PART 2: The moral grammar of the political left
The ARAB NARRATIVE, the WAR OF 1948, and the COLLAPSE OF THE LEFT (an MOR series)
If you didn’t read PART 1 yet, you may do so here:
What is an ideological, discursive ‘game’?
How are such games governed by particular grammars?
What are the fundamental rules of moral discursive grammar on the left?
And how are such leftist rules applied to the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Lots of people make the following claim these days:
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ no longer mean anything.
If defined by their specific policy positions, then I agree: ‘left’ and ‘right’ today would be unrecognizable to those attaching such labels to themselves even just one generation ago, to say nothing of the revolutionary French National Assembly, where the habit of speaking of ‘left’ and ‘right’ was invented. However, the social display rules by which leftists publicly identify each other as leftists ‘in good standing,’ or what you might call the identity-signaling grammar of the left—that has remained precisely the same.
I claim that the powerful Western bosses have hacked the identity-signaling grammar of the left, manipulating leftists into thinking—among other outrages—the following two thoughts: ‘The Jews are bad’ and ‘I am good because I oppose the Jews.’ This worries me because, over a span of two-and-half millennia in the West, the following regularity has been observed:
Whenever lots of people think ‘the Jews are bad,’ and also ‘I am a good person because I oppose the Jews,’ totalitarianism is descending on all of us.
You saw this in the mid-20th century, when Western Civilization collapsed in a planetary war caused by the antisemites. Those antisemites were not satisfied to kill the European Jews—they killed 64 million non-Jews, too. And, for good measure, they enslaved hundreds of millions of other non-Jews. The lesson is obvious (or rather, it should be): the antisemites also hate us, the goyim, the NON-JEWISH nations.
But why do antisemites always oppress everybody? Because they are totalitarians. Or perhaps I should say it like this:
Totalitarians are antisemites.
In other words, it is because they are totalitarians that they become antisemites. For 4,300 years in Western Asia, totalitarians have employed antisemitism as a social tool to impose themselves on all of us. We explain that here:
We must avoid totalitarianism—nothing is more important because under totalitarianism we lose absolutely everything. Therefore, antisemitism, the trap door for totalitarianism, is our key strategic issue. Yet we have not understood this, and we are now at the brink. It is the Western left’s position on the Arab-Israeli conflict—anchored in a particular interpretation of the War of 1948—that has brought us to the next impending disaster. If we do go down this time, it will be the last time: we will lose Western Civilization.
But that doesn’t have to be our fate. Not if we can quickly find better ways to communicate—in peace—with our leftist brethren, our fellow Westerners, our dear relatives, co-workers, and friends. We must help them make a profoundly ashamed, squealing U-turn (and soon). And we must welcome and encourage this transformation with love, avoiding condemnation, because they are going to feel just awful about themselves when they finally understand.
For a model of the situation, think of those loving parents who trusted public-health authorities and inoculated their kids—their treasure—with Big Pharma’s phony COVID ‘vaccines.’ These parents, subconsciously horrified by the guilt they would feel if they truly opened their eyes, are understandably prone to rationalize away the overwhelming evidence that the totalitarian bosses conned them into committing a legal and medical outrage against their own children.
Leftists who’ve supported Arab Palestinian terror now find themselves in a similar moral cul-de-sac. They are tempted to sabotage their own reasoning processes in order to avoid feeling guilt for what they’ve been doing to Western Civilization. They don’t want to feel the deep shame that comes from realizing you’ve been on the wrong side of history, supporting the oppressors, the psychopathic Western bosses, the authors of world wars that kill and enslave us all.
In warm empathy for the difficult emotional position that leftists are in, I recommend that we abandon all judgment and triumphalism and work hard to make them feel loved and welcome. If we seek to change their minds, it is not to defeat them, but to protect them—to protect us all.
The more scientifically we approach this matter, I believe, the easier we can lay our emotions to the side and recruit historical facts and logical reasoning, with objectivity, to consider competing arguments. The first thing we must examine scientifically, I believe, is the signaling grammar of the left, because one can hardly be freed from manipulation before one has seen how that grammar operates. We must rise ‘above’ the conversation to examine the conversational rules themselves.
