Across the country, especially on university campuses, Americans are witnessing a growing sympathy for what one could only call “barbarism,” and that in its most pristine form. Protests in favor not just of the Palestinian people, but of the radical Jihadist wing of Palestine, Hamas, have multiplied around the nation. For many, this is shocking. For others, it is a development to be welcomed. For a few of us, it is upsetting but also not surprising. In the end, however, we must try to answer what is a fairly serious question about the current society we live in. That question can be framed simply as: why do our kids love Hamas?
By “kids” I do not mean those young people who are connected in some organic or explicit way to the Palestinian cause. I am excluding from my answer to the question those protestors who are themselves Palestinian, or children of Palestinian immigrants, or even just adherents of the Islamic faith. What I am talking about when I use the term “kids” is a generation of young people (Millennials and younger) who are non-Palestinian, non-muslim, western, usually of white European descent, and who have grown up in some kind of generic Judeo-Christian culture. Why are these kids, of which there are still many, coming out in support of groups like Hamas. I will offer three reasons why this is the case.
#1: The Demonic Love of Death
Far be it from me to give an exhaustive answer to such a question. With any extraordinary social occurrence like this, there are always multiple factors involved in its explanation. Of course, on the face of it, many might be tempted to say there simply is no possible reason, no explanation, to account for such an embrace of barbaric cruelty. It is simply too insane to account for. And that might be a very reasonable evaluation, one many decent people will make.
Others, thinking similarly, might go one step further and chalk this phenomenon up to the demonic, which, if properly understood, would not be a wrong attribution. To support, in any way, the murder of the innocent is certainly demonic; just ask King Herod (see Matt 2:16-18). But what is the “demonic” as opposed to a “demon?”
The demonic is an abstraction. Demons are concrete. The demonic describes something else, something like a demon, but it doesn’t do anything itself, because it is not a being or a creature. The demonic comes to us in the form of an idea, or a mood, or a movement. The point I am making is not that thousands upon thousands of young people have been possessed by something like actual demons (or a “legion” of them). The point I am making is that the culture has become demonic. There is a demonic pall that shrouds our cultural attitudes, that drapes our shared sensibilties. But, what are the features woven into this tapestry that currently darkens our western culture?
Theologian Paul Tillich once pointed out that the demonic, in general, is that which “destroys the rational structures of the mind” and that “blinds” as opposed to “reveals” (Tillich, Systematic Theology, 114). In contrast to authentic religious “ecstasy,” which is an experience of the divine, an encounter with God that elevates rationality and Reason, the demonic is that which obliterates reasons and murders rationality. Thus, the demonic always contains two features: a lie and an intent to destroy some thing. In fact the lie always precedes some concrete destruction (Gen 3:1ff), for the lie is an aggression in the abstract. But lies never stay abstract, they always translate into real harm: a lie about one’s mother may wind up in a punch in the nose; a lie about an entire people group, in a holocaust.
For several generations in the West, there has been an attack on Reason. It has been carried out under the guise of various academic disciplines. Most of them, but not all, are forms or variants of Marxism, itself a variant of Hegelianism, that are intentionally focused on the destructive nature of human activity, on deconstruction. Or, in more technical terms, on the negative dialectic. Peter Kreeft comments on Marx’s own attitude toward destruction and the death of mankind:
Marx combined Rousseau’s emotionalism, apocalyptic utopianism, and verbal power with Machiavelli’s militarism, pragmatism, and willingness to support terrorism and assassination. In one of his poems in Oulanem (1839) Marx wrote, ‘I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind’ whom he called ‘apes of a cold God.’ In the early work German Ideology, admiring the violence and terror of the French Revolution, he looked forward to a day of judgement “when the reflections of burning cities are seen in the heavens…”
Kreeft, Socrates Children Vol 4, 244
As one recent chart implies, American culture has over the last several decades become a culture fascinated with deconstruction and obsessed with power: with violence in the abstract and violence in the concrete. One of Marx’s favorite maxims, taken from Goethe’s Faust, sums up this philosophical, nay theological, view of human history: “Everything that exists deserves to perish!” It is not that everything that came before has to perish, so that some greater good may come. No! It is that it deserves to perish. Whatever comes after is an afterthought to the destruction of that which doesn’t deserve to exist (like Israel, for some).
Since the 1960’s, the mantra of revolution has become more and more one of destruction than of production, one of death than of death and rebirth. 1960’s flower children may have placed carnations in the muzzles of National Guardsmen’s M-14s with some modicum of hopefulness. But by the time the “Grunge” culture of Gen-X rolled around, hitchhiking barefoot while wearing flowers in one’s hair on the way to San Francisco was replaced by steel-toed work boots and mosh pits. The dark turn occurred somewhere between Woodstock and 9/11.
