Situations on occasion satirise themselves; too many words, or even the word itself taken for a title, however, may obscure the humour. By now this is an old lesson, though the passage of many people through a rather long period of time has not lessened the inability to absorb it, nor raised an inkling of the irony which then overtakes and encompasses them, as if to requite their not knowing what they say.
Ignorance makes for alliances and lineages that historical sense, had it instructed itself better, might have avoided in the first place, or counselled against continuing, were they somehow entered into by mishap, under the force of circumstance. But the serious study of history demands effort and ἄσκησις, whereas today’s society and all too many of its members are as though fully resolved to expend energy in easier pursuits. So the historical dimension, even though lip-service is given to it, concerns them very little for its own sake; in the common attitude, undertones of disdain for it are not exactly muffled.
Nonetheless, the lip-service becomes voluble and unctuous when the cause du jour prompts them to denounce sins of which the West is said to be guilty, in the shape of demonstrations whose aspect is single-minded and credal, not political in the better sense of the term. These amount to rites where penance is done, in acts of pseudo-contrition that confer great pleasure upon the participants; the insouciance with which they greet the phantasma of destruction being visited upon the West, in the first instance upon the state of Israel and the Jewish people, constitutes one significant part of these imaginary amends. Such proceedings are the conventicles of something like a “political religion” whose moral level, low to begin with, last October, has sunk further during the months since. History interests these adepts only insofar as its records are twisted to rationalise flagellant outbursts that facts do not warrant. Hence they approach it mainly as a fount of chastisement-value, without considering how its factuality retreats before their importune attentions.
In so doing they are in unspoken agreement with the society they profess to hate. What does the castigation they find so thrilling comprise, but a variation upon the frisson of violent spectacles that circulate incessantly through the mass media (also social media) and without which social relations would falter for lack of energy? When thrill-value becomes so prominent amidst today’s rapidity and enervation, they do not object, because their activity too is driven by this mode of stimulation. Images of violence visual and acoustic help to keep their metabolisms churning, and if the duplicity they live on foments bad conscience in them, at least some of its reproaches can be diverted into their protests themselves; although with this expedient the posturing is exposed more than before as being egoistic and farcical.
Inflated amour-propre on one side, evident disdain for the survival of a way of life on another: this pairing seems to contain the elements of a contradiction. Unless – they suspect everything, themselves included, is utterly misshapen, and anticipate, in recompense, an entire self-sacrifice to come, a full clearing-away of the debris, as still offering a route to some kind of salvation.
All are such caricatures of what they should be that death appears to be the only fitting resolution.
— J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors, ch. vi
If this nihilist alchemy tempts some Westerners to embrace the war against Israel, it may clarify the appeal of the idea that murderous violence will help bring about the birth of a free people.
Could boredom be more terrifying than all of war’s terrors?
— Hannah Arendt, Introduction, in Gray, The Warriors
Deliberate scratching of a vague sense of debt or guilt into an ulcer that must discharge – an end unto itself? What do they seek to awake (from)?
The actual motives continue to mystify me: perhaps to fathom them one’s mind really would need a Dostoevskyesque turn. Might the most adequate provisional explanation be that this bunch, by and large, acts out an echo of a state of soul it once heard about at school, the whole show little more than a mimetic exercise? Originality, after all, is not exactly these people’s forte.