Algorhythm -- Who Could Ask For Anything More?

By Michael Posner

copyright@great untold stories inc.

It was long claimed that technique was neutral. Today, that is no longer a useful

distinction. The power and autonomy of technique are so well secured that it...has become the judge of what is moral, the creator of a new morality. Thus, it plays the

role of creator of a new civilization as well. -- Jacques Ellul

I no longer believe that technology is simply a matter of means, which men can use well or badly. As an end in itself, it inhibits the pursuit of other ends in the society it controls. -- George Grant

The other day, a friend posed the following question: how did the Western, liberal left become so anti-Semitic?

Gary Saul Morson calls this the Dostoevsky problem. In a recent essay in Mosaic Magazine, Morson -- a professor of humanities at Northwestern University -- notes that the Russian novelist was simultaneously among the most compassionate of men and yet, in his later years, a rabid, dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite. What makes good people hold horrendous beliefs, Morson asks.

In other words, how is it that so many otherwise humane, caring, well-educated people can embrace such a toxic ideology as anti-Semitism?

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about right-wing anti-Semitism, an ugly and genuine phenomenon on its own. I'm not talking about the carefully veiled discrimination that still exists in corporate boardrooms, private golf courses and yacht clubs, or the more virulent "Jews will not replace us" strain chanted by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

I'm talking about liberals, people who, in normal circumstances, might be reliably expected to denounce cold-blooded terrorism. And indeed, to be fair, some have.

But in the effluent of the October 7 pogrom, in defiance of reason itself, a very large segment of the hard-core left -- students, high school teachers, college professors, trade unionists, civil servants, social workers, celebrities -- has bizarrely chosen to align itself with Hamas, murderers who incinerate grandmothers, mutilate the dead, smash the heads of infants against walls, burn entire families alive, and play catch with the sliced-off breasts of women they have raped, before shooting them in their vaginas.

Hamas did all of this, as British writer Douglas Murray observed, not with any sense of shame or guilt, but gleefully -- jubilantly -- dutifully recording the carnage and the horror on their GoPRO cameras.

Even if it were not defending itself against this kind of barbarism, Israel is a country that a liberal left should reflexively support -- in fact, celebrate. After all, it's a beacon of democracy in an authoritarian, theocratic part of the world. It's a relentless champion of the most cherished liberal values, including free speech. It's an enlightened defender of women's and Lgbtq+ rights. And, ex nihilo, it has incubated and developed some of the world's most transformative consumer and medical technologies.

Compile a checklist of every bleeding heart leftist's favourite causes and, by any impartial assessment, Israel would get two thumbs up on every one.

And yet, marching hand-in-hand with the baying mobs at pro-Palestinian rallies, the liberal left endorses calls for Israel's destruction, lionizes terrorists, supports appeals for Jews (not just Israelis) to be gassed, and proclaims that Hitler was right after all -- that the deaths of six million Jews in the Holocaust was not nearly enough.

The moral contradiction is so striking that it forces one to ask: how did the left manage to keep its Jew-hatred so well hidden for so long?

In part, it is now obvious, by screening anti-Semitism behind the veil of anti-Zionism. "We're only criticizing the policies of the state of Israel," they whined, ad nauseum. Well, at least we can put that lie definitively to rest.

Recently, testifying in Congress, three uber-woke female presidents of once-elite American universities found themselves unable to unequivocally state that calls for Jewish genocide violated campus codes of conduct.

It was an astonishing moment in the American conversation, one that crystallized the moral depths to which the progressive left, and the Marxist ideology that underpins Critical Race Thinking, has led higher education.

Use the N word in any conversation, in any context, and you will be cancelled forthwith, probably in perpetuity. Use the wrong pronoun, misgender someone (even unintentionally), attempt to defend a pro-life position on abortion -- all of these micro-aggressions, and many more, are deemed acts of violence, threats to the safety of students, for which the campus thought police must be dispatched. God forbid a university student should feel intellectually unsafe, or be forced to deal with the free exchange of ideas.

But explicit calls for the murder of Jews? That, the three college presidents grimly and repeatedly insisted, depends "on context."

Nor is the left's support merely rhetorical. Its kaffiyeh-clad legions have defaced Jewish-owned businesses, ripped down posters of hostages, harassed, intimidated and physically assaulted Jews, issued death threats, and fired bullets at synagogues and Hebrew schools. According to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents in the two months after October 7th reached the highest level since it began tracking the figure in 1979.

How does this happen? They can't all be card-carrying anti-Semites, can they?

I'd like to propose three tentative answers. The first is denial, a blanket refusal to accept documented, historical truth.

