Ep53 -- The Paths Not Taken

 I've always been a big fan of alternate histories. Books like Philip K. Dick's The Man in The High Castle, or Robert Harris's Fatherland, both of which take place in a world after the Axis powers won World War II.  Or the absolutely brilliant and tragically underseen 2004 Mockumentary, CSA, the Confederate States of America, which not only tells the story of American history after the South won the Civil War, complete with images of AbraHa'am Lincoln attempting to escape the country in blackface with the help of Harriet Tubman and the Confederate flag being raised on Iwo Jima and planted on the moon, it even includes commercials for companies like Confederate Insurance, protecting a man and his property, and the Slave Shopping Network.  

I'm also fascinated by the sort of inevitability bias that we all tend to have. We have a difficult time acknowledging, despite the fact that it's a crucial plot element of every time travel story ever told,  that had things gone even slightly differently in the past.

Reality as we know it may never have come to pass. And a different reality would have come to pass in its place.  For example, had the planet we call Earth settled into an average orbit just a bit closer to the sun, about four times the distance between the Earth and the moon,  this little home of ours would've been uninhabitable.

Or on a more individual level, how many things must go right and how few can go wrong for a professional athlete to have a successful career?  I mean, you have to assume that there were countless potential Jordans or Messis or Gretzkys who missed their calling for whatever little reason, they hated their coach, they got caught up in some other activity, or they sprained an ankle just days before their amazing talent would've been realized.  

So on this episode of The Great Ungaslighting, I wanna talk a little bit about alternate realities, what they can teach us about how we might improve the reality we've got, and how we might see through the strategies of those who want to gaslight us into believing that there isn't now and there never was and there never will be, any alternative to just the way things are,  which coincidentally I'm sure, is a reality that's likely working out really well for them.  

Stay tuned. 

I'm Craig Boreth and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting a manmade culture that's out of sync with our human nature and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.  

Now, this ended up being a pretty long episode, so unfortunately, I don't have time to talk about a non-sponsored this time around, but I'll make sure I've got a good one for next episode.

So without further ado, let's dive in, shall we?  

I've been reading and loving Cory Doctorow's new book Enshittification.  As regular listeners to this podcast, you know.  I'm a huge fan of Doctorow, a prolific writer who has been an internet activist for decades and is a staunch defender of digital human rights.

For those who may not know, enshittification is Doctorow's term to describe the process of degradation of internet platforms like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, et cetera. Enshittification happens like this.  First, these platforms are good to their users.  Next, they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.  Then they abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.  

The reason why that term has caught on, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it their 2023 Word of the Year, is because it so accurately describes the process through which our online lives, which every day occupy a larger portion of our lives overall, have gotten so shitty. 

I mean, remember when your Facebook feed was filled almost entirely with posts from your friends? And that's why Doctorow's book ties into the idea of alternate realities that I wanna talk about.  Example after example in the book reminds us how much better our online realities used to be,  and explains exactly what happened to steal that reality away from us and lead us down what writer Jeff Tiedrich refers to as the shittiest timeline.  By the way, if you don't already, you should definitely read Tiedrich's Substack. Everyone is entitled to my opinion.  I'll post a link to it and a link to Cory Doctorow's blog at Pluralistic.net in the show notes. 

In the book, Doctorow doesn't just explain how Enshittification makes our online lives so much worse. He also explains how our government opened the door to rampant Enshittification through lax regulation and antitrust enforcement.  As he so eloquently describes this situation: "Musk, Cook, Zuck, Pichai Nadella, Larry Ellison, they're just filling the monster-shaped holes that policymakers installed in our society."  And thinking about it that way, I'm reminded of another great inflection point that really started us on our way down this shittiest of timelines.  That moment was summed up perfectly in this funny little meme that popped up for me the other day.

It was a hand-drawn chart with the X axis labeled "some metric". Now that's actually incorrect. The X axis should be time in decades probably, and the Y axis should probably read some metric, but never mind, it doesn't matter. What's important is there are two lines running from left to right, a green line labeled GOOD THING, and a red line labeled BAD THING.

In the early decades, GOOD THING is up high and BAD THING is down low. So lots of good things, not so many bad things. But then we cross a moment in time that's labeled on the graph, Ronald Reagan. So it's 1980 and just after that time the lines swap. GOOD THING plummets and BAD THING jumps up high.  

