The fiends' frustration

The pro-Hamas fifth column can't understand why it's losing, and how independent scholars can save us from the dictatorship of the professoriate.

I’ve read several articles in recent days about the attempt by Hamas supporters to intimidate Joe Biden into turning against Israel by voting “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries.

Interestingly, almost all of those interviewed said they voted “uncommitted” because all else has failed, especially the mob events they’ve attended. So, they’re going the way of the suicide bomber and threatening to kill the Democratic party, even if it puts Trump in office.

This argument has been used to justify literal suicide. Supporters of the mentally ill man who immolated himself outside the Israeli embassy in DC have praised him for raising the “protest” stakes in the face of persistent failure.

Obviously, there’s quite a lot to say about this, but I am particularly interested in what the “uncommitted” self-immolators whining says about themselves.

I think it says two things: a) These people are morally arrogant on a world-historical scale and b) they are completely incapable of self-reflection and self-criticism.

Regarding the first, it should be obvious why the pro-Hamas mob events have had limited effect: The majority of the American people, thank God, are not willing to support a movement that publicly endorses genocide, supports mass murder and rape, lionizes terrorism, engages in demented antisemitism, hates America, and generally acts like a keffiyeh and love-beads-wearing Ku Klux Klan.

This is much to the American people’s credit, but I think it goes deeper than that. While America has a long history of mob violence, except for a few lamentable exceptions it has rarely let the mob get its way. I imagine this is because democracy is burrowed deep in the American psyche. The mob is, by definition, an enemy of democracy. That is, any mob is a small group of angry, violent, disrespectful, and unscrupulous individuals who know they cannot get what they want by democratic means. So, they take to the streets to impose their desires on others. Politically, the mob is at best a rapist and at worst a tyrant.

In other words, the pro-Hamas mob has failed because, thus far, the American people do not want to allow the mob to make policy. They understand that to do so would be antithetical to democratic principles and threaten their rights and liberties. In a democracy, the majority rules, not a psychotic minority diseasing the streets.

Now, the pro-Hamas fifth column could acknowledge this and change their tactics accordingly. They could stop the genocidal rhetoric and violence. They could stop the virulent antisemitic incitement. They could even call on Hamas to surrender rather than attempt to save it.

But this they cannot and will never do. The reason is that they are absolutely convinced that they are the finest and most moral people who have ever existed in the entire history of the known universe. They are saints in their own eyes, and as such they can never be wrong, never be immoral, and certainly never be evil.

The problem is that they are evil. They are demons, not saints. And they are evil because they have chosen evil. Nobody forced them to be genocidal. Nobody forced them to attack Jews. Nobody forced them to support terrorism. Nobody forced them to do any of it. They chose it because they like it. It makes them feel good. Evil needs no other definition.

If the pro-Hamas fifth column were capable of self-reflection and self-criticism, now might be the moment for them to stop and reassess their beliefs and actions. They could ask themselves if perhaps they are not saints and if hating other people and wanting to kill them is a bad thing. Maybe they could even ask themselves if they are bad people. Indeed, if their goal is peace and an end to the war, success might be more likely if they did so.

But this will never happen, because, despite their moral arrogance, they do not actually believe in any of the principles they claim to cherish. If they did believe in them, they could never say and do what they say and do. It would be literally impossible.

So, instead of engaging in the moral inventory that terrifies them, they have chosen the way of the suicide bomber. Given who and what they are supporting, this should not be a surprise. But it is yet another reason why nobody should listen to a word they say.

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I’ve written a lot here about the dictatorship of the professoriate and the totalitarian regime it has imposed on academia, but not a great deal about possible alternatives to it. I believe the professoriate regime can be smashed and its institutions rescued from moral and intellectual oblivion. However, it will require the political will to do so, and this may not be forthcoming. If this is the case, then other options have to be considered.

The best option, I think, would be to bypass the regime entirely by reviving the venerable and honorable tradition of independent scholarship.

It is important to remember that academia as a system is, relatively speaking, fairly new. It took nascent form in the Middle Ages, but during the Renaissance and into the modern era, much of the great work of scholarship and innovation was accomplished by scholars working on their own, outside the strictures of the university establishment. As for the university as we know it today, it is largely a product of the late 19th century.

The list of independent scholars who created modern civilization is very long, but it is enough to mention Spinoza, Gibbon, and Copernicus alone to get the point across. Certainly, there were academics like Newton who made enormous and decisive contributions to science and the humanities. But in many ways, the independent scholars had the greater impact. No academic I know of has written a history of such towering brilliance as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In many ways, one of the worst things to happen to Western intellectual life was its institutionalization.

A revival of independent scholarship would have several advantages. First, independent scholars would by definition have to be enthusiasts. This would be much in contrast to today’s academics, many of whom clearly loathe their disciplines and want to destroy them. Hence, their fashionable vulgar deconstructionism—which lacks any of Derrida’s impeccable sense of irony—and a general tendency to accuse everything under the sun of racism.

Moreover, independent scholars are not burdened by the administrative drudgery that bedevils academics and the immense pressure to publish even when one has nothing to publish. Nor must they contend with the toxic politics that currently affect academia, both in terms of interpersonal relations and the totalitarian ideology that the regime has imposed. As independents, they are free of the stifling imposition of group prejudices and collective biases that have all but destroyed Western intellectual life. Perhaps most important, independent scholars are not dependent on the regime for their livelihood, and cannot be bullied and intimidated by threats of dismissal from students or administrators.

Independent scholarship can indeed produce cranks like Richard Carrier and outright monsters like Holocaust denier David Irving. But this is in no way a problem caused by independence. Over the past half-century alone, the professoriate regime has produced, institutionalized, and all but deified psychopathic and sometimes genocidal racists like Edward Said, Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, and numerous others. It is now the primary engine of racialist and antisemitic ideas in the West today. Academics have no room to complain about crackpottery. They are crackpottery.

The entire point of the university is to preserve and develop the Western intellectual tradition. The professoriate regime has not just failed to do that, it is actively hostile to it. If there is anything it really wants to kill, it is the Western intellectual tradition. Independent scholars, since they act solely out of love for their subject, are far less likely to be taken in by this cult of suicide.

In other words, independent scholars would be far more likely to actually do their jobs. They would take far better care of the Western intellectual tradition than today’s academia. In this, they would not be doing anything revolutionary. They would be returning to that tradition at its best, a tradition in which the freedom of the mind triumphed over institutions dedicated to nothing but their own decadence and dysfunction.