Thus, this attitude of destruction has been inculcated at most of America’s major institutes of learning for some time now. There has been an indoctrinating of generations not in the ethics of civility, or the pursuit of public and private virtues, or in the proper use of freedom, but in the tearing down and dismantling of all things: all stories and histories, all heroes and heroines, all proverbial wisdom of the past. Coupled with unconstrained individualism, this consistent drumbeat of nihilism has led to what Pope John Paul II poignantly referred to as “the culture of death.”
It should not surprise us that a culture of death, one that embraces child sacrifice in the womb as a sacred right, has fewer qualms about a self-proclaimed oppressed people group slaughtering babies, even babies outside the womb. Again, the demonic in the culture does not entail possession of individuals by actual demons, but its effects are similar. The demonic, or what St. Paul referred to as “the cosmic powers and spiritual principalities” of the world, affect at the level of corporate culture. While a demon may seek to destroy a particular body, the demonic destroys the body politic.
In sum, this may be one reason why some of our kids have less concern about supporting a terror organization like Hamas: their rational compass, to include their moral compass, has been so distorted by a demonic idea; an idea that has seeped into the fabric of our culture, especially our intellectual culture, that they genuinely cannot discern good from evil any longer, and destruction for them is not only a component of “progress” in the abstract, it is one that must be executed in the concrete. As such, it is not just about tearing down narratives, it is about taking out those who tell them. Thus, Hamas, who “loves death more than you (we) love life,” finds resonance with this kind of nihilistic western mind. It should not wonder us too much, therefore, when we see, at least for the moment, strange alliances between the far Left and the radical Islamic.
#2 The Demonic and the Dumb
The demonic does not only attack the moral compass of a culture, however. It, as Tillich pointed out, also has an effect on the noetic capacities of the human person. The noetic effects of sin deprive us not of reason per se, but of our ability to reason rightly. The demonic affects us in such a way that we may be very educated, very learned even, but still somehow come off as incredibly dumb. But this is the dumbness of the man who has eyes but cannot see or who has ears yet will not hear. It is a kind of stupidity that often arises among the overly educated in a culture, yet who, in rejecting God and their position vis-a-vis God, place too much faith in their own rational abilities.
This is the kind of blindness that lead leading intellectuals like Martin Heidegger to resoundingly and without qualification support Hitler and the Nazis, an endorsement he never rescinded. It is the kind of blindness that descended upon many intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals of the 1960’s in their assessment of Communism. Philosophers of common sense, like Thomas Sowell and Paul Hollander, incisively spotlighted this dumbness in the course of America’s own jaded history. Hollander, in his magisterial work Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, documents extensively the phenomenon of western intellectuals overlooking the most brutal atrocities of such demagogic nations as Russia, China and Cambodia, a phenomenon bewildering to a Hungarian-born Jew who hid from the Nazis during wartime:
To this writer it did not cease to be deeply puzzling how and why so many Western intellectuals could lose, at certain periods of time, the capacity to differentiate, to note important distinctions between various socio-political systems, countries, amounts of repression, corruption, social injustice, organized lying, and so forth.
Political Pilgrims, xii
In cases like these, certain kinds of intellectuals fail to note “important distinctions between various socio-political systems” that practice “repression, corruption, social injustice and organized lying”. They lose the “capacity to differentiate” between such systems. This impaired capacity eliminates the ability to judge or reason rightly about certain moral or political realities:
This impaired capacity to make important moral and political distinctions appears to be a major legacy of the 1960s, its rhetoric, it impatient anti-intellectual, anti-rationalist mind-set, it radical revolutionary romanticism.
Political Pilgrims, xii
Some of the features of the western intellectual spirit that relate to its unfortunate tendency to lean into barbarism are relatively simple to recognize. Hollander identifies some of those that open the door to intellectuals’ embrace of moral barbarity: unrestrained emotional forces that lead to poor moral judgements, a deficit in common sense, a philosophical presupposition of moral relativism, an idealization of more rudimentary forms of society and culture, and a “cult of the victim” mentality (Political Pilgrims, lii-liii).
It is this last feature especially, the “cult of the victim” assumption that has now fed two generations of university students. Thus, all that Hamas propaganda needs to achieve is to paint the Palestinian as “the victim” in order to win support from minds already softened by simplistic and, ultimately, false interpretations of human nature. For in their dual confusion about God and man, namely, that God does not exist and that man is essentially good, western intellectuals make the faulty, and quite devastating assumption that all moral relationships are predicated upon one, and only one, factor: the factor of power.
As such, whoever has more power, mainly in its economic and political forms, is by default the morally guilty. Alternatively, whoever lacks power is, by default, morally innocent. When this childish framework is applied to Israel and Palestine, the more politically responsible, more economically self-sufficient and more morally liberal Israel has no chance against Palestine in the court of leftist, public opinion, and that regardless of Hamas’ cruelty.
