Grand Communion

As I have examined in the previous posts, Dostoevsky’s antisemitism was in a sense a side-effect of his belief in the imminent arrival of a final, just order on Earth. This ultimately is the essence of antisemitism: the notion that Jews are somehow fundamentally in the way of the new order. It has always been the same whether we are talking about medieval Catholics, Protestants or indeed the last century’s seemingly unbelieving totalitarians, and it was also the case with Dostoevsky’s peculiar millennarian vision for Russia.

The latter is deserving of some exploration on its own, not just in terms of those who were implicitly excluded, because it differed markedly from all the other aforementioned antisemitism-generating systems of thought in a number of significant respects.

The way history subsequently played out in Russia might lead us to conclude that Dostoevsky’s apparent belief in the coming of a ‘great and open-hearted communion’ was completely wrong, almost laughably so, but people continue to turn to The Brothers Karamazov, because the vision expounded by the dying elder Zosima continues to intrigue, not just as one of what might be, but of what might be wrong with all the other programmes for societal change that we currently possess. 

Dostoevsky's Russia does ten to sound like a bit like something off the pages of Spiked! There are the people, and there are those deluded metropolitan elites. The latter are liberal, rational and atheist. They imagine themselves as free, but they are 'isolated'. 

When the poor rise up against the elites they are often led to do so with bloodshed by a discourse that is fed to them by dissident elements of those same liberal, rational, atheistic masters. "Their wrath is accursed, because it is cruel."

The insistence on non-violence is explicit: He who draws the sword will perish by the sword.

Instead, the people have to be true to their own essential selves, to their faith and humility, acting without vengeance or envy, in a manner likely to eventually sort of shame the rich into allowing a society grounded in equality. 

This is a new order to be won by 'humble love' not by force of arms. Salvation must come from the people in effect swallowing those who would be their masters, economic or political, into their big blob of love.

When confronted by the wicked, the elder Zosima advises that the best approach is to 'shine' on them. 

Earlier on in the story he had perplexed many of those present when he threw himself down at the feet of the town's best known wrong-un, seemingly responding to the 'pride of Satan' with performative grovelling. 

In his deathbed Talks and Homilies Zosima explains his approach...

"If the wickedness of people arouses indignation and insurmountable grief in you, to the point that you desire to revenge yourself upon the wicked, fear that feeling most of all; go at once and seek torments for yourself, as if you yourself were guilty of their wickedness. Take these torments upon yourself and suffer them, and your heart will be eased, and you will understand that you, too, are guilty, for you might have shone to the wicked, even like the only sinless one."

Reaching this part of TBK is rather like coming across one of those unusual somewhat stand-alone episodes in the middle of a favourite TV series, which initially generates significant frustration as one comes to terms with the realisation that there will be a further extended delay before the cliff-hanger at the conclusion of the previous episode is resolved. And yet, once everything has been wrapped up, one starts to look back on it with greater fondness.

And here at least we get a lot more than a bunch of flashbacks and character backstory padding. One might say that these observations lie at the very heart of what Dostoevsky was trying to say and that the wider 'plot' is the padding, really.

 

 

Jewlaks

Dostoevsky, literary poster boy of universal brotherhood and compassion was also a really horrid antisemite.

Many other such bigots are perfectly happy to admit to the charge, but Fyodr was one of those, a bit like Gary Lineker, who vehemently denied it, even as he was ‘posting’ content which made it rather obvious.

Hatefulness goes against my profoundest principles, he would say, and in this he did seem to have a point. He also had his own version of the ‘some of my best friends’ get out clause. This is one the racist’s oldest subterfuges, whereby they highlight specific individuals they like, while demonising certain salient forms of the collective.

The recent online ‘faux pas’ involving Lineker hung not just on latent Nazi symbolism, but on a fanciful characterisation of Zionism, which has clear parallels with Dostoevsky’s ‘Jewish Idea’.

In simple terms, Jews are just fine as long as long as they don’t go around being Jewish or attaching themselves to specifically Jewish aspirations or cultural patterns. If they do, they become a kind of existential threat to the wider civilisation.

Ultra-nationalism and Ultra-socialism were for a long time fairly compatible e.g. Vietnam, Cuba etc. But today Ultra Socialism seemingly rejects all expressions of Jewish post-colonial national aspiration, choosing to misrepresent it as the reverse phenomenon, a continuation of colonialism.

One can find some specific historical reasons for this, and others bound up with the complexities and absurdities of modern geopolitics, but deep down it is connected to one of the very oldest antisemitic tropes: the notion that Judaism itself presents a uniquely serious obstacle to most other forms of universal brotherhood and salvation. (For Dostoevsky universal meant Christian and Russian, but he would have barely understood the distinction. Some of the same civilisational violations he impersonalised via his ‘Jewish Idea’, he also fingered the ‘Turks’, rather broadly defined, for in his novels.)

Lineker has thus been retreading ground that is essentially medieval, and this is one of the serious quibbles I have with the widespread 1930s Germany obsession, because the pathology has much deeper roots. In the Middle Ages every time Europe became obsessed with millennarian fantasies of worldly cleansing and the final imposition of Divine justice, there would be major pogroms.

One can see that the difficulty Dostoevsky perceived with the Jewish collective had analogues in other groups, notably the ‘commune-eaters’ referred to in The Brothers Karamazov by the Elder Zosima. These were the same Kulaks later exterminated en masse by Stalin: a group of people who seemingly lived by their own ‘selfish’ ideals within a romanticised rural society, and were thus like a tumour which had to be forcibly removed.

