Artificial Unintelligence (AU) and the Problem of Perpetual Patchability

It is increasingly recognized that large language models (LLMs) are prone to erroneous outputs, a phenomenon known as hallucinations. As AI spreads ever wider into the technological substrate of late modernity—summarizing news stories, synthesizing search results, condensing research papers, speeding up office worker productivity, and so on—the hallucinatory effects of AI are only likely to grow more consequential.

To give just one relatively innocent example: In 2022, Google announced that it was deploying its Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to produce “snippets,” or brief summaries, of search results. So how’s it faring? Say you want to learn whether Switzerland is a member of the European Union. You might plausibly search for a phrase like “Switzerland EU.” As of May 2024, the phrase results in the following Google-manufactured summary of a Wikipedia page devoted to Switzerland-European Union relations: “Switzerland is a member state of the European Union (EU).”

The only problem, of course, is that this is completely wrong. In fact, the first sentence of the Wikipedia page that Google summarizes, states exactly the opposite of Google’s AI-driven summary: “Switzerland is not a member state of the European Union (EU),” Wikipedia writes (emphasis added). 

So how did Google’s AI-driven model get it so wrong? How can artificial intelligence be so confidently unintelligent as to omit something so basic as the negation, thereby inverting the original proposition’s meaning and upending its truth-content?

There are lots of other examples of hallucinations, such as LLMs generating lists of references to works that do not exist, or summarizing books that have never been written, or which contain completely different materials from what the program claims. 

The makers of AI do not necessarily know why their LLMs produce the outputs they do, a phenomenon known as the “black box problem”: You enter some input X into a program, which produces some output Y, but what happens in the intermediate phase is governed by logics and datasets so complex and convoluted that the mediating link risks turning into a mystery, even unto its own creators.

Artificial Unintelligence (AU)

The problem with AI’s growing proliferation today, then, can be summarized in the following formula: hallucinations * black box = Artificial Unintelligence (AU).

1. Hallucinations mean we cannot inherently trust the truth-content of AI outputs. From this basic lack of trustworthiness, it follows that we cannot determine in advance when we might find ourselves in the throes of AI hallucination and when we are being addressed by a more lucid apparatus. The outputs are therefore in essence spoiled, unless we possess the expert knowledge to make reasonably certain determinations about their veracity (but then why would we want or need AI outputs?).

2. Worse still, the black box problem means we do not necessarily know why the AI model is hallucinating. This has led to the rise of the Explainable AI movement (abbreviated to XAI), which advocates constructing AI in such a way that the inscrutable black box might turn into a more transparent “glass box,” satisfying a claimed human “right to explanation,” a basic condition of human machine-learning oversight.

3. The modulation of hallucinatory drives by the basic fact of black-box opacity means that, even as the world seems on the verge of a “great leap forward” into the unknown abyss of machine learning (from higher education to journalism, from office productivity to tutoring aids), we are at risk of consigning ourselves to Artificial Unintelligence.

The Forever Patch

Silicon Valley is, I think, increasingly aware of the risks posed by the two-headed beast that is Artificial Unintelligence, which is at once enormously learned (measured in the vast quantities of text and other data that it has consumed) and strangely idiotic (claiming, for instance, that Switzerland is a part of the EU, or offering summaries of imaginary books). 

But Silicon Valley has, intentionally or inadvertently, developed—or hit upon—an ingenious technical-political technique to manage and respond to the problem: perpetual patchability. 

An AI model is never “finished,” never actually ready for consumption in a completed state, but exists in an ever-evolving state of development. All we get are versions, never finalized editions, a basic feature of software as such, but all the more aggressively emphasized in AI marketing. Thus, in early May 2024, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, claimed that ChatGPT, while seemingly impressive today, would retroactively be transformed by the future appearance of newer, improved versions of the program: “In the next couple of 12 months, I think the systems that we use today will be laughably bad.” Similarly, in early 2024, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, promised that ChatGPT-5 (version 5.0) would be a major improvement. The present moment “is the stupidest these models will ever be,” Altman said.

AI LLMs, then, are said to be in a constant state of improvement, and developers claim the right to forever make improvements to “the system,” even going so far as to admitting that their present-day product is “laughably bad.” This creates a state of permanent disruption, throwing the user—and much of an increasingly AI-fixated society—into an always unraveling present moment that awaits only the next patch. 

More importantly, permanent patchability precludes socio-technical critique: If the object is always being unmade and remade, how can critics hope to convince with their assessments of a system that is always-already undergoing transformation (and, so it is claimed, fundamental improvement)? The forever patch, or state of perpetual patchability, is an ingenious technique for regulating and stifling criticism, not by modernist techniques of brute control, but through the late-modern promise of a permanently disrupted/improved future.

Perpetual patchability may be Silicon Valley’s optimism of the will, embodied and turned into social ontology. But is it enough to fundamentally alter the basic problem confronting AI today: its shadowy obverse, the specter of artificial unintelligence? I think not. I suspect that throwing more data at the AU will not fundamentally alter the constraints outlined in the formula above: hallucinations * black box = Artificial Unintelligence (AU). In fact, the hallucinatory tendencies may worsen or grow more insidious. The problems of opacity might become more profound as the systems grow in complexity.

But who can really tell? The forever patch means we can never, finally, be certain of what we are dealing with. A perpetually patchable object is one that, therefore, intelligently eludes critique. In this, at least, Silicon Valley demonstrates the not inconsiderable intellectual resources at its command.

And that Switzerland search result? It might already have been patched by some Google engineer.

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First published on The Theory Brief

Social Democracy, or Defending the National Interest

Social democracy may be the solution to the problems of some fortunate subset of individual nations, but it is not a solution for the world as such—that is, to collective global problems and to the problems of poorer nations around the globe today. Instead, social democracy—so I argue in a forthcoming publication—fundamentally hinges on the preservation of difference, and in many cases the active production and acceleration of differences between nations, for internal, nationally-bounded ends.[1] Social democracy is, finally, about furthering the well-being of a nation’s own citizens—and by extension, a given state’s own national interests. If everyone were to become a high-functioning Nordic welfare-capitalist society, for instance, the difference-reliant components inherent to the social-democratic model of political economy would in short order begin to break down.

Briefly restated: No social democracy without global hierarchies—of wealth and poverty, of power and dispossession, of capital and labor, of financial rentier and client-tenants. In this sense, social democracy fails Kant’s categorical imperative: Social democracy can never become a solution for the entire universe of states in the world today, can never become generalizable to the world as such.

Why is this important? Because social democracy, and the countries most commonly associated with this reformist vision of market capitalism, the Nordic countries, are often held up as exemplars for the rest of the world to follow. (The examples are too many to enumerate, but for one example, see George Lakey’s Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right—and How We Can, Too.) 

But as I argue in my paper, “The global hinterland of social democracy,” this is strictly speaking an impossible promise to the world, especially those parts of the world riddled with poverty and positioned at the lower ends of global political-economic hierarchies. Social democracy needs what I call a global hinterland to meet its specific national needs and relies upon global hierarchies to feed its national populations. Social democracy is, we might say, great for those who can get it; but so few can—and largely for structural reasons. While social democracy is often redescribed as welfare capitalism, in practice this usually ends up meaning welfare for those on the inside of the social-democratic national polity (including social security and free public healthcare and education), and capitalism for everyone else.

So what are some of the things this global hinterland supplies a nationally-bounded social democracy like Norway with? In the specific case of Norway—and we sociologists should always be careful to ground our analyses in “concrete analyses of a concrete situation,” in Lenin’s famous phrase—the big factors are cheap labor from geographically peripheral zones (mainly Eastern Europe), cheap imported goods (from the industrial heartland of the world in East and Southeast Asia), and accessible financial markets across the world, to revalorize its pension funds and world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, the Norwegian government’s “Oil Fund.” Meanwhile, Norwegian corporations—including a booming weapons industry—are increasingly present and engaged in profit-extracting activities around the world .

Without labor, goods, profits, and financial value pulled in from the global hinterland—that is, from those less privileged zones of the globe not fortunate enough to be ensconced at the top of political-economic hierarchies, whose citizens are largely not protected by the welfarist side of “welfare capitalism”—social democracy in Norway would be that much harder to sustain. While it might be tempting for reformist progressives to ask, “What can we learn from Norway?”, as Senator Bernie Sanders did in an interview with Norway’s Washington DC ambassador in a 45-minute long webcast in 2022,[2] it is equally important to follow up and ask: What must social democracies do in and to the world in order to remain identifiably social-democratic? And is this is a trully universalizable model of political-economic transformation?

Does my paper, then, tell a story about social democracy in general or Norway in all its messy empirical specificities? A bit of both. In the company of the Nordics, the Oil Fund is a highly specific Norwegian institution to be sure, but Sweden and Denmark’s large state-owned pension funds are key pillars in their respective welfare states as well, with deep reliance upon profit-extraction from global financial markets. Norway has also been enormously fortunate to be able to export oil and gas for decades, making it less exposed to international market competition, unlike, say, Sweden’s manufacturing industrial base, which has been ravaged by competition from countries like China, without the soft cushioning effects of vast oil resources to act as a shock absorber for the welfare state.

But if anything, the vast wealth generated by the commodification of these natural resources demonstrates even more clearly the basic logic at the core of the social-democratic project: This is a national, not internationalist, system of market-capitalist reform, primarily intended for the benefit of the nation and its people. The trillions in natural resource revenues over the years have not to any significant degree—development aid notwithstanding, which has always consumed a paltry proportion of state budgets—been devoted to amelioriating the life chances of the world’s poor, or redressing global power imbalances, but rather to bolstering the nation-state and its privileged citizenry. 

Yet again, welfare capitalism tends to mean welfare for those on the inside, and capitalism for all the rest. To truly attend to the world’s problems would mean abandoning the parochial, nation-centered vision of social democracy for something like a true internationalism.

Notes

[1] For a fuller elucidation of this argument, see: Shammas, V. L. (2024) “The global hinterland of social democracy: On the limitations of Norwegian welfare capitalism.” Nordic Welfare Research/Nordisk välfärdsforskning.

