Columbia as a phenomenon – a few thoughts
On my last visit to America I had several trips to southern Missouri. Whether for a coffee stop or to refuel, I happened to pass through towns the like of which I had never seen before. DeSoto Missouri, Bismarck Missouri, and the like – broken and neglected towns built by huge rusting mineral mines. Their streets raise dust, their roofs are broken, and their inhabitants are forgotten. Outside each house set a group of villagers seemed to be waiting. Waiting for someone to help them in the poverty that globalization has landed on them, waiting for their existence to be acknowledged. Parallelly, the US global stratum looks everywhere but to its backyard. It denies it. Ashamed of it and mocks its residents for generations. Refers to a chunk of land as big as Western Europe as a “black hole” stuck between the coasts. The forgotten people see it, and they do not forget. This account remains open and is redeemed on election day. Most of all – Donald Trump is a revenge of the forgotten. He is tomatoes thrown at the ivory tower. To the smart – he is a wake-up call. That brings me to my second point.
The Ivory tower is too tall. The book of Genesis tells the story of the tower of Babylon – the one that challenged God. As the story goes, God got angry at the pretensions of humans and created different languages for them. From that moment the ability of the tower builders to communicate was taken away – and the tower collapsed. It seems that the American academy, as well as the mass American stratum that boasts of the title “liberals” are passing from such a Babylonian phase. A stage that appears in several ways – the first, is a continuous distancing from simple logic and replacing it with a cumbersome dialectic, the whole purpose of which is to show off an intellectual ego that hides a conceptual void when it comes to the practical reality of the world. This is a society where discourse is completely disconnected from its actual meaning. For Columbia students, October 7th is the application of theories in political science and nothing else. It is not about human life but an intellectual exercise in which the winner’s identity must be decided. In a society where people are crucified for misusing pronouns, humans are bowling soldiers with a label. A second phenomenon is the infiltration of messianic thinking characteristics since the American society perceives itself as a messiah on earth and not as it is – an imperial society whose existence depends on it being such. The transformation into a Messianic society is reflected in the aspiration for an apocalyptic vision that has characterized religions and other utopian movements throughout history. Accordingly, the right and Christian side of the American political map became more evangelical over the years, and the left and secular side of the political map turned to communism – the first secular religion, or to Islam which entered the vacuum left by the separation from the church. In a messianic society, destruction is a good thing. It’s a step towards redemption. Of course, this is a serious logical error. Some say that it originates from an ancient line of thought that follows the mechanism of the seasons – autumn brings fall, and the frozen winter is followed by the warm days of spring, the stimming summer, and yet again. As mentioned, this is an error. The human world is separate from nature and experience shows that destruction brings destruction and growth brings growth. In the context of the attitude of American society to Israel, this appears on two competing levels – the American evangelical right donates a lot of money to the settlement enterprise to bring about the Armageddon and the return of Christ, and the American left donates a lot of money to Palestinian Salafi terrorism under the assumption that the disappearance of Zionism – which they identify their own primal sin, settler colonialism – will bring the solution of the climate crisis closer. Both are equally messianic beliefs, both are disconnected from reality, and both are popular among those who have the privilege of not bearing the consequences of their beliefs. As said, the Ivory Tower is too tall – and people are just ants in the distance.
And more precisely, a distance of two oceans. The US is a vast country with friendly borders. As a result, its citizens are among the last in the world to face threats from conflict. Indeed, in the past century and a half, the United States has experienced only two attacks on its soil. The first was met with the dropping of two atomic bombs, and the second with a prolonged ground invasion of several countries. The American citizen, regardless of who they are, is almost immune to external threats—and this is an unparalleled privilege. Still, for American society, which obsessively focuses on privileges, this privilege is so transparent, so taken for granted, that a generation has grown up in the US seeking revolution to support, and look as far away as in the Middle East, where it finds Islamism. At this stage, the direction taken by the ‘intellectual circle’ of the American pro-Palestinian movements appears to be vigorous support for enterprises and actions that do not benefit the well-being of Palestinians or the well-being of anyone else in the Middle. The praise the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ had received focuses solely on the attack being a manifestation of radical revolutionary impulses, completely ignoring the consequences of that action in reality – which are thousands of dead Israelis, tens of thousands of dead Palestinians, and the complete destruction of Gaza and its society. A movement that truly championed the liberation of the Palestinian people would place great importance on the devastating and perhaps irreversible damage caused to Palestinians after the attack on October 7. However, as I mentioned earlier, destruction is viewed positively in messianic movements— movements like Hamas – which initiated the attack knowing what the response was going to be, and like their Anglo-Saxon supporters who are in it for the blood. From my perspective, Western support for Islamic terrorism, while based on an ideological framework, is actually an expression of a Freudian psychological tendency.
According to Freud, every person in the world has a death drive. In a state of nature, that drive kept us safe, but since we live in civilization, it is considered destructive, and we repress it, and the stricter civilization is, the more we repress it. A basic lesson in psychology is that repression creates neurosis, which eventually leads to an outburst. This was the case of Nazi Germany. After World War I, German society entered such a severe phase of repression that it ultimately led to a violent outbreak unprecedented in human history. In my view, these movements of Islamist apologists are expressions of American neurosis. Indeed, a positive and direct correlation can be identified between belonging to circles where the cost of individual limitation is higher and supporting murderous movements from the other side of the world. All of the above provides possible reasons for the bizarre scenes sweeping through the campuses of prestigious American universities over the past year. But let there be no mistake—pointing out causality and providing explanations do not absolve these movements of responsibility. Despite the postmodern tendency to confuse explanation with justification, those drooling students have a choice, just as Palestinians have a choice, and the Israeli army has a choice. Reality is not a decree of fate; at the very least, we should not view it as such. The adoption of determinism, characteristic of American radical left movements, absolves individuals of responsibility for their actions and is a dangerous phenomenon. It undermines the concept of free choice—one of the cornerstones of liberalism that enables these movements. This danger must be taken seriously, as in the case of American society—which, as noted, is immune to external threats—it represents an internal vulnerability that might contribute to a Babylonian collapse.