Corbyn is out celebrating Nakba Day today, pushing the loaded tale that 750,000 Arabs were forcibly evicted in 1947-8 by the dastardly Jews of Israel through no fault of their own, and of course no mention is going to be made of the even greater number of Jews who also had to up sticks at around the same time as they were driven out of assorted Muslim majority nations around the Middle East.

Within Corbyn’s worldview Israel now has to go for the same reason the Kulaks had to go in the USSR, yet the mental gymnastics involved are even more extreme, because achieving this involves a loose-ish alliance with Jihadists whose own ideal of brotherhood is about as ultra-exclusive and un-diverse as one could imagine. 

 

The South African Afrikaaner refugees showing up in Trump’s America are undoubtedly ludicrous, but there are certain parallels worth observing with Arab Muslims in the Levant: they are the descendants of a colonising culture which has consistently failed to accept or adapt to the 20th century post-colonial carve up as presented to them by the out-playing of history. They essentially desired to continue to run the whole show with the indigenous culture as, at best, second class citizens. (See also, Rhodesia.)

Being a substantial minority within a society run by peoples with an older claim was anathema to them, even though within it they’d enjoy more rights than they’d have ever given other ethnic groups if they’d held on. Time to play the victim.

 

The Dostoevsky Problem

The name given by scholars to the phenomenon whereby individuals who appear to define themselves by their compassion, somehow withhold it from Jews.

The Russian author was himself self-consciously uber-compassionate, indeed could be said to have devoted himself to compassion and vicarious suffering , and yet made athis pointed exception when it came to Jews. He would vehemently deny hating Jews even as he was making rather obviously hateful statements about them.

While he’s very much not the only example of this phenomenon, he has given his name to it.

When pushed he would say he had no ‘preconceived’ hatred of Jews, which permitted him to hate specific real world examples, usually collectives rather than individuals, and perhaps even ‘the Jewish idea’.

Some say that the underlying problem has been that Jews, with their messianic views and their unique historical suffering, offer a sort of implied rivalry to the Russian culture Dostosevsky saw himself as belonging to.

You often witness something similar today with identity politics and anti-racism movements, which tend to regard Jews as a threat rather than as fellow travellers, and this is in part because Judaism is relatively isolationist and does not easily lend itself to more universally conceived movements of liberation or salvation. It is the one monotheistic faith which has not gone out of its way to make converts.

Throughout the Middle Ages antisemitic violence attended almost every moment when Christians engaged with the millenarian fantasy that the world was about to be cleansed and made perfect. 

 

Dostoevsky’s own ideology of compassion comes with a vehement rejection of utilitarian logic, which he came to associate with Jews, along with materialism, something which has stuck with many modern believers in the socialist utopia. 

 

Staunchly Christian, he nevertheless hated the Crucifiction as a Jewish utilitarian idea: that God would sacrifice his own child for the greater cause.

A lot of antisemites today share his apparent obsession with children and yet appear absolutely unwilling to see how Hamas has been applying the utilitarian logic against the Jewish state, sacrificing their own people so that their cause might better thrive.

 

Quatermass (Thames TV)

I have lately been re-viewing some of the films and TV shows which most unsettled me as a child, and this 1979 four-parter, written by Nigel Kneale, was a stand-out.

Strangely enough, I had either mis-remembered the end or missed the final episode entirely, reminding me of a vaguely-related content consumption phenomenon in the seventies.

There was a swashbuckling French series set in the days of Cardinal Richelieu which was shown on various occasions on Saturday morning telly called The Flashing Blade. The concluding episode seemed to have upsetting elements because — for some reason — the dubbed English version never included the final installment and one was left with the impression that one of the good guys had been struck down and there were various other détails en suspens. Only years later did I see the missing conclusion on DVD.

 

 

Anyway, in the case of Quartermass, if I imagined that a much older, more worldly me, bingeing the whole show over a long journey, would find it quaintly dated and thus less discomforting, I was mistaken. If anything the original effect was not only still present, but even more pronounced.

The set up is fairly straightforward. It’s the end of the 20th century and human society is breaking down. The young have either joined warring urban gangs or an itinerant cult which believes they are all about to be transported to another world. Masses of the latter gather at ancient stone circles and similar sites around the world, where they are seemingly reduced to swirling white dust and granular detritus.

These ultimately impersonal mass casualty events induced from space are fundamentally shocking, especially within a storyline which spares almost none of its main characters, even young children, from unhappy termination. (Back then in Star Trek you knew the guys in the red shirts were slotted for extinction and in Doctor Who at least one of each story’s incidental leads would probably not make it, but Kneale was absolutely relentless here.)

The strangely obsessive and deluded demeanour of the ‘Planet People’ in Quatermass chimed with an earlier experience from my childhood: a visit to Hyde Park during the ‘Summer of Love’ where I found the whole place overrun with hippies either dancing manically or frolicking on the grass which my barely-formed mind found all rather sinister at the time.

The abject state of the yufe requires a solution to be cobbled together by a collection of old timers. And this is where Kneale’s scenario delivers its emotional punch within a decidedly creepy package, for he does something which other marquee British content has always done, though perhaps a little less explicitly: position a vision of a gadget-tastic near future with a deeply nostalgic anchor in the British past. This is what makes the likes of James Bond, Doctor Who, The Avengers etc work. Indeed, these formats basically cease to function properly when the backward-looking part of the product is neglected.

This particular dystopia is situated perhaps a decade on from the date of filming, yet we are constantly shown glimpses of costumes and other iconography from the middle of the twentieth century and the crumbling generation left to confront the threat from deep space are Britain’s ‘wartime generation’. The references to the Holocaust are overt. Thus what you have here is a combination of the predictive power of the genre at its most gloomy, with an eerie kind of reverse speculation.