[2] Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, which in some ways is but an American synonym to the more European-inflected term social democracy, is similarly laudatory of Norway in his 2023 book, It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism—understandably so, since social democracy does tend to offer tangible benefits to its citizens.

[Originally published on Substack: The Theory Brief.]

Post-Politics and Technocracy: Taking "People Power" Seriously Again

I have just completed writing a chapter destined for an edited volume published by an academic press. Because the topic is a specialist one, unlikely to attract a general readership, I won’t delve into the details of the argument (though interested readers can consult the draft here)[1], which is about how societies deal with crime and punishment, and how they structure the policymaking processes around crime control and imprisonmnet. That might not sound very abstruse, but, alas, it is (for substantially defensible reasons, I  claim).

There is, however, a broader claim about the nature of democracy running through the chapter, which might be of interest to a wider audience.

Essentially, I claim, we are passing through an era characterized by two broad, and seemingly contradictory, political tendencies: 

(1) a form of post-political technocracy, meaning “governance by experts” and the displacement of the very idea of “the political” (to be replaced by “self-evidently” true procedures of fact-finding and the formation of value-free “policies”);

(2) a rare moment of right-wing resurgence, after several (sluggish) decades of centrist liberalism (think Clinton, Blair, Obama), characterized by paradoxically high levels of political polarization.

Now, it makes a great deal of sense to view the latter as the direct result of the former. The post-political attempt was a social-political project engineered from above, which tried in essence to take “the people” out of the political equation. This has opened up for a number of oozing, festering popular resentments, which have gone largely unaddressed by political elites. And these resentments have been skillfully exploited by the (far) right. Throughout the 2000s, there was a growing belief among liberal elites in Washington and Western European capitals that one really could craft a “politics without politics” (as Slavoj Žižek might say), run purely on rational reason and without the noisome interference of “the people.” Democracy is otherwise a messy business. It involves the meeting of a profusion of conflicting viewpoints, often with loud fighting (preferably in the metaphorical sense) and slow-moving, laborious processes of contestation. Much better, so the conventional wisdom went, to implement a politics of “the best answers.” Let the policymakers determine the course of society.

The problem with the post-political, of course, is that it actually involves a huge amount of politics, only now disguised and disavowed. The Iraq War—the U.S.’s costliest foreign policy misadventure in modern times, costing at least a trillion dollars—was hardly the work of brilliant policymakers producing unassailable syllogisms of war. The dismantling of the UK welfare state has largely accelerated the decentering of Britain from the world stage—another “irrational” move, even from within a purely “realist” perspective. Even the statist response to the Covid pandemic, involving mass vaccination and lockdowns (which I agree with unqualifiedly, incidentally), were hardly the result of neutral “science” in action, but involved the implementation of a political will. (In Norway, there was an attempt in 2020 to debate the merits of school lockdowns on the basis of empirical studies of so-called “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” at times verging on the comical, where even the most avid empiricsts finally had to admit defeat: The pandemic was a unique laboratory setting that exploded the validity of past studies. History only runs through once. School lockdowns were implemented, but not on the basis of “science,” but precisely a political will.)

So where does this leave democracy today?

Democracy, of course, comes from the Greek: the noun, demos, or “people,” and kratéō, denoting rulership: to “have command or control,” to “have sovereign power,” or simply to rule.[2] Democrats are those who care about whether the people (demos) rule (kratein).  “People power” was the somewhat hackneyed phrase bandied about in the 1960s, but it has the admirable quality of cutting right to the core of the matter. Are the people in power? My claim in the book chapter mentioned above is that so much of recent political history has been about diluting democracy, by gradually lengthening the distance between real power and the public as a whole, ensuring that strong “buffers” are established between the people and political power. Power, on this terminology, has been “insulated.”

On the liberal-centrist view, “the people” are essentially thought to be irrational, uninformed, and, what is worse, in some sense uninformable, not to be trusted with the reins of power. They are the “basket of deplorables” (as Hilary Clinton said) who look “low-class” (as Trump is to have said in candid disappointment of his supporters during the January 6 insurrection); they are the “sans-dents,” the “toothless” masses (on Francois Hollande’s phrase). There is nothing very new about these thoughts. Gustave Le Bon wrote of the irrationality of “the crowd” in the late nineteenth century. Many feared the “dangerous classes” in the epoch of Marx and industrialization. But these ideas run right through the 21st century project of post-political technocratization. 

If the conventional wisdom of technocratic liberal centrists has paved the way for far-right victories across the postindustrialized world, is the solution less democracy? Hardly. But if you listened to political pundits and liberal journalism of the past decade, you could be forgiven for thinking that the problem with “populism” is that it gives too much power to the populus, failing to “insulate” power sufficiently. 

My claim is quite the contrary. Right-wing “populism”—a misnomer much better described in conventional terms as a renascent far right, verging in places on neofascism—is not the result of giving the people too much of a say, but precisely of taking them too far away from the halls of power. By failing to bolster living standards, shore up real wages, build vibrant communities supported by generous welfare-state investments, liberal centrism has started digging its own grave. The post-political centrists thought they could get away with the negative consequences of neoliberal restructuration by appealing to “unassailable facts”—demographic transformation, global competitiveness, etc.—but Trump, Brexit, Meloni, and so on are symptoms of the very failure of an essentially anti-democratic form of rule, namely technocratic governance. 

To ensure the survival of democracy requires not just combatting the symptoms of the post-political project—e.g. Trump and his assorted political allies across the world—but taking the fight directly to the idea of technocratic liberalism as such. Only by building coalitions of activists, organizers, experts, and “ordinary people” can this be achieved. It means taking economic conditions very seriously. But it also means displacing the very political class that has tried for decades to keep “the people” out.

Notes

[1] An earlier statement of a similar argument can be found in: Shammas, V. L. (2016) “Who's afraid of penal populism? Technocracy and ‘the people’ in the sociology of punishment.” Contemporary Justice Review 19(3): 325-346.

[2] Diggle, J. (2021) κρατέω. In: Cambridge Greek Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 831.

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[Originally published on Substack: The Theory Brief.]

Book Review: The Gourmand as Class Warrior

Dwight Garner (2023), The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

There’s much jocularity in The Upstairs Delicatessen, New York Times book critic Dwight Garner’s witty, if meandering, literary-cultural commentary on two seemingly unlikely topics: novels and eating. Garner’s Delicatessen, as the subtitle lightheartedly proclaims, is a book “on eating, reading, reading about eating, & eating while reading.” But while nominally weighing in on literature and food, the book is also a poignant meditation on meatier topics, like class, culture, place, and power.

Garner repeatedly returns to the point of his origins, in the Rust Belt state of West Virginia, perhaps more nostalgic than authentic, given his relatively early adolescent relocation to sunny Naples, Florida. But food and books allow Garner to portray the tensions inherent to any ambiguous class identity, skewering the pretensions of the urban intelligentsia and cultural elites along the way. Against the foibles of the foie-gras class, Garner ruminates longingly on the wonders of West Virginian cuisine, from industrially processed fried bologna sandwiches to other homegrown culinary delectables like “peanut butter and pickle” sandwiches, another Depression-era West Virginian staple on Garner’s telling. This fare contrasts deliciously with the culinary silliness of Microsoft millionaire Nathan Myhrvold’s “molecular dining,” all fifty courses of which ultimately leave Garner unsatisfied when he is invited to partake; a cheap cheeseburger from a fast-food joint is finally needed to scratch the author’s caloric itch.

As an outsider’s insider, Garner never seems to forget, for long anyway, that he is finally a stranger to the cultural establishment, even after his decades-long tenure as a book reviewer for distinguished publications like the aforementioned Times and the New York Review of Books. Thus, Garner writes approvingly (and tellingly) of the Australian poet Les Murray: “I like a lot of things about him: his wit, his jumbo intellect, the essential wildness of his vision. I like his class politics, which speak to someone who is sometimes made to feel the cultural cringe of coming from West Virginia.” Perhaps you have to be an outsider to see the field of power, as sociologists sometimes call it, including the cultural establishment, in truer colors.

While we can agree with the Times’s own reviewer, who describes the book as a “bricolage” (a polite term for any rambling, slightly disjointed work of art), it is nevertheless Garner’s clear-sighted, almost Goffmanian attention to crisp, everyday anthropological detail that makes the book so refreshing. There are perhaps too many disembodied books about literature, but there can be little that is more embodied, after all, than a belly to fill. Garner shows that what are we really talking about when we talk about food is the body in all its myriad permutations, but also, therefore‚ the classed nature of bodies, which carry a near-infinite variety of seemingly personal—but actually deeply “socialized”—tastes and preferences. Garner is doing cultural sociology, almost Bourdieu-style, without professing any high-flying theories about consumption and socioeconomic power. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s an at times hilarious read. He carefully scrutinizes all the variegated and classed meanings of food and eating, with all the late-modern malaises (of obesity, over-eating, faddish diets, etc.), excesses (the snobbery of “fine dining”), and social distinctions (farm-fresh vs. processed food) involved in the seemingly simple act of chewing down one’s daily chow.

Only with the kind of structural cultural analysis of a sociologist like Bourdieu can we make sense of what Garner means when he says that in West Virginia, “grapefruit is as popular…as solar power.” 

During the Depression, relief trains filled with grapefruit came into Appalachia, and people had no idea what to do with them. People ate them raw and thought their mouths would never unpucker. Archie’s family tried to boil them, he told me. They fried slices in grease. West Virginians have long cultural memories.

Of course, grapefruit is not just grapefruit, but a symbol (of elevated tastes, of outside meddling in internal affairs, of poverty vs. wealth), just as solar power is not just solar power alone, but the thing-in-itself plus all that it stands for in a wider set of relations of power and signification. A political movement that fails to reckon with the cultural-sociological force of such semiotic relations is, quite simply, toast.