I'll post a picture of this graph in the show notes. It's funny because while it's obviously not true, there was all good stuff throughout the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. There's a pretty solid historical element of truth to this little meme. So many trends that have gotten us into the mess we are in now started then, whether it was wage stagnation, housing affordability, the national debt monopolization across pretty much every industry.  And it was about this time that America switched to its current shitty timeline of obscene income and wealth inequality.  How obscene? Well, according to the Rand Corporation had income distributions remained as they were in 1975 and just continued to the present day.  Between then and now, the bottom 90% of Americans would have earned an additional $80 trillion,  which instead went to the top 1%.  How would that translate into an alternate reality today? Well, had things not started shifting around 1980, in 2023 alone, every full-time worker in the bottom 90% would've received an additional $32,000. 

Reagan's great dance partner during this time was the Iron Lady herself, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who, among other subtly ominous sayings, was known for the phrase, there is no alternative or TINA.  And what she said she meant by that is there's no alternative to capitalism that serious people would even consider.  And in one sense, she's right. I mean, it's hard to argue with this quote attributed to Marxist political philosophers, Frederick Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that quote, it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. 

But in another, more particular and important sense, she's wrong and is trying to end the conversation before anyone asks any pesky follow-up questions that might challenge her dismissive mannequin view of the world as a simple choice between thriving, glorious free market capitalism and brutal Stalinist repression. 

The question of course, is, well, aren't there alternative types of capitalism we could try?  Now, I know that Marxists and other anti-capitalists will say that this too is a false choice, that any type of capitalism is fundamentally flawed.  The Marxists will say that any system that criminally exploits workers and steals the value of their labor is a non-starter.

And I understand the motivation behind that opinion. It's a deeply moral and humanistic one.  But for purposes of this podcast. I prefer to look for alternatives that actually exist in the world today that are, on the whole, working better than ours.  Working better for a broader swath of citizens who are living longer, happier, healthier lives than we are, and who are working toward a more regenerative, less extractive society to protect the rights of future citizens. 

And all one has to do is look back at my interview with documentary filmmaker Jonathan Blank and his film "Sex, Drugs, and Bicycles" about life in the Netherlands, to see that a style of capitalism in effect right now, one that offers progressive taxation, worker and environment protecting regulations and focus on the positive liberty of ensuring the structural and material necessities for everyone to reach their highest potential,  should certainly at least be considered as a possible alternative to the neoliberal utopia of every man for himself survival of the richest capitalism that we currently have.  

I mean, of course people like Thatcher want you to believe there is no alternative because if your only, or even primary metric of human value is money or power, and if the current arrangement of things with you at the top, is either God's will or natural law, then of course you're going to convince yourself and try to convince everyone else that this is just the way it has to be. 

But the simple truth is nothing is really set in stone. It never has been. And there are always alternatives.  The slight of hand they're trying to pull is setting up a false choice between one extreme and its opposite.

When in reality there are countless choices between those two extremes that may very well improve the lives of the vast majority of people living within a given society.  It's why we've heard for decade after decade, going back well over a hundred years, this notion that if you oppose rapacious, neoliberal capitalism.

You are somehow a capital S Socialist. Hell, they even called Harry Truman a socialist. It's complete bullshit and it's intended to prevent you from seeing that there are lots of way better ways to do capitalism, but those realities would have invariably lessened the power and influence of the people at the top of the system as it was currently set up.  Just remember, there are always alternatives 

Over the course of producing this podcast,  I have very intentionally avoided wading into the debate over Israel and Palestine.  I have my own opinions on the issues surrounding the conflict, which have evolved significantly over the past two decades as I've educated myself on the issue, far beyond what I was taught growing up Jewish in relatively affluent, well-educated suburban America. 

But I don't want to share just my opinions and interpretations of history. There are plenty of people who were doing that with much greater authority and eloquence than I ever could.  I've been trying to figure out if there's something that I can contribute to the debate that fits within the broader subject of this podcast.

And I think this episode's focus on alternate realities provides just such an opportunity. So what I wanna talk about is the debate, often heated debate that went on among Jews as they tried to figure out what to do about rising antisemitism in Europe in the mid 19th century.  And I'll start with a very quick overview of the Jewish nationalist ideas that arose at that time.  

Jewish historian and expert on nationalism, Hans Kohn described three paths forward: One was political  Zionism, which saw antisemitism as insurmountable. 
And saw a no possible future in the Jewish diaspora, so demanded a Jewish state on the biblically defined lands that the Jews originally inhabited.  They advocated for a kind of normalization of Jewish life in the form of a nation-state, just like the European nation-states. 

On the other side were those who felt that the 2000 year long diaspora was kind of a fundamental state of Jewishness and this quote unquote, abnormal national existence, as Kohn wrote, might "represent a higher form of historical development than territorial nationalism."  This was an anti-Zionism.  