Maybe the late 1970s was the last great opportunity to pull something like this off. (Rather like The World at War). As we saw last week at the VE Day concert at Horse Guards', only a few stragglers remain from the wartime experience, almost none of whom will have played a defining role. And we have coated the period in so many layers of platitude and positive nostalgia that the fundamental nastiness which Kneale tapped into with his script for this series would probably not operate in the same way today.

And in truth the massed youth movements of the epoch, often characterised by collective hysteria (I lived just a few doors away from where the Osmonds stayed on their London visit in May 1975) are also something of a distant memory.

If there is a villain of the piece, it is an alien machine harvesting our young for some property, possibly their perfume, yet it remains unclear whether this artifact, which has come before in ancient times, remains under the conscious control of other beings.

Down below on Earth, this partial apocalypse is perceived as one that has occurred as a result of a unfathomable foundering of the collective psyche — not a virus, environmental catastrophe, global-level conflict etc. as we tend to come across more commonly today, and this, I would suggest, makes it that much more ominous and perplexing.

Dumbfounding

During the 2-3 year period when we were working through the deal underpinning the sale of our company, I was exposed on numerous occasions to the basic pattern of 'hard-nosed' American negotiation, especially as epitomised by NYC lawyers. 

For almost anyone who has grown up within a different culture, Brits and Scandinavians in particular, these machinations are often profoundly shocking. 

No obvious attempt is ever made to establish mutual goodwill or indeed an opening position not far from that which either side might be content to settle on. Instead, the first move is always almost ludicrously extreme, morally highly suspect, and often enough, seemingly self-defeating to boot. 

I see rather obvious signs of this in Trump's administration and it is clear that many outside observers are not quite getting how this works. 

There's a pattern emerging of a spectacular gnashing of teeth whenever he indicates an approach to a possible 'deal' — even prior to any formal discourse — and then a form of semi-relieved gloating when he later appears to cave in. 

But this is how it always goes. He is not some sort of outlier in this respect, at least not within the environment he has always operated in. 

Traditional politics have tended to be more like a marketplace than a Manhattan lawyers’ office. But Trump, Netanyahu and others are adopting — with mixed success so far — an alternative strategy which always begins with an attempt to dumbfound the opposition with its basic unreasonableness.

Resisting it is going to have to involve a bit more than acting dumbfounded.

Potted History

 

These potted histories of the subcontinent and its currently sub-nuclear discords, usually delivered via animated infographics, are starting to proliferate on social media.

Two common themes; well, one theme and one kind of glaring non-theme.

Firstly, it's all the Brits' fault. In this particular clip the AI voiceover in Spanish tells us that India was basically minding its own business until, in 1820, it was forcibly Raj-ified by 🇬🇧 and then had little alternative but to descend into murderous, religiously-motivated conflict once the imperialists had departed in a great hurry in 1947.

Listen to the extremist voices amongst the Arabs and Jews in the Levant and a broadly similar refrain will emerge: their raging mutual animus has developed at least partly as a side-effect of clumsy British colonial interference.

But the way that the big picture allegiance of Pakistan has been illustrated here is unintentionally oh-so-telling.

And this is how we intuit the theme that seemingly nobody wants to openly discuss, either in the case of the Indian subcontinent, or indeed in the case of the Levant — what exactly have Muslims, specifically expansionist Islamic fanatics, been doing there in the first place?

Might there have been an earlier history of brutal, faith-based conquest prior to the arrival of everyone's favourite historical villains: nineteenth century Europeans? And is the situation implied by the term 'post-colonial' a little more complicated than many amongst the semi-literate will allow it to be? 

Hinduism looks fairly indigenous to the territory, just like Judaism does. Islam, on the other hand, comes over a bit more like that chap up there, top left: a 'peaceful', smiling visitor from the Arabian Peninsula.

Free luxury Jumbo…anyone?

VE Day(s)

This has been a week where, after eighty years, it has become clear that our culture is losing a bit of clarity around how and when (and where) WWII ended. Though a measure of ambiguity has always been present. 

The Donald is here referencing a not especially relevant event which took place in the Pacific in February 1945. 

Germany meanwhile would surrender largely as a result of defeat to the Russians in the Battle of Berlin and the suicide of Hitler on April 30. The relevant docs were signed at Rheims on May 7 and formalised in Berlin the following day, which became VE Day for us. 

Though the Russians continue to celebrate on the 9th, owing to some procedural delays both sides kicked up, for Stalin didn’t believe Jodl, the general who’d signed up to unconditional surrender in France, was senior enough to do so — though he’s one of those allowed to stay in the bunker office room to witness the Führer going ape in the Downfall memes — or indeed, that the location was appropriate. 

And Keitel started nit-picking over a single clause, which meant the war would end — and for the Russians and Germans REALLY end — after the ceasefire had formally commenced. 

For London civilians like my mother, the experience of war would wind down both sooner and later. The last V2 rocket struck on March 27, but emergency conditions like the rationing of basic foodstuffs would persist a further nine years. The general election of July 5, 1945 was perhaps the greater watershed moment. 

My uncle’s Division, the ‘desert rats’ (into which his regiment, the 8th Royal Irish Hussars fitted) had accepted Hamburg’s surrender in March and he’d reached the Elbe in his tank at the time of ceasefire, and would later participate in the Berlin victory parade at the end of July. 

My father, then just 18, was also in the army and stationed in Sinai, in charge of a courier company within the Royal Fusiliers. He was not especially demob happy as the news reached him, fully expecting to be redeployed out to Asia. For most British soldiers in active service, the prospect was fairly terrifying. 

