Week 45: A Fraction Too Much Friction
Week 45: A Fraction Too Much Friction
Violence on Melbourne's streets is part of a convergence of fissures that are destabilising all our societies – rather than one major event.
This week in Melbourne there was a significant street clash outside a synagogue in a Jewish suburb. The clash came after a burger restaurant owned by a Palestinian-Australian man was subject to an arson attack. Police have yet to confirm whether the attack was politically motivated, but given the heightened emotions of the time, people have drawn their own conclusions.
Similar skirmishes are occurring throughout the world. The current crisis in Gaza animates people in the way other conflicts don’t. No-one is getting similarly roused up by the on-going ethnic slaughter in Darfur, for example. Israel/Palestine attaches itself to existing political cleavages (although also creates new ones), inflames polarisation, ferments conspiracy, and hardens worldviews in ways that other issues don’t.
Understanding these passions was undoubtedly a factor in Hamas’s actions. Broadly, there was a threefold strategy – firstly, to do as much violent damage as possible with the initial attack, secondly, to encourage a brutal response from Israel which would kill thousands of innocents to shift people’s revulsion towards Israel (a trap Israel has walked into), and thirdly to create major domestic divisions throughout the world.
These divisions are forming another fissure in our current age of instability. Rather than one major destabilising event – like a world war – we are seeing numerous fractures appearing across a range of different issues. This issues can range from regional wars (which are obviously horrific for these regions) that have global emotional investments, the undermining mutually-beneficial rules by China, the emergence of authoritarian domestic actors in the West, to the cost of housing and other necessities, to the increasingly “male drift” that make personal relationships – what societies are built upon – difficult to form.
Big and small, a myriad of different fractures and difficulties are emerging that are making our foundations far less sturdy. Although we should always try to reject political binaries (your regular reminded to burn the left-right spectrum to the ground), the one political superstructure of our era is stability vs instability. Recognising who is invested in the former and who is trying to ferment the latter is our key public responsibility. With a recognition that destabilising forces are often attracted to and in conflict with each other.
This Week’s Reading:
(A bit less this week, apologies)
The Battle for the Soul of the Dalai Lama
Lobsang Sangay – Foreign Affairs
“As the Dalai Lama gets older, China has become increasingly invested in the question of his succession. When a high lama—an important priest—dies, his post is typically filled by someone identified as his reincarnation. This tradition is deeply entrenched in the spiritual and cultural fabric of Tibetan Buddhism. Communist China, which under Mao was so vigorously and uncompromisingly atheist in its orientation, now seeks to control the process that will identify the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. This audacious move points to China’s drive to consolidate its hold over Tibet, a strategy that not only seeks to fatally undermine the institution of the Dalai Lama but also encroaches on the Tibetan people, their rich culture, and their civilisation.
In 2007, the Chinese government asserted its jurisdiction over spiritual matters and proclaimed that the tulku system could operate only with state approval. Traditional precedents were not enough to govern the selection of reincarnated lamas; it now was subject to Chinese laws. Authorities promulgated a national-level decree through the State Administration and Religious Affairs department. This legislation formalized an earlier set of reincarnation rules announced by the Chinese-controlled Tibet Autonomous Region in 1995.
China may officially be an atheist state, but through such legislation it continues to interject itself into the religious lives of its citizens. Its track record of meddling in the selection of Tibetan reincarnated lamas has proved largely unsuccessful, often leading to widespread anxiety and confusion among Tibetans. A distressing example is the case of the 11th Panchen Lama, the second-most well-known lama in Tibetan Buddhism, who was endorsed by the Dalai Lama in 1995 at the age of five as the reincarnation of the tenth Panchen Lama. That same year, the Chinese government forcibly disappeared him from his hometown in Tibet. Authorities then elevated their own choice of a boy as the 11th Panchen Lama. The disappeared boy remains missing after 29 years, as do his parents and the main members of the search committee that identified him.”
