Only one day after the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations warned that the Ontario government’s threat to start monitoring campus groups who criticise Israel would have a chilling effect on academic freedom, Western University in London Ontario announced that a campus imam had been fired for “divisive” speech. How someone is to take a coherent position on a war (i.e. a fundamental political division) without being ‘divisive’ is a question I would like the Western administration to answer. I would also ask how they convinced themselves that firing an imam is not divisive. I assume that the Islamic students and faculty might find this move all too familiarly divisive.

This attack on the imam’s right to articulate his own position on the war is the latest act in a drama playing out on campuses across North America. Major donors have threatened to pull funding from universities in the US judged insufficiently critical of Hamas and not uncritically supportive enough of Israel. In Florida, the state government has effectively dissolved campus Palestinian solidarity groups, while back in Ontario both Toronto Metropolitan University and York are investigating and threatening to sanction student governments and campus groups because of statements in support of the Hamas attacks.

I have made my position on Hamas’ tactics clear in my earlier posts on the war. Anyone who understands the Palestinian struggle as a moment in the broader struggle for human freedom has to condemn attacks on Israeli civilians, for both moral and political reasons. Being a member of a nationality or a citizen of a state is not a capital offence. While contradicting the life-value justification for the struggle for national liberation, the Hamas attacks, as they are now finding out, were also monumentally politically stupid. They seem to have been based on a number of miscalculations: that the Israeli government would be willing to exchange Palestinian prisoners for the hostages, that they would eschew the medieval tactic of imposing a complete siege, and that Iran and Hezbollah would be able to deter the complete destruction of Gaza. Instead of negotiations, Israel has been on an arrest rampage that has doubled the number of Palestinian prisoners. The people of Gaza are literally the targets of genocidal violence, while Iran and Hezbollah talk tough but lack the power to decisively alter the conflict. The recent meeting between Hamas and Hezbollah to discuss their “final victory” over Israel was otherworldly in its failure to understand the political reality in which they find themselves.

The intensity of the violence in a region that is no stranger to war has provoked heated rhetoric on both sides of the conflict. University campuses have been flashpoints for solidarity rallies. As it always does, the Israeli state tries to short-circuit criticism of its policies by attacking anyone with the temerity to question its goals as an anti-Semite. They have been joined this time by the billionaires pulling funding and governments and university administrators threatening student groups. Their combined assault on academic freedom reveals a three-fold problem with the contemporary university.

First of all, it reveals the danger of relying upon private funding. Billionaires giveth and billionaires taketh away. When they give, they give on their terms, so that if the university becomes addicted to those donations they will find themselves, like all junkies, having to sing whatever tune the dealer wants them to sing. Major US institutions are now facing the loss of tens of millions of dollars in donations because some of their donors have decided that the universities’ statements about the Hamas attacks and resulting war have not been sufficiently critical of Palestinians. University policy thus finds itself hostage to outside forces who lack any academic standing and should have no input into the intellectual life of the institutions.

The second problem is that universities as corporate bodies feel the need to intervene one way or the other in the first place. Since the murder of George Floyd it has been de rigeur for university PR departments to selectively issue saccharine bromides in response to world events. These interventions are as unwelcome as they are ineffective. Universities are complex networks of students and researchers engaged in the difficult, open ended work of trying to understand our world in all of its multiple dimensions (physical, political, etc). University administrators do not speak for the whole, because there is no whole in whose name determinate political positions can be expressed. The active members of the university, faculty and students, necessarily have different perspectives on complex problems, and they all must be free to argue pro or contra on any issue. The role of administrators should be confined to ensuring that the work of research and teaching carries on; they do not speak for the “university community.”

