I guess I’m old enough, now, to look at youth and the young as a foreign country. My own memories of coming of age seem woefully outdated. I’m reminded of this every time I speak to groups of students who, with every passing year, appear increasingly confused when I go on about what it was like to be freshman in college when the Twin Towers fell. That was a very weird time. Also a frightening time, which makes me perhaps unreasonably grateful for contemporary American politics, including the Trump era, which I experienced as a relative golden age of Muslims and Islam in America. It could have been better, but it could have also been worse.
I gave a talk at a Muslim event the other week. Most of the attendees seemed to like it. One person came up to me afterwards and said it was, or at least could have been, life-changing. He wished he had heard my remarks a couple months ago, before he decided with regret to break things off with his non-Muslim girlfriend who just couldn’t seem to understand why he was so worked up about the Gaza war. In my talk, I had said, “everyone is allowed one or two terrible or ridiculous ideas at any given moment, and perhaps 4 to 5 over the course of a lifetime.” Everyone, here, should include those we care about the most, our close friends, wives, husbands, relatives, and families.
I appreciated this person’s laudatory comments. If we can’t change the world, what more might a writer hope to do then to change a life? Not everyone, however, felt the same way. A couple of the younger attendees came up to me afterwards. They felt that I had pulled my punches. The crowd, almost all of whom were Muslims and therefore pro-Palestinian to one degree or another, was on my side, and I on theirs. But they felt that, perhaps as a result of being a product of the post-9/11 climate and having been ensconced in mainstream, establishment institutions and media organizations for most of my adult life, that I had lost the ability to let it rip. I couldn’t give the audience what they presumably wanted, which was apparently a little bit of red meat. Why were you holding back?
I had also, perhaps as a result of being a “contrarian,” attempted somewhat half-heartedly to “steelman” the pro-Israeli position. But they didn’t find this exercise of steelmanning to be particularly useful or appropriate. What was the point, after all? Some opinions were beyond the pale.
Perhaps unrelatedly, one of the young critics asked me about TikTok. And this is where I really felt old. She said that she didn’t read books. Why preoccupy oneself with endless text when you could just listen to a podcast in which the author of said book explained all the main points and arguments? I told her that I didn’t think TikTok should be a primary source of news. How much could you learn from a relatively short video? I’ve always found the move to video to be pretty baffling. As someone who reads quickly and can, if necessary, speed-read, I always found video to be a terribly inefficient means of acquiring information or insight. There was no obvious way to “speed-read” a video, or to skim the contents of a long lecture to figure out the parts that were most relevant or interesting.
But was this really unrelated, or was this par for the course, yet more evidence of ideological sorting? Videos didn’t seem designed for intellectual curiosity and for being confronted with uncomfortable views and ideas.
Which brings me, finally, to a conversation I had last night. Again, I had found myself at a Muslim event, which included a younger person who I didn’t know but was sitting at our table. I figured that she was in her twenties, although I couldn’t be entirely sure. We, again, got into a spirited debate about whether you could, or should, be friends with “pro-Israel” people. It seemed obvious to me that this was not only possible but also desirable. At the bare minimum, we come to know who we are (and what we believe) by knowing who we aren’t. But it’s not just that! Ideas, even bad ones, are fascinating.
But, again, she expressed a similar concern: What’s the point? On an issue as weighty as Gaza and one that involved the killing of innocents, it wasn’t just a question of conflicting opinions. It was a moral question. I insisted that the personal shouldn’t necessarily be political, and that the political shouldn’t necessarily be personal. She disagreed quite strongly with this. Of course, the political was personal. In fact, everything was political, our very existence was political, she replied.
On a topic like Gaza, it was important to protect oneself from “emotional vampires.” I admitted that I hadn’t heard of this term before. These were morally questionable characters who wanted to, well, suck our energy, and there was nothing to be gained from putting yourself in such a vulnerable position. Our time and energy was finite. The lines had, in any case, been drawn clearly enough.
This was Ramadan. It was a Muslim event, where the idea was to eat food before sunrise. Which meant that it was probably around 2 am. I was getting tired. I wasn’t entirely sure what to say. So we left it at that. It seemed that the divide was rather fundamental. I simply viewed the world differently, and I didn’t have the energy to explain exactly why. Where to begin? Part of the problem, I realized, was that I simply didn’t care about politics enough to insist on my position. I felt good about this. I was convinced that not caring that much was a better way to live. But the conversation also left me with a vague sense of dread, not necessarily because I disagreed strongly with this younger person, but because foreshadowed what I feared was yet to come: a persistently political age, when I think at some basic level I longed for a certain kind of de-politicization. I wanted to live in a world where the political wasn’t personal, all the while realizing that I probably wouldn’t get my wish. That world no longer existed, if it ever had.
Thought-provoking though not easy to achieve
Well, Lebanon isn’t a democracy in the way Israel is for starters. And in any case the answer is simple: no individual should be held as responsible for their government’s policies and that applies for Israelis or Americans just like it would anyone else. Nowhere in my piece did I suggest that Israelis should be mistreated just for being Israeli. In face, I’ve long been a critic of BDS on precisely this grounds.