Josh Marshall has a thoughtful essay on the rise of anti-Semitism since October 7th. There's one point I'd like to expand upon that's been intruding on my thoughts recently. Why have campuses become such hot beds of frankly odd theories about how the world works?
In Marshall's piece, he notes how odd it is to refer to Israel as a "colonial" nation. A colony is, by definition, when one country overthrows and takes political control over another territory that it has no plans to annex. It will always be separate from the imperial center. Israel has no external imperial center. There isn't another Jewish state somewhere imposing imperial control over Palestinians. And if you believe that, then you're probably engaging in anti-Semitic tropes about shadowy Jewish power.
There are all sorts of leftist theories about how everything, everywhere is about racial subjugation, which allows them to force a very inapt racial lens on Israel. Most of the debates about Critical Race Theory are nonsense, since it's a very specific legal theory. What does begin to approach a true argument is that there are a lot of academics in the "justice" field who do apply CRT to everything.
Now, there are certain really good applications of CRT. For instance, grandfather clauses were used to exempt Whites from literacy tests under Jim Crow. The actual text never mentioned race, but as CRT argues, you have to look beneath the text and see if race actually does motivate these laws. Same with voter ID laws that disproportionately effect poorer minorities who might not have drivers' licenses.
I think the flaw comes fundamentally from how especially advanced academics seem to work. If you go to college and get a BA or BS, you'll certainly focus on certain things and most students are in college looking for fungible skills. My sons are studying architecture and probably some sort of business oriented field. Now, I don't like this! There's a lot of value in a classic liberal arts education that gets lost with simple pre-professional training and accrediting.
However, once you start on your Masters or PhD in a field - especially the Humanities and Social Sciences - you really have to start digging absurdly deep into theory and very specific applications of those theories. Sure, you have to guard against confirmation bias and a host of other cognitive fallacies, but it's all but inevitable that you become a partisan of your academic theoretical perspective. As Marshall notes in his essay, Israel is not Jim Crow America or Rhodesia; it's its own thing.
And therein lies the rub. If you've studied post World War II liberation movements, then Palestinian liberation is just the same thing in a different context.
But it's not. The context matters.
So you have people in thrall to their theories - usually fairly left wing, because that's where the approval of the academy does lie - who force new experiences through old theories.
I sit at the intersection of two, really three, different academic fields of study. I specifically study US History, Comparative Government and now International Relations. Can I pinch hit and teach a course on Bourbon France for a colleague? Sure. It's high school. But those are my fields.
International Relations is really about the study of theories used to explain the world. I started in college as wanting to major in IR, but the preference for theories that ultimately failed to account for how things always work was frustrating my teenaged brain. Comp Gov exists at the intersection of theory and case studies. You have various theories about how different governmental types might work and then you compare them to see what's similar and what's different. In US History, I have to know Colonial History and the end of the Cold War.
So, in September I'm teaching early revolutionary America in one class then turning around and teaching the basic terminology of political economy. In December, I'm teaching the case study of democracy in India and Reconstruction America. In May, it's Realist Foreign Policy concerning the UN during A block and race relations of the '80s and '90s in B Block.
All of this means that if I try and become a true expert on one thing, I'm lost when it comes to the other 97% of my teaching. In many ways, that's not true in college, and certainly not PhD programs.
Being a "generalist" or perhaps more expressively a true student and teacher of the liberal arts means that I'm not locked into any theoretical perspective. What's more, when I think about whether I would've liked to get a PhD, I generally think, "nahhh." I like being able to bounce from topic to topic. However, there are very much people who love to dive really deep into a subject and become a true expert.
Isaiah Berlin referred to "foxes and hedgehogs" when describing learners. I'm a fox. I know a little bit about a lot of things. A hedgehog know a lot about one big thing. A fox's knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep; a hedgehog is an inch wide and a mile deep. As a fox, let me say that we absolutely need hedgehogs. I want my oncologist to be a hedgehog. It's pretty clear that "academia" preferences hedgehogs.
A social scientist once compared the predictive ability of foxes and hedgehogs and foxes turned out to be must better prognosticators, primarily because they were so much more comfortable with doubt.
I think that's where I'm going with all this. Hedgehogs are legitimate experts on a subject matter and their expertise clouds them to the fact that they really aren't very comfortable with the complexity and messiness and unpredictability of the actual world.
The Israel-Palestine situation is not complex, not nuanced. It's paradoxical. Both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. Both have a right to press for or preserve their existence in the face of violence. Hamas is awful. Netanyahu and the Israeli Right is awful. The idea that a neat theory about race or colonialism applies here is simply not true. The intractability of this issue is because of this fundamental paradox.
I would bet that if you spoke to academics who studied the Middle East or adjacent fields, they would tell you this. It's the people who have developed their expertise elsewhere and especially those who have access to a "little theory" who are making the maximalist claims in a situation that really does need that right now.
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