The third problem is the most serious. This problem stems from a misunderstanding of the political value of universities. Activist academics and student groups typically mistake academic freedom as their academic freedom to be critical of established structures of power. They are jealous in their defence of their right to speak but, over the last decade or so, quite willing to sacrifice opposed groups’ academic freedom. As I have argued in a number of earlier posts, academic freedom is not a personal right to say what one wants to say, it is an institutional right necessary for the functioning of the university as an intellectual institution. The university cannot function as a space for free inquiry and argument if billionaires, governments, administrators, or one-sided campus political movements determine what can be said and not said, questioned and not questioned. By its nature inquiry questions, opens up a field of problems for critical scrutiny and debate.

The only legitimate means of “shutting an argument down” is to articulate an opposing argument so powerful that the opponent feels compelled to revise their position. Everyone who works or studies at a university must be committed to this principle on pain of performative contradiction. A performative contradiction (Habermas) is a form of speech that undermines the institutional conditions of its being made. If members of the university owe their ability to speak to the principle of academic freedom, then any attempts to deprive opposed groups of this right contradicts the institutional conditions of their making that argument. Academic freedom presupposes and justifies the university as a site of intellectual exchange of positions and argumentative conflict. Those who cannot bear the argumentative burden of proving their conclusions against opponents are not fit to remain members of an institution of ‘higher’ education.

Sadly, even though it typically has the most to lose when academic freedom is threatened, elements of the campus left have led the charge against academic freedom. Childish demands to ban speakers, cancel events, and boycott publications because they run afoul of some dogma have become too common. These movements are both intellectually cowardly and politically suicidal. When real conflicts like the Gaza war break out, state and administrative powers exploit the weakened commitment to academic freedom to threaten to ban and fire anyone who does not toe the party line.

Universities are not revolutionary parties. No one is obligated by party discipline to take one position as opposed to another, but to reason their way to their own conclusion and– crucially– to defend it against opponents and revise it if found wanting on grounds of insufficient evidence or self-contradictory reasoning. The job of the revolutionary is to make the revolution, as Che said, but the job of the academic is to prove their argument. No one needs be an academic: if argument seems too thin a practical contribution to the resolution of complex problems, one is free to leave the academy and organize a more kinetic struggle against whatever structure is supposed to be the problem. But if one remains an academic or a student one’s duty is first of all to the truth, which is rarely obvious. The truth will out and set us free (one hopes) but only through a process of exchange of arguments.

Bad arguments are exposed by better arguments. Which is better and which is worse cannot be determined if one side is simply banned by state or administrative power or silenced by political movements afraid to defend their position against critics.

Dehumanization is the classic means of de-legitimating the struggles of oppressed groups. First, the ruling power makes the movement personal, portraying political struggle as an attack on the individual members of the dominant group. Once the opposition movement’s political goals have been portrayed as a smokescreen hiding their real goal: to kill the individual members of the dominant group, the opposition can be denounced as subhuman killers. All the while, the violence that the dominant group rains daily down upon the oppressed people is ignored.

This pattern is repeated over and over again. The established powers declaim that the oppressed cannot be granted the freedom they demand because they are not really human beings who just want to live as other humans do, in peace, security, and for the sake of enjoying meaningful lives, but wild murderers who would use their freedom to rampage and destroy.

The oppressing power can always point to specific events to bolster their case. If oppression goes on long enough, some groups will be driven to violence. Their acts, and not the history of oppression, will be seized upon as evidence with which to convict the oppressed of crimes against humanity: the humanity of the oppressor.

But “humanity’ is not reserved for some specific groups of human beings. Human beings are social self-conscious centres of experience, activity, and enjoyment. Our capacities for receptive enjoyment of the world, thought, planning, creative activity of all sorts, and mutualistic, peaceful relationships with others and the world at large constitute the basis of everyone’s legitimate claim to life-security and the means of life-enjoyment. The other names by which we call ourselves: Israeli, Palestinian, Jew, Muslim, are valuable not as such, but only as concrete instantiations of the underlying humanity that links us all beneath constructed historical differences. Those differences are real and valuable, but they are not ultimately valuable, because they presuppose life. People change religions or become atheists, they move to different countries and they change political ideologies: they do not thereby cease to be human beings.