Below, therefore, is a brief general presentation on the grammatical nature of ideological games, and signaling therein, immediately followed by an application of that conceptual framework to the identity-signaling grammar of the modern political left, and more particularly as regards the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Social grammar and the theory of games
All manner of social interactions are strategic because they have costs, which players try to minimize, and benefits, which they try to maximize. The strategic aspect is what justifies calling these interactions games. They are games in the manner of chess rather than, say, musical chairs. Economists, evolutionary theorists, and sociologists in the tradition of Erving Goffman all speak of social games in this manner. I use the term game with respect—I am doing what is called game theory.
In social games, each individual player makes moves in the context of other players’ moves. The cumulative or articulated sequence of a player’s moves is his or her strategy.
Strategic behavior may be entirely conscious, pre-planned, and rational (for example, when diplomats from different countries negotiate), or, more commonly, it may be deployed intuitively and emotionally via adaptive rules of thumb, whether innate or acquired (as happens matter-of-factly in all manner of daily interactions).
My chief interest (and, momentarily, yours) is in social games where costs and benefits flow from producing, or from failing to produce, the correct meaning.
The simplest game of this kind is perhaps the two-person spycraft game of countersign challenge, with two rigidly fixed roles: ‘challenger’ and ‘responder.’ The challenger says something—the challenge—that must be answered with the agreed-upon response or ‘password.’ The responder either knows the password or he doesn’t. If he does, he gains entry or receives the package (or whatever); if he doesn’t, he stays outside or is denied the package (or whatever). (And perhaps, once identified as an impostor, he suffers something worse!)
A slightly more complicated countersign-challenge game is when both individuals alternate in the roles of challenger and responder, for they both need to confirm the other’s identity, which requires a slightly longer sequence. For example, in From Russia With Love (1963), James Bond is approached by someone he needs to work with:
Man: Excuse me. Can I borrow a match?
Bond: I use a lighter.
Man: Better still.
Bond: Until they go wrong.
In this example, each challenge and response must sound innocuous to eavesdroppers because the exchange takes place in public.
The point of this game is for both participants to satisfy each other that they are each dealing with the right person, because they have never met. The meaning of this game, if played correctly, is therefore: We are both on the same team. The payoff, if the interaction is successful, is that Bond and the other guy get to work together on whatever was planned (murder an enemy, save the day, etc.).
The spycraft countersign-challenge game is a formal ‘toy example,’ a simple limit case, if you will, of a game that we are all playing in more complicated naturalistic settings all the time.
Picture a group of, say, ten people at a social gathering. They might be talking about anything at all, and without a prearranged order, so that any one of them might, in principle, say anything at any given moment. Everyone is improvising, true, but that hardly means their expressions are random. Like jazz musicians playing at a club, who will have agreed beforehand on a style, key, and scale, there is likewise a grammar involved in our naturalistic social interactions. Except that, unlike jazz musicians, we don’t usually explicitly agree beforehand on the parameters of our conversational grammar; the entire agreement is implicit—a social convention.
People use lots of words in such exchanges, but careful: the grammar I am speaking of is not the grammar of the language as such. I am speaking of a meta-linguistic grammar, lying ‘above’ language, so to speak. It’s the grammar of what French philosopher Michel Foucault called discourse: a grammar that governs not the construction of sentences, as such, but rather governs the meanings that one expresses with those sentences, and how those meanings should be combined. To quote my (very serious) academic article on this:
“Some explicit claims and background assumptions, and some combinations, are obligatory, others taboo, some flourishes are de rigueur, some beginnings demand certain prefaces or closures, some implications must be protected, and so on. Violations of these grammatical expectations are felt to be, in a scale of increasing gravity, ‘eccentric,’ ‘unmannerly,’ ‘irrational,’ ‘insane,’ and morally ‘outrageous’ (but always ‘wrong’ or ‘false’), which motivates us (often prodded by others) to correct deviance.”
If one makes claims allowed within the relevant grammar, and moreover articulates them in sequence also according to that grammar, then one is grammatically correct in the discursive sense.
Consider a local etiquette. Your sentences might all be grammatically correct from the linguistic point of view, that is, with respect to the rules of English, but, despite your English correctness, you could still make a move that is incorrect with respect to the grammar of the local etiquette. You might say the ‘wrong’ thing—commit a faux pas (a misstep).