In May 1945 hardly anybody had an inkling of those goings on at Los Alamos and so there was no sense of imminent surrender in the Asian theatre as there had been in Europe after the failure of Hitler’s last offensive in the Ardennes during the previous winter. 

The war, it was presumed, might drag on for a while. Elation was tempered.

Locked (2025)

 

This is basically a B movie with an A-list, two-hander cast.

You wouldn’t even need a whole ride in an elevator to pitch the concept.

A Covid Compliance officer appears in the end credits. So maybe the idea recommended itself at a time when the industry was looking for this kind of restricted set-up.

It was shot in Vancouver and so, looking ahead, might be the sort of production attracting 100% tariffs in the near future. Though on my one visit to that city in 2010, I did come across some peculiar patterns of street-level indigency and social decay there which are certainly plot-relevant in Locked.

Everything about it is perfectly adequate. The writing is decent and it avoids the risk of both obvious absurdities (OK, maybe that nigh speed ride through the city) and of trivialising the social and ethical issues it necessarily evokes. Dostoevsky is name-checked.

The two leads add some notes of genuine excellence.

 

Intransigence

 

There are several points of view or even world-views which have informed the conflict in the Levant over the last 80 or so years.

The Arabs will tell you that the perverse mindset which trumps all others is Zionism. In truth no serious historical analysis is likely to conclude that this particular ism, understood as some sort of malign western-colonialist ideology, has been the key driver. And the Arabs are conspicuously slippery on this matter, using the term to refer to either a niche form of ethnocentric extremism or all Jews no matter how they think, according to the way it suits their argument and current state of mind.

In as much as whenever someone chants 'Free Palestine' what I usually hear - according to context, though actually not really -  is 'Destroy Israel', and as I could never support the latter proposition, you could tar and feather me as a Zionist, but it would be churlish to do so, especially as I am very much on the record for my abhorrence of all forms demented ideology and childish sloganeering as ways of dealing with the world's problems.

Next up for consideration, Jihadism. It's been around for over a millennium, and what we really need to consider here is the way it has more recently become entangled with 20th century European death cult extremism, specifically in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood and then later as Hamas. This unlikely cocktail form of ism is especially relevant today, though the Arabs of this region openly flirted with hateful Nazi nonsense some time before the end of colonial rule and this connection with fascism has persisted. 

Is this really then all about deciding which of the available partisan dogmas one finds most repellant?

I would argue not, because the finger pointing over formalised ideas only serves to disguise the fact that one particular perspective above all others has led to the slaughter of many thousands: the unwillingness of the Arabs to accommodate themselves in any way with the post-imperials set-up which was presented to both them and the Middle Eastern Jews. The latter did indeed accept significant compromises, but the Arabs chose the most violent version of winner takes all and lost. Pretty much everything else surely stems from that.

There are sections of the extreme wings of both camps who like to point the finger at us Brits, the suggestion being that we dropped the ball and that the actions of my immediate ancestors were at best unhelpful. Yet, given the collective mentalities then prevalent, I think Britain did ultimately make a fairly decent attempt to pinpoint a post-colonial resolution which all sides could live with. Arab intransigence was and is the problem.

Game of Isms

ISMs are, for me at least, codified systems of ideas that want to be shared. The basic idea is that those who live their lives according to an ISM are largely freed from the requirement to think or investigate before speaking or acting. In many cases these individuals — though this may not be the right identifier here — are motivated by pre-dispositions and prejudices.

Now, while this is true of both Zionism and Anti-Zionism, any debate which frames the contention between these two as a battle of ISMs, tends to either misrepresent or suppress what seem to be the rather obvious underlying balance of basic sentiments.

The vast majority of Zionists are not really living by the precepts an ism at all (least of all one that calls for colonislism and/or racial annihilation); they are simply Jews, a fact that their detractors seem well aware of in practice.

And on the whole they would appear to have adopted the term in order to indicate a desire to stake an emotional share in a ‘national’ homeland which is a place of both sanctuary and self-determination.

There are of course those who have permitted this sentiment to become encrusted with the proper trappings of an ISM, including a more expansionist vision and an ingrained hostility to the other, but these tend to be in the minority.

Anti-Zionism on the other hand is indeed a slippery one, because it has been formulated specifically in order to disguise those components of expansionism and hostility towards the other which come packaged with the Jihadist mentality, along with some rather obvious associated streams of intolerance and bigotry.

There are of course those who simply see the Middle East through progressive goggles and apply the appropriate anti-western tropes, typically with oodles of highly-performative humanitarian sentiment, but these tropes and the sentiments which motivate them, have become far too entangled now with much more toxic and bigoted perspectives, not to mention the militant dictates of Jihadism: the most menacing ISM in the modern geopolitical mix. (Though Antisemitism is once again in ascendant mode.)

The point here is that one needs to look behind the formulations and the pretensions of the ISMs and confront the underlying thinking patterns (if any), but more importantly, the feeling patterns.

One Way

There are, and always have been two basic possible resolutions of the conflict in the Levant, at least as far as the main participants are concerned. For one side there is the peace that can come when the Palestinians renounce violence, and for the other there is the peace that will come when they have exterminated their enemy.

Palestinians will undoubtedly never be free to live with dignity as long as their adopted identity fundamentally embodies — above all other aspirations — the urge to eliminate or at least totally suppress the Jews of Israel, for we are bound to assume that this is not currently an achievable goal.

Everybody knows — or really ought to know —that the ball is in the Arab court when it comes to making the key move that ends the bloodshed, but the Palestinians and their enablers have lately attempted to disguise this bit of conspicuousness by projecting their own genocidal urges onto their nemesis...and not entirely fancifully, because their obstinate refusal to accept the way of compromise and coexistence has undoubtedly encouraged both Israelis and a subset of Americans to consider a potential third route to resolution: one which involves drastic population removal or re-engineering.