Splitting the difference between these two ideas was what some referred to as cultural Zionism, which acknowledged that the diaspora was a permanent part of Jewish existence, but called for a Jewish homeland, which Kohn describes as quote "a center, which would counteract the atomizing tendencies of a scattered worldwide existence." 

Now, I don't know about you, but I was pretty much today years old when I found out not only that there were different types of Zionism, but that there were Jews, leftist American Jews in particular, who were vehemently anti-Zionists, who saw the creation of the state of Israel as an imperial venture and wanted nothing to do with it. 

As Benjamin Balthazer wrote in Jacobin Magazine this last July  quote, "seeing Zionism as a form of imperialism in the 1930s and forties was the commensurate understanding on the Jewish left. Not only would Zionism as Hannah Arendt accurately predicted, displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and set a minority of Jews against an entire subcontinent of Arab neighbors.  It would be aligned with British and US imperialism and the bourgeois interests of the Jewish ruling class."  NYU Professor and screenwriter Robert Gesner wrote in 1935, probably inaccurately that quote, "about 1% of American Jews are Zionists,"  but even if he's off by a factor of 10 or 20 or even 50, it's still important to understand that there were many American Jews who were opposed to the creation of a Jewish state.  I've read a lot of people recently who are critical of the modern state of Israel, from Peter Beinart and Gabor Maté to Ilan Pappe and Norman Finkelstein, and among all of them there's just not that much emphasis on the heated, intra Jewish debate starting in the late 18 hundreds about the best path forward for the Jewish people,  and I find it really useful to dig into that debate. So that's what I want to do.  

Now, of course, none of those early opponents could have foreseen the level of horror that would beset European Jews during World War ii.  With the rise of Nazism and the awareness of the Holocaust came a desperate existential urgency to guarantee Jewish survival and calls for the creation of a Jewish state grew stronger. To this day, 80 years later, a great deal of Jewish support for Israel is based upon the fact that when Jews had nowhere else to turn, when the European allies wanted them out of Europe, and America wouldn't let them in. Israel was their only hope,  and that understanding is valid and irrefutable.  But again, for the purposes of this episode, I wanna remind you that there wasn't just a debate between the Zionists and the anti-Zionists, there was also a debate among Zionists about how Jews should return to Israel.  And most significantly between political Zionists like David Ben-Gurion and Theodore Herzl, who called for an explicitly Jewish state,  and cultural Zionists, who opposed that form of nationalism and advocated for a Jewish homeland within a multicultural state. 

The most eloquent advocate of cultural Zionism was journalist Asher Ginsburg, who wrote under the pen name Ahad Ha'am.  Ha'am, like his political Zionist counterparts was a strong proponent of Jewish nationalism, but he referred to it as a love of Zion rather than Zionism. As Hans Kohn wrote for Commentary in 1951, "The survival of his people seemed to him important and justified only through and for the sake of its spiritual heritage and ethical tradition.  These seem to him almost extinguished after 3000 years.  To rekindle them was the goal and meaning of his nationalism, of his love of Zion." 

In 1889, in Ha'am's first article titled This is Not The Way  Ha'am wrote of his demands for the survival of the Jewish people, but that they could only truly survive and thrive if they didn't become like other peoples. He disagreed with the political Zionist emphasis on power and population.  He countered that, "The main point upon which everything depends is not how much we do, but how we do it."  He believed that the Jews had survived as Kohn writes, "while all other nations perished because the prophets had taught them not to seek glory in the attainment of material power and political dominion to create a small state based upon power and diplomatic favors would not add a glorious chapter to Jewish history, but would undermine the historical basis of Jewish existence." 

Would it not be worthier  to quote Ha'am  "for an ancient people, which was once a beacon to the world to perish than to reach such an end?"  Now that is strong stuff.  Ha'am believed fervently in "an objective justice, perfect morality. From the Jewish point of view, demands that men quote, feel even the slightest deviation from justice instantaneously  and with the certainty of intuition.  Personal and social considerations will not affect them in the slightest degree. Their instinct will judge every action with absolute impartiality, ignoring all human relations and making no difference between the self and the other."  

And it was this objective justice that led him to a critique of political Zionism that we often hear today, 125 years later. 

I wanna read a few long quotes from Ahad Ha'am.  The first was written in 1891.  He said,  

"We must surely learn from both our past and present history how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong. How we should be cautious in our dealings with the foreign people among whom we returned to live.  To handle these people with love and respect, and needless to say, with justice and good judgment.  And what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite. They deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason. And even boast about their actions. When these people feel that the law is on their rival's side, and even more so, if they are right to think their rival's actions are unjust and oppressive, then even if they are silent and endlessly reserved, they keep their anger in their hearts. And these people will be revengeful like no other."