Notice that what people say politely carries—beyond the politeness—an explicit meaning: it is saying something. In the exchange of such explicit meanings any kind of social game (greeting, hosting, negotiating, marrying, etc.) might be going on. But there is always something else going on: an implicit countersign-challenge game. Any improvised but grammatically correct expression becomes a kind of implicit ‘challenge,’ and the next expression counts implicitly as: a) ‘knows the password,’ if improvised according to the rules of the grammar implicated by the prior sequence of expressions; or ‘doesn’t know the password,’ if improvised in violation of that grammar. Anyone doing the latter is silently—or not so silently—discovered as an ‘outsider,’ and perhaps also, depending on context, as an ‘impostor.’
A classic (and clear) example is a pauper pretending to be a rich person, or a king traveling incognito among the commoners, who then says or does something considered a faux pas—or, more gravely, a taboo violation—within the local grammar of that social register and gets discovered.
In ideological discourse, a grammatically incorrect faux pax makes you politically incorrect, and therefore an ‘impostor’ or ‘traitor,’ depending on context, but always an ‘enemy.’
How to study these implicit social games rigorously?
In my anthropological work, I have argued that such games become easily interpretable when you have figured out the final meaning—that is, the meaning which the players are trying intuitively and cooperatively to produce, and which, if successfully implicated by the arc of their joint contributions, brings the social interaction to a psychologically satisfactory (stress-reducing) ‘close’ that saves everyone’s ‘face’ (as the great sociologist Erving Goffman would put it).
This stuff is fundamental to human social life—it’s not like we can get rid of it. By socializing people with a shared identity into a common grammar, coordination is improved and the cost of cooperation thereby lowered. Finding and excluding deviants is thus a limit case of a more general ‘policing’ function that nudges those still imperfectly socialized into becoming rigorously fluent in the local grammar. Since the entire social structure is held together by the grammatically correct contributions of the members, to socialize them into the local identity’s various grammars, and to keep them obediently within them, is the very process by which a community’s social structure is reproduced, yielding stability and cohesion.
In ideological identities the scare quotes around ‘policing’—and the gloves—come off: the identification of deviants—who will be publicly punished—is quite deliberate and central, and plenty of conscious policing is always going on. In some leftist circles in the West, especially on the woke far left, something formally identical to (though at least for now less violent than) the communist ‘struggle session’ has been imposed on deviants.
The strongest locus of socialization for the modern left is the Western university. When students arrive as young undergraduates with their brains still developing, they of course want to ‘fit in’ with the culture of the institution they are joining, which already enjoys great prestige in their own estimation (that’s why they worked so hard to get in). Within the university prestige system, the professors are at the top, so students are quickly influenced to adopt the moral positions that their professors present to them as allegedly ‘obvious.’ Overwhelmingly, these academic professors at Western universities are on the very woke far left.
The grammar of the woke far left
As mentioned, the left has changed a great deal in the last century. But in the identity-signaling game that leftists play within their own discourse—especially woke leftists—the left has not changed at all. I mean the game by which they seek to identify deviants: those accused of not being true leftists, or at least not leftist enough.
Speaking very precisely, what has not changed is this: within the discursive grammar of the left, an interaction can only be satisfactorily ‘closed’ when the improvised moves of the various players have combined to implicate the following meaning:
‘We have defended victims against oppression.’
That’s the meaning goal of all leftist ‘virtue-signaling’ grammar.
Whether leftists really do defend victims against oppression in any given historical period is, of course, a matter of debate. But we are not considering that yet. What I am saying here is that expressing the above meaning—however honestly or accurately—is how one raises, behaviorally, the leftist flag.
Once you’ve seen this, you can begin to understand the rules that govern the improvised expressions of leftists as they interact within their own grammar. These expressions are, of course, consciously scrutinized for ‘correctness’—political correctness. For this is a political ideology, not merely a culture. All expressions must be ‘correct’ according to the political grammar of the left, ruled by its meaning-goal: We have defended victims against oppression.