In places, the book devolves into mere miscellanies, teetering dangerously on the brink of turning into a catalog of curiosities. But it’s also a hugely fun tour of recent and not-so-recent literary fiction. And there is, as suggested, a great deal of seriousness behind the fun. The Upstairs Delicatessen is something like an invitation to the joy of physical, sensate life. On Garner’s account, this involves reminding his readers that they lead bodily lives. With the arrival of hyper-digital late modernity, we increasingly live so abstractly—data-driven, always-connected, socially distanced (even after the passing of the pandemic)—that it is almost a shock to the system to witness this effervescent middle-aged writer plead for innocently corporeal pleasures, which seem almost old-fashioned. There is a great, healthy charm in the mode of existence Garner maps out here—not the health of the calorie counters or year-round joggers, to be sure, but the salutariness of joy, which, Garner seems to affirm, must in some sense be a joy of the flesh. In this way, too, he is reminiscent of a figure like Bourdieu, the sociologist of “flesh and blood” par excellence.

In all his celebrating of honest, cheap, authentic, homely fare, Garner also gives a deeper political lesson:

When I can’t muster the energy to cook at lunch, I make a baptismal bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup, from the can. I grew up on it. […] I use whole milk and add a pat of butter. Ideally this is consumed alongside a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s redolent of all that is good in the world. In The Making of the President 1960, Theodore H. White reported that, while boarding a plane after campaigning in West Virginia, John F. Kennedy “called for a favorite drink—a bowl of hot tomato soup.”

There’s that West Virginia upbringing again, and its celebration, against the apparent artifice of the East Coast elites. Curiously, of course, nobody was more élite, and more blue-blooded, than JFK. Still, in that unpretentious bowl of hot tomato soup, there was a folksiness, a popular charm. It might have been fake. It probably was fake. But if you want to understand political leaders who have successfully won over that great American heartland, the Midwest and the Rust Belt—derisively labeled “fly-over country” by some insiders—you have to try to understand that bowl of hot tomato soup, and all that it signifies.

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Originally published on The Theory Brief (Substack).

Israel/Gaza: The Economic Consequences of War, the Economic Prospects for Peace

Israel cannot continue its war on Gaza indefinitely—not so much owing to grueling moral quandaries or unbearable ethical qualms, but due to strictly fiscal and macroeconomic concerns, with all the political-economic consequences that an expensive war must have for both Israeli society and state in the coming year.

In fact, any desire to end the war on Israel’s part—beyond the terms of the temporary truce negotiated by Qatar—is likely to have very little to do with strictly moral reasoning, much less international law. Israel is not a state party to the Rome Statute, and consequently, the International Criminal Court holds no sway over Israel; and in the face of international criticism, Netanyahu seemed to double down on his Gazan policy in the war’s first 45 days. All the rhetoric and actions of Israel’s far-right-influenced government suggest that appealing to the conscience of Netanyahu with reference to the more than 5,500 Palestinian children killed so far[1]—with another 1,500 children reported missing by mid-November,[2] likely trapped under the rubble of Gaza’s destroyed or damaged housing stock, estimated at 50%—is unlikely to yield tangible results. Instead, economic concerns are likely to play a far more important role in driving the Israeli government to pursue a more lasting peace deal.

The reasons are straightforward: The war is dealing significant damage to the Israeli economy, and any state must sooner or later contend with the economic consequences of war, no matter how righteous its cause might seem to both leaders and voters.

Currency Troubles, Declining Consumer Confidence

First, some relevant data points. A weekly analysis report from the Israeli bank Leumi,[3] published one month after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, shows that Israel’s currency fared better than feared in the first month of war, with the “exchange rate of the shekel vis-à-vis the US dollar return[ing] to its pre-crisis level.” After the attacks, the shekel weakened significantly against the dollar, reaching a nadir two weeks out from the October 7 attacks. There were palpable concerns among analysts and central bankers that a continued currency depreciation would cause rising import and manufacturing input prices, with predictable inflationary effects.

This was avoided, however, solely due to the Bank of Israel’s resolute, costly, and (in recent memory) unprecedented intervention in currency markets to prop up the shekel. The central bank “announced a program to sell up to  US$30 billion in foreign exchange, and a program to make swap transactions up to $15 billion in the foreign exchange market” in the weeks after the attack.[4] Recall that Israel’s foreign exchange reserves only stood at slightly less than 200 billion dollars in September 2023,[5] meaning the central bank was forced to sell some 15 percent of its reserves to prop up its currency in the wake of October 7. One Bank of Israel head noted, “We are in an unprecedented security situation, and our estimate was that the market could get to a situation of divergence without the announcement of our intervention.”[6] Divergence is, of course, just a central banker euphemism for currency catastrophe.

Bank Leumi’s Capital Markets Division emphasizes how exceptional this move was: It “came following a period that began in January 2022 during which the central bank was not active at all in the foreign exchange market.” The central bank’s actions were further exceptional because “for the first time in 15 years” the central bank “sold foreign currency” (see Figure 1). To reiterate: Israel’s central bank had not sold foreign currency in a decade-and-a-half, a pattern broken only because of the October 7 attacks, indicative of Israeli central bankers’ concern that the nation’s currency was in for a rough ride, with predictable results for the domestic economy.

Figure 1. Source: https://english.leumi.co.il/static-files/10/LeumiEnglish/Economic_Weekly/leumi_weekly_08.11.23_english_acc.pdf

While significantly adverse effects on the currency were staved off—but not before taking a significant chunk out of the country’s foreign exchange reserves—consumer spending took a real hit after the October 7 attacks. As Figure 2 shows, credit card spending in Israel declined appreciably, “lower[ed] by about 14 percent compared to the forecast value,” according to the Bank of Israel—a pre-October 7 forecast, that is. Meanwhile, the market research firm Ipsos’s Global Consumer Confidence report in November 2023, tracking consumer sentiment in 29 countries, showed that out of all these countries, ranging from the U.S. to Turkey and beyond, “sentiment is down most of all in Israel (-5.6 points).”[7] The one-year decline was even greater: Compared with November 2022, Israeli consumer confidence had fallen by 10 percent over the preceding 12 months.

Figure 2. Source: https://www.boi.org.il/media/xyadg02z/2023-10-october-23-interest-rate-decision.pptx

The All-Importance of Labor

Far more important were ongoing, chronic labor shortages, probably the key contributor to the war’s negative economic impact. Some 360,000 reservists were called up on October 10, and as the New York Times reported a month later, most of those thousands of reservists were busy doing exactly nothing: “For now…the hardest part is the waiting.”[8] Remember that Israel’s total labor force only stood at 4.37 million workers prior to the war.[9] Pulling nearly one in ten out of the labor force—or 8.23 percent to be more precise—would be detrimental to any economy and certainly fiscally burdensome: All those boots on the ground come with hungry mouths to feed and bank accounts in need of replenishment from government coffers.

In fact, no need to guess about the extent of this costly endeavor: On November 9, more than a month after the attacks, the war cost the Israeli economy “an estimated NIS 2.3 billion ($600 million) a week, or about 6 percent of the weekly GDP,” according to central bank research, mainly due to the call-up of reservists, but also owing to an estimated 200,000 people relocated from areas bordering on the Gazan theater of war.[10] By November 22, the Times of Israel was reporting on a survey conducted by the Manufacturers Association of Israel, showing that “the absence of workers is posing an acute problem” for manufacturers.[11] Indeed, some sectors were hit harder than others. Tourism declined precipitously: Arrivals by air quickly declined to levels not seen since the tail-end of the pandemic in 2021,[12] and Reuters reported that October 2023 saw a paltry 99,000 visitors, “most designated as tourists…versus 369,000 in October 2022 and 485,000 in pre-pandemic October 2019,” according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.[13]

The construction industry was adversely affected as well. Some 90,000 Palestinian laborers were estimated to have been working in Israel’s construction industry pre-October 7, but the attacks “prompted Israeli authorities to revoke their work permits.”[14] The Israel Builders Association, an organization representing firms in the construction industry, was reportedly “negotiating with India,” its vice president said, hoping in lieu of Palestinian workers to “engage 50,000 to 100,000 workers from India to be able to run the whole sector and bring it back to normal.” The construction industry, vital to any thriving economy, was no longer able to function without cheap, docile Palestinian labor; other foreign laborers would have to be brought in to resuscitate the industry.

The real estate market as a whole seemed increasingly in a parlous state, too. In an interview with an investment officer in a leading Israeli investment house, a journalist asked, “What’s your forecast for the Israeli real estate market?”. The answer was forthright:

“At the moment, it’s completely frozen. There are hardly any sales of new homes, because financing costs have risen so much. Also, workers are not coming in from Judea and Samaria [i.e. the Occupied West Bank] and from Gaza, and some of the foreign workers have left.”[15]

Even the Bank of Israel’s rose-tinted economic forecast of October 23 could not conceal the fact that the War on Gaza was macroeconomically damaging:

“Under the assumption that the war will be concentrated on the southern front during the fourth quarter of the year, GDP is expected to grow by 2.3 percent in 2023 and by 2.8 percent in 2024.  It is expected that the impact to economic activity will lead to an increase in the government’s budget deficit, which will reach 2.3 percent of GDP in 2023 and 3.5 percent of GDP in 2024.  In view of this, the debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of 2024 is expected to be 65 percent.”[16]

The assumptions are worth paying close attention to: This better-than-feared outcome was predicated upon the war remaining limited to Gaza, or “the southern front,” without further regional conflagration, and the war would have to remain restricted to the tail-end of 2023. If moderate economic growth and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 65 percent by the end of 2024 was going to be realistic, according to Israel’s central bank, Netanyahu would need to wrap up the war in short order.

