A Schism in The Current Thing

Regarding Israel and Palestine

Earlier this year I wrote a series explaining The Current Thing and how it works.

What is The Current Thing?

Per Marc Andreessen, the technical term for the Current Thing is "availability cascade", a combination of a social cascade and availability bias. The availability bias describes the idea that people tend to focus on the things that are right in front of them, the thing that is most visible. The social cascade describes the process of an idea gaining more and more steam, like an avalanche. 

There are a few different flavors of Current Things. Sometimes The Current Thing is the rally against an abstract virus (e.g. COVID). Sometimes it’s rallying around a war with a clear enemy (e.g. Ukraine/Russia). Sometimes it’s organizing around a social cause (e.g. Same-sex marriage). Sometimes it’s around a cancellation of a person (e.g. Too many to name. See this list)

Mass cancellations can be partly explained by Girard’s ideas of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. Interestingly, Girard points out that this phenomenon develops even by people who are fully aware of the pattern. Each time, the death of the scapegoat is uniquely required by the specialness of the situation. And the absolute moral requirement that this time there must be mob justice. “This time, It’s not political—it’s moral.”

With Israel and Palestine we’re now facing a new Current Thing — a situation where people have to take sides — but this time it’s much more complicated. Unlike previous moral movements, it’s unclear what the right Current Thing is.

Western governments are putting the Israeli flag on arches. But Western institutions like Harvard and NYT have been much more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

While the previous moral movements of the last few years (BLM, MeToo, Ukraine) had unequivocal support across the board, this is the first instance where there is a civil war on the left.

This time, there is a great generational schism: Young people support Palestine; Older people support Israel.

What explains the generational schism? Partly how far-left our colleges have gotten. Partly Tik Tok. Partly because people born after 9/11 are more sensitive to Islamophobia. But also because younger cohorts are just less religious and more diverse, whereas older ones are more Christian and thus more philosemitic since Christians and Jews have much in common.

Indeed: Israel is the Current Thing among older, more traditional Democrats. But it's *not* the Current Thing among younger, more cutting edge Democrats. This is the schism that you see coming out in the press coverage, the university statements, etc. This is why you don't have Israeli flag emojis everywhere.

To frame it differently, it's the Biden current thing, but it sure isn't the AOC Current Thing. And Biden is going to die and AOC is going to take over. So this is the direction of where things are headed…

That’s how the left views Israel/Palestine at any rate. On the right, Israel is the Current Thing, but the right doesn’t have the power to set the current thing, except when it inflames the left to stand for the opposite of whatever right stands for, which happened frequently under Trump. Which could happen again here, because it's the Current Thing on the right for bad reasons. Arnold Kling’s theory of politics helps explain what’s happening here: Liberals care about supporting the oppressed vs the oppressor, whereas conservatives care about supporting civilization vs barbarism. So the left automatically supports what they see as the oppressed class (in this case, mostly Palestine), and the right automatically supports what they see as the more civilized group (in this case, mostly Israel). And so the fact that the right supports it for bad reasons could drive people on the left to not support it. The same way Trump advocating for coming out of COVID lockdown caused the left to go bananas for endless lockdowns and masks etc.

This conflict certainly causes people to go bananas. Israel/Palestine has been repressed in our culture war because it doesn’t match the typical script — where the underdog is the helpless victim and the more powerful the clear perpetrator — and because it’s such a loaded and complex topic...

Even ChatGPT is confused as to who to support:

It makes sense that western technologists struggle to understand what’s happening: High IQ autists living halfway through the singularity can't comprehend lower IQ Hamas foot soldiers who would kill and rape, and so they try to ascribe enlightenment values to a group that does not share them. This explains our foreign policy blunders more broadly: concepts like the Enlightenment, pluralistic society, democracy, are so rare and fragile—and not every society wants them.

Political Realignment

Within tech, there seems to be a massive realignment happening

We’ve even see cancellations start to happen, ironically among the people who were doing the cancelling a few years ago, by the people who were complaning about it! This makes sense: Whoever gets power enforces norms via cancellations, and whoever doesn't have power begs for liberalism, until they get power and then repeat the cycle.

The question is whether this realignment will stick. If Jews hold strong in their pro-Israel stance, then this will be a long-term intra-left civil war. While Jews are a small population, they are 10% of billionaires, and 25% of democratic party donor capital, so they materially influence leftist institutions.

In a society in which the oppressor/oppressed dialectic possesses the only moral valence, deciding who can be in the oppressed bucket is the most pressing moral debate. And the people tearing down signs of Israeli hostages are saying "We refuse to put Jews in the divine victim category." And Jews are saying back, “we refuse to be seen as oppressors”. Not this time. And that pushback by an accused oppressor is new, and explains why we have our first intra-civil war.

Indeed: One thing we learned as a result of this conflict is that the people who run our institutions were willing to be targeted as men, they were willing to be targeted as whites, but they aren’t willing to be targeted as Jews.

I’ll close on this tweet that captures the spirit of the times:

“It’s amazing how perfectly this conflict encapsulates the spiritual deficit of modernity, how every action may only be taken if it is in compliance with the ‘opinion of the world’, and how both sides only exist still because the mustered the support of actual kinetic powers by making those powers feel sorry for them or ethically appeased by helping them survive. It’s funny how one side’s basis for this appeal is ultimately the holocaust, and the other’s is anti-brown racism/apartheid/slavery. The twin pillars of modern morality, set against each other in cosmic, existential war. The gods themselves will be on the battlefield, but which will prevail? For now, only the Fates can know…”