Links to Consider, 4/23
Brink Lindsey on dystopia; Heather Heying on natural light; Daniel Gordis on Israel's internal tensions; Liel Leibovitz on Israel's internal tensions
My own sense of the likeliest dystopian outcome is one in which things gradually devolve into an ever more repellent caricature of where we are today: a cossetted and insular elite that maintains plebeian acquiescence in its domination through a combination of intensive surveillance and digital bread and circuses; the general abandonment of efforts to improve the material conditions of ordinary people in favor of facilitating their escape to frictionless virtual fantasy worlds; the ongoing substitution of stimulation, spectacle, and distraction for relationships with flesh-and-blood people and engagement with the physical world; the continued triumph of safetyism and the therapeutic ethic, and the consequent marginalization of value systems that prioritize anything above healthy bodies and calm, pleasant affect; the progressive breakdown of epistemological and ethical universalism and retreat into identitarian tribalism; deepening estrangement from the idea that history has anything valuable to teach us other than a catalog of unenlightened horrors; and thus, in sum, the dismal flattening and narrowing of existence that is the inevitable result of disconnection from all the primary sources of human greatness and fulfillment.
Otherwise, this is not an information-dense essay.
The sun emits NIR photons at a staggering rate. Moonlight does as well, at a rather less substantial rate. So does firelight. Even incandescent bulbs do. But compact fluorescent bulbs, and the LEDs that we currently have access to, do not. So those of us who spend most of our time inside, with little exposure to sunlight, working in “modern” spaces without candles or incandescent bulbs, are getting very little NIR. Our cerebrospinal fluid can’t direct NIR deep into our brains if we aren’t receiving any in the first place. The brains of those who spend all their time inside are both dark, and without any sunshine at all. And that lack of sunshine in the brain may be making us very sick indeed.
what you have seen play out in recent weeks has been an extraordinary exhibition of love of country, of devotion to Zionism, of almost completely violence-free protests by hundreds of thousands of people for three months. What you have seen is the melding of (whatever little bit remains of) the left and the center, joined by many on the right who were so deeply worried about the split in the nation that they, too, though they favored the reforms, said it was time to stop. …
What you witnessed was the left-center adopting and embracing the flag, embracing and loving the country that many people thought they’d long since stopped caring about.
The upshot?
you just witnessed one of the greatest weeks in Israeli history.
…no resolution to the protests that are tearing the country apart is likely forthcoming: the people marching in the streets of Tel Aviv want to make sure theirs is a country like any other, one that mandates mixed-gender seating for everyone, where malls are open on Yom Kippur, and that the benighted bigots who insist otherwise are kept safely away from the levers of power. You can focus, like Ben Haim, on the inherently racialized undertone of so much of these protests—Mizrachi Israelis, who overwhelmingly support Netanyahu, are routinely characterized as uncultured rubes too simple to understand intricate ideas like global finance and blockchain, let alone international relations. But you hardly need that added layer to understand the depth of the drama.
To me, the array of political forces seems complicated.
There are the descendants of European Jews. Many of their ancestors came to Israel before a state was declared in 1948. Their priority was a state where they would not be subjected to pogroms and Final Solutions. For many of them, Jewish traditions are not a high priority. They would like to live in a European social democracy, but without the antisemitism.
There are the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews, or Mizrachis. Their ancestors mostly came after 1948. In Israel, they faced decades of prejudice and scorn inflicted by the European elites, much like the prejudice and scorn that rural blue-collar folks in the United States face from college-educated elites. Today, the Mizrachis are about half of the Israeli population, and the prejudice has declined considerably. There is a lot of intermarriage between Mizrachis and Jews of European descent. The Mizrachis, who support Netanyahu’s party, want to continue to gain respect. They want to keep up at least some of the traditions of their ancestors from Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East. But they want to make darn sure that they are never again subjected to the sort of Muslim oppression that their ancestors experienced under Arab rule.
There are the ultra-Orthodox, who have been fruitful and multiplied. They want a state that enforces Jewish religious laws.
There is the settler movement, which wants Jews to be able to live anywhere within ancient Israel, including land that everyone else in the world thinks ought to belong to the Palestinians.
Until the recent election, governing coalitions were a blend of these groups and others. Netanyahu’s coalitions typically included secular and/or left-of-center parties, which acted as ballast that kept policy from drifting very far to the right.
The newest coalition government essentially assembles the last three of the groups above, each of whom is determined to advance an agenda that is anathema to the first group. For the secular descendants of European Jews, this raises fearful prospects. Hence, they have taken to the streets.
Picture the left as a four-year-old whose favorite toy has been grabbed away by playmates. The left yells, “It’s our democracy. You can’t have it.” The minor parties in the coalition reply, “No. You had a long turn. You never let us have a real turn. It’s our turn now.”
Gordis looks at the situation and sees adults coming in to settle things. Leibovitz doesn’t.
Substacks referenced above:
@
@
@
@
The theory that cerebrospinal fluid conducts significant amount of NIR photons into the brain and that these photons somehow interact with the brain in a meaningful way (lighting it up - instead of just heating it) is a bit quack.
Brink Lindsey writes about the need to pivot our society to a Plan B because of the challenges in our society that you cite here. But what kind of political solution do you think our present dysfunctional government and our divided and distracted electorate would settle upon? It would either be forced upon the 49% by the 51%, leading to chaos, or it would be some half-baked compromise leading to chaos. The odds of a near term political Plan B being better than staying put are basically nil. I would much rather we stick as close as possible to what we have now (which, as Lindsey mentions, is actually a very good place to be historically speaking) until our culture is in a better place for making decisions. For now the push for radical change has to be cultural (toward unity and reality) rather than political.