A Worsened Economic Outlook

The lid could not be kept on the bad economic news coming out of Tel Aviv. By November 21, nearly 45 days out from the war’s start, the Times of Israel was reporting that credit rating agency Moody’s had cut its growth forecast for the country quite severely. Moody’s now “expects [the] economy to contract 1.5% in 2024, with 18% of Israel’s workforce absent during war.”[17] The agency noted a report from the Institute for National Security Studies, affiliated with Tel Aviv University, suggesting that the war’s price tag could be “as much as NIS 150 billion to NIS 200 billion [$40-53 billion], equal to up to around 10 percent of gross domestic product.” And the credit rating agency “put the Israeli government’s A1 credit ratings on review for downgrade.”[18]

Similarly, only a week earlier, the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s had published an equally muted report detailing the state of Israel’s economy, citing “‘lower business activity, depressed demand from consumers, and a very uncertain investment environment,’ as well as the massive call-up of reservists, as reasons for the downturn.”[19]

Could this be part of the motivation for the late November ceasefire? As the newspaper Haaretz noted, Israel’s military forces began rolling out vacation leave to “soldiers fighting in Gaza, following expected cease-fires” on November 23 not simply because they had been on duty for a month and a half and wanted, or needed, a break: It was to “allow them to return to their jobs, [and] also to alleviate the damage to the economy.”[20] The ceasefire was less a grand humanitarian gesture to the Gazan population, nor solely aimed at bringing Israeli hostages home, but also sought to restore macroeconomic solidity. With nearly 10 percent of the labor force out of commission and on the government payroll, and with international ratings agencies cutting their outlooks for the future of the Israeli economy, increasingly it appeared as if Netanyahu could not afford to keep the war in Gaza going indefinitely.

And this was the case even with U.S. military and financial support: Biden’s announced $14.3 billion aid package earlier in October came with multiple strings attached and caveats that restricted its macroeconomic utility.[21] It is worth taking a closer look at President Biden’s request for supplemental funding from Congress.[22] First, $4.4 billion of the package was not so much aid to Israel as a boost to U.S. domestic military spending, including money for “replacement, through new procurement or repair of existing unserviceable equipment, of defense articles from the stocks of the Department of Defense”—in other words, money to replenish U.S.  armament supplies. Another $4 billion was devoted to funding Israel’s Iron Dome systems, with a further $1.2 billion to “Iron Beam defense system capabilities.” Finally, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes here, $3.5 billion would be spent on “Foreign Military Financing” of Israel’s armed forces—still a drop in the bucket when Tel Aviv University-affiliated researchers were claiming the war might cost in the order of 40-50 billion dollars.

While it would be foolish to discount the importance of the injection of U.S. military aid, only a proportion of this money would be spent on covering the direct operational expenditures a state would need to devote to placing hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground, and this proportion would itself not be matched by the true scale of the costs of war: Defensive rocket systems, yes; ammunition and missiles, yes; but not so much the “political economy” of war. And while some of this cash certainly freed up Israeli state spending to be devoted to other budgetary items, it seemed unlikely that U.S. aid packages alone would be able to prop up Israel’s economy as such.

In short, the war is slowly bleeding the Israeli economy—perhaps not dry, but surely resulting in a slow trickle that over time will undermine the livelihoods of ordinary Israeli voters. A shrewd and discerning political leader must necessarily take this into account.

While reporters and commentators in the West have given a surprising amount of coverage to the suffering of Palestinian civilians in the wake of Israel’s Gaza War, far less analytic firepower has been trained on the economic consequences of the war. And yet it is these fiscal, monetary, and economic effects that hold out the best hopes for peace.

Practically overnight, this has come to constitute conventional wisdom among Israeli economic analysts as well. “No end to the war in the Gaza Strip is yet in sight,” the Senior Equity Markets commentator Hezi Sternlicht of the Israeli business newspaper Globes intones, “but this is an event that will eventually pass, and its intensity is expected to decline in the first quarter of 2024.”[23] And as already noted, Israel’s central bank similarly made the assumption in its October 23 outlook that “that the war will be concentrated…during the fourth quarter of the year.” People who think about the Israeli economy for a living seem increasingly to be planning around the prospect of peace with the onset of the new fiscal year.

Does Netanyahu realize that he cannot afford to allow the war to drag on indefinitely? If he does not, his political opponent Yair Lapid, who has repeatedly called for Netanyahu’s resignation after the Hamas attacks, will only be further strengthened.

Given the affective state of current Israeli politics, however, it is far from certain that the patent irrationality if not outright unrealism of keeping a small, vulnerable economy on a war footing for an extended period will be permitted to affect policy. Wars can be waged in deeply irrational ways: The United States spent $2.31 trillion on the War in Afghanistan in the two decades following 9/11, with very little to show for it.[24] But Israel is not America; its economy in 2022 was roughly the size of Norway’s. The bill is coming in—and fast. The economic, and hence political, consequences will not be pleasant if the war drags on much longer—certainly not for the Palestinians, but from the vantage point of Israeli military-political-economic strategy, not for the Israelis either.

References

[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/22/israel/gaza-hostilities-take-horrific-toll-children

[2] https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-45

[3] https://english.leumi.co.il/static-files/10/LeumiEnglish/Economic_Weekly/leumi_weekly_08.11.23_english_acc.pdf

[4] https://www.boi.org.il/en/communication-and-publications/press-releases/b23-10-23/

[5] https://www.boi.org.il/en/communication-and-publications/press-releases/c09-10-23/

[6] https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/bank-israel-sell-30-bln-forex-moderate-shekels-volatility-2023-10-09/

[7] https://www.ipsos.com/en/november-2023-singapore-sees-sharpest-increase-consumer-confidence

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/world/middleeast/israeli-reservists.html

[9] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN?locations=IL

[10] https://www.timesofisrael.com/war-is-costing-economy-some-600m-a-week-due-to-work-absence-bank-of-israel/

[11] https://www.timesofisrael.com/worker-absence-due-to-war-poses-main-hurdle-for-manufacturers-survey/

[12] https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2023/355/28_23_355b.pdf, Figure 3

[13] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/tourism-israel-drops-sharply-october-amid-war-with-hamas-2023-11-06/

[14] https://www.dw.com/en/israel-hamas-war-will-indian-workers-replace-palestinians/a-67417429

[15] https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-cheapest-stock-market-in-the-western-world-1001462965

[16] https://www.boi.org.il/en/communication-and-publications/press-releases/b23-10-23/

[17] https://www.timesofisrael.com/war-with-hamas-to-cost-nis-1b-a-day-hit-economy-harder-than-previous-conflicts/

[18] https://www.timesofisrael.com/war-with-hamas-to-cost-nis-1b-a-day-hit-economy-harder-than-previous-conflicts/

[19] https://www.timesofisrael.com/credit-rating-agency-sp-sees-israels-war-economy-shrinking-5-in-fourth-quarter/

[20] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-22/ty-article-live/israeli-cabinet-okays-deal-for-release-of-50-hostages-held-by-hamas-temporary-cease-fire/0000018b-f52c-d117-abcf-f7ef5d450000

[21] http://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/11/18/23966137/us-weapons-israel-biden-package-explained

[22] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Letter-regarding-critical-national-security-funding-needs-for-FY-2024.pdf

[23] https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-cheapest-stock-market-in-the-western-world-1001462965

[24 https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2022

Review: Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2023), 'The War That Must Not Occur'

Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2023), The War That Must Not Occur (translated by Malcolm Debevoise). Stanford University Press.

What is the “war that must not occur” of which the French philosopher and Stanford professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy speaks? All wars are aberrations best avoided, of course, manmade errors in the universe’s (at times overlong) arc bending toward justice, but there is one impermissible mistake that stands above all others: the ever-present, ghoulish specter of nuclear war.

When the economist and nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling’s Proud Prophet war game was run in 1983 with some 200 military and political participants over 12 days, an estimated half a billion people were killed in the (simulated) first rounds of nuclear exchange between the then-regnant superpowers—with an additional estimate of half a billion dead from radiation and starvation. (The report of the 1983 war game, only partly declassified in 2012, is woefully uninformative, with huge chunks of text redacted from public view, at times to an almost comical degree.) In her summary of the war game (a term that is, of course, a horrific euphemism), Condoleeza Rice notes that “large swaths of the planet were rendered uninhabitable by radiation,” but not before lamenting that “NATO was no more”—a fact hardly likely to register in the minds of those presumably left to roam the wastelands of an ever-deepening nuclear winter.

Nuclear war is in short, in the words of Schelling (and quoted by Dupuy in this book), “the most spectacular event of the past half century […] that did not occur.” 

But is this relatively irenic nuclear age one that is so by necessity? Rational choice theory would have us believe so. Every major nuclear onslaught by some nuclear superpower, such as, say, Russia, would be counteracted by a second strike of such overwhelming force that the original aggressor would be annihilated, thereby deterring the original strike from occurring in the first place. 

Or at least, so the theory goes. To a sophisticated philosopher like Dupuy, however, who is interested in time, contingency, and necessity, it is simply not true to say that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) necessarily “works,” to keep us safe from the threat of global cataclysm, because the apparent “necessity” of holding the thousands of currently existing nuclear warheads in check through rational deterrence can only ever be verified retroactively, from the vantage point of whatever actually happened. If the world goes up in flames, blown apart by an exchange of thousands of nuclear Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), then MAD will have been shown to have been an erroneous theory; and even as we continue to live in a world without nuclear war, we can never rest assured that deterrence works, is real, or has the force of “necessity”: The necessary property of an event will only ever appear retroactively, Dupuy suggests.

The theorists of MAD, who really are mad theorists, as Dupuy wisecracks, are just as wrong as a figure like C. P. Snow, the English “Two Cultures” essayist, physicist, and novelist, who in 1960 pronounced that unless there significant nuclear disarmament took place, “thermonuclear war within the decade was a ‘mathematical certainty’.” Snow was proven wrong, of course. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of nuclear armament—and yet, no thermonuclear war resulted.

Could the theorists of MAD be proven equally wrong at some point in the future, but in the opposite direction? Could their casual certainty that nuclear war is mutually held in check by the balance of terrible forces? Since history is not like a chemistry experiment, playing out in one direction alone, without the possibility of controlled repetition in the strict sense, the only form of empirical verification of claims to necessity available to us is to actually run through history itself. Every simulation is fiction, and every thought experiment, or war game, is a fabrication. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction could at any juncture in time be proven wrong. 

