative" forces in creating fascism.

It helps in the construction of a fully fascist state that American society has long been essentially psychological.

An effect of this is that nothing and no one can be criticized. It will only fall back on you. An absolute state in a society with no functioning public sphere, such that power can never be contested (except maybe by calling your representative, or otherwise making some appeal, after you have been violated by people in authority, which everyone knows is pointless and stupid), has a need of such a notion of ‘karmic’ justice. Injustice in this right-wing imaginary is the very existence of anyone who wants anything contrary to what the people in charge are saying, doing, and ordering you to do. I learned this from living in California. It was called "friendly fascism." This meant that the one unpardonable sin was to ever show any negative emotion. Always be calm.

In this mythology, Hitler was an angry paranoid hater, and that was the cause of the Holocaust. That is a lie. Many Nazis are kind to their neighbors. The cause of the Holocaust, and the war, was not bad attitudes anyway. That is a fascist idea of what fascism was and is. Fascist governments will police the society to see that its people mostly have good attitudes, as workers are supposed to, and not rebel. And the man or woman who pushes a button that causes large numbers of people outside their immediate presence to die or suffer horribly, that man or woman may be a nice, ordinary person, just doing their job. In this context it is better to focus not on the commonality of evil (that all or most of the German people were guilty of causing the Holocaust is a popular myth sold to the citizenry of the conquerors, obviously distinct from the reasons (indeed, of course) justifying the cause) so much as the rarity of good, since a person doing their job is not so much guilty for that as the one who resists this evil is uncommonly to be praised, in, often under great risks, opposing the evil they are (indeed) unwittingly involved in. If evil is banal in some territory, than any force capable of exercising power upon it may as well destroy its residents: a logic of war. The Americans, now with their Israeli allies supported by the dominant American Jewish institutions funded by a class of wealthy donors and aligned with far right elements in our government, have been thinking in such ‘theological’ terms for decades. Social evils are not necessarily caused by personal moral ones. The barbarism of history is ill explained by attributing it to the causal force of an evil will. Religion, all religion, has difficulty recognizing this, and so do American liberals. To treat social evils as crimes is to refuse history and thus affirm as unchangeable and so uncriticizable the present state of affairs accessible to us through the possible actions of our government.

The American form of the hatred of hatred is to attribute social oppression to racism, anti-semitism, and other "hatreds," as if ideas and attitudes drove history in such a way that a government with a good enough police force and system of law and courts could solve history's problems by punishing every appearance of oppressive attitudes. As if slavery were caused by the prejudices of white Europeans, more than greed and the drive for profit. If oppression were caused by prejudice, than it would soon end as the more liberal American organizations would simply insist that all their employees sign an enforceable pledge to always be polite and never say anything that anyone might be offended by. Then poverty would stay as it is, but some lucky people would have legal protection from getting their feelings hurt. This is a wonderful likely consequence of ending all hatred. Who knows what it do for America's endless genocidal wars, including the current one being fought by proxy on the increasingly absurd pretext that it benefits American Jews outside the donor class that supports the synagogue rabbinate. Then again, Christian moralism was always rather thin in the utility of its consequences.

The Holocaust is the central event of recent European history, acknowledged as such since the project of a democratic socialism in Europe linked to global revolts against European colonialism was abandoned, in part because of disenchantment in Eastern Europe with the antidemocratic character of the form of socialism that had triumphed in Russia. It is still not possible to know if that idea is dead, especially since disenchantment with the capitalism that reemerged triumphant has grown. Now the problem is that the state of the world’s forms of (capitalist) governmentality (now increasingly authoritarian, even when ‘liberal’, meaning for markets and capital, not labor power, people, and populations, any of which can be confined, terrified, or massacred, while at the same time there is no clear alternative available, nor means of achieving. This means that the Holocaust is not past but something like it, something of which it must be seen as a part, continues. A conservative normality insists on the exceptionality of the Holocaust and by implication the acceptability of most, perhaps every, sufficiently (and judged so on what grounds?) less horrible form of barbaric practices of involuntary confinement, torture, and state-authorized murder, including genocide. A corollary of this usually is the exceptionality of the destruction of much of the European Jewish world. American narratives of American exceptionality are consistent with this in the popular ideological media-fed imaginary, and in their liberal form they typically combine (often mere) memes of anti-colonial, feminist, and anti-anti-semitic motifs in order to implicit affirm continued American global hegemony on the ideological supposition that what must be (with little thought or care) rejected is the barbaric colonial and patriarchal civilization of Europe that has been in decline since 1914. This narrative is not able to account for the problem of the current (latest) genocidal war and what has made it possible. Now the American government is poised to simply shut up or shut down all criticism, as happened in Germany in the early years of Nazism well before the Holocaust, which historiography’s condition of uncertainty renders it necessarily impossible to judge or know whether or to what extent that eventuality was “destined” or not, though we can infer that it might not have happened from the contingency of all events. But Holocausts continue.

