Your ‘love’ is a graveyard
Athenae delendae sunt.
My recent repentance, and repudiation of, the entire field of academic philosophy (of which I was a participant) amounts to this.
Philosophy does not love wisdom. Philosophy would, if it could, treat Miss Ḥikmah the same way that Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein treated their victims. Philosophy does not love wisdom. Philosophy, constantly referring to itself, loves only itself, just as all human beings love only themselves. In addition, philosophers are among the worst perpetrators of the lie that human beings are capable of love in any meaningful sense.
Of course I am speaking here of the German continental philosophers, such as Jürgen Habermas, who openly and without qualification support genocide against the Palestinians those perpetrating it. This is in the name of supposedly combating ‘anti-Semitism’. Thus they conveniently ignore that both Palestinians and Israelis are, according to the texts that both of them traditionally revere, numbered among the offspring of Šem. But, when Germans like Habermas in particular blame Palestinians (Semites) for a rise in anti-Semitism, what they are really doing is projecting. They are using Levantine Arabs as a scapegoat for their own nation’s world-historical sins against European Jews.
However, I am also speaking of mealy-mouthed, middle-of-the-road Anglophone continental philosophers like Slavoj Žižek and (relevantly to American Orthodox circles) David Bentley Hart. These types engage in a moral cowardice masquerading as intellectual sophistication. By pontificating that ‘both sides’ (or, in Žižek’s phrasing, ‘fundamentalists on both sides’, though of course he gave his own game away on Piers Morgan by imputing fundamentalism to all Arabs) are to blame for the present situation, they are left free to conveniently wash their hands of both Israeli and Palestinian victims. All while the governments under which they both live, arm one side to the hilt with all the latest modern weaponry, and turn the largely-unarmed and defenceless children of the other side into bloody bags of unidentifiable body parts.
This way, they can still claim to ‘care about’ the Palestinians, to ‘love’ them, while justifying their own complacent inaction in the face of the children being blown apart, eviscerated, hung from lampposts and crushed under rubble. Aren’t they so nice? Aren’t they so enlightened?
J’Accuse! It is not only the bare aesthetic consideration that rarefied, cerebral, effete philosophical discourse is disgusting and obscene when children are being slaughtered—though that, too. It is that the West’s prominent philosophers are actively aiding and abetting the slaughter. You philosophers, your ‘love of wisdom’—hell, let’s be honest: your ‘love’, tout court—is nothing more than a graveyard!
Don’t shoot me for saying so, though I know you would if you could. I’m just the messenger. I wasn’t even the first one to say it.
‘“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”’ (Matt 23:27)
I’m not claiming innocence. For me, it took a literal genocide to show me the vanity, shallowness and self-obsession that characterises what used to be my intellectual world.
It’s also not like the solution is to take refuge in the churches. The churches are nowhere close to innocent here, either. Ask any Indigenous American over the age of fifty what their memories are of the residential schools. Ask them what their memories are of religious education. I used to be quite proud of my Quaker ancestry and roots. Nowadays not so much, given what I know about how deeply, not just complicit but actively involved, the Quakers were in the brutalisation and cultural genocide of American Indian children.
And don’t pretend that that’s not connected to the plight of the Palestinians today. Look at who it is supporting all the Zionist politicians on both sides of the political aisle! Harris and Trump were equally emphatic and insistent in the debate, that they would continue sending the bombs that are murdering Palestinians right now. Hint: it isn’t Jews who are at the root of the problem. Jews in America are nowhere even close to as supportive of Israel as white evangelical Protestants are—but even mainline Protestants and Catholics are far more supportive than not of Israeli nationalism and the Israeli destruction of Gaza. Zionism isn’t solely or even primarily a Jewish problem.
It is your problem, American Christian. And it is my problem.
It is your churches that are the whitewashed tombs.
It is your churches that must repent—not only in words, but in deeds.
And they should have done so a long time ago.
But now, they need to start by repudiating Israel’s genocide of Gaza (note that once again, it is a Black church which has taken up the prophetic mantle—over and against Harris in this case!), demanding an arms embargo, and demanding an immediate and lasting ceasefire.