This one covers quite a bit of ground, and all of it is very good and recommended.
There is much to comment on, but I think it is better to let the article do the talking.
However this particular passage struck me:
As she explained to Fest: “This inability, as Kant
says…’to think in the place of every other person’…. This kind of stupidity,
it’s like talking to a brick wall. You never get any reaction, because these people
never pay any attention to you.” Such a person, she went on, is “infinitely
worse” and “incomparably more fearsome” than a murderer who kills from passion
or self-interest, because “he no longer has any relationship with his victim at
all. He really does kill people as if they were flies.”
It strikes me so vividly because Noam Chomsky just recently despaired about this very phenomenon (using very similar language) in his exchange with the morally blind Sam Harris, who insisted on analyzing and contrasting the inner "intentions" of purveyors of state violence versus purveyors of "illegitimate," and "terrorist" violence, and who also seemed more interested in emphasizing the gentlemanly rules of debate, as opposed to contemplating the suffering of living persons in societies foreign to him, an exchange which forms the basis of a short comment I wanted to make. Chomsky comments on the Clinton Administration's bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory (additional discussion here):
"And of course they knew that there would be major casualties. They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who cares?"
There is this paradoxical act of extending one's own insulated ideology over the other, as opposed to attempting to extend a compassionate understanding towards the other, in order to acknowledge a shared human condition. This act is paradoxical in the sense that an attempt to make the other like oneself ideologically, in order to understand the other and bring the other closer, actually results in the other's alienation and separation, whereas letting go of one's self and one's ideology and acknowledging the difference of the other actually allows one to form a common human bond, that emotional undercurrent whose universality ideological systems tend to form boundaries around and obscure. This reveals tensions, symbolic and experiential boundaries between living bodies, rich and stable, and poor and tumultuous.
There is much more to digest here: power and discourse, ethics and action, tensions between the Jewish character and the state of Israel, and etc.