But conducting checks against the generative meaning goal is hardly the only leftist ‘countersign-challenge.’ They abound. Another important one requires you to broadcast that you know who the leftist grammar identifies as a ‘proper’ victim. Where questions of international relations are concerned, this takes the following form:
‘The ancestral native is always the victim of imperial and colonialist powers.’
This is a strong—indeed, axiomatic—principle of modern leftist grammar. You must, whenever relevant, express this meaning to remain politically correct.
For a kind of meaning laboratory of this principle, consider the practice of land acknowledgment.
Land acknowledgment is a recent ritual modality of the politically correct left. It operates in relatively formal settings—and increasingly, even in informal ones. I’ve seen it in online meetings. For example, when introducing yourself before a virtual collaboration, you might say a bit about who you are and then: “I am here in the United States, on land taken by force from Native Americans,” or something to that effect. That’s a land acknowledgment. The pressure to perform this ritual is especially strong on those who physically resemble the original colonizers of the place they’re in.
This practice has that ‘countersign-challenge’ feel to it. It functions like a club handshake. By making a land acknowledgment, I broadcast to all concerned that I, too, side with ‘victims’ against ‘oppressors.’ And I signal that I understand who the victims are: always the natives. By expressing these meanings, I establish myself as a leftist in good standing.
To test whether this is, as I claim, a sacred—axiomatic, paradigmatic—litmus test for leftists, try this: ask a leftist to explain why it is always the natives or their descendants who are the victims, and never anyone descended from—or physically resembling—the colonizers. My prediction: you will not get an explanation. You will get outrage at the mere fact that you asked for one.
Another hard, sacred, axiomatic principle of the modern woke left is this:
‘The weak are always right; the strong are always wrong.’
The relative ‘little guy’—whoever has less power, fewer guns, less territory, less wealth—is always the deserving ‘victim.’
These sacred principles make it very difficult for leftists to think clearly about certain crimes. When the little-guy native commits a heinous act, leftists often seem more troubled by the need to condemn him than by the act itself. This is especially true of woke leftists. The protection of their leftist identity requires them to treat the little-guy native as a victim of oppression by definition; his violence must therefore be rationalized as resistance.
Conversely, no charity may be extended to the big-guy colonialist. No benefits to the natives from any conquest may be recognized. To acknowledge such benefits would veer, within the rigid grammar of the left, into an apology for the imperialist—who must always be thought of as a guilty oppressor and nothing more.
To see how these sacred principles create grammatical rules that make the nuanced, scientific study of history nearly impossible, let us consider one prominent example from my own local context: the Conquest of Mexico.
The left, and the distortion of Mexican history
In Mexico we say: La Conquista la hicieron los indígenas; y la Independencia, los españoles. It means this: the Conquest was an Amerindian achievement; and our Independence, a Spanish achievement. It’s true. Most of the warriors responsible for the ‘Spanish’ conquest were Mesoamerican Indians. And the War of Independence was chiefly a fight between Spaniards born in Mexico (criollos) and those in Spain.
There is no controversy over this point: the so-called ‘Conquest of Mexico’ was mostly a war between Mesoamericans; the Spaniards were very few. At no point did Hernán Cortés command more than 1,300 Spanish warriors, apparently. And he began with far fewer. When Cortés approached Tenochtitlan the first time, according to Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s first-person account:
“… in front of us stood the great City of Mexico, and we—we did not even number four hundred soldiers! And we well remembered the words and warnings given us by the people of Huexotzingo and Tlaxcala, and the many other warnings that had been given that we should beware of entering Mexico, where they would kill us, as soon as they had us inside.”1
According to Wikipedia’s summary, during the siege of Tenochtitlan, in 1521, as many as 200,000 native warriors joined Cortés to defeat the Mexica (‘Aztec’) Empire. Without them, Cortés didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.
Why did so many native Mesoamericans join Cortés? At least partly, according to one view, because they were fed up with Mexica oppression. Cortés’s most important allies were the Tlaxcalteca, who had repeatedly resisted Mexica efforts to subjugate them—and who, not coincidentally, had the most decentralized and participatory political system of any State in Mesoamerica.
I will not dispute that the Spaniards, once established, oppressed the natives of Mexico in various ways. And they don’t get a pass: it is entirely fair to condemn the Spanish government for any and all abuses visited upon the Mesoamericans—and on the Spaniards themselves! But that doesn’t remove the following question:
Were Spanish rulers worse than the Mexica?