Even the Oppressed Have Obligations
Michael Walzer – The Atlantic
“In light of all this, to cast Hamas solely as an agent of resistance is to overlook a lot. It is a government that has failed its people. It is also a movement for Palestinian national liberation with a significant, but probably minority, following in Gaza and considerable influence throughout the Arab world. It is, finally, a movement that has chosen terror as its means of struggle—not as a last resort but as a matter of policy from its beginning. What are the obligations of a movement like that? I should say right now: Its first obligation is to reject terrorism.
Let’s pause here and look at a classic argument first worked out in a different liberation struggle—the class war of Europe’s and America’s workers. Lenin famously distinguished between “revolutionary” and “trade union” consciousness among the workers, the first directed toward the distant achievement of a communist society, the second aimed right now at higher wages, better working conditions, and the end of the factory foreman’s tyranny. Lenin favored the first and worried that any advance along trade-union lines would make revolution more difficult. Most workers, it turned out, favored the second approach. Revolutionary consciousness ended in dictatorship and terror or in defeat and sectarian isolation; trade-union consciousness led to the successes of social democracy.
That old distinction holds for national liberation too. In the case of Palestine and Israel, revolutionary consciousness aims at a radical triumph: Greater Palestine or Greater Israel “from the river to the sea.” That aim is often expressed in messianic language—the religious version of revolution. By contrast, trade-union consciousness is represented by those who work for a division of the land—two states, sovereign or federated or confederated. That may seem utopian right now, but it isn’t messianic. One can imagine it as a human contrivance, worked out by Palestinians and Jews who are committed concretely to the well-being of their people. We should judge Hamas, I would argue, by the standard of trade unionism because that kind of politics is genuinely responsive to the needs and aspirations of the people it aims to liberate.”
Brian Klass – The Garden Of Forking Paths
“The Red Queen Fallacy helps explain why, as the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han puts it, “Haste, franticness, restlessness, nervousness and a diffuse sense of anxiety determine today’s life.” We schedule a dinner with a long-lost friend, only to find out that the next available window is in six weeks. But too often, in the meantime, we’re unthinkingly living a drive-thru existence. Efficiency is paramount because everything feels like a race that never ends, a treadmill without an off switch.
Racing to keep up, we tend to find it exotic and eccentric when people linger without a purpose, when one wanders aimlessly, or when we see a stranger sitting and thinking in public without a smartphone as a distraction. The solo diner without a book or phone is seen as a weirdo; the person who wanders alone for hours in nature deemed a loner. Constant hyper-activity hasn’t just defeated patient stillness and slow reflection—what Hannah Arendt called the vita contemplativa. Instead, the modern rat race has massacred it so much that many of us can’t even handle being forced to be alone, with nothing but our minds as company.”
Republicans Have Chosen Nihilism
Peter Wehner – New York Times
“Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it is no longer by any means clear who is leading whom. So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved, because the Democratic Party is, for them, an unthinkable alternative. The result is that they have been sucked, cognitively and psychologically, into their own alternative reality, a psychedelic collage made up of what Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to Mr. Trump, famously called “alternative facts.”
The original left-wing version of postmodernism that Mr. Bloom complained about was corrosive for the reasons he discussed, and it still is, but the right-wing version is several orders of magnitude more cynical, irrational and destructive. Nihilism is a choice — it is forced on no one — and conservatives must somehow find a way to turn back toward their original ideals.
The core concern expressed by Mr. Bloom more than 35 years ago was that relativism and nihilism would lead to impoverished souls, especially among the young, the decomposition of America’s social contract and its political culture, and a “chaos of the instincts or passions.” His worst fears have been realized. What Mr. Bloom could not have imagined is that it would be the right that would be the author of this catastrophe.”
Recently I’ve been listening to a quite a bit of Split Enz – a great Kiwi band from the 1970s and early-1980s. In doing so I’ve been thinking about the cultural terrain that allowed them to develop – New Zealand men are more secure in their masculinity than Australian men, and so more musically, and especially visually, creative bands have been able to develop there. This clip seems very unlikely to have emerged from Australia – even if the band spent most of their career living in Melbourne.