Kids, Idiots, Holism, Hamas

Moral seriousness and flying by vibes

Maybe I’m an idiot, and Hamas is coming for my kids. But I don’t think so. Here’s my general framework, in short spoken and then written form, followed by my prompt:

Hello internet stranger. So I’ve actually given this stuff quite a bit of thought. I’m not sure about that particular quote in your screenshot but I do know that lots of really bloodthirsty brutal things have been said by Hamas leaders, and by other Palestinians. And by Likud leaders, and other Israelis. And I’ve got a few different lines of thinking on this.

One is that I’m against it. I’m against killing, suffering—like if we could not do that, that would be great. Another line of thinking is my understanding that whenever two groups of people are in any kind of armed conflict that means real hate on both sides. That is how we are wired. When we are fighting and killing each other, we hate each other. Not all of us, but a whole lot of us.

I absolutely know that the attack on the seventh killed Israeli civilians, and that there was definitely some cruelty and sadism involved. At the same time, I know what’s happened since. And what happened prior. Meaning that I know the outlines of the history, with the Brits taking over from the Ottomans in 1917, and the next 30 years of migration, and then the Nakba, and occupation since 1967, and settlements.

Here’s one more line of thinking. In judging any armed conflict, any geopolitical conflict, it’s a feature of our psychology that we can really just fly by vibes. We can just look at particular statements, particular horrors, particular sufferings. We can look at some particular instances, and rightly feel strongly about them, but then wrongly decide our whole view by them. I don’t think that that’s a good way to judge things like morality, justice, politics, war.

Our gut reactions are absolutely important. But if we aim them only at relatively few pictures, relatively few events, without trying to take in some sweep of the whole, then that’s not a morally serious view of things.

Prompt:

Thank you for your interest friends, enemies, idiots, internet strangers, sadists, saints, savants, etc.