Why? When you abstract away reality in favor of broad, sweeping ideas — work that belongs at the heart of many academic endeavors —
dangerous things can happen. You can abstract away men, women and children, thinking of them only as bit players in a larger (and much more interesting) intellectual drama. Why bother with reality when it is the life of the mind that matters?
When I see very smart, very earnest individuals, including my fellow Yale and Penn students and alumni, either cheering on Hamas, or, at the very least, working to understand and sympathize with them, I know that many of these individuals are not true Jew-haters (
though some are). They may not discriminate against Jews in their personal lives. They might not be peddlers of the Protocols, closeted Cossacks, or brazen blood libelers.
They’re something worse: intellectuals.
The hip intellectual move today is to see everything, everywhere, as an example of the
oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. The oppressor is perceived as privileged; the oppressed,
marginalized. The oppressor has more power; the oppressed, less. The oppressor has agency but no feelings; the oppressed has feelings but
no agency. The oppressor is automatically wrong; the oppressed, automatically right.
Since Hamas attacked Israel, the hip intellectuals have demonstrated the ultimate expression of this binary: The group that conducted a brutal attack on innocent civilians is good, and the group responding to try and ensure no such attack ever takes place again is bad.
The intuitive appeal of such black-and-white thinking is seductive. Is there anything better than feeling like part of an international movement of the underdog? What is more soothing than a wall-to-wall, all-encompassing moral vision? Such a vision divides the world into right and wrong, good and bad — and you’re always in the camp of the good guys.
Plus, for these intellectuals, the cost of this
luxury belief is
free. When you’re living in Brooklyn or Berkeley, you’re protected from the conflict itself. So you get the warm, fuzzy feeling of moral superiority while someone far away pays the costs. Best of all — it immediately simplifies our otherwise complex reality. You have power? Bad. You’re less powerful? Good.
What could be wrong with that?
Because it offers moralism without morality. Because it intentionally ignores reality in favor of an intellectual hologram. Because it justifies acts that, as President Joe Biden aptly put it, are “
pure, unadulterated evil.”
Despite being so concerned with history’s judgments, the hip intellectuals today seem blithely unconcerned with the fact that a similar group of intellectuals in the 20th century also abstracted away reality. They, too, had an all-encompassing vision. Part of the right race? The right class? Good. Part of a different race? Bad.
Different intellectual paradigm, same rotten intellectuals.