It is frankly absurd to characterise the violence that the Arabs refuse to renounce as ‘resistance’ because the goal of movements worthy of that name has always been regime change: the removal of an oppressive administration, a new and better beginning for all, or almost all, Whereas the decapitation project the Islamists envisage here is certainly of the more general sort that they have practiced elsewhere against other non-conforming communities (and are in fact practicing right now in Syria, although nobody seems to care.)

What is actually being resisted in the Levant today is the only valid path to peace: a territorial settlement and mutual recognition of each other’s right to exist. And the blowback from this affectation of resistance as an excuse for violence rooted in prejudice and delusion, is government by venal bullies and fanatics, for Hamas and Fatah are natural extensions of a deeply embedded delinquency and it seems that this curse has started to seep into Israel too, though so far to a lesser extent.

Havoc (2025)

 

Wales's own Gareth Edwards, purveyor of an ultra-violent aesthetic one might just have to refer to as 'John Woocky', is back on home turf — albeit a version that has been computer-coated to look like a GTA take on an American metropolis.

This isn't quite the extended attempt to reach a new close quarters body count record within a reasonable running time that we experienced before with his 'Raid' films, for there are one or two character-building pauses here, separating three principal set-piece sequences, one of which — inside a suitably brutalist nightclub — did have me pondering whether there are enough Chinese extras in Cardiff to supply all the bodies in that scene.

The plot is as 'throw away' as one of those Little Caesar's boxes.

 

Missing You (Netflix)

My only prior exposure to the oeuvre of Harlan Coben had been Guillaume Canet's rather decent adaptation of Tell No One (2006), which led me towards the otherwise avoidable error of attempting to read the source novel.

This five episode show is oddly entertaining, yet unlike any British cop show I have ever seen before. In the book the action apparently takes place in NYC, but has been transferred here to Manchester...a Manchester almost exclusively inhabited by Londoners, leaving the impression that this is some sort of experimental remake of Coronation Street using the cast of Eastenders.

It is basically a soap opera. Characters deliver hackneyed lines of dialogue as the 'dramatic' music swells and the camera is concentrated on the recipient's straining features.

There are two streams of plot, one ludicrous and the other predictable, and a mysterious character with more than a passing resemblance to Lionel Richie who may or may not be the link between the two. (There's also an IT-specialising DI whose narratively non-relevant creepiness seems to belong in a more open-ended format.)

Stop reading here if you abhor spoilers, but this story ultimately hinges on a non-credible cover up by multiple members of the secondary cast, who have spent ages protecting the protagonist from the supposedly destructive consequences of a certain piece of knowledge. It seems that for 11 years she has been more or less happy in her ignorance but suddenly starts pulling the loose thread, but when the dark secret is finally out, she's like 'whatevs', making you think everyone, including the makers of this show, could have saved themselves a whole load of bother.

 

Essence vs Experience

The dawn of Europe’s long day of rational inquiry began with the presumption, upheld by Spinoza et al, that essences precede experiences, so it is perhaps fitting, as dusk approaches, that the opposite notion is now starting to gain the upper hand.

A day or so ago I encountered an exchange on X in which JK Rowling was trolled as a “biological essentialist” and her response was simply to observe that all forms of zealotry tend to rest on an obstinate defence of fraudulent ideas.

I am about to make an argument in order to make a point — about a certain kind of argument — and I would ask Trans activists, especially the zealous kind, to bear with me, and thus forbear marching upon my house with torches and pitchforks until I have proceeded to at least partially (and tentatively) debunk the content of this argument myself. 

Here we go...

In any human society at any time, in any place, one would be likely to come across homosexuality. How this manifests might vary, but it would be hard to argue with the statement that it represents a human universal. Trans-sexuality or trans-genderism on the other hand, is rather less ubiquitous and it seems reasonable to therefore conclude that any underlying biological or psychological factors are often significantly amplified by cultural factors. And therefore Trans rights must be seen to differ innately from Lesbian and Gay rights, requiring an additional layer of collective negotiation and buy-in.

I think the above paragraph sounds perfectly reasonable...but in fact I have grounded it in one of those dichotomies which may either be imperfect or even fallacious, at least in certain contexts: Nature vs Nurture.

Now, I am not going to speak for everyone who had the same education as myself, but as my years of study progressed I began to see everything in less granular terms. Meanwhile, the NATSCIs around me were probably becoming more and more reductive in their reasoning and I am well aware of Richard Dawkins’s snide “Holistier than thou” characterisation of some of the arguments which most irk him.

When one starts studying history one tends to imagine that all one has to do with any large scale event is something akin to examining the dish as it comes out of the oven and reasoning back to the original recipe. 

Gradually however, one starts to comprehend that parts of the mix only really become operative in the process when exposed to each other, often in highly complex ways (Physicists are probably more on board with that intuition these days than biologists like Dawkins).

I was pondering this (occasional) fallacy of the clear distinction recently when I recalled one of the central contributions made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to twentieth century philosophy: speech is the accomplishment of thought. 

This existentialist thinker had begun his career by taking aim at the duality which had dominated French thought for centuries: the Cartesian notion that Mind and Body are fundamentally different in essence — and soon determined that any attempt to prise apart thinking and speaking was likely a fools errand.

So, if we're looking for a resemblance to today’s trigger-fingery Twittersphere, Merleau-Ponty was trolling the "thought essentialists".

We are kind of stuck now with this world that is at once mechanical and relative, where we still imagine we have certainties, but the truth is that these only really make sense in relation to others, and a degree of uncertainty is necessarily baked into the whole dish. 