Just a quick aside,  I have seen some people take exception to the translation of Ha'am, suggesting that the gist of his sentiment was not really as is portrayed In the English translation,  that he was merely describing interactions between the Jews and the Arabs, and wasn't as overtly critical of them as the translations make it seem.

Those may be valid criticisms and if someone can make the case that Ha'am was in fact supportive of political Zionism, then I will gladly do an episode rethinking his legacy. But I would be very surprised if that's the case, and I have no reason to doubt the intellectual integrity of philosopher and historian Hans Kohn, who wrote the article from which most of my Ha'am quotes are drawn.

Here's another quote from Ha'am in 1907.

"Is this the dream of our return to Zion? That we come to Zion and stain its soil with innocent blood?  There is a growing inclination to sacrifice the prophets on the altar of a national rebirth to sacrifice the great moral principles for the sake of which our people live, for the sake of which it has suffered, and for the sake of which alone it is worthwhile to return to the land.  For without them, my God, what are we and what is our future life in this land that we bring all the innumerable sacrifices without which the land cannot be rebuilt?  Do we really do it to add a small people of new Levantines in a corner of the Orient who will vie with other Levantines in shedding blood, in vengeance and wrath?  If this be the Messiah, then I don't wish to see his coming."  

Again. That is powerful. 

And then there's this quote: 

"When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine, the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it, the terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks, those misled and criminal people."  

Now actually, that quote wasn't from Ahha Ha'am. That was said by Albert Einstein in April, 1948, just a few weeks before the establishment of the state of Israel.  20 years before then, Einstein's views were already well, well-formed.

In a letter to Chaim Weitzman, the Future President of Israel, he wrote. 

"If we are not able to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned nothing during our 2000 years of suffering and deserve the fate which will befall us."  

Even though Einstein was an outspoken critic of political Zionists,  the most incisive descendant of Ahad Ha'am  was certainly renowned political philosopher and groundbreaking authority on the origins of authoritarianism, Hannah Arendt.  There is an absolutely stunning piece of research  by Shiraz Bossa 1986 titled Lethal Fantasy Hannah Arendt on Political Zionism that clearly lays out her vehement disagreement with the founder of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl.

Even though she was a staunch Zionist who fought for a Jewish homeland until her death in 1975,  as Dossa writes,  

"Arendt was totally committed to the primordial aspirations of political Zionism. Her scathing critique of political Zionism was the lament of a loyalist infuriated by the political naivete of her fellow Zionists.  In terms of Arendt's political theory, Zionism was the magnificent seedling that would blossom into a Jewish political space, a Jewish public realm, where Jews would pursue excellence in word and deed, where Jews would become Aristotelian citizens, where Jews would build an exemplary polity. The new Jerusalem would be the new Athens."  

The foundational basis for Arendt's disagreement with Herzl was on the nature of antisemitism.  And I just gotta say, given that Hannah Arendt was among the 20th centuries foremost authorities on the nature of antisemitism, it's hard not to favor her understanding of it over just about anyone else's.

Arendt understood antisemitism as a fundamentally political phenomenon, originating in the reactionary resentment towards liberalization, secularization, and modernity,  which was directed towards Jews because Jews were associated with those phenomena.  Herzl, on the other hand, saw antisemitism as a permanent phenomenon, intrinsic to human nature.  In a strange way, he sort of actually validated the notion of Jews as alien, fundamentally different from other Europeans.  For Herzl, there was no chance whatsoever for Jews to avoid antisemitism anywhere except in a purely Jewish state.  In other words, there was no alternative to a Jewish state.

So not only was there no reason to fight against antisemitism, Herzl embraced it as a source of inertia toward fulfilling his dream of a Jewish state, one that would, in a weird way, endorse the national and racial exclusiveness inherent to antisemitism by creating a state that would do the same thing except for the Jews rather than against them.

As Dossa writes, "Herzl's Zionism had a vested interest in antisemitism insofar as antisemitism was a political asset.  Fighting antisemitism was the last thing on his mind. On the contrary,  Herzl wished to ride the tiger of antisemitism, to harness its force to the political advantage of the Jews. Unwittingly, this Machiavellian strategy led Herzl to celebrate power and force as the grammar of political life." Something very distinct from what Ahad Ha'am was proposing. 

