May 27, 2024

Infinity Mirror

A few weeks ago, I googled the phrase, “moral clarity,” because I’d been hearing it a lot lately in the context of protesters for standing up for a ceasefire in Gaza and Palestinian statehood, and I realized I actually didn’t know what “moral clarity” meant.

And before you start thinking I’m that obfuscating bad-faith “just asking questions” guy, as I googled “moral clarity,” I’d also just sent an email to the President of the university of which I’m both an alumnus and a neighbour voicing my support of students encampments, suggesting that I’d prefer the university administration to work with the protesters and learn from them too, instead of the nightmare of having protesters violently cleared as we’ve seen at other institutions. I’m writing this post now weeks later with the protesters facing the imminent possibility of forcible removal, as though this was the most pressing issue of our time, instead of the people burned alive in Rafah last night, the very people for whom the university protesters are rallying. Like, let’s have some perspective.

But even against a backdrop of abject horror, our words matter.

The article I found when I googled “moral clarity” was Frank Guan’s 2019 essay from The New York Times, “What Could Be Wrong With a Little Moral Clarity?” written in response to a line uttered by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the summer before after she’d won a Democratic-primary over an incumbent. “Until recently,” Guan writes, “‘moral clarity’ was more likely to signal combativeness toward the left, not from it: It served for decades as a badge of membership among conservative hawks and cultural crusaders.” He continues, “What adrenaline does for the body, moral clarity does for semantics: It generates a surge of willpower, serving as a prelude to—and maybe a pretext for—combat.”

And I was thinking about Guan’s essay as I read critiques and take downs of Zadie Smith’s New Yorker essay, “Shibboleth,” a piece I admired, which is also about how semantics becomes a weapon. Stacey Lee Kong of Friday Things (whose work I admire as well) called out Smith for “both-sidesing,” Kong and other readers discussing the essay as confusing, its point indecipherable, though I wish they’d tried a little harder to understand. That Smith’s piece is about the problem with “moral clarity,” with imagining that there is nothing remotely analogous about the following examples just because one happens to be on the right side of history (because everyone thinks they’re on the right side of history):

It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it.

It is also a great relief to say, “Moral clarity.” Even though, as Smith writes, “Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands.” Even though, “Hamas will not be ‘eliminated.’ The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless.”

I’ve been thinking of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger for months now, especially its consideration of Israelis and Palestinians being mirror images of each other, and how it turns out these mirrors are infinity mirrors, and moral clarity is part of the problem. And about how when protesters are speaking of “moral clarity,” as Guan writes, they’re unwittingly using language created by their political opponents, by Cold Warriors in the 1950s, by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, George W. Bush in his 2004 Presidential campaign, and Alan Dershowitz, author of the 2009 book The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza, whose moral clarity is a different moral clarity than than of the protesters—or is it really?

I think of how often, when you ever try to fight a monster, the monster turns into you.

Isn’t fighting moral clarity with moral clarity a bit like fighting fire with fire? I’m still thinking of that line I read in the newspaper in March: “Both sides brought large speaker systems and screamed duelling chants at each other.” And where we do go from there? And isn’t it moral clarity that got us here in the first place? Moral clarity and righteousness, and isn’t unpacking such simplistic notions (constantly testing our ethics, rather than smug certainty) the only way to break the cycle, for the mirror to finally shatter so we can see the world as it is?