The postmodern tendency to give precedence to the uncertain and/or wholly subjective should probably be resisted, for this leads to a discourse where either nothing matters or what certain very shouty individuals say matters, absolutely.

But choosing to die on the hill of an apparent certainty threatened by the flood waters unleashed by these forces may also not be the most productive approach to argument right now.

Mind boggles at DNA goggles…

As antisemitism flourished in Germany during the first few decades of the last century it became increasingly 'scientific', which in practice meant that the underlying prejudice was coated with a growing corpus of bogus academic interpretations.

In today's America, where ignorance has gained the same kind of prestige that science and medicine once had in early twentieth century Germany, the requirement to appear knowledgeable whilst being openly bigoted has been softened, to say the least. 

To wit, this report of a 'visible' DNA test with the finding that Israel's PM is Polish.

Some time ago Benjamin Netanyahu had an actual ancestry test, which uncovered that his genes reveal a mix of Ashkenazi and Sephardi heritage, which is completely unsurprising as his father emigrated from Poland to the Mandate and there met his mother, who had been born in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule.

Netanyahu's father was Polish in the way that South Asians in Idi Amin's Uganda were Ugandan i.e. a member of a deeply resented and persecuted ethnic minority.

So yes, technically he was indeed a Polish national, but the way that this antisemitic podcaster and Xcreter uses the term is rather like referring to a Mayan family living in Boston as 'Irish'.

Would these same a simple vista DNA tests determine that Obama is a native Polynesian from Hawaii?

This is all racist and stupid in equal measure, and unfortunately, unashamedly so. (Let's not even begin to wrangle with the notion of assessing people's territorial rights by relative pigmentation.) 

And this is the problem we now have with ideologically-driven discourse emanating from the US on a range of different topics, especially those referencing other parts of the world, for this toxic emulsion of ignorance and thin, low-grade information is steadily seeping out into the wider world and affecting the thinking of everybody who comes into contact with it.

Archetypal Pole?

As a boy I read and enjoyed Arthur Koestler's provocative book The Thirteenth Tribe in which the author speculated that Ashkenazis may have descended from the Khazars of the Northern Caucasus — who had mass converted to Judaism in the early medieval period — a notion since debunked by both historians and geneticists. 

It remains one of those immensely stimulating yet patently wrong hypotheticals, like Julian Jaynes's bicameral mind: worth reading if you are not the sort of person who systematically believes the last thing you read.

Ironically, Koestler seems to have imagined that by throwing doubt on the semitic origins of European jews he could take the sting out of antisemitism, yet today his theory has been appropriated by numbskull antisemites and used to make out that Israelis are on some fundamental level European settler-colonisers within a territory that has — as any broader historical analysis informs us — been under brutal and restrictive Arab and Turk colonial rule for around 1500 years.

And this when not even half of Jewish-Israeli citizens today have this Ashkenazi heritage which seems to set off the fanatical and chauvinistic simpletons.

Rabbit Hole Contours

The 'Free Palestine' fixation bears comparison with similar ideological rabbit holes. 

Take the Anti-Vax dissension. Adherents can point to certain verifiable facts that might appear to support their case, just as long as everyone agrees to avoid zooming out to the perspective at which it is reasonable to properly consider them.

At the same time they often insist on highlighting handpicked, sometimes brutal truths, even as their overall disposition speaks rather clearly of a tendency to dispense with information which could prove inconvenient. 

Crucially, at the far less granular level, their outlook is typically inundated by a raging stream of less focused sentiment, invariably a more diffuse, anti kind of animus.

Thus the Anti-Vaxers are virulently anti-science and anti-expert in much the same way that the Pro-Pals are virulently anti-western...and anti-semitic — though they are usually at pains to disguise that particular pathology by assuming exclusive responsibility for the public interpretation of this rather hoary form of bigotry. 

 

 

Adolescence...and Apaches

If there are any positives to be intuited from the past three months of Trumpian chaos is that they appear to be at least partially inoculating the developed ROW outside America against what was becoming a pronounced populist drift.

This appears to be especially the case in Canada. Keir Starmer too seems to have been a beneficiary, recovering from what had been an appalling first six months in No10. In Germany however, the ‘extreme right’ continues to make gains, at least in terms of background opinion.

One is also led to conclude that the centrists and the otherwise sensible have come up with their own formula for fighting project fear: fabricating somewhat spurious alternative spectres with which to distract the population from their traditional favourites, like immigration.*

The basic option has been “oh no, the 1930s”, but they are starting to craft a whole menu of new-fangled anxieties which might work to take the sting out of traditional conservative fear-mongering, even if they leave everyone feeling stung one way or another.

We have seen how this is going to work in the UK recently where a prestige Netflix series had been deployed as a policy instrument by the sitting government, elevating a diversionary tactic almost up to the level of one of those ‘moral panics’ a certain type of commentator revels in flagging up.

Now, I see absolutely no reason why British school-kids should not watch Adolescence in the classroom, but the government’s apparent determination to refer to this excellent show as a ‘documentary’ reminds me of one particular ‘public information’ film we were shown in our own primary school (below), which promoted the idea that an ordinary farmyard was a place where untold opportunities existed for fairly gruesome ends.

Being in the majority city kids, born and bred, almost none of us had been anywhere near a farm at that stage of our lives, so the relevance of these determinedly grim dramatised warnings was questionable, and the statistics currently available in the UK tend not to support the notion that the country’s young white males are being turned into an army of misogynistic murderers after watching Andrew Tate videos.

Stephen Graham has stated that he was inspired to co-author Adolescence after learning of two incidents in the UK where schoolboys had stabbed schoolgirls, but in neither case had the offender apparently disappeared down the ‘red pill’ rabbit hole.