I am happy to conclude whatever the evidence supports—I am not prejudging it. I’ve been known to oscillate under the influence of very different hypotheses about the evidence. What I cannot abide, as a scientist, is a totalitarian tantrum the moment someone asks to investigate the question. Like any relevant question, it is worth considering.
Relevant to this investigation is the fact that pre-Columbian Mesoamerica was hardly an Eden of peace and brotherhood. The ancestral natives were not kind to each other. They were perennially at war. Moreover, Mesoamerican societies could be quite oppressive internally. And let us not forget all that human sacrifice, and the cannibalism—which was at least ritual, religious cannibalism, and perhaps also (in the views of some scholars) dietary.
What is the psychological obstacle to believing that the Mesoamericans were terrified of capture, followed by a dramatic cardiectomy—heart gets carved out of the living body!—at the pyramid summit, to then become a priestly meal? None, I would think, except heavy ideological schooling in which Spaniards are ‘bad’ because they came from elsewhere, whereas the Mexica are ‘good’ because they were natives. But this is a nonsense ‘argument.’
The Spaniards, though they certainly did oppress the natives in various ways, also brought some blessings. They pacified the continent. And though they imposed their religion by force, that religion contained the idea that all humans are fundamentally equal as children of God. This idea supported a Spanish movement—led by influential Catholic priests—to extend more legal protections to the natives. And the ideological and social transformation of Mexico made it ready for the revolutionary changes of the Enlightenment, which finally brought modern, Western democracy.
Again, I agree: colonial Spanish society was oppressive. And not just to the red-skinned natives and the brown, mixed-blood mestizos, mind you, but also to most white Spaniards. Granted. But still: Was that society, for most ordinary people, worse than pre-Columbian oppression?
For most of our scholars—an overwhelming majority of them leftists—even putting this question on the table appears to be impossible. According to GPT’s perception of the literature:
“Yes—the academic left has often underplayed the brutality of the Mexica regime and been hesitant to seriously entertain the idea that some indigenous groups may have preferred Spanish rule (at least initially). That hesitance is driven less by evidence than by a desire to moralize the narrative.”
The narrative is moralized by the orthodox leftist principle that ancestral natives must always be held up as innocent victims, and the European colonizers always as guilty oppressors. (I recommend the intelligent discussion of a fellow native Mexican on these problems.)
The modern left and the Arab–Israeli conflict
In the Arab–Israeli conflict, the modern leftist allegation is this:
That the Arab Palestinians are the natives of ‘Palestine,’ whereas the Israeli Jews are foreign imperialist colonizers; and
That the Arab Palestinians are the weak party—the ‘little guy’—fighting the strong Israeli Jews.
If anybody objects that the Arab Palestinians are killing Jewish babies, many on the modern Western left will tell you that that’s okay—those babies are colonizers.
Whoever justifies a killer of babies has plunged into the darkest moral corruption. I might therefore stop here. But I will do something more interesting.
I will demonstrate that even granting the modern left all its principles—however twisted—by which it excuses the crimes of alleged ‘victims,’ these principles cannot be applied to the Arab–Israeli conflict in favor of the Arab Narrative. That’s because the so-called Arab Palestinians:
are not the natives of ‘Palestine’;
are not fighting Zionist oppression; and
are not even the relative ‘little guy.’
In other words, the left has gone out of its way to ignore its own principles—whatever one may think of them—in order to prefer the Arab Narrative over the Zionist one. This is my claim.
History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, edited by Davíd Carrasco, University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
If the anti-Semites win the leftists will indeed feel awful about themselves. But, cheers! - they won’t have to suffer for long. Because then they will be forced to make the “unforced” choice - “la iqra fil al Din” - “there is no compulsion in faith” between becoming Muslim or being beheaded. If they “accept” Islam then they can celebrate being among the “winners” whilst they meanwhile will have to slave for their now co-religionist but pitiless masters. Or else having been decapitated they will no longer have awareness of anything - no more pain, no more regret (unless the prophets also spoke truthfully about a future Gehenna.) Then the world will have to suffer at least five hundred years of decline and collapse before somehow the spirit of liberty will be rekindled.