Hamas/Sade

We should harbor no illusions about the nature of our own species.

I have a strange pet peeve, which is the tendency to refer to Hamas and its atrocities as “inhuman.” Obviously, the term is largely a colloquial one. It is used simply to refer to something one finds impossibly horrible or monstrously criminal. In this sense, it’s an accurate description. But it also entails something that strikes me as a vaguely dangerous misconception.

It is simply this: It equates “human” with being compassionate, gentle, and good; and “inhuman” with being cruel, sadistic, and evil.

The problem with this is that, unfortunately, it isn’t accurate. Certainly, human beings are perfectly capable of being compassionate, gentle, and good; but they are also very capable of being cruel, sadistic, and evil. To say that something is “human” is by no means a compliment. We are, in many ways, a distinctly ugly bunch, barely more than Stone Age carnivores, and eminently talented at doing unspeakable things to each other.

Of course, one should point out that certain cultures and civilizations enable and encourage unspeakable things more than others. Hamas obviously qualifies as one of them. But it would be foolish to deny the fact that the problem with Hamas isn’t that its members are inhuman; it’s that they’re too human. That is to say, they express humanity’s most destructive impulses to an extreme and horrific degree.

This may be precisely why Hamas and its ilk must be fought and destroyed. If civilization means anything, it is the control and channeling of humanity’s most destructive impulses. It is quite possible that humanity cannot survive too much humanity. Unfortunately, as Freud noted, civilization involves an uncomfortable repression that, it seems, leads inexorably to the eruption of all that is horrific in the human. If this eruption is not stopped, life is impossible.

Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the pro-Hamas mobs came out not when Hamas was weakest and most beleaguered, but at the moment when it succeeded in carrying out an incomprehensibly sadistic massacre. It was not compassion and empathy that brought the mob into the streets, but their own sadism; their gleeful joy at the spectacle of an abattoir in motion. Yes, the mob hates Israel, but it loves death even more. Unfortunately, this is animal only in the sense that humans are animals.

I’m not an unqualified fan of evolutionary psychology, but there are probably good Darwinian reasons for this. Those who made the best hunters and fighters almost certainly had a strong streak of sadism in them, and given the essential role they played in preserving the tribe, likely reproduced at a considerable rate. The result was a kind of survival of the cruelest. That we bear what Darwin called man’s “stamp of his lowly origin” is not a surprise.

Perhaps this has been on my mind because I’ve recently been reading the work of sadism’s namesake, the Marquis de Sade. Now, Sade’s work is clearly monstrous and sometimes so disgusting that it’s simply unreadable; but it does seem to me that he was a great thinker because he alone was willing to confront the Enlightenment with a terrible truth.

The Enlightenment held that man was the measure of all things. In his exactingly clinical descriptions of perversion and torture, Sade is essentially saying: Man is the measure of all things? Well, here is man. It isn’t pretty, is it?

There’s value in that kind of prophetic admonition, however horrific the details might be. Indeed, in many ways, the castle of horrors in The 120 Days of Sodom is the closest thing to Auschwitz that any pre-Holocaust writer managed to envision. We don’t like the fact that Sade was a satanic prophet, but there may be a few things we can learn from him nonetheless. One may be that we should harbor no illusions about the nature of our own species.

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On a not very much lighter note, my latest column at JNS was published yesterday. In it, I deal with the pervasive bias against Israel in the media, the activist industry, and academia and discuss what I think is the best way to combat it; namely, invective.

Read it in full here.

I also realized that I forgot to mention last week’s column, which deals with the perpetual and perpetually irritating question of when criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism. I posit that it’s actually very easy to answer. Simply ask, “What is the measure of their hate?”

You can read it here.

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On a genuinely lighter note, there’s a very interesting interview over at the wonderful site Wellesnet with a fellow named Brian Rose who has made an animated reconstruction of the original version of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.

The story of Ambersons and its mutilation by RKO is too vast to go into here, but if you’re interested, I once recorded an amateur commentary to the film that deals with it in depth.

In any case, Rose’s work looks fascinating and, if the rest of the reconstruction is of the same quality, might be the closest we’ll ever get to seeing what was probably one of the greatest films ever made.

Rose says, “I very much would like this film to be paired with the theatrical cut in some way, so viewers can compare and contrast both. I sincerely hope that it could be possible to screen it in theaters, and ultimately make it widely available.”

I have to say, I hope so as well. It’d be something like seeing the ghost of a great film; but if the evidence is any indication, it would be a very beautiful ghost indeed.