That part was almost entirely fictional, yet the Labour government appears determined to insist that this narrative reflects and represents a very real threat to the core of British society in its formative phase, and one has to wonder if they are doing this because they would perhaps rather Brits weren't fretting about any of the actual threats to social cohesion which appear almost daily in the inboxes of say, MI5 and Prevent.

Anyway, if there is indeed an underlying, ‘useful’ truth in this superb series, it is that the online world can become a place of overwhelming obsession, sucking both the perspective and restraint out of just about any kind of vulnerable mind, no matter how loved and protected they might otherwise appear to be.

And this does strike me as a useful topic for a conversation with teenagers today, and as a phenomenon with the power to distort and ultimately degenerate just about any worldview, nascent or otherwise.

 

 * Whatever happened to Freemasons?

Triggers

Sometimes it can be fun to detect some of the triggers currently at the disposal of the crazies in our culture.

‘Visigothic Spain’ is an anachronism, just like ‘Iron Age Scotland’. It’s perfectly normal and I would argue, legit, for historians to use modern labels for geographical zones so that their readers know which areas they are referring to. (One ought not need to remind everyone that culturally and politically a good deal has undoubtedly changed.)

Today I was I was reading about the early Jōmon culture in the far East (from c14,500 BC) and the book in question liberally makes use of terms like Japan and Korea. No need for anyone to spontaneously combust over that...right?

Yet it seems that when it comes to Spain, any attempt to use this designation to refer to the pre-modern situation breaks open a hornets’ nest of haters.

Some of the trolling that I have been treated to on Threads lately appears to reveal that Visigothic Spain now enjoys a similar status to the pre-twentieth century Jewish presence in the Middle East e.g. it’s something that the Islamists would rather you didn’t know about.

In this way, Al Andalus, or the Moorish period on the peninsula, can either be taken as Edenic and indigenous (like 'Palestine') or as a kind of gallant anti-colonial reaction to the Romans, rather than say, an imperialist project (a Caliphate no less) which duly made second class citizens of Christian and Jew alike.

‘Spain’ in this worldview is thus that tiny territorial remnant in the north which then came and stole the lands below from Allah. That cities like Toledo, Segovia, Cordoba and Mérida had a monotheistic history going back several centuries before Arabic became the official language, is seemingly a major inconvenience for the Jihadist narrative today. 

 

The trouble with ceasefires...

 

Several of the more high profile conflicts in today’s world appear far more medieval than the ones we grew up with, which tended to be driven by supposedly more modern phenomena: ideologies, nationalisms, imperialisms and so on. 

This quote comes from a book about the 1380s when England and France were already locked into what would become known as the Hundred Years War, (which actually lasted a bit longer than that). 

At the time the country rather clearly needed peace in order to avoid the financial burden and all round distraction of permanent international strife, but there didn’t seem to be a way to achieve it without giving up what was seen as a fundamental principle, sovereignty: e.g. England did not want to hold its remaining territories on the continent in ‘fealty’ to the French King, it wanted Aquitaine and Calais for example, to remain part of England. 

And because they could not make peace in any way that would be satisfactory, this war became a long drawn out game of temporary ceasefires. In such an environment, negotiations tend to bog down with all sides acutely aware during this process that the best form of defence is almost always attack. 

The English also had to crane their necks to look behind them, so to speak. In 1385 the truce between them and the Scots was due to expire on July 15. As this date approached, a massive army was assembled at York, because the French were simultaneously preparing to join forces with the Scots at the moment the ceasefire was due to expire in order to attack from the north. 

Faced with this combined threat, 20,000 Englishmen marched behind their King and all his great lords into Scotland. For reasons not entirely military, this campaign collapsed fairly quickly and the English had retreated back to Newcastle as the French and the Scots poured over the border into Cumbria. 

This invasion in turn fizzled out because these perhaps unlikely allies discovered a few of their basic incompatibilities: the French knights were apparently appalled by the uncouth habits of the Scots coupled with the horrendous absence of wine, while the latter found siege warfare utterly boring, convinced that their home territory favoured faster-paced ‘guerrilla’ attacks. 

Anyway, medieval truces were respected, for what they were, which was not peace, but rather constantly re-scheduled interruptions to the on-going fighting. 

Compare the violent competition between states here in ancient Mesoamerica, which was also stop-start, but according to fixed calendrical milestones, so a bit more like the way European football leagues are currently organised.

Experts are part of the problem…

"If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past" > Spinoza

Seems like a good idea, doesn't it? Yet most historians of the phlegmatic variety will tend to admit that by the time the parallels are so obvious that they need to be called, it is often too late. 

When looking to avoid a recurrence of proto-fascist tendancies in our own times, we are generally quick to pinpoint certain streams of cranky and potentially hazardous thinking which took hold in say, early twentieth century Germany. 

This exercise fits with our sense that right now we are witnessing a widening gulf between 'populist' chatter and the discourse we associate with experts and the more technocratic sort of administrator. 

Yet one of the things that has struck me about Richard J. Evans's exposition of the situation The Coming of the Third Reich, is that beyond the antisemitism and other forms of extremist babble bubbling up in German political life at the start of the twentieth century, there was another problem emerging from an entirely different and perhaps less avoidable source — what Evans refers to as a "widespread medicalization of society".  

German scientific successes, especially in the field of medicine, had given one particular group of accredited experts an almost untouchable form of prestige in the society, and a consequence of this was the way "the concept of hygiene began to spread from medicine to other areas of life, including not only ‘social hygiene’ but also, crucially, ‘racial hygiene’." 