That our kids are dumb in this way should again not surprise us, given how we have allowed our institutes of higher education to be controlled by such ideological blind guides. This is not so much to say that the average 18-year old college freshman protesting in favor of Hamas is herself an ideologue, let alone a nihilist. Rather, it is that they become the “useful idiots” of those who are: caught up in emotional fervor, wrapped up in a cult of victimhood, and with an extreme deficit in common sense.
#3 The Demonic and The Culture of Boredom
There is one final reason to consider in this all-too-brief and superficial analysis. However, it is one worth exploring, as it is may be more deeply part of the problem than the other two. It is something more subconscious, and thus more subtle, but that may be motivating the atrocious behavior of our children. That reason is boredom: yes, boredom.
This needs some unpacking. For the kind of boredom I am talking about is a more embedded kind of social pathology than the boredom we might feel when we can’t figure out what to do on our day off and are tired of watching Netflix or playing video games. (Although the two are not entirely unrelated). The 19th-century philosopher who most accurately put his finger on this kind of civilizational boredom, or better said, resignation, was none other than Nietzsche, a man whose life was quite boring but whose writing was anything but.
In his greatest book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche contrasts two types of men: the “Last man” and the “Overman,” or “Superman.” The last man is the kind of man that western culture has produced. For Nietzsche, western culture was a pitiful abomination, an anti-human edifice built upon the teachings of history’s two greatest criminal minds: Socrates and Jesus. The “Last man” that emerged from this synthesis of Greek logical thinking and Christian moral teaching is the kind of man that exists now, or existed in Nietzsche’s day. This “Last man” was weak and his world unsustainable. He and it had to be supplanted by the “Overman,” who was like a new god, a hero refashioned in the mold of Homeric epic poetry, who took life by the horns and created culture in virtue of a pure act of the will.
The Overman is not beholden to any system. The Last man, according to Nietzsche, is consumed by the system. With regard to his position, the Last man is like those in Huxley’s Brave New World, who are hooked up to the pleasure inducing “Soma,” and who exist simply to be fed (see Kreeft, 24). The Last man is the man, or woman, of total resignation. She is the one who cares not to think profoundly, to feel deeply, or to fight or love with any great degree of passion or conviction. Nietzsche describes this profoundly passionless person as such:
The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the Last Man lives longest. ‘We have invented happiness,’ says the Last Men, and they blink….’
One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. ‘No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into the madhouse….’
One is clever and knows everything that ever happened; so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled–else it might spoil the digestion. One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night; but one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented happiness,’ says the Last Men, and they blink.’
quoted in Kreeft, Socrates’ Children Vol 4., 25
Nietzsche’s lament is one that many today in America share, although not always explicitly, even to themselves. It is the desperate cry of the soul that senses, however faintly, that all the things that were once worth pursuing, the things that made life and the men who lived it great, are no longer interesting or worth taking time on. They are, in short, too hard. This great leveling out of all things, and the malaise that follows, was something that Nietzsche’s predecessor, and philosophical Yang to his Yin, Soren Kierkegaard had also sensed:
The dialectic of the present age tends toward equality, and leveling….The individual no longer belongs to God, to himself, to his beloved, to his art or to his science; he is conscious of belonging in all things to an abstraction…A demon is called up over whom no individual has any power….That phantom is the public. It is only in an age which is without passion, yet reflective, that such a phantom can develop itself with the help of the Press which itself becomes an abstraction.
quoted in Kreeft, Socrates’ Children Vol 4., 14
A public culture that is informed and reflective, but whose members have no great personal conviction or individual passion, is easily stoked by an impersonal media, or “Press.” When we have no strong beliefs of our own, no great causes to fight in our own lives, and no deep relations to speak of, we naturally seek a substitute for the emptiness we feel. The “Public,” or being part of the public, gives us a semblance of meaning, of purpose and of community. But this entity is a “phantom,” because it is itself an abstract generalization. It is virtual thing. But phantoms are not nothing, even if they are not entirely real, and virtual reality is, in some way, not only virtual.
And so we come to what I believe to be the most deeply rooted reason, and the most profoundly disturbing one, for why many young people, our children, are out in the streets supporting a group like Hamas. That reason is this: Hamas, regardless of their tactics, in spite of all their brutality, represent something which many in the West no longer have: real conviction, a cause worth dying for, and a purpose worth killing for. That that cause is not just the elimination of the Jew, but, in fact, the execution of total, global Jihad is less important to the empty-headed, and empty-hearted, Westerner, who, at this point, is desperately looking for anything to attach their soul to, if just to avoid the feeling of being the “Last Man.”
After all, it’s either that or watch another season of The Masked Singer.
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