Human beings also fight. No group of human beings is constitutionally warlike or peaceful: violence is a function of socio-historical structures and forces, not the peculiar traits of one or another culture. De-humanization strategies draw attention away from the structure and point it at a one-sided, caricatured portrait of the purported essence of the culture to which the demonized individuals belong, the secret that explains “what they are really like.” But this strategy too is generic and not a tactic unique to any particular ruling group. Wherever a group in power needs to justify itself, it does so by de-humanizing the culture of the group to which it is opposed.

In a brilliant short essay “Who Thinks Abstractly?” Hegel exposed the way in which demonizing constructions depend upon adopting an ahistorical, or as he says, abstract point of view. His example will be familiar to us: the criminal. When a terrible crime has been committed the newspaper will trumpet the community’s outrage and portray the criminal as some beast without a life-story. They never ask: how did the human being come to be a criminal? Instead, they fixate on the deed without inquiring into the historical process by which a human being became the sort of person that could commit the ghastly crime.

When we encounter political crimes the same sort of ahistorical thinking tends to prevail. The media focuses on the atrocity and not the historical process– the reasons, as Hegel would say– that led up to it. Hard as it is for people to accept, the militants who commit atrocities are human beings. Only human beings can behave inhumanely. The terrorist who blows up a bus or shoots up a rave, and the pilot who bombs civilians and goes home at night to his family are not space aliens. They are human beings as much as the pacifist. When they were born there was no gene that programmed them for a life of violence. If they were lucky their mother held them tenderly in her arms and whispered all the hopes she harbored for them.

But not everyone is lucky. 50 000 pregnant Palestinian women are currently under bombardment by Israel. What will they whisper to their newborns if they survive the onslaught? But even under those circumstances none of those children are fated to become one thing rather than another. Human beings can change, if they recognize the causes of their conflicts, actually address them, exchange one-sided justifications in favour of mutual understanding, and understand differences as the concrete form that humanity takes.

A tall order which often seems impossible. But wars end and former enemies can reconcile.

The task of solving problems and forging different futures is delayed when opponents lock into cycles of ultra violence such as we are currently seeing in Gaza and Israel. The reality of political struggle once it takes a predominantly militarized form is that the lives of non-combatants become instrumentalized. Perverse as it is, in war death can be more important than life. The perverse logic of the moral economy of war is the reason why war should be avoided at all costs by liberation movements. Their goals are peace and life-security, and they should choose means consistent with those ends. Non-state terrorism and state-led terroristic bombing campaigns are political choices that movements and governments make. No strategy or tactic is a function of pure mechanical necessity. Other means than military force are always possible.

One would have to be a complete naif to believe that Hamas did not know exactly how brutal an Israeli response to as audacious an attack as that of October 7th would be. Indeed, they openly crowed about luring Israeli forces into a ground invasion. Therefore, they must hope for even more civilian casualties, because they believe that they can turn those images into propaganda vehicles while at the same time dealing Israel such high casualty levels as to tip the strategic balance in their favour.

Israel is obliging. The bombardment of Gaza is shocking to the sensibilities and sentiments of any human being paying attention, but is entirely predictable when judged within the strategic calculus of means by which conflict is pursued. Enjoying complete air superiority, there is no military reason for Israel to stop bombing. Civilian lives are just part of the cost that must be paid.

One can never say for certain what the outcome of war will be. However, from a strategic perspective Hamas may have seriously miscalculated. Trapped without means of re-supply, their fate lies in the hands of the morale of the Israeli army. If it remains as high as it is now in the face of mounting casualties, then Hamas is almost certainly facing its Tamil Tiger moment. In 2009 the Sri Lankan government decided that the time had come to end the threat from the Tigers once for all. They were destroyed as an effective fighting force, along with tens of thousands of civilians.

