Responsibility

Some sense of what can now be expected was given by the Israeli reserve major general Oren Shachor, who explained: “If we kill their families, that will frighten them.”

---S. Milne, The Guardian.

It always surprises you why the Israel-Palestinian 'conflict' (perhaps occupation is a better word) always elicits such strong and passionate views from people not directly involved in it. I mean, when it comes to Darfur or gas attacks on the Kurds, East Timor or East Pakistan there is a great reluctance to even acknowledge any great injustice inflicted by the brothers, let alone beat one's chest about the suffering. The occupation of Kashmir fails, for some odd reason, to get people very excited (perhaps because 'mystical' India is beyond reproach...more likely that large potential markets don't favour much honesty).

Benjy: Hamas is 100% responsible for the deaths of civilians (Palestinian and Israeli). 

Now, in terms of causality the argument goes: IF they didn't fire the rockets Israel wouldn't have responded and there would be no deaths. That makes some sense, but is causality the same thing as responsibility? If Israel didn't pound Gaza then there would be no deaths. So, how far does mechanical causality take one? 

I think the argument about responsibility entails an idea about freedom:Israel did not have any choice, therefore it is not responsible; Hamas did have some choice and are therefore responsible. But is that true? I suppose Hamas would say that being cornered and living in conditions that have been equated with a large camp by some that they had no other choice. 

You don't buy that from either side. 100%? There are very few cases in life where something is 100%.

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Mark Edmundson:

Perhaps there's always a  tension (if not contradiction) between the simultaneous need for transmission and continuity on the one hand, and the need to see things in a new, fresh light on the other. Broken circles. 

'The primary reason to study Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who at a cocktail party is never embarrassed (but can embarrass others). The ultimate reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. They may help you to cut through established opinion — doxa — about who you are and what the world is. They may give you new ways of seeing and saying things, and those ways may be truer for you than the ones that you grew up with. Genuine education is a process that gives students a second chance. They've been socialized once by their parents and teachers; now it's time for a second, maybe a better, shot. It's time — to be a little idealizing about it — for Socrates to have a turn.

For a student to be educated, she has to face brilliant antagonists. She has to encounter thinkers who see the world in different terms than she does. Does she come to college as a fundamentalist guardian of crude faith? Then two necessary books for her are Freud's Future of an Illusion and Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ. Once she's weathered the surface insults, she may find herself in an intellectual version of paradise, where she can defend her beliefs or change them, and where what's on hand is not a chance conversation, as Socrates liked to say, but a dialogue about how to live. Is the student a scion of high-minded liberals who think that religion is the OxyContin — the redneck heroin — of Redneck Nation? Then on might come William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience or Schopenhauer's essays on faith. It's this kind of dialogue, deliberate, gradual, thoughtful, that immersion in the manic culture of the Internet and Adderall conditions students not to have. The first step for the professor now is to slow his classroom down. The common phrase for what he wants to do is telling: We "stop and think." Stop. Our students rarely get a chance to stop. They're always in motion, always spitting out what comes first to mind, never challenging, checking, revising.'

So, something in-between the reverence for the status quo and the constant need for change (which is concomitant with the ethos of late capitalism). If a good education is about balance then it has to be said that a lot education isn't very good-training students for the market or inducting them into snobbish and elitist ideas of knowledge. The extreme specialization and levels of abstraction in many fields ultimately making the approach to the question of how to live far too removed from life itself to be of much relevance. Academic, as in: redundant. 

In any case, modern conditions of life militate against thoughtfulness, slowness, and second spaces, against a few, limited possibilities being known in any depth.