So as you can probably tell, regardless of which side you support, it's clear that political Zionists, like Herzl, David Ben-Gurian and others, held a very different view of the best path forward for the Jewish people compared to cultural Zionists like Arendt, Ahad Ha'am, and Albert Einstein.

Of course the political Zionist won that argument. And the state of Israel has always been led by political Zionists of one type or another. On the left leaning side with David Ben-Gurian, in the center, with people like Theodore Herzl, and mostly by right wing descendants of Ze'ev Jabotinsky like Menachin Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and of course, Israel's longest serving Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. 

But interestingly, both cultural Zionists and political Zionists seem to agree on one thing,  what a Jewish state would mean for the people who lived in the land, the political Zionists were planning to take over.

Okay. I wanna do a little quiz.  I'll read you a quote and you guess whether it was said by a cultural Zionist like a Ha'am  or Hannah Arendt who opposed an exclusively Jewish state in Israel, or a political Zionist like Theodore Herzl or Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who saw a Jewish state as the only option. Okay, first quote. 

"If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel.  It is normal. We have taken their country. It is true. God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault?  They see but one thing, we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" 

That certainly sounds like a cultural Zionist, and you even hear that kind of sentiment from critics of Israel today.  But that was from Israel's primary founder and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurian in 1956.

Okay, another quote,

"The proposed Jewish state [And this is referring to the proposed 1937 Peel Commission partition plan]  would not be continuous, its borders would be twisted and broken. The question of defending the frontier line would pose enormous difficulties. Moreover, the Arab reaction would be negative because they would lose everything and gain almost nothing.

They would lose the richest part of Palestine. They would lose major Arab assets, the orange plantations, the commercial and industrial centers, and the most important sources of revenue for their government, which would become impoverished. This would be such an uprooting, such a shock, the likes of which had never occurred and could drown the whole thing in Rivers of Blood." 

Now that is a quote from Mosha Sharrett, who was Israel's second prime minister from a speech to the Zionist Action Committee in 1937.  10 years later, the UN approved a partition plan that gave the Jews an even greater proportion of land than the Peel Commission proposed. 

Okay. One last quote:  

"The native populations civilized or uncivilized have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage. This is equally true of the Arabs. They feel at least the same instinctive, jealous love of Palestine as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico and the Sioux for their rolling prairies.

Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of Palestine into the land of Israel again."

This is from someone who clearly sees what Zionism will do to the people living in Palestine,  and also refers to the Zionists as colonists, which one would assume means the speaker is not among them, but that would be incorrect. That was written in 1923 by Revisionist Zionism, founder Ze'ev Jabotinsky. In case you're unaware, revisionism was a right wing version of Zionism that opposed any partition of Palestine and called for a Jewish majority state, not only in all of the land west of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, but also all of trans Jordan, east of the Jordan River as well. 

Now, this revisionist demand of not only all of Israel from the river to the sea, but also east into trans Jordan, is something that Hannah Arendt called the revisionist Insane Demand.  She had a clear idea of where all of this was headed when she wrote her 1944 essay called To Save the Jewish Homeland.

In it, she writes, 

"Even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed. The land that would come into being, would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist, and non Zionist. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people. Social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries. Political thought would center around military strategy.  Thus, it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances, a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of a Jewish homeland."

So all of this history that I've tried to present as objectively as possible, almost exclusively through just quoting people from the time as they debated the possible futures for the Jewish people leads me back to the theme of this episode and to one, pretty straightforward, but I suppose potentially dangerous question.

Is it possible that Jews around the world could be better off today more secure, more spiritually free, living more at peace with their Middle East neighbors if the Zionist vision offered by Ahad Ha'am, Hanna Arendt, and many others of a Jewish homeland as opposed to a Jewish state had been implemented in 1948? 

I don't know the answer to that question.  Maybe Herzl was right and antisemitism is intrinsic and eternal. And a multicultural state in the land of Israel would have resulted in a Jewish minority being extinguished there in another Holocaust, and maybe the diaspora without a Jewish state is unsustainable, or maybe Ahad Ha'am and Hannah Arendt are right, and a multicultural Jewish homeland in the land of Israel would have brought us today to a reality that is less fraught and less dangerous for Jews in Israel and around the world.  Again, I don't know the answer,  but I would suggest that if there's any chance of a better future for both Jews and Palestinians,  it will require us with the kind of honesty and integrity that Ahad Ha'am saw as essentially Jewish,  to consider the question. 

Well, that's it. For this episode of the Great Ungass Lighting. If you found it interesting, please share it with anyone you think would also appreciate it.  And until next time,  be kind to yourself.  Cut each other some slack  and please use your damn turn signal.