Gaza is not the first city to be absolutely flattened in an all out war. The world watched in 1999-2000 when Putin completely levelled Grozny during the 2nd Chechen War. Just last winter the world was treated to another Putin extravaganza, when his forces completely destroyed Bakhmut. Hamas has nowhere to go and cannot win by hiding in tunnels. If Israel remains committed to the task there is no doubt that they will obliterate all of Gaza.

And they will tell the world that they were justified and that the complete liquidation of Hamas was necessary. But they will not ask themselves who the human beings who made up Hamas were or what their mothers hoped for their lives to be when they were born. A relative handful of people will protest in solidarity, but they are thousands of miles from the conflict zone and powerless to stop the forces that have been unleashed. The protests will end and Palestinians will be left to their fate, even more impoverished and desperate than they had been before the war.

Hamas believes itself to be engaged in a heroic struggle to the death with an inhuman enemy. Israel is exacting genocidal revenge for the citizens it has lost. Locked in a death dance, neither can comprehend the other’s perspective and instead they are trying for the final victory.

There will not be one. If Hamas is destroyed, a new version will emerge. Militarily, Israel cannot be defeated, but, politically, morally, Israel does enormous damage to itself when its leaders openly declare genocidal aims and- what is worse– execute them. It is beyond the capacity of people outside Gaza to imagine what it would be like to know that water, food, medicine, fuel and power have been cut off, and that the power that could force Israel to turn them back on- the United States- is not only not doing so, but parking aircraft carriers off the coast to ensure that Hezbollah does not open a second front.

As sickening a human tragedy as has been ever been written unfolds before our eyes.

Tragedies are difficult to witness, but they also teach lessons. It is time for the politics of heroic self-assertion and sacrifice to end. Justice is not on any one group’s side. Justice– getting what one deserves– is a human right. No one deserves to be killed as a matter of right. Meditate on the absurdity of a human right to be killed.

National liberation is a human right and as such a life-value. But when the struggle is pursued using life-destruction as a means it contradicts itself and encourages the cycle of killing and revenge that must now work itself out to its undoubtedly bitter end.

Ideas always come to me from the world when I need them most. Like every other political philosopher in the world I have been reflecting upon the implications of Hamas’ attack on southern Israel. What can one say that has not been said before about this seemingly endless dance of destruction between Hamas and Israel? Palestinians, like all people, have the right to resist the unbearable oppression under which they have been forced to live since 1948. They have the right to elect whatever party they think best serves their interests. Western governments’ are hypocrites when they decry the loss of Israeli life while for decades ignoring the murder of Palestinians. All of these well-worn truths circulate every time the Gaza cauldron boils over and they do nothing to change the reality on the ground.

The reality on the ground is going to rapidly get worse even than one’s worst imagination about what Israel’s response would be. Today is Thanksgiving day in Canada, a day usually marked by drinks that begin mid-afternoon and Turkey dinners. In Gaza, it was the day that Israel announced a an absolute, total blockade of the strip: no electricity, no water, no food, no medicine. The strategy is clear: the population will be starved into breaking with Hamas or dying of lack of food or water or bombardment. One could predict that reprisals for a humiliation as deep as Hamas inflicted on Israel would be severe, but the policy announced today is literally medieval. “We are fighting human animals,” the Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant announced, “and we are acting accordingly.”

The language comes as no surprise. The Netanyahu government is composed of open racists who have long dreamed of a pretext to crush all Palestinian national liberation struggle if not expel the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories outright. Shockingly, Hamas has given them this pretext. All oppressed people have the right to resist oppression and to choose the means by which that resistance is pursued. But it is the most lunatic, abject, political stupidity to launch an invasion of a state with vastly superior military means under the assumption that a spectacular assault by a few hundred guerrillas will be a crushing blow.

As Gilbert Achcar wrote:

“And whereas it is not difficult to understand the “enough-is-enough” logic behind Hamas’s counter-offensive, it is much more doubtful that it will help advance the Palestinian cause beyond the blow to Israel’s self-confidence mentioned above. This would have been achieved at a hugely disproportionate cost for the Palestinians.