Does Judaism possess the resources to understand and stop the horror? It has moral resources that may contribute to anyone’s living a good life, but little political theory. And much of what passes for it is now manifestly in the way. Good then indeed that some people within it are seeking answers, or ways of posing the questions needed, with their tradition’s own resources. The largest obstacle here is surely the religious fundamentalism and obscurantism to which the religion is not immune, as none is. If you believe that divine authority stands behind any statement, descriptive or prescriptive, rendering it impervious to criticism (though not of course interpretive elaboration that depends on it), then your practical political judgment today is at the mercy of what you are able to find in the available texts ascribable in some manner you are able to regard as credible to that divine authorization. This was disproved philosophically in the work of Kant, “the philosopher of the French revolution.” I learned finally that Judaism is not the set of beliefs that are property of the Jews and either true on a divine authority American protestants can well appreciate, or “true for” this particular nation of people (the modern state of Israel) because this truth represents their "interests,” which must be defined, since the factual historical existence as event of the Holocaust, supposedly, proves that “the Jewish people” are uniquely endangered, the privileged victims today of history, a history that the exceptional American state is uniquely authorized to prosecute and realize according to its ideas and plans, which means that those interests are of the continuance of a form of life that must be defended and that of course, is also identified with the being life as such of this specially privileged people, so that their “interests,” which are by definition a matter of property defined by the laws and armies of territorial states. But Judaism is not that; only Israel today is that. What is Judaism? It is a religion of a text. That text is not the Bible but the Talmud. This is a religion not of a land or a people but a text and a practice. That practice is study. It is true that that text involves arguments in discussions that, while themselves open and at least temporally undecidable, always ultimate reference the authority of an origin, an original text said to be given by a divine authority whose existence in Jewish tradition is mysterious enough that it is inadequate to suppose that this is the mystery of one who hides himself, since that itself is an imaginative figure. There is in fact no actual authorial origin, the origin the text references being an artefact of itself. This circularity is of the kind that only sophistical thinking can regard as sufficient in itself to authorize its maintenance by way of the arbitrary choice of a sovereign individual (reading, originally listening) subject to accept it upon “faith.” That is the sophistical, dogmatic, and obscurantist supposition of all traditional theology, Jewish and otherwise. As it is philosophically untenable, this is precisely where Judaism and philosophy normally, though not necessarily, part company. They must part company unless philosophy is granted epistemic priority. That priority is a fact, and an historical consequence of a revolution in thought that first took place in Greece, and that the Talmud was developed partly by absorbing. Judaism as we know is unimaginable otherwise, though a Biblical religion is not, and most Judaism remains epistemically in service of a dogmatic theology, rendering adherence to its textual claims, which practically are normative ones concerning justice and the obligations pertinent to living a good life, founded upon an untenable ground, which only fails to bother people who are satisfied, which is possible in premodern circumstances, with those ethical and moral prescriptions and the study of them. I take all this to mean that a fully modern Jewish culture would continue to value its tradition’s texts, while refusing every dogmatic belief. Reform Judaism made some efforts in this direction in the same period in which a modern philosophy influenced by the enlightenment and the French revolution was developing in Germany, but its intellectual creativity was weak indeed and the subsequent modernity of thought in Germany and all of Europe continued to escape it as it had the Jewish world largely. Reform was the religion of the German and then American Jewish bourgeoisie, not very different from protestantism; its virtue was that it remained intellectually open to developments in modern thought, though certainly the cultural and intellectual achievements of modern Jewish life continued to be overwhelmingly outside religion. The fatal fault of Reform in my opinion is that it was based ultimately on nothing, beyond a vague will to continue some involvement in the religious tradition’s practices, and that meant that beyond this all it could offer people was the same sense of community that churches offer, and a sense of cultural and social identity that in fact is the one thing that unites most American Jews today, as is well recognized. Should then the religion be salvaged by better philosophy? Probably not, because