On occasion, Dupuy notes, we have come dangerously close to its falsification. In 1961, for instance, the Soviet submarine B-59 lost contact with Moscow off the coast of Florida after being struck by a U.S.-released depth charge and very nearly let off a T-5 nuclear torpedo in response, with all the predictably horrifying results that would have followed. Were it not for the “tangled hierarchy” of the commanding officer and his subordinate onboard (in which the submarine captain’s second-in-command was his fleet-wide superior, who therefore felt he had the authority to refuse to cosign on the launch order), a billion lives might very well have been lost in the atomic exchange that could very well have been unleashed by this initial series of misunderstandings. The margins are slim, and all casual talk of necessity and contingency falter when faced with Hegel’s “slaughter bench of history.” More recently, in 1995, the Norwegian rocket incident, as it has come to be known, involved a scientific experiment launched from the northern Norwegian Andøya Base that ultimately resulted in Boris Yeltsin’s cheget (nuclear briefcase) being activated for fear of an impending American ICBM. To think that for a moment, the fate of humanity lay in the hands of a president often seen in public too inebriated to legally drive a car, much less decide whether to launch a thousand nuclear warheads. As Dupuy writes,

What has allowed nuclear deterrence to work until now, and may allow it to go on working, is the indeterminacy of the future in a conception of time that makes the future necessary. […] As long as the future has not been actualized, it must be conceived as including both the catastrophic event and its non-occurrence—not as disjunctive possibilities, but as a conjunction of states of which one or the other will prove a posteriori to have been necessary once the present has selected it.

In other words: There’s no way to tell which future will have been necessary until after the fact, which may involve the smoking, irradiated ruins of civilization—or not.

One of the surprising figures in agreement with Dupuy’s argument is none other than Donald J. Trump. Dupuy quotes a statement by Trump in the book’s epigraph, from 1990, just as Fukuyama’s end of history was unfolding and well before anyone could seriously imagine Trump’s presidency (was it already then “necessary”?):

I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everyone knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit.

What bullshit indeed. Mistakes happen. Trump comes across as presciently pragmatic, and cautious in a way the liberal-centrist idealists of international relations theory do not. Dupuy does not accept the conventional view “since 1945…that atomic weapons regulate themselves, that their very power makes them self-neutralizing,” and dismisses it as a “feeble line of reasoning.” But more than mistakes, the technical feasibility of humanity self-destructing in a mass nuclear exchange ushers in a new epoch of history, on Dupuy’s account. Drawing on the work of the German philosopher Günther Anders, Dupuy discovers how the German philosopher Anders “recognized that on 6 August 1945 [i.e. the atomic bombing of Hiroshima], human history had entered into a new phase, its last.” Far from being hyperbole, Dupuy convincingly shows that it is precisely this suspended possibility of self-annihilation, which remains forever a threat thenceforth, that remakes our relationship with the world:

History, Anders said, became obsolete that day. Now that humanity was capable of destroying itself, nothing could cause it to lose this ‘negative all-powerfulness,’ not even a general disarmament, not even a total denuclearization of the world’s arsenals. Apocalypse having been inscribed in our future as fate, henceforth the best we can do is to indefinitely postpone the final moment. We are now living under a suspended sentence, as it were, a stay of execution.

We can no longer live in easy comfort about a forthcoming future. Some of the most unnerving parts of this book are when Dupuy draws heavily upon the whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s 2017 memoirs, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear-War Planner. Dupuy relates Ellsberg’s shock at learning that Cold War planners figured that the number of dead to follow in a nuclear exchange would be six hundred million people, “the equivalent, as he takes care to point out, of ‘a hundred Holocausts.’”

Why would nuclear disarmament not pull us out of this new epoch, this new logic of history, which is what Dupuy suggests is the obsolescence of history? Because the relevant science is now known, the relevant technology has been developed, and there lurks forever the possibility that some nation might stash away a stock of fissile materials, if not warheads, even in the vanishingly unlikely situation that all nations were to voluntarily proclaim disarmament and agree to further nonproliferation.

Hence, the chilling line toward the end of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), delivered by the film’s eponymous protagonist: “I believe we did.” This is in reply to Einstein’s probing question (at least in the movie—the dialogue is Hollywood make-believe) about the fears the Los Alamos research group had before the Trinity test of July 16, 1945, that it might cause the Earth’s atmosphere to ignite, setting in motion a globe-spanning destruction. In Nolan’s movie, Oppenheimer asks Einstein whether he can recall this initial fear that the scientists might destroy the whole world. Einstein replies: “I remember it well. What of it?" - “I believe we did.” In other words, the meaning of Oppenheimer’s invention might very well still be the undoing of human existence on this planet—a very “Dupuyean” way of thinking. Dupuy’s terrifying claim is that we have no way of knowing for sure whether this won’t someday happen, and so we might as well treat it as a foregone conclusion.

Some might not be entirely convinced by Dupuy’s muscular claim that “apocalypse” has now been “inscribed in our future as fate,” and earlier in The War That Must Not Occur, Dupuy seems to treat this abyssal fatalism more as a pragmatic exhortation to act: “It needs to be assumed, as I say, that the worst is going to occur, and, for just this reason, everything that can be done must be done to ensure that it will not occur.” But whatever one feels about the substance of Dupuy’s argument regarding necessity and contingency, it is difficult to imagine that one could take the threat of nuclear warfare too seriously. With the world rapidly moving away from nonproliferation and disarmament, the deepest, darkest fears of the Cold War planners ought, if anything, to be resuscitated. Russia’s November 2023 decision to withdraw from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was a step in the wrong direction. And Ukraine’s lesson from Russia’s February 2022 invasion must surely be that voluntarily giving up its weapons of mass destruction—around 1,700 nuclear warheads after the Soviet Union’s dissolution were left on Ukrainian territory—was a terrible idea. And Iran, as Dupuy notes in passing, must surely, too, have drawn the appropriate conclusions from Bush and Cheney’s apparent plans in the early 2000s to “destroy [Iran] by means of a preemptive attack” rather than enter into protracted negotiations “to prevent it from equipping itself with atomic weapons.”

But if the war that must not occur is in some sense unavoidable, as this book seems to suggest, then let us at least recombine our efforts and energies, banding together across countries and continents, to attempt to postpone it for as long as humanly possible.

Flattening Gaza: Israel’s Politics of Destruction and the Problem of the “Arab Body”

Since Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks on Israel, Israel has responded by unleashing tremendous amounts of violence on the Gaza Strip. This violence, Israel claims, has been targeted at Hamas infrastructure, aimed at preventing a repeat of the October 7 attacks. But Israel’s warfare has come at a terrible, and untenable, human cost, with UN Secretary General António Guterres repeatedly calling for a ceasefire and determining that Israel was responsible for “clear violations of international humanitarian law” in Gaza.[1] After nearly a month of war, some 9,000 people have been reported killed in Gaza by Israeli attacks, largely involving a combination of airstrikes and mortar attacks, including white phosphorus artillery shells, according to Amnesty International, “which may be considered indiscriminate attacks and therefore unlawful.”[2]

Children are being killed in staggering numbers. Between October 7 and 25 alone, more than 2,913 children were reported killed on the Gaza Strip as a result of Israeli attacks,[3] and a week later, this figure had risen to 3,760 Palestinian children killed.[4] One would do well to recall that after fifteen months of war waged by Russia against Ukraine by the summer of 2023, the UN’s top humanitarian official in Ukraine reported “over 1,500 children killed and injured in Ukraine” since the war’s outbreak in February 2022. What took Russia fifteen months to accomplish, then, Israel achieved, and more than doubled, in only fifteen days.

While Israeli officials have done their utmost to cast doubt on the fatality statistics reported by the media, emphasizing that they are provided by the “Hamas-run Palestinian Ministry of Health” on the Gaza Strip, as media outlets like the BBC often point out, UNRWA’s Philippe Lazzarini has stated that the ministry has a track record of providing “credible” figures in the past that there is little reason to doubt.[5] If anything, these horrific figures — evidence of what Israeli lawmakers have previously described in chillingly euphemistic terms as “mowing the lawn,” that is, cutting down future generations of Palestinians — may very well prove to be a significant undercount, as bodies continue to be pulled from the rubble of Gaza’s decimated housing stock in the months and years to come. After all, after less than a month of warfare, the United Nations noted that “at least 45 percent of Gaa’s housing units” were “reportedly destroyed or damaged,”[3] and with limited fuel and machinery, and with the constant threat of bombardment, rescue workers have been hindered from making a full accounting of the death toll wrought by Israeli forces, according to Save the Children.[6] By November 2, the UNOCHA recorded some “1,150 children reported missing and [who] may be trapped under the rubble.”[3] With 40 percent of Gaza’s population under the age of 18, the Israeli war on Gaza is to a significant extent a war on children.

The mass of evidence of what Israel is attempting in Gaza is now compelling and in fact, overwhelming in the overall trajectory it suggests: the “flattening” of significant portions of Gaza, the forcible deportation of at least the northern half of the zone’s residents, a militarily enforced changing of “facts on the ground,” motivated by a far-right, extremist, nativist, ethnoculturalist ideology, such that Gaza as its residents once knew it will no longer be permitted to exist.