The very idea that such an operation, however spectacular it was, could achieve “victory” can only stem from the religious type of magical thinking that is characteristic of a fundamentalist movement like Hamas. The distribution by its information service of a video showing the movement’s leadership praying to thank God on the morning of 7 October is a good illustration of this thinking. Unfortunately, no magic can alter the fact of Israel’s massive military superiority: the result of Israel’s new ongoing war against Gaza is certainly going to be devastating.”

Slogans and spectacular symbolic operations are one thing. Military and geo-political reality are another. Israel has the means not only to seal off the Gaza strip but to bomb it for a century if it chose to do so. Hamas has no allies anywhere capable of restraining Israel. The EU has cut off all aid to Palestine. China and India are not going to support Islamist movements in any meaningful sense. Russia will certainly try to exploit the tensions for its own purposes in Ukraine, but given what it did to Islamic Chechnya in the second Chechen war, any support it offers the Palestinians would be cynical at best. Hamas’s hopes that Hezbollah will intervene from the North are likely to be dashed. And to put an exclamation point on why such intervention would be a bad idea, the US has just repositioned an aircraft carrier battle group off the coast of Lebanon. Given that there are Americans held in Gaza, American intervention from the air cannot be ruled out. Likewise, Iran is unlikely to get further involved. Iran’s leaders are thugs but not stupid. When they take a break from ordering their laughably named “morality police’ from beating teenage girls to death for showing their hair, they will realise that any attempt to overtly intervene on the ground would risk a massive Israeli response. Does anyone doubt that that Israel would use nuclear weapons against Iran if it felt seriously threatened?

Achcar is once again astute in his analysis:

“On the other hand, if Hamas’s leadership had been betting on Lebanon’s Hezbollah—and Iran behind it—to join the war at a level that would really put Israel in jeopardy, this bet would be very risky indeed. For not only it is far from certain that Hezbollah would take the high risk of massively entering a new war with Israel, but such a situation, if it were to happen, would inevitably bring Israel to resort unrestrainedly to its massive destructive power (which includes nuclear weapons), thus bringing about a catastrophe of historic magnitude.”

Serious critics must also add that attacking military targets is one thing, gunning down unarmed teenagers attending an all night rave is indeed barbaric. Anyone who believes that such tactics can advance a liberatory cause is both politically deluded and morally bankrupt: ends do not justify any means whatsoever. Liberation and vengeance are distinct. Vengeance is born from hatred, justified or not. Liberation is born from the need to live freely: free to create democratic institutions that give voice to the collective goals of people, but also free from ancient hatreds that imprison the emotions and imaginations of people and poison their relationships with each other.

Dancing in the desert is not a capital offense. Singular individuals are not responsible for historical crimes such that they can be legitimately gunned down in cold blood. No North American or European commentator sitting in the safety of their study with their teenage kids or young adults safely at university or exploring their world should be excusing such self-undermining political insanity. No one but lunatic fundamentalists could convince themselves that a rampage against a rave would not unleash the full murderous fury of the Israeli Defence Force. No one but a crazed fundamentalist could contort the idea of an all-powerful, all-perfect deity into a petty human imbecile who wants one group of humans that It created to kill another group that It also created. As ye sew, so shall ye reap, in Israel and Gaza, round and round it goes, occupation breeds resistance, resistance breeds reprisals, reprisals breed resistance, and on and on it goes.

That is not to say that resistance is not fully justified and that the root cause of the violence is Israeli occupation. As horrific as the civilian costs were, one must not shy away from the truth that the conflict is caused by the refusal of Israel to seriously negotiate the creation of a geographically, economically, and politically viable Palestinian state. The question is: what are the most efficacious means for struggling for that state.