philosophy today is most vital addressing topics that are of interest to much broader audiences, and largely within the tradition that developed in Europe after Rousseau and Kant, and largely because of the political events leading to and following the French revolution. The American experience is different, and that of most American Jews is, like that of most European settlers, of finding refuge in this country and enjoying its liberties. A very different experience, leaving most American Jewish thinking that of a conservative liberalism. It suffices to look at the terrain of philosophy in Europe after the war, and even after the industrial and French revolutions, to see a different terrain. The theoretical resources that can help us understand the current civilization barbarisms are, I am convinced, in the European philosophical tradition, and that is indeed partly because it is part of the culture that brought us both modern colonialism and its violence (of which the Holocaust is an effect and variant instance) and modern liberal, democratic, socialist, egalitarian, political and social thought, which are among the world’s people’s best available resources for getting us out of this mess. We philosophers should look at contemporary expressions of experience and thought in the arts, as well as textual resources within our shared traditions. Jewish traditions are in a non-bounded sense (intersecting with and thus also exceeding it) a component of European one, culturally and intellectually. This is my tradition. I don’t claim to impose it upon anyone, and I don’t believe in a European or American cultural project that excludes some set of population groups that supposedly are outside it. There must be openness to the outside, and to those who might be (or have been) excluded. I reject identity as a member of an ethnic or national people. I affirm, as minimally as possible, in accordance with a preference for the minimal state, my legal citizenship in a country whose other citizens and government have certainly not been uniformly friendly to me (I recall many real experiences of the contrary, not attributable solely to my own deviance, however theorized - and my hatred endures against its psychologization or medicalization, profitable and readily, if unthinkingly, invocable as I have seen it to be, in a popular imagination driven by the dictates of school authorities and media information sources). I am an American by law, and by identity a person, who lives in a place and wishes to open to learning about the world. My neighbors are my neighbors wherever they are “from”; insipid is the idea of properly belonging in any place; one must always: proper to the place I am here and now is the fact of my being here, and the question is always how can I/we best assess the situation, which when defined becomes a practical question, in study a “problematic” (formally this means how a practical problem is figured and modeled conceptually). I am not a member of an ethnic identity group, or a sexual one, or a gendered one. Only under a tyranny is one obligated to answer to any authority other than one’s own conscience. In a total tyranny everyone is enlisted in the government’s war, and that has the implication that we are also its potential targets, since the governmental figures of war are the friend and enemy subjects of the sovereign power, subjected to it, obligated to have faith in it, not capable of being trusted by it, since its interests may not be ours and indeed to be properly subjected is to have no autonomous desire. America is already a police state in part because having no active class-based resistance to the capitalist form of political economy, our culture has no common sense that the governmental authority exercised by bosses of whatever kind is necessarily and essential hostile at least in a strongly visibly marked potentiality, since the boss’s interests are not yours, and capital is always in conflict with labor power and potentially in a violent repressive war against it. Jewish tradition has in it some wonderful elements contributing to the culture of any useful political activism in resistance, as do various other religious and cultural traditions. Politically, I think that’s about it. Its religion is not a politics, though in corrupt forms it seems to make as wonderful a support for fascism as it did in Germany. Small difference in my opinion this matter of the historical configuration of the Jews in Europe and Germany then and in America today. There is little interest right now in defending the interests of Jews in America (or Israel) as such; they are well defended, celebrate that if you like, since of course it is better than it has been elsewhere. When I hear so many Jews whine about history and their ancestors, I find something cowardly about this, especially as it is so contrary to fact, at least presently. Of course we have ample grounds to imagine that this could change or be very different in some other time or place. But this is the paranoid logic of scared people. I find it annoying enough when it is said and done in the context of not much, beyond the now frequent acts of violence in American life that affect lots of people. It is horrifying when used as an excuse to support genocide.