For evidence of motives, look no further than to the statements of leading figures in the Israeli establishment and halls of power. Israeli agents in the field of power are, after all, no strangers to muscular rhetoric when it comes to Gaza. Back in 2012, the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai demanded that the Israeli army “blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water.”[7] Meanwhile, the same year, the son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Gilad Sharon, called for a harsh, punitive policy toward Gaza in shockingly candid remarks published by the Jerusalem Post:

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima — the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.[8]

These were figures to some degree ahead of their times: While the 2012 Israeli “Operation Pillar of Defense” involved some 1,500 airstrikes and an estimated 101 Palestinian civilian deaths, according to the UN,[9] these figures pale in comparison with the 2023 Gaza War. In 2012, the moment was not yet opportune for a policy of flattening; by 2023, however, it seemed to have arrived in fuller, more fleshed-out form. It would take a major attack by Hamas — which all reasonable people condemn, left or right, North or South — to legitimize a massively disproportionate destruction of civilian lives and infrastructure by Israeli forces. Two days after the October 7 attacks, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced his government’s medieval-style policy of a “complete siege,” noting that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.”[10] His government, Gallant said, was fighting “human animals” and his government was “acting accordingly.” For anyone with a historical consciousness, this reduction of the Other to the status of animality was surely chilling. Gideon Levy, the progressive Israeli journalist, noted presciently two days after the October 7 attacks in Haaretz, “The threats of ‘flattening Gaza’ prove only one thing: We haven’t learned a thing.”[11]

But Israel’s response has been precisely to flatten significant portions of Gaza. The conservative Daily Telegraph reported on a Gaza neighborhood, which it claimed had once resembled London’s middle-class district Islington: “Before the war, it was the most upscale neighbourhood in Gaza City, with vibrant shops, cafés, ice cream parlours and a view on to the Mediterranean. Today it stands largely in ruins after ferocious Israeli bombardment, in a clear sign that no part of Gaza will be safe in the coming weeks and months of conflict.”[12] Euronews reported that “northern Gaza” had been “reduced to rubble,” based on inspecting satellite imagery from the space technology company Maxar: “Whole rows of apartment blocks simply disappear in the photos, reduced to smears of dust and rubble.”[13] Some “200,000 housing units” had “either completely or partially” been destroyed after three weeks of warfare alone.[14]

Perhaps the closest analogy to Gaza’s fate is that of Grozny, the Chechen capital, which over the course of a month of fighting at the outset of the 21st century was bombed and shelled intensively by Russian forces, with an estimated 5,000–8,000 civilians killed, and “some 80 percent of residential buildings” destroyed, according to a UN report of this “city razed to the ground.”[15] The “Groznyfication” of Gaza was by early November certainly well under way. By late October, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported that technology companies, including Maxar, were restricting the flow of satellite imagery to the public, with reporters citing “pressure from the authorities in Israel and changed guidelines from the American authorities“, according to the newspaper — perhaps an attempt to stymie the flow of imagery documenting this Israeli carnage.[16]

Israel’s policy of population dispersal and urban flattening in Gaza was the direct result of the far-right government in power in Israel and its ideology of nativism and anti-Arabism. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right National Security Minister, had in the summer of 2023 given voice, perhaps in the clearest terms thus far, to the Apartheid mentality motivating much of Israel’s policy in the occupied Palestinian territories: “My right, my wife’s, my children’s, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria are more important than the right of movement of the Arabs,” Ben-Gvir said.[16] In a widely condemned move, Ben-Gvir also ordered the storming of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque in July that same year,[18] the near-equivalent of ordering security forces to disperse the faithful in the Papal Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican or St. Paul’s Cathedral. Ben-Gvir, of course, was the man who until entering government proudly displayed a photograph of Baruch Goldstein — who single-handedly shot and killed 29 Palestinians and wounded some 125 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994 —in his living room, according to the Times of Israel.[19] Ben-Gvir only took down the picture as a symbolic gesture of moderation in order to join the government.

The United States has been the most important guarantor of Israel’s policy of dispersal-and-flattening in Gaza. Within weeks, President Biden promised to allocate $14.3 billion in spending assistance to Israel,[20] and 15 naval vessels, including two aircraft carriers and some 15,000 U.S. sailors, were moved to the eastern Mediterranean.[21] On October 15, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted in a conversation with the Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant “the ironclad U.S. commitment to Israel’s defense,” according to an official U.S. Department of Defense readout.[22] Over the next few weeks, the mood subtly shifted in Washington in tandem with the piling up of Palestinian bodies — sometimes literally so, as the Financial Times reported that the “inability to give” victims “the dignity of a proper funeral” meant that “bodies were dumped ‘on top of each other’ in the back of a pick-up truck” instead.[23] By November 2, Secretary Austin once again “reaffirmed the U.S. ironclad commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself,” but now also vaguely “underscored the importance of protecting civilians.”[24] With growing fears among some Democrats that Biden could lose the 2024 election against Trump over his carte blanche policy vis-à-vis Israel,[25] the once-unqualified “ironclad commitment” would now have to be tempered by at least the appearance of concern for humanitarian issues, like the killing of thousands of Palestinian children that UNICEF rightly described as a “growing stain on our collective conscience.”[26]

There is little mystery involved in accounting for these policies. Underlying all of them is what I have previously described as the problem of the “Arab body” in Western politics and culture,[27] that is, the contempt, fear, and disregard for which the Arab has historically been held, evidenced in much of the West’s dealings with the regions historically associated with Arab populations, and in its relating to its peoples, its emigrants, its cultures, and religious expressions. One finds the problem of the Arab body voiced in the most grandiose of policy disasters, from the U.S.-led Iraq War, with its 109,000 deaths, reported in classified U.S. military documents and relayed by Wikileaks,[28] as well as in the minutest of cultural expressions. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, for instance, we find the Arab repeatedly represented as a figure of disrepute and revulsion, as when an “Ay-rab” rushes up and “appropriate[s]” a woman’s “ring finger before she could let out a cry” — a source of what I have described as criminal danger and existential risk to the pure, hallowed, sanctified Western body.

This analysis owes much to the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said’s Orientalism, of course, but diverging ever so slightly from Said, I argue that the contempt, if not outright hatred, for the Arab body operates at a deeply precognitive, visceral-corporeal level, which is precisely that of the body, where certain things are taken for granted without cognitive-reflexive awareness: one does not ask for permission to handle this body in any particular way; one simply acts upon it, often without restraint, often without self-critical examination or reflection. The Arab body is a body that can be surveilled, monitored, inspected, x-rayed, scanned, fingerprinted, swab-tested, profiled, registered, logged, and databased (as in a thousand airports post-9/11). The Arab body is a body that can be blindfolded, zip-tied, renditioned, waterboarded, force-fed, truncheoned, beaten, punched, and tortured (as in Abu Ghraib, or more recently, in the West Bank village of Wadi al-Seeq by Israeli forces[29]). The Arab body is a body that can be bombed, shelled, shot at, and buried beneath rubble — often with absolute legal impunity, frequently with only a limited response by the media and leading political figures in the West. The Arab body is a body that need not be mourned or grieved over — at least not to the same extent, and often with a delayed response. As the philosopher Judith Butler rightly asks, in When is Life Grievable?, one way of figuring out “who ‘we’ are” is to ask “whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable.”[30] It is clear that for decades, indeed centuries, the Arab body has been essentially less grievable than its Western counterparts.

Perhaps this is changing. One should not advocate a politics of fatalism nor apocalyptic essentialism: there are signs of change in the form of tens and hundreds of thousands of people flocking into the streets in Western capitals, and there are cracks in the facade of the West’s fundamentally malign relationship with the Arab body beginning to appear in the form of condemnations and negative reporting on Israel’s actions against Gaza.

But if the Palestinians in Gaza are now being forced from their homes, which are flattened behind them, with thousands of their children killed by Israeli bombs and buried under broken buildings, let them at least know that their problems are not solely those of the Palestinian people alone, but those of the Arab body as such.

***

Since writing this essay, the death toll on the Gaza Strip has only risen: By November 8th, more than ten thousand people have been reported killed, with more than four thousand of them children.[31] Meanwhile, an Israeli cabinet minister has called for the use of nuclear bombs against Gaza—for which he was suspended, not fired, from the Israeli cabinet government.[32] (Despite his apparent suspension, the minister was able to take part in voting later the same day, according to the Jerusalem Post.[33]) A group of 83 Israeli doctors urged the bombing of Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, according to the progressive group, Physicians for Human Rights - Israel (PHRI).[34] António Guterres, the UN Secretary General, was unequivocal in his pronouncements upon the war: “Ground operations by the Israel Defense Forces and continued bombardment are hitting civilians, hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, churches and U.N. facilities – including shelters. No one is safe.”[35] The UN reported that 89 staff members of UNRWA had been killed thus far, making the War on Gaza the “deadliest ever for its personnel,” in the words of the New York Times.[36]

References

[1] https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2023-10-24/secretary-generals-remarks-the-security-council-the-middle-east%C2%A0

[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/lebanon-evidence-of-israels-unlawful-use-of-white-phosphorus-in-southern-lebanon-as-cross-border-hostilities-escalate/

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/11/1/know-their-names-palestinians-killed-in-israeli-attacks-on-gaza

[4] https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-27

[5] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/27/un-says-gaza-health-ministry-death-tolls-in-previous-wars

[6] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/over-800-children-missing-under-rubble-gaza-rescue-efforts-hindered-ongoing-bombardment-and

[7] https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/%E2%80%98flattening%E2%80%99-gaza

[8] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/11/19/gilad-sharon-calls-israel-flatten-gaza_n_2157198.html

[9] https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session22/A.HRC.22.35.Add.1_AV.pdf

[10] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-minister-announces-complete-siege-of-gaza-no-power-food-or-fuel/

[11] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-10-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israel-cant-imprison-2-million-gazans-without-paying-a-cruel-price/0000018b-1476-d465-abbb-14f6262a0000

[12] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/11/rimal-gaza-hamas-israeli-bombardment-palestinian/

[13] https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/27/northern-gaza-reduced-to-rubble-satellite-images-show-before-and-after-air-strikes

[14] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/26/satellite-images-show-scale-of-destruction-in-israels-assault-on-gaza

[15] https://reliefweb.int/report/russian-federation/chechnya-under-rubble-grozny-january-2002

[16] https://www.nrk.no/nyheter/nye-restriksjoner-pa-satellittbilder-fra-israel-og-gaza-1.16617368

[17] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66614459

[18] https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/4457306-israel%E2%80%99s-ben-gvir-storms-al-aqsa-mosque-prompting-condemnation

[19] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ben-gvir-responds-to-bennett-fine-ill-take-down-baruch-goldsteins-picture/

[20] https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-ukraine-israel-budget-3762a0bdf00653e3c8a38175d3c3d3cb

[21] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/10/27/with-two-aircraft-carriers-us-wants-to-create-a-naval-bubble-around-israel_6208194_4.html

[22] https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3557633/readout-of-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iiis-call-with-israeli-minister/

[23] https://www.ft.com/content/a3fded7d-7b91-4733-9e28-e3eb84026554

[24] https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3578193/readout-of-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iiis-call-with-israeli-minister/

[25] https://apnews.com/article/biden-michigan-arab-american-reelection-bb86bc0059a6ea33fee8a1ec1b0ac743

[26] https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/child-casualties-gaza-growing-stain-our-collective-conscience

[27] For a more fully-fleshed out form of this argument, see Shammas, V. L. (2018) “The Arab body.” Rhizomes, no. 34. DOI:10.20415/rhiz/034.e09. http://rhizomes.net/issue34/pdf/shammas.pdf.