Achcar is again insightful:

“Against an oppressor that is far superior in military means, the only truly efficient way of struggle for the Palestinian people is by choosing the terrain on which they can circumvent that superiority. The peak in Palestinian’s struggle effectiveness was reached in the year 1988 during the First Intifada, in which the Palestinians deliberately avoided the use of violent means. This led to a deep moral crisis in Israel’s society and polity, including its armed forces, and was a key factor in leading the Israeli Rabin-Peres leadership to negotiate the 1993 Oslo Accords with Yasir Arafat—however flawed these accords were, due to the Palestinian leader’s indulging in wishful thinking.”

As always, the primary victims of Hamas’s “heroic” thinking are the mothers and children of Gaza. When I see their tears all I can think about is that they would rather have their dead child alive, happy, in school , playing with other children, than in heaven with the boble martyrs of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. If they want to martyr themselves so be it. But they should do so by means that do not cause the vast majority of Gazans trying to get on with their lives in impossible circumstances to die with them, vaporized by a bomb dropped from an invulnerable plane.

So what was the idea that found me just when I needed it? I was reading a collection of poems by Adrienne Rich last night, and in her notes on the poems she quoted the eccentric Catholic philosopher Simone Weil. “The love of a fellow creature in all its fullness consists simply in the ability to say to him: “What are you going through?” I would only add: and take their response to heart.

If the Israeli, before they vote for far right racists in the misguided belief that only the most hard-hearted killers can protect them, would ask the mother in Gaza “What are you going through,” and really listened, perhaps they would could understand, on a human level, why that mother might support people who want to kill Israeli children.

Ultimately, this dance of death will not cease with a political solution, because a political solution requires trust, and trust requires that people ask each other (and mean it) “What are you going through?” Somehow some people on both sides of this conflict are going to have to find the impossible courage to tell their leaders to stop shooting and ask each other: “What are you going through?” And if the Israeli side listens then they will have to prove that they have listened by ending the occupation and creating the conditions for the construction of a viable, prosperous, free Palestinian state.

It seems impossible that two peoples locked in a seeming battle to the death could ever become neighbors and friends to each other. But between 1939 and 1945 Britain and Germany were locked into another battle to the death, raining incendiary bombs on each other’s cities just as Israel is doing today. Human beings can overcome almost any past, eventually, but only once they risk listening to each other.

Mainstream political commentators and empirically minded political scientists have been sounding the alarm about growing social polarization within the liberal-democratic world and between the Global North and the Global South. Radical critics of liberal-democratic capitalism should perhaps be pleased: sharpening social contradictions portend an era of fundamental change. It does feel as if we have entered into a period of severe social crisis, but the dominant political signs point to the right and not the left (as narrowly or broadly as one wants to extend the concept of “left”) capitalizing on the tensions. Far right parties have been elected in Sweden, Italy, and Slovakia, the atavistic populism of Modi rules the world’s largest country, Israel’s Netanyahu has just declared war on Hamas (and by extension, the Palestinian people generally). Impossible as it is to believe, there is a 50 50 chance that Donald Trump wins the US Presidency a second time. First time tragedy, second time farce indeed.

The left does not suffer from a lack of ideas but from a lack of credibility. The far left is too concentrated in academia to have a noticeable effect on global political trends or national policy. The social democratic left, it seems, has burned too many bridges to the working class in Europe to function as an effective counter to the right-wing outrage machine. The right has effectively mobilised anxieties about immigration and economic stagnation while the left too often responds with slogans about open borders and unlimited hospitality towards migrants that sound the right notes and are rooted in the correct life-values, but fail to resonate politically and do not address the real pressures on working class living standards that keep people awake at night.