The American left is intellectually almost bankrupt. The Jewish left was once Marxist, and otherwise defined itself by the realities of American history and politics. Most activists derive their thinking from the newspaper, not the philosophy seminar. I am turning to philosophy. I satisfied myself in studying the matter that nothing in Judaism if understood right validates this American and Israeli idea of the Jewish people as a social identity being at the basis of either the religion or anything else that is normative. And those claims can in fact only be made sense of in terms of the tradition of political thought developed in the modern Western philosophical tradition, since all of the relevant ideas and questions derive from that tradition and not the earlier ones of literature in Hebrew and Aramaic. The only Jewish modernity that has ever existed to my knowledge, so far, is the one that developed in modern Europe beginning with the Renaissance, out of a philosophical tradition that was developed in Europe and the Mediterranean in the middle ages. This can certainly be found in Israel, though it is there by an accident of history, since the political, economic, and social forms of that state are almost entirely independent of it. That state is destined to be eventually transformed from within into one that is no longer an Apartheid state resident to more than one nationality but the legal property of only one. This will happen peacefully, as war could not achieve it. It will happen peacefully when enough Jews no longer want it, perhaps because they can no longer tolerate the consequences. There will still be a Jewish presence in Israel/Palestine or whatever bounded territorial name is given with a governmental apparatus serving its residences as citizens without discrimination. This is an historical necessity, and if it does not happen, there is surely no future for the Jewish people in that land, but only outside it, and that would be sad in many ways. I would like this presence to be maintained, but the cost of genocidal war is far too high, and the exclusionary practices that led to it, inevitably perhaps, were already unacceptable. They are horrifying, rendering Israel an armed camp, a military state, a Sparta, whose ultimate reason for being is only that all its ‘proper’ citizens are scared to death. It is even more horrifying if the world is becoming like that, and in some ways it is. Jewish tradition does provide plenty of prophetic authorization for wanting to stop that and create something much happier, for its adherents and the world. The resources for thinking about the way the world is today and what can be done to get out of this mess are in a larger tradition widely shared, and I find it funny and strange that most American Jews I have met know nothing of it just as American liberal culture is outside it, perhaps because this country is so militarized and ultra-capitalist, a model Israel exemplifies in extremis, at least the military part, though it is also true simply that American culture is profoundly anti-intellectual. I was pondering the question of a leftist Jewish politics versus the involvement of Jews in a renewed leftist politics. I vote for the latter, because the intellectual resources of such a politics (and the cultural ones, which are in modern art, including cinema, which today is quite international, American hegemony in this field also now happily in decline) are outside it. I also affirm the primary of philosophy. It is only a matter of opinion in the banal sense that the reader is not obligated by force of arms or boss of a company to compliantly consent to the propositions argued. Philosophy is primary over religion at least in its domain, and it has a domain. Religious thought as such must not be granted political authority, as publicly its claims always have only the status of opinions that people are authorized to maintain privately, and that means that claims in the public sphere may be tacitly informed by one’s religious views and other personal inspirations, but claims thereto are, as claims, perfectly irrelevant. ML King and others were admirably inspired by their religious thinking, but their public political claims derived their urgent appeal from actual realities intelligible on the perfectly ‘secular’ terms in which they were articulated. Everything else is religious fascism at worst, dogmatic obscurantism at best. Religious people on the left should find all the inspiration they can from their particular traditions and texts, but the discussions we ought to have that most matter depend little upon them (at least pending work by religious scholars that has not yet been done - is there more?) and much on traditions of thought that are not even on the map of American activists. Contemporary radical political philosophy is studied in American when at all by university scholars studying to be historians and critics of one or more of the arts. At least until now.