[28] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wikileaks-109000-deaths-iraq-war/story?id=11949670

[29] https://www.commondreams.org/news/israeli-torture

[30] https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/2339-judith-butler-precariousness-and-grievability

[31] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/06/middleeast/gaza-10k-deaths-intl/index.html

[32] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/world/middleeast/amichay-eliyahu-israel-minister-nuclear-bomb-gaza.html

[33] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-771766 

[34] https://www.phr.org.il/en/physicians-call-eng/?pr=45 

[35] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-says-it-is-open-gaza-fighting-pauses-aid-hostages-2023-11-07/

[36] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/world/middleeast/un-unrwa-death-toll.html 

Review: Shadi Bartsch (2023), ‘Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism’

Shadi Bartsch (2023), Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. Princeton University Press.

Shadi Bartsch, a Classics professor at the University of Chicago, has written an interesting, if uneven, book that starts as a study of the reception of the Western classical tradition in Chinese public discourse, before veering off into something far more ambitious and, perhaps as a result, hazy and ill-defined: A mapping out of what one might call contemporary Chinese ideology, the convergence of Confucianism and state socialism in the era of Xi Jinping, and its rhetorical appropriation of parts of the Western tradition.

While professing to study the reception of “The Greek Classics,” as the subtitle has it, the book also discusses such varied topics as the Jesuits’s attempts at introducing Christianity to China in the 1600s, the recent Chinese intellectual fascination with the conservative philosopher and classicist Leo Strauss (who has enjoyed a huge, and surprising, following among some Chinese intellectuals for several decades), and the ridicule Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis has been met with, to name but a few tangents and offshoots from the main story. This makes for a somewhat frustrating read: For while these asides are interesting in their own right, it isn’t entirely clear what they’re doing in a book aimed at answering the (wholly worthwhile) question, “What would an entirely different civilization with its own traditions — namely, China — make of the Greek classics?”

Add to this that the book is — or so the author claims — not about how Chinese classicists have understood the Western classics, but rather how the writings of thinkers and writers like Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides have been received in public (semi-)intellectual discourse, and there are real risks of analytic overshoot and misfirings. Lacking clearly demarcated criteria of textual selection means that with such magnitudes as the whole sweep of the Chinese intelligentsia (including the Journal of the Fujian Provincial Committee Party School and humble bloggers), one is simply going to find a huge range of opinions expressed. But a power-sensitive discursive approach has to weigh the nodal points uncovered in the course of analysis: Not all utterances are created equal (or are given equal efficacy within the social system).

At times, the sourcing does seem strangely eclectic, and this is despite the author’s initial claims that “[t]he Chinese scholars I do investigate promote public and ideological responses to classical texts and are widely influential and well represented in the public arena” (p. xi). To take but one example of how the author deviates from this otherwise sensible methodical precept: In the book’s closing section on Francis Fukuyama, Bartsch writes about one Chen Guan and his blog on Zhihu, a Chinese website “modeled on Quora,” the author writes (p. 185). But upon closer inspection, Chen Guan, a self-styled “Independent thinker,” enjoys no more than a paltry 146 followers on the platform in question at the time of this writing — hardly the reach of an influential public intellectual. To read his views as somehow indicative of Chinese (informed or intellectual) opinion would require far more stringent reflections about representativity and generalization. Why should we expect this blog post, taken seemingly at random (perhaps discovered through a bit of unsystematic Googling?), to be representative of the wider field?

Not every example is as flagrant as this one, of course, and Bartsch clearly has read widely and certainly discusses influential intellectuals, but this one is particularly egregious; one can only imagine what level of seriousness a Chinese cultural critic of contemporary American society who latches onto the fulminations of a blogger with around 150 readers would be taken. With Bartsch casting herself as the Virgil to our Odyssey through Chinese public intellectual waters, to mix our metaphors a bit — the author recounts spending a decade learning Mandarin Chinese in pursuit of this project — the question of method seems all the more important.

Bartsch recognizes this, too. In a half-apologetic footnote after citing the Chinese Journal of Classical Studies, probably aimed at forestalling criticism, Bartsch notes, “To be sure, one might reasonably ask: to what extent can we make generalizations about Chinese culture at large on the basis of a journal which most Chinese have never heard of?” (p. 192, footnote 20). This is a sensible question, of a slightly different kind than the one suggested above, but without a satisfactory answer offered.

In Search of Hexie, or Harmony

Bartsch’s thesis, in brief, is that the Chinese (non-scholarly, public-intellectual) appropriation of the Greco-Roman corpus serves to bolster the claim that its own system of political-economic governance is superior to that of Western liberal-democratic capitalism. After the crackdown on Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989, so the story goes, the liberal-democratic impetus receded, and a whole class of intellectuals was mobilized to find textual support for the legitimacy of the state and party. In recent years, these intellectuals have sought support from Western classics.

But, as Bartsch writes, “Turning to western texts to support Chinese claims of civilizational superiority requires a complicated balancing act on the part of the Chinese intellectuals” (p. 9). After all, one would have to explain why Western societies, to whom these texts would seem to ”belong” — at least to a greater extent — have failed to live up to their at times concealed ideals.

And many interesting potential convergences between Eastern and Western thought are on display here. Plato’s kosmos (order) could be read as converging upon the Confucian notion of hexie (harmony); Plato’s attack on music and poetry bears a certain resemblance to Confucius’s concern with elegant and vulgar music and criticism of “new” songs. “In Plato’s Laws especially, the connection of music, text, and chorus to social order seems strikingly Confucian.” And Chinese intellectuals have been eager to show how Socrates’s concern with justice in Kallipolis (the good or noble city) is actually Confucian harmony, or hexie, in disguise:

“Justice is essentially a kind of order and harmony,” emphasizes Wen Tao, adding that “The essence of justice lies in harmony.” “Justice is harmony and order,” says Rong Guangyi. Zhang Xiaomei argues that “justice was the benefit of harmony.… Justice was overall harmony”. (pp. 154–155)

Obviously, Bartsch doesn’t accept this interpretation of Plato/Socrates. Still, it has the merit of being clearly understandable within the broader framework of something like what we might call “contemporary Chinese ideology.” Peace, calm, and order are to state-oriented intellectuals a kind of higher-order justice, in which harmony arises as the ultimate and foundational form of justice. Of course, it is certainly possible to critique the understanding of Confucius that lies behind these harmony/hexie-centered readings of the Western classical tradition, and Bartsch helpfully quotes the Australian Marxist theologian Roland Boer, who attended a Party conference on the Chinese master in 2019: “As I listened to papers and spoke with many there, it became clear that the Confucius of today is a rather truncated sage. We heard of harmony with diversity, of welcoming friends of like minds from all over the world, of peace over the four seas (there seemed to have been fewer of those 2,500 years ago)” (p. 159).

Bartsch adds, “Anything objectionable or antiquarian in Confucius’s views tends to disappear (it has been harmonized!). The sage’s insistence on the centrality of ritual and the ancestor cult, his low regard for women, his distaste for profit — these are not useful for a modern Chinese nation.”

In fact, after reading Bartsch’s book, one gets the sense that its central concern — to prove the importance of Western classical philosophy to contemporary Chinese ideology — is somewhat overstating its case. Far more important seems Confucius and China’s homegrown philosophical tradition, with ”135 of Xi’s quotations from classical Chinese philosophy…even published in a book titled Xi Jinping’s Classical Allusions…by the main Communist Party newspaper, The People’s Daily” (p. 5).

Bracketing Methods, Querying the Thesis

But let us for a moment accept the central thesis of the book, namely that the Western classics have been weaponized to advance Chinese nationalism (though perhaps civilizationism would be a more apt descriptor, given the scale involved), allowing a seamless fit between intellectuals and state, with texts either supporting the view that what is needed is “harmony” or a “strong state” (a via positiva) — or that disorder, inequality, etc., said to be associated with Western neoliberal democracies (a via negativa), must be avoided.

Could we not still object that this has been the lot of the classics even in our Western civilization? Hasn’t the U.S. done the same, extracting and yes, weaponizing, the classical texts, picking and choosing what it wants and needs to suit the ideological order of the day? The classics are, after all, almost endlessly malleable. Bartsch is right to quote Alfred Whitehead’s observation that all of Western philosophy are but footnotes to Plato (p. 83); but the interpretive “footnotes” span the whole field from direct-democratic council communism to heavy-handed, right-wing authoritarianism (with the two sometimes overlapping in paradoxical ways). In Plato, as in the Bible, one largely finds what one is already looking for. These texts can be made to fit nearly any political purpose or aspiration.

Bartsch very nearly notes as much: “Indeed, the texts of this reception study have shown themselves to be almost infinitely flexible. Epictetus can serve Christians proselytizing to Confucians; Plato can emphasize rationality or harmony; Aristotle can call for democracy; and classical Athens itself can be a locus of the absence of freedom” (p. 179)

However, the author does not draw the deeper ideological lesson, namely that the Chinese reception of figures like Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle is far from unique in instrumentalizing the philosophy of philosophy for domestic political purposes. American liberalism is founded on the notion of a “new Athens,” an interpretation of Socrates/Plato likely as alien to the ancient Greeks as the Confucian-state-socialist reading of Plato’s Republic and Laws. But one senses that the author agrees more with the system derived from the former misappropriation than the latter; hence it passes without notice. Ideology is that which goes unnoticed, that which has one’s tacit acceptance, as Marx and, later, Žižek remind us. Perhaps this is the ultimate lesson in reading the classics: They do little but reflect our own concerns. As we read the classics, we inevitably come face-to-face with the central tenets of our own social systems, both stated and tacit.

But perhaps even more interestingly, when we read how others read the classics, we are also mirroring ourselves; the reception of reception studies would itself be a worthwhile object of analysis, one largely left untouched in this book. For who will interpret the interpreters? And what can we learn about the concerns and prejudices of our own intellectual classes as they begin to peer eastwards and construct their “interpretations of the interpretations”?