From a philosophical perspective what worries me is that, in the abstract, the left has the better objective arguments. Migrants suffer from structures and dynamics not of their own choosing; erecting barriers that cause them to drawn in the Mediterranean is inhuman. Yet, time and again, abstract invocations of humanitarian concern fail to carry the day, their force dying out as soon as they run into the brick wall of political expediency. The abiding belief of philosophy is that the truth will out and the better argument will eventually carry the day. But where is this power when it comes to the resolution of long standing political problems. Hamas launched the October attacks on Israel because Israeli policy over seventy years have rendered talk useless. But it does not take a strategic genius to see that Hamas’ strikes will unify what was becoming a deeply divided Israeli society, give carte blanche to settlers to launch even more extreme racist violence against Palestinians, and allow the Israeli defence forces to flatten Gaza and whatever they decide to bomb. Philosophically, in other words, Hamas’s decision was understandable,

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history will not be surprised that the immediate pressures of political decision-making have once again trumped philosophical argument. When push comes to shove, critical voices without armed backing are easily liquidated. Socrates was executed, Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, and Spinoza sent off to Leiden to grind lenses. Christianity is a philosophy of love and Marx proclaimed that the workers of the world had no country. But Christians have loved their enemies by destroying them and the workers of the world are rather too easily mobilised to kill each other for the sake of a flag.

That the same general problems seems to repeat itself for thousands of years must be dismaying to anyone who is committed to the principle that fundamental social problems can be solved by rational argument and without violence. I believe that all philosophies, even those which try to explain the historical necessity of violence, are peace-loving at root. Philosophers talk and write and even if what they talk and write about is the reason why war and violence can never be eliminated from history, still they assert that through the tip of a pen and not the barrel of a gun. Such thinkers thus draw a distinction, at least in practice, between their own commitments to peaceful argument and the historical forces that cause wars. But if it is possible to sit quietly and write about historical causes, to understand them in other words, it should be possible to convince the people who make the decisions to understand those causes too, and then avoid them when the pressure that turn conflict towards mass violence increase.

Should philosophers fold their tent and stop arguing that a better means of social change than organized life-destruction is possible? Perhaps, but that would be to admit that philosophy as such has no role. I am not talking about “philosophy” the academic subject, but philosophy as it has always been: open ended inquiry into the human condition. Since we must live together on this planet, open ended inquiry into the human condition cannot but arrive at problems of how we can at least stay out of each other’s way and at best how we can organize global life such that our different societies and cultures form harmonious communities that dynamically interact in ways that preserve what is valuable in the existing cultures while constantly engendering novel forms of symbolic life.

Let us assume that philosophers (that is, anyone who engages in these sorts of reflections and makes these sorts of inquiries) achieves some level of understanding of the problems involved. Understanding is not an abstract intellectual achievement; by its very nature it has practical and transformative effects. If one understands what poison is, one does not ingest it. If one claims to understand but continues to act in a way contrary to the truth purportedly understood, one has not yet achieved real understanding. So politicians who claim to understand what is good for their own people, or, indeed, the whole of humanity, manifestly do not understand what is good if they mobilise armies to kill for it. All human goods, those that can be realised in time, are experiences or activities. Experiences and activities are functions of living, self-conscious organisms. if human goods are functions of human experience and activity then they are, in general, universal. Different people value different experiences and activities, and, to them, the content matters. However, from a philosophical perspective that tries to understand the good for human beings as such, what matters is the form: all human goods are expressions of our capacity to sense, experience, and interpret the world and to act in it in various ways.

What would be the practical result of understanding this conclusion (assuming that it is true)? No one would be willing to kill– to undermine the conditions of experience and activity, i.e., the basis of all human goods– for the sake of imposing any particular content on other people who have different concrete values. In short, a life-valuable approach to the problem of the good, properly understood, would undercut all justifications for the use of life-destructive violence in the service of particular ends.

Neither national security, nor spiritual truth, nor economic growth is good in and of itself. National security that can only be achieved by making the peoples of the world friends to each other. Pursuing national security by turning others into enemies to be liquidated undermines its aim. As Hamas has just shown, enemies will find ways to strike blows against even the most powerful opponent. Prosyletizing about the one true way to freedom or salvation likewise is self-undermining. People must find their own path to spiritual truth. The fact that there are many spiritual traditions and that atheists find meaning and purpose in their lives is proof enough that there no religion is compulsory for our spiritual health. If, therefore, that which religious believers value in their beliefs is spiritual health, they must agree that if others feel the same way about different traditions, or no religious tradition at all, then all are valid ways of realizing spiritual health. Killing others in the belief that you are saving their souls is therefore a contradiction. Believers who understand this conclusion will let everyone live in peace and allow God to sort out our souls after a full and free life.