What is denial? Denial is pretending that terrorists are resistance fighters. Denial is maintaining that Jesus was a Palestinian, not a Jewish rabbi. Denial is contending that there once was a land called Palestine governed by indigenous Arabs; it hasn't happened in all of human history. Denial is claiming Gaza is still "occupied," although Israel vacated the territory in 2005, ceding control to the Palestinian Authority. Denial is insisting that the state of Israel is somehow illegitimate, ignoring that it was established in May, 1948 in accordance with the United Nations Partition Plan, and was admitted to the UN with full member status the following year.

In its most egregious form, perhaps, denial is suggesting that Hamas wasn't in fact the author of October 7th. What really happened, you see, is that the IDF deliberately killed its own citizens, in order to justify invading Gaza and resettling the territory. Sadly, there are people with Ph. Ds, who believe this.

It is this refusal even to hear counter-evidence, Morson suggests in his Mosaic essay, that characterizes the well-educated bigot. "Even the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn into committing...a monstrous offence,” he quotes Dostoevsky as saying. And he cites this passage from The Possessed: "And therein lies the real horror: that...one can commit the foulest and most villainous act without being in the least a villain!...That is our whole affliction today!"

After denial, there is ignorance -- of a shocking degree. Let us count the ways.

Among those lustily calling for the extermination of Jews, many have only the thinnest grasp of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They get most of what passes for their understanding from 30-second TikTok videos, or from other morons who get their 'knowledge' from TikTok.

The things anti-Semites don't know about the Middle East would fill encyclopaedias, were encyclopaedias still published.

They don't know that, during the past century, Arab leaders rejected 10 separate peace proposals that would have created an independent Palestinian.

They know that Israel's 1948 war of independence displaced 700,000 Arab settlers in Israel -- the so-called Nakba -- but don't know that an equal number of Jews were evicted from their homes in half a dozen Muslim countries at the same time.

They don't know that the name 'Palestine' has nothing to do with Arabs, who originated in Arabia. They don't know that the name was given to the region by the Romans, as a deliberate slight to the Jews, who called it Judea and Samaria.

And of course, when pro-Palestinian protestors chant, "from the river to the sea," fewer than half can actually name the river or the sea referred to.

"Knowledge is no guarantee of good behaviour," American philosopher Martha Nussbaum has observed. "But ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behaviour." Or, as English satirist Alexander Pope remarked, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Pope, incidentally, belongs to that now disgraced class of dead, white writers (b.1688-d.1744) whose work used to be taught in what used to be the humanities departments of what used to be institutions of higher learning that used to be dedicated to genuine education.

Today, of course, the primary goal -- at least in the humanities and social sciences -- is no longer to teach students how to think critically, but to indoctrinate them, and protect them from the grave injuries inflicted by offensive words.

This objective, the New York Times opined recently, is in many ways understandable, "especially for students who find campuses to be uneasy places because they are among the first in their families to attend college. One way to make students feel safe, schools have decided, is to restrict speech that upsets students."

Put aside for the moment the notion that college and university is precisely where students should be exposed to the cut and thrust of intellectual debate. But wait a minute: wasn't a previous generation of students also the first in their families to receive a higher education? I'm thinking of battle-scarred Second World War veterans, who on the killing fields of Europe and the Pacific confronted actual aggression and genuine violence.

Not so long ago, one looked to the humanities departments to illuminate the great minds of western civilization, to teach undergraduates how to think critically, and see beyond binary options in the marketplace of ideas. At Montreal's McGill University, for example, Professor Louis Dudek taught a two-year course called Great Writings of European Literature, which covered everything from Voltaire's Candide to Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Today, the humanities are largely an afterthought -- enrolments plunged 30 per cent between 2005-2020 -- and those who do enlist are lectured by rigid commissars of identity politics.

The left's ignorance also extends to the historical persecution of Jews. A recent survey found that one in five Americans aged 18 tor 30 believe the Holocaust is a myth. Even more maintain that the six million deaths recorded are exaggerated.

You can hardly fault them for their cluelessness. In colleges and universities, the narrative is wall-to-wall Palestinian victimhood, Israeli belligerency.

The mainstream media -- the BBC, NPR, CBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Independent, as well as Reuters and the Associated Press -- has become an echo chamber, repeating the same message, along with evocative images and videos: that Israel is a white, racist, colonialist enterprise illegally occupying someone else's land, and that it is principally interested in killing Arab women and children.

In a recent essay in The Economist, former New York Times Op-ed page editor James Bennett -- he was forced to resign in 2020 after publishing a controversial piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton — charged that the once-liberal Times had become illiberal, shifting from "an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether."