Review: Joseph Vogl (2022), 'Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present'

Joseph Vogl (2022), Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press.

What is the relationship between information, financial capitalism, social media, and the “new” right, from Bolsonaro in Brazil to Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, from Orbán to Trump and the emerging “national conservative” movement in Britain? In this book, originally published in German in 2021, Joseph Vogl, professor of modern German literature at Humboldt University in Berlin, argues that we live in an age characterized by ressentiment, in which both Silicon Valley and liberalized financial capital play decisive roles.

Vogl offers a largely thought-provoking analysis of the complex interplay between financial capitalism, information technology, and the rise of right-wing movements. Vogl's work delves into the concept of ressentiment, a term associated with Nietzsche, to elucidate the underlying dynamics of our political landscape. Vogl claims that our current era is marked by ressentiment, a pervasive sense of grievance. He argues that Silicon Valley and the liberalized financial sector are instrumental in fueling and exploiting ressentiment, ultimately contributing to the ascendance of right-wing movements across the globe.

The book also asserts that financial capitalism has evolved into an information-oriented system where information is the most valuable resource. Digital technology plays a crucial role in accelerating the circulation of financial capital. Vogl's analysis of the “financialization of information” and “informatization of finance” is a core constituent of the book. He delves into the historical evolution of financialization and its cultural and economic ramifications. The book also emphasizes the significance of information in modern capitalism, emphasizing that it necessitates an incessant flow of data. Information, he posits, replaces objective truth in financial markets, and this shift toward post-truth is paralleled with the rise of “fake news” in  media discourse and the realm of politics. 

Vogl argues that financial markets are driven by “doxological” considerations rather than objective truths, as financial actors operate on the basis of perceptions of perceptions, such that, “information circulating on the market is justifiable only in ‘doxological,’ not epistemological terms. It is not possible to ascertain or ground the ‘real,’ ‘true,’ or ‘fundamental’ value of things. Instead, valuations emerge from opinions mirroring opinions about opinions” (p. 34).

The book scrutinizes the major players in the (supposedly) novel political-economic regime of information/financial capitalism, focusing on Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple. But Vogl largely skirts the role of human labor in these digital platforms and how they contribute to creating value. Vogl distances himself from Marxist value theory by claiming that Big Tech’s “meta-platforms” are not “value-creating” but “value-extracting,” i.e. that they extract rent rather than accumulate profits on the basis of workers’ value-production (p. 62). 

To this one can object that enormous amounts of human labor are nevertheless embodied in an apparently abstract, digital platform: Don’t these human workers create value? This of course applies to the programmers, but also to the users of these platforms: The content on many of the sites or services in question are often created by users, without any form of payment, as Jaron Lanier and others have pointed out. Google’s search engine, for example, is operated by an estimated, and almost unfathomable, two billion lines of code: It therefore requires a great many (salaried) “hands and brains” for an apparently immaterial, abstract “sociotechnical ecology” to arise, and the transition from value appropriation to interest is perhaps not as obvious as several critical theorists, such as Negri and Žižek, have made it out to be. Although there may not be a clear correlation between working time, amount of code and profit rates, the platform theorists have not thought enough about the role of the worker as a value producer also in the creation, operation and daily maintenance of these platforms or “ecosystems”. (Facebook is estimated to use the services of 15,000 content moderators , for example; therein also lies the potential for labor struggle, as the 43 Kenyan contractors who sued Meta in March 2023 show.) If the platform is a seemingly natural “ecosystem”, rather than a worker-made product, the political class struggle also disappears from the analysis.

In the final chapter, Vogl delves into ressentiment, drawing on Nietzsche's concept to highlight the characteristics of aggrieved subjects. These include a tendency toward reactive attitudes, external objects serving as reminders of loss and trauma, and a focus on personal grievances rather than structural analysis. Vogl ties these characteristics to the hyper-personalized, reactive actions of right-wing movements worldwide, which often focus (obsessively and pathologically) on ethnic, gender, and religious minorities rather than economic elites.

While Vogl makes a compelling case for the role of financial capitalism, information technology, and ressentiment in contemporary politics, Vogl’s narrative about finance and digital technology is still not entirely convincing. Why should we be wary of the thesis of a financialized information capitalism and digital financial capitalism? A significant part of capitalism still revolves around elements that, strictly speaking, have no place in Vogl’s analyses, such as heavy industry, traditional raw materials (coal, iron and steel), and pre-digital commodities (from food to textiles and cement). As Jacques Rancière points out in a recent interview, [1]there are still huge swaths of traditional industrial proletarians in the world today, and the very precondition for the so-called knowledge economy remains industrial production, which continues apace on a mass scale. The notion that capitalism now predominantly consists in the manipulation of “signs” is largely the “spontaneous philosophy” of the intellectual class.

Vogl is too sophisticated a thinker not to understand this. Nevertheless, he appears to inflate the importance of “Silicon Valley” (digital technology) and displaces other aspects of capitalism in his rather one-sided focus on “Wall Street” (finance). Is there nothing beyond this new Athens and Jerusalem? In the midst of all the new, perhaps the most surprising thing about our time is how much of the old, albeit outwardly transformed in form, remains. The truly striking thing about our time is not the new, but the reproduction of well-worn, well-established historical and structural patterns. Everything that once was repeats itself – first as tragedy, then as farce (but what about the nth time)? Workers are exploited, capital is accumulated, crises polarize populations, ideologies are reproduced. Behind the outwardly new, the old and familiar political-economic elements remain in place.

[An expanded version of this review was first published in Norwegian in Agora: Journal for metafysisk spekulasjon (2023, issue 2-3).]

Review: Zachary Jonathan Jacobson (2023). On Nixon's Madness: An Emotional History.

Zachary Jonathan Jacobson (2023). On Nixon's Madness: An Emotional History. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12723/nixons-madness.

In a global system of (supposedly) rational international actors, could an irrational feint—pretending to mercuriality, slouching towards unpredictability—constitute a higher form of rationality than “pure reason” alone? In On Nixon’s Madness, the historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson takes a closer look at the famed “madman theory,” and its apparent progenitor, President Richard Milhous Nixon. 

Observers of Donald Trump’s presidency will recall similarities between DJT and Nixon’s apparent policy posture: Keep your enemies on their toes by faking a kind of absolute volatility. In Trump’s case, threatening to derail the special relationship with South Korea, or pull out of NATO (to extract concessions in defense spending from European member states), have been chalked up to the madman theory in action: Trump wouldn’t really have pulled the plug, so the conventional wisdom goes—or would he? This “X factor,” this uncertainty about the genuineness of the feint—in essence a question about authenticity, representation, and stagecraft—is what is supposed to make the madman theory’s corollaries such a powerful foreign policy instrument.

Jacobson portrays Nixon as a famously studied, and studious, statesman, described memorably by journalist Hunter S. Thompson as a “plastic man in a plastic bag,” who was, lest one forget, tragically, responsible for the deaths of millions in Southeast Asia at the height of the Vietnam War, with the ferocious bombings of Cambodia and Laos.

With Nixon, the threat of extreme violence—in effect, going nuclear in or around North Vietnam—was designed, it is said, to keep the USSR and China at bay.

But as Jacobson shows, the madman theory was probably not as clever, from a pure bargaining standpoint, as Nixon and some in his inner circle might have thought: If anything, “Nixon’s nuclear saber-rattling sufficiently scared the Soviets and Chinese into enlarging their nuclear arsenals,” Jacobson writes, possibly on the theory that when a mad dog is on the prowl, it is eminently reasonable to go in search of a bigger stick. Affecting volatility isn’t the four-dimensional chess move that leaders like Trump and Nixon have thought; it can just as likely push international relations into a more parlous state.

In an entertaining series of passages, Jacobson also shows how Nixon’s nuclear posturing vis-à-vis North Vietnam was if anything too global, too sophisticated, even subtle, assuming a “Big Other” to observe and record all the US’ careful military stage manipulations that simply did not exist.

Jacobson’s book veers away from this tight focus on foreign policy into a psychohistorical account of Nixon’s emotional life, as well as a lengthy chapter on the, decidedly “un-mad” 1972 trip to China, which found Nixon playing the somewhat unlikely role of peacemaker and bridge-builder between East and West; contemporary policymakers would do well to study how Nixon and his team stage-managed the courting of Mao and Zhou Enlai. Readers of more conventional Nixon biographies will probably learn little new here, but these accounts are deftly composed. Jacobson convincingly shows how Nixon was fueled by resentment toward higher-class elites, Kennedy and the Ivy League types, that both embittered and propelled him forward. His work ethic was fierce; classmates from his school recalled a loner type rushing down the school’s corridors with huge stacks of books; even later in life, Nixon relished “homework,” and after the Watergate scandal, he claimed to lunch on an ascetic lunch of rye crackers and canned tuna. He was a loner, perhaps even a lone wolf. “Despite constantly reaching out, he thought of himself as a loner. ‘I believe you should keep your troubles to yourself,’ he said. ‘I never wanted to be buddy-buddy . . . I don’t believe in letting your hair down, confiding this and that and the other thing.’” And he was beaten by his father, Jacobson notes in passing, without truly mining the effects this original violence may have had on his future political decisions: “Only on rare retellings would Nixon reveal that most secret of knowledge within the Milhous Nixon home. Only rarely did he say it simply: ‘Yeah, we got the strap.’” Were the fleets of B-52s bound for Indochina a kind of psychohistorical return or revenge for “the strap” he suffered under in his childhood?

Such texture, of course, should not distract from the only fact about Nixon that finally matters, looming impossibly large over his legacy, vastly larger than the Watergate break-in that ultimately toppled his presidency: The deaths of millions of South-East Asian civilians, whether the result of “rational irrationality” or not, remain a terrible stain on humanity’s history, and the history of the United States in particular. In the wake of half a million tons of munitions dropped on Cambodia and Laos, according to scholars Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, the true act of madness was the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award one of its co-architects, Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize only a handful of years later, in 1973. And with war crimes such as these to explain, have we really arrived at a sufficient account of Richard M. Nixon the man and destroyer of worlds?