Likewise, economic growth has no value in itself but is good only in relation to its contributions to overall human well-being. Economic growth must both be measured and governed by life-valuable standards. Growth is good to the extent that it is used to satisfy fundamental natural and socio-cultural needs and that it does not undermine the life-support capacity of nature and depend upon the exploitation of labour. Economic growth of a life-valuable sort would require democratic cooperation and sharing and not, as at present, zero sum conflicts to commodify the world’s life-sustaining resources.

The struggle to promote this sort of philosophical understanding is therefore far from useless. However, I do not ask the question of whether it was useful or not, but whether it was powerless or not. And on this question the answer is perhaps more troubling. It seems as though philosophers will never be kings because, in so far as they are philosophers they argue, but kings must be willing to use the sword.

But must they? For obvious reasons social critics point to the violent conflicts roiling one part of the globe or another, but perhaps it is worth pointing out that many, many more conflicts and tensions are resolved without warfare. There have been precious few years over the past 5 millennia free of war somewhere, but with only two exceptions, 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, the whole world has not been at war simultaneously. (And even then, not all nations were direct parties to the fighting, although some, in North Africa and the South Pacific, were victimized by the great powers fighting there). Why should we not see this fact as a hopeful sign, as proof that argument can resolve differences?

The hope is reinforced when we remind ourselves of another historical fact: no movement, no matter how ruthless, has ever been able to kill all of its opponents. Therefore, ultimately, struggles must terminate in the agreement of the parties. Either one side (or some of that side) are won over to their former opponent’s position, or they at east agree to some sort of modus vivendi. Again, if we actually understand what history teaches (I am not pleading a moral case first of all, but claiming that history teaches the lesson that non-violent conflict resolution is ultimately necessary) different choices can be made as the pressure builds towards war to relieve rather than increase it until armed violence becomes inevitable. The war in Ukraine is a case study in what not to do as tensions increase. .

One must distinguish, I think, mass violence from mass struggle. Philosophical arguments are not spells or incantations that change reality just as soon as they are spoken. If war is politics by other means (von Clausewitz) perhaps we can say that demonstrations, strikes, pickets, boycotts, and the organization of new political movements are argument by other means. Like arguments they attempt to change reality without physically liquidating the opponents. However heroic struggles to the death have been portrayed as in history, the attempt to achieve fundamental social change through violent means never succeeds in fully destroying the enemy and always damages and destroys the democratic values of the movement that chooses the violent path. The historical evidence suggests that people do not normally spontaneously kill other humans, they have to be motivated to do so. The hardening of head and heart which killing requires impairs the subsequent ability to live in democratic peace afterwards.

Understanding is the precondition of our transcending mechanical necessity in history. It is true that conflicts can reach a point where the use of violence becomes necessary. If you know that your opponent is going to strike you must strike first or risk destruction. But if we study the history of past conflicts we can see that there are typically opportunities to defuse tensions that are missed. The US could have sat down with Russia to discuss its security concerns; the Minsk accords could have been enforced. Israel could have allowed for the creation of a territorially integral, fully sovereign Palestinian state. These failures are a tragedy for everyone involved, but they also teach a lesson for the future: one must take the other side’s concerns seriously.

When parties to a conflict start from that principle (not a naive moralistic assumption but fruit of historical inquiry) they can become partners in dialogue. They do not have to love or even care for each other, they just have to respect the fact that the other side has a perspective. Sharing perspectives and finding a compromise is life-preserving: neither side gets everything that they want, but everyone lives to enjoy another day, and as enjoyable days pile up, ancient hatreds fade and new forms of cooperative interaction, new forms of world-creation and life-value become possible.