Standard practices at both the CBC, the BBC and elsewhere virtually guarantee a skewed picture of the conflict. Their idea of journalistic balance is to interview one Arab/Palestinian spokesperson and one Israeli, although the latter almost invariably is a left-winger who despises his government as much as the Arabs. When IDF representatives or Israeli diplomats are invited on air, they are grilled as if they were on trial at Nuremberg, while Palestinian mouthpieces are given carte blanche to lie, distort and defame, without pushback.

Another common tactic is the deliberate omission of news that vindicates an Israeli talking point, or stigmatizes Arabs. Thus the refusal to label Hamas a terrorist organization. Thus the willingness to uncritically accept any claim of Israeli aggression, while failing to correct the record when the facts exonerate the IDF.

One example: when Israel asserted that Hamas had turned Gaza's hospitals into military fortresses, the mass media worked strenuously to disparage the evidence. But when the medical chief of Kamal Edwan Hospital admitted that he had served as a lieutenant colonel in Hamas since 2010, and that 16 other doctors, nurses and paramedics on staff were members of the al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas terror wing, the BBC, CBC and others simply ignored the story.

The polarization that marks the Gaza debate, however -- and the anti-Semitic fervour it has unleashed -- is a symptom of a much deeper problem: the binary universe we now inhabit.

In 1937, a 21-year-old named Claude Shannon submitted his master's thesis to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Its deceptively boring title -- A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits -- obscured a revolutionary finding: that the simple, binary structure of Boolean algebra, in which variables are either true or false, ones or zeroes, could form the building block of complex computers. These on-off switches were referred to as bits; a package of eight became a byte.

Various scholars have since deemed it the most important academic thesis of the century. Regardless, it’s fair to say that Shannon's insight forms the bedrock of our hyper-technological world.

In fact, the binarial approach has become a prominent feature of far more than computer programming; it now governs an ever increasing swatch of daily social interaction. Played out largely on line, public debate of the most important policy issues -- politics, war, abortion, climate change, immigration -- is conducted almost exclusively in binary -- i.e., polarized -- terms.

It's either for or against, yes or no, true or false. Good or evil. Safe or unsafe spaces. Pro-life or pro-choice. Pro carbon taxes or against. Pro curbs on migrants or in favour of open borders. Pro Putin/Russia or pro Zelenskyy/Ukraine. Pro Israel or pro Hamas. And philo-Semite or anti-Semite.

On Mega's Facebook, opposing voices joust and parry, while 'friends' signal approval or disapproval with thumbs up Like or Dislike icons, much like Romans voting on the fate of Christians in the Coliseum.

On TikTok -- the platform's very name suggests its binary construct — the propaganda duel on Gaza, climate change and other hot-button issues is conducted by warring videos.

On TV reality shows (America's Got Talent, Master Chef, Dancing with the Stars, etc.), judges decide whether contestants will go home (i.e., die) or return for another week (ie. live); literally on The Voice, and metaphorically elsewhere, judges' chairs either turn for Yes, or do not turn for a No. In one new Fox TV show, Snake Oil, participants win or lose by determining whether a new product invention is real or snake oil. Many video games, a sealed universe occupied by tens of millions of young men and women, force players to make simplistic binary choices about heroes and villains -- i.e, about morality itself.

It gets worse. The algorithms that regulate social media platforms -- Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), etc. -- are written to provide content that satisfies pre-formed opinion, and thus entrench biases. Watch, if you can stomach him, one podcast of anti-Israel British activist Owen Jones, and the algorithm will soon feed you six more. The same phenomenon, of course, applies to virtually everything else: right-wing commentators, sports highlight reels, pet videos, TV sit-com and film clips, perilous rollercoaster rides, pickle ball tournaments, etc.

The operations of old school media are not appreciably different. The New York Times, James Bennett lamented, is essentially serving partisan audiences versions of reality they already prefer, a relationship that "proves self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified."

McLuhan was right, after all: the medium is the message. Because, in hierarchical terms, content -- and therefore meaning itself -- now takes a back seat to the technological imperative, the algorithmic construct, which is designed to stoke and exploit primal emotions like fear and anger. Bland doesn't sell. Neutrality won’t keep the eyeballs glued.

In Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, writer Anne Applebaum notes that "polarization has moved from the online world into reality...The result is a hyper-partisanship. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world, because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.” Thus are anti-Semites born and nurtured.

Taking stock of the dismal, post-First World War social landscape, the poet Yeats feared that the centre would no longer hold. "The best," he wrote, "lack all conviction. The worst are full of passionate intensity." Is that not an apt description of our current malaise?

Today, more a century later, the centre itself has essentially vanished and -- flung centrifugally, algorithmically, to the margins -- we are left bellowing at each other across the vast abyss.