In the "Nation & World" section of my Sunday paper (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 11, 2018), included in the "In Brief" round-up on p. A21 of the print edition, was the following item:
ISRAEL
Israel backing off its blockade of GazaIsrael has tried to quell Gaza's border protests through force. Now Israelis easing a blockade and allowing millions of dollars in aid to flow into Gaza and to Hamas, which controls the impoverished enclave. The aim, in a plan mediated by Egypt and with money supplied by Qatar, is to provide relief for Gaza, restore calm on the Israeli side of the border, and avert another war. Watching unhappily is the Palestinian Authority, which regards any hint of cooperation between Israel and Hamas as an existential crisis and, many in Israel believe, would welcome a new Gaza war (my italics).
My key point, it should be obvious, is that at any given moment, not everyone wants peace, in the case of Israel-Palestine and more generally. In many cases, not everyone perceives the resolution of conflict as beneficial to their interests. Not only might peace not be in everyone's interests but some may see peace as a veritable threat, or, as per above, as an existential crisis.
Subsequent events--condemnation from Israeli quarters and increased hostilities between Israel and Gaza--prove the point. For example, see this AP report dated November 13, 2018.
As I continued reading my newspaper on that same morning, I came across a review of Stephen King's new novel Elevation. My link is to the entire Ron Charles review as it appears in The Washington Post, whereas the reprinted version in my paper had been whittled to the point of being abridged. Nevertheless, what struck me was that the reviewer picked up on the political incorrectness of Stephen King's having written the good guy in the story as a white male. (Okay, more than a good guy; maybe heaven-bound while still in this life.) Meanwhile, the lesbian couple in the novel are the ones wearing the black hats. Liberals and leftists would cry foul, said the reviewer. In other words, it's not going far enough to say that no thin authors should write about fat characters, no white authors should create black characters, and, maybe, even, no males should give us female characters. No; stories in which a white male provides moral enlightenment while the bad actors are from a suppressed group should not be written, on the grounds of reinforcing our white supremacist culture with its collective foot on the neck of the marginalized.
These two cases, the paralysis in the Israeli/Palestinian situation and the political incorrectness of Stephen King's new book, go beyond accentuating the negative. Instead, what we have is entrenched "us-them" thinking, in which everything bad gets outsourced onto "them," leaving "us" pure and innocent, and also relieved of responsibility. Entrenched narratives have become the foundations on which broad swaths of people stand, such that any change would be unthinkable, would be an earthquake, or, as we hear, an existential crisis. While participants in such dramas invariably insist they want peace and justice, what they demand is for their stories to prevail and with blame borne by the opponents. Anything otherwise would be intolerable.
In his new book, The Road to Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder says those us-them phenomena are "fictions." It is a fiction that the evil of the "other" can remove all the blame and responsibility from one's own side. When we do that, we're writing fiction, not facing reality. The fiction serves a purpose. It also serves as a distraction. Fictionalized problems aren't amenable to solutions.
We're smart and informed, and we know all about these us-them narratives--except that in our own cases we justify our attitudes and behaviors because our opponents "deserve" it. To restate: our narrative comes first and determines the roles we insist others play, allowing us to justify our attitudes and behaviors.
A hated common enemy is so politically useful.
Tell me, please, if we tell only negative stories about "white" people, particularly the males, and confine them in the "bad guy" roles, how is that teaching them to behave well? As the Elevation reviewer says, we on the political left don't think stories in which the privileged and undeserving white guy is the hero should be written. We don't need any more of those stories, we say. Those guys have had more than their share of attention.
However, if we keep them focused on imagining only their evils, why be surprised when some of them turn out to have been imagining being school shooters, country-music festival shooters, church and synagogue shooters...?
So it is that even without reading the Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos--and maybe I'll check it out--I saw how much we need it or something like it.
Judge not lest you be judged. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Is it possible those aren't pie-in-the-sky platitudes but, instead, strategies for avoiding the insoluble problems that are our worst nightmares?
