Because the demands of the academic cycle, because of the challenge of term papers, dissertations and dissertation proposals, I am late this week in this review. But now that I have a few moments this Sunday evening, I can make a few points, noting that all week we have been concerned about the difficult relationship between words and deeds.
If there were any deed which would be clearly and unambiguously a candidate for automatic verbal condemnation, it would seem to be slavery, but this is not the case. Narvaez shows, choosing the extreme case to make his very important point, judging the unacceptable requires a capacity for moral indignation. He worries that with the noise of infotainment, of cable television, web surfing and social networking, the capacity to express indignation is waning. On the other hand, Gary Alan Fine, in his reply to Narvaez, seems to be as concerned with the direction of such indignation as its presence or absence. Condemnations of Israel, for example, sometimes come too easily from the left and the Arab world, and they can be manufactured, as Daniel Dayan shows in his post this week.
This was an exciting and provocative exchange. I think Narvaez in his response to Fine revealed how sound public debate yields results when it is specific. Small things, details, make all the difference. Not moral indignation about Israeli atrocities, but a specific atrocity, the complicity in the massacre in Sabra and Shatila, for example. And Narvaez is surely right, democracy requires such indignation. The jaded society is a clear and present danger to democracy, explaining for example broad American acceptance of torture of political prisoners as long as it goes by the Orwellian name of “enhanced interrogation.”
And paying close attention to the relationship between words and deeds applies as well to the persistent problem of fictoids in our public life, as we discussed last year. Little tales that confirm preconceived notions of the truth, blissfully without regard to their facticity: Obama the Kenyan post-colonial non citizen, Newt Gingrich, the man who divorced his first wife while she was hospitalized on her death bed. Gary Alan Fine explains why such stories are too good to not be believed. I, influenced by Hannah Arendt, add that to base our politics on such fabrications is extremely dangerous, reminiscent of the horrors of totalitarian practice, perhaps now as a joke, but serious nonetheless.
Daniel Dayan’s post this week demonstrates that he is a student of his great teacher Roland Barthes. In a compressed mediation, he compares the power of two recent radical events in North Africa and the Middle East. Without explicitly supporting or condemning either, the terrorist attack on a café in Marrakesh and the flotilla directed against the Israeli blockade in Gaza, he shows what each could and could not accomplish. He shows how, through theater, deeds speak. In my terms, he shows why “the politics of small things” is more powerful than terrorism. I was blown away by Dayan’s contribution. It would be great if we could further explore this in the coming weeks.
And then there was the power of words that President Obama unleashed in his speech on North Africa and the Middle East. I was impressed. The speech was better than I thought it would be. It actually got the serious potential consequential debate going again. Tomorrow, Gershon Shafir will present his careful commentary on how he thinks the speech moves the Israelis and Palestinians forward.
An additional note from me for now: I wrote my piece concerned that Obama would give an attractive speech that would be presented artfully and be pleasant to hear, but would prove to be inconsequential, like the speeches of a President of a Central European new democracy, not getting involved in the nitty-gritty of tough politics. But that is not what happened, evident in two ways. Netanyahu was given the opportunity to be a historic figure, to actually move toward peace now, and he angrily refused. And Republican candidates and office holders abdicated their responsibilities and played foolish politics.
Obama gave a careful speech on the American relationship to the promise of the Arab Spring, and he quite diplomatically tried to nudge Israelis and Palestinians forward to serious negotiations by saying publicly what has been the first commitment of all parties of the peace process for decades: “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” The practical consequence of this is yet to be seen.
But an important theoretical point was revealed, a mirror image of what Dayan shows in his post. Dayan’s analysis showed that deeds speak. Obama politics revealed that speech acts.
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