I take this to indicate that the interplay between the elite culture and the strange, mutating pathologies further down the chain may have been crucial in the formation of the truly 'diseased' politics which would emerge under the Nazis. 

When I came across these passages it prompted me to think about how the recent global pandemic may be informing political attitudes in 2025. 

And low and behold, today this article pops up...

Incertidumbre

 

There’s something going on in this novel which bears comparison to the conceit of the Apple TV series Severance: a world of innies and a world of outies, with formally separate memory streams and a narrative process by which the two are potentially ‘re-integrated’ even as it becomes perhaps a little less clear which of the two is the actual ‘underworld’.   

Modern long form TV seems above-averagely fascinated with journeys to and from an isolated, relatively constricted alternative reality or inframundo: Lost played with this scenario and a host of related motifs for six seasons, before finally settling on what was probably the most banal of available symbolic resolutions.

The ancients were of course fascinated with these transitions into mythological realities which abruptly coalesce for dramatic purposes with our own. There’s Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Cretan labyrinth of course, and over here we have the central narrative of the sacred book of the Quiché Maya — Popul Vuh — recounting the away games of Mesoamerican ball played by the hero Twins against the Lords of Xibalba.

I am fairly certain this isn’t Murakami’s best novel, but it strikes me as undoubtedly his most profound that I have read to date. 

However, it may well end up being hard for many to appreciate just how interesting and original it is, because it is long and packed with passages of workaday language (especially in the English translation).

Yet beneath the verbiage, Murakami’s city with its uncertain walls has a range of qualities which set it apart from other hidden worlds one might stumble across in modern literature....

1) It’s an imagined place — a story with a back-story — which sometimes assumes the properties of a real place

2) It is a hard-working multi-layered metaphor: at its simplest, for human consciousness and its processes for interfacing with the unconscious. 

And in this sense the latter assumes the role of the underworld’s own underworld, with dreamland forming something like an interstitial space between the mundane world and the wobbly-walled city. 

Murakami is noted for his blend of east and west — or perhaps for the western cultural patina he lays upon eastern intuitions — and here we can see how European ideas, like those of the psychoanalysts, are made to connect with native Japanese notions, such as those which emerge out of Shintoism. (The English translation, not the Spanish, works the title of Miyazagi’s film Spirited Away, into one passage, in italics.) 

3) The city is seemingly subjectively-constructed, for two (apparently) distinct individuals can perceive it differently from both within and without.

Something similar is intimated — though never explicitly — in Dante’s Inferno and other western tales of descent into worlds caught between literal and figurative existence. These tend to have been rather obviously customised to the cultural perspective of the poet/author, in Dante’s case that of late medieval Florence. 

Murakami also hints at a kind of Chinese Whispers effect here, whereby an individual can experience the structure and content of the city according to the misremembered or re-constructed version of another.

4) A representation of what a world might be like if somehow tailored for people who have refrained from engaging with the actual world. 

5) It is a place where time happens but has no meaning and remains somehow 'anchored', compared here to turning the pages in a book and finding that the number never changes.

6) And lastly, it functions as a kind of laboratory for testing Murakami's notions of self-hood and perennial anxieties such as incipient transparency and/or the existential version of imposter syndrome.

I may be projecting a little here, but I detect that Murakami understands the self as variations on a theme, at least two, if not more, and not all of which may be present within the sheet music book to hand at any one moment.

Each individuality is always a multiplicity and some of our multiples may right now be away getting by in another world. 

At the very least every person is a packaged duality, yet not precisely in the way Descartes saw it. Murakami himself seems a little uncertain at what he is getting at here, and the novel is better for it. 

People and places have shadows, which sometimes rebut each other and on other occasions align and merge. This phenomenon is loosely mapped onto the interplay of the subjective and the objective, and this leads to a discernment according approximately with one of my own: the possibility that we might somehow, sometimes be able to project the uncanny into the world around us. 

As Anaïs Nin said Nous ne voyons pas les choses comme elles sont. Nous les voyons comme nous sommes, though I don't think that's quite what she meant.

Only one of the basic pair can cross over between realities. There is a sense here that for some people the distinction could be more demarcated, but for others the barrier between them is far more permeable to the extent that at any one time a sentient human cannot be sure it is him or herself leading this life or whether the shadow is filling in while the ‘real’ person goes off for a metaphysical wander.

Yet these essentially fused beings are sometimes also able to share knowledge and sentiment when apart. 

Many years ago as an undergraduate I attended a fascinating series of lectures on popular beliefs in early medieval England. Inhabitants of small rural communities tended to imagine that objective reality started to blur at the physical edges of their village. They understood that certain members of their community always had one foot in this supernatural shadow reality: those whose job it was to wander, like hunters, but also some who hardly ever left home, like children. Dogs too could pick and choose which world to perceive. These ideas have been very sticky and often form the basis of Horror genre treatments in contemporary films, and in this novel Murakami also suggests that certain individuals have privileged access to existential ambiguity (though he'll swap dogs for cats). Yet the personages of this age old 'superstition' have been seemingly placed within an inherently more vague yet sophisticated cosmological geography, where the netherworld is neither simply down below us or out in the woods somewhere.

In the Afterword Murakami explains how important these fancies have always been to him. Indeed, this big book started long ago as one of his earliest short stories which appeared in the literary magazine Bunguku-kai c1980, and then, once established as a writer, he approached it five years later, from a parallel perspective, appropriately enough, in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a novel I am yet to tackle. 

Now he has returned to what he sees as the core conceit because he suspects he has never quite nailed it, perhaps because underlying it there is a shimmery set of convictions which one can only catch sharper glimpses of by changing perspective. The substantial and its shadow are sometimes hard to tell apart.