Hamas and Other Normal Humans

Cold opening:

Ultimately, democracy and other demotic polities derive their ability to exist from the (extremely rare) accomplishment of getting a critical mass of "citizens" to take a basically positive-sum approach to "others," to step out of the hard zero-sum, us/them dyad (Richard Landes).

Context: we've been frolicking through the history of philosophy, separating the starters from the non-starters, and we're actually still on the "philosophy" of Jesus. But one can hardly talk about Jesus without bringing in the Jews. If Jesus is the marketing arm of salvation history, the Jews of antiquity were deeply involved in research & development. 

Or, you could describe the same arc as proceeding from tribal to global, particular to universal. Frankly, you -- or God rather -- must begin with a tribe, because man himself begins with tribes. Put conversely, there were no non-tribal men when Abraham walked the earth. 

This is one of those books -- we're speaking of Can "The Whole World" Be Wrong? -- that is so heavily highlighted by yours truly, that it's difficult to know where to begin. I can't just reprint the whole thing. There are rules. 

But one of my points is that those of us who grew up in a Judeo-Christian civilization have no idea how weird -- or W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) -- we are. And I was thinking about this before I read this book, which makes it even weirder, albeit in a different way. 

Those of us who grew up in such a civic culture, dedicated to these positive-sum strategies, tend to take them as axiomatic.

Mistakenly.

I blame the Jews. As does Landes:

[O]ne finds a remarkable overlap with Jewish (biblical and rabbinic) values on the one hand, and modern liberal thought, on the other.

NOT with illiberal progressive thought, which is a denial or inversion or perversion of our Judeo-Christian tradition. 

For example, what could be more perverse than arguing that From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free, when our (Judeo-Christian) concept of freedom is at antipodes to the premodern understanding of the Hamacidal savages? 

Before Abraham was, I AM. Nevertheless, what is first in intent is last in execution, so chronologically, Abraham is first:

Abraham and his descendants are given a task that, when successful, results in all the nations of the earth being blessed (ibid.). 

The Bible reminds us that Whoever blesses Israel will be blessed, and whoever curses Israel will be cursed. Big time, if we consider what a curse it would be to have to live in one of those Shiitehole countries where the Sunni don't shine -- which we can recognize with a glance at the world freedom index. Israel is free, and they are attempting to free Gaza from premodern tyranny. But no good deed goes unpunished by the left.

The descendants of Abraham are commanded to pursue high levels of positive-sum behavior regardless of whether those they deal with are trustworthy, even at the cost of suffering a great deal from those who abuse the vulnerabilities that entails (ibid.).

And here we are. 

Wait -- aren't Muslims descendants of Abraham too? Yes, but the line apparently split between Isaac and Ishmael. At any rate, someone dropped the ball, and I don't have time to research it. But Joyce certainly did. It's a motif that runs throughout Finnegans Wake:

Earwicker and his wife have two sons, called in their symbolic aspect Shem and Shaun.... They are the carriers of a great Brother Battle theme that throbs throughout the entire work.... [and] represent a subordinate, exclusively masculine battle polarity which is basic to all of history (Campbell).

I suppose it begins even earlier, with Cain and Abel. But let's focus.

Yesterday's post ended with the observation that an adequate theory of psycho-social evolution has yet to be constructed. So, we need to do something about that. 

For Landes, the development of a positive-sum orientation is a clear evolutionary advance over a negative-sum one, although the latter is a kind of default position that is baked into our genetic makeup. For those of us in the Judeo-Christian stream, things like tribalism, xenophobia, and racism are totally unacceptable. 

And yet, in earlier periods of human history, and for millennia longer than any modern cosmopolitan experiment, the basic structure of social reality (i.e., survival) revolved around a sharp dichotomy between us (band, clan, village, tribe), on whom we depend, and others (strangers) whom we, on principle, mistrust, oppose, even plunder, to survive (ibid.).  

Again, these latter are the default setting, although some of us move on from primitive identity politics. However, those of us who do leave tribalism behind imagine that other cultures have similarly transcended this modality -- somewhat like a bad case of psychohistorical Dunning Kruger.

[W]hat some of us contemptuously dismiss as a xenophobia, has been the overriding and necessary norm for most of the 150 millennia of human experience: "moral tribalism" (Landes). 

In this deeper evolutionary context, you might say that Hamas is totally normal, and that we are the historical freaks. So, let your freak flag fly:

To be continued...