Before I launched The Ethical Spectacle as a web site in January 1995, I had had the idea in mind for about twenty years, as a print newsletter I knew I could never afford to publish. I was (and am still today) proud of the title.
The articles I write here center on ethical implications, inferences, sidelights, considerations and outcomes of the acts we perform in daily life, private, family, community, official. I like to offer as an example/ thought experiment/ case study a blind vendor giving you too much change. If you pocket it and walk away, he will never know, nor will anyone else. You will, though. What do you do?
But, every once in a while, once a year or so, I have the privilege and pleasure of analyzing something I have learned to call an "ethical spectacle". What diferentiates this from my case study above is that, in the former, the scene is best understood as an incident in daily life, buying a can of soda from a street vendor-- and everything else follows subtly from that. Ethical spectacles are best viewed sub specie spectacle, performance, iconic event that the participants sense is different, fundamental, iconic, though they may not understand it is a spectacle (let alone an ethical spectacle).
Ethical spectacles share quite conflicting qualities: they can be fascinating, funny and horrible all at once. Here is the best-- and worst-- to come to my attention in a long time.
From a 2023 editorial in the Jerusalem Post: "[H]ere we are, following a spate of Jews – often, but not only, haredim (ultra-Orthodox) or religious Jews – spitting at or towards Christians in Jerusalem". "Spitting at people – at their feet, their places of worship, on their clothes, in their faces – is bad and repulsive and unkind and disgusting and wrong. Plain wrong." Read that twice. "[I]t makes Jews look bad, because it will incite antisemitism around the world, and because it puts Israel in a terrible light." "Following Tuesday’s incidents in the Old City, Channel 11 found an interview done six years ago with Itamar Ben-Gvir – today the national security minister, but at the time a private lawyer – defending a girl arrested for spitting at a monastery, arguing that this was an 'ancient Jewish custom'".
Some ethical spectacles speak for themselves-- they can be reprinted without comment. This one really qualifies, but:
Something worthy of attention happens when bad people no longer even know how to fake being a good person. Today, we can watch people like Marco Rubio follow an early Hitlerian playbook, staying within bounds of performed respectability while advancing quite horrifying ideas, via tricks with language, careful phrasing and intonation, and strategic silences. Here is a quite radical statement he made at a security conference in Munich, carefully and even beautifully written, and doubtless delivered in calm, professional, thoughtful, even kind tones: "“We are part of one civilization – Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.” I could devote an entire lead essay here to breaking that one down: for example, bringing Christianity into it was radical, excluding me from his "civilization" and a significant minority of his audience. But these were much the words of someone who still has "eyes on the prize"-- the fading, receding standard of goodness that we all learned, from kindergarten on, to imitate, if not to share.
There is an intermediate class, of which Donald Trump is the paradigm (literally "first citizen") that understands, at least vaguely, the parameters of the "good person" model, but rejects it on various selfish, exceptionalist grounds (in his case, billionaire entitlement is a big factor) as inapplicable, outmoded, a stupid constraint on their freedoms.
Then there are the Haredim who spit on people, who have no clue whatever of the standard, and could not fake it if they tried. You know these people by the fact that they make no attempt to conceal their actions, then by the justifications they offer, which treat quite violent and absurd things as normal.
Coming at this from another angle. For much of my adult life, I have referred to the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, fancifully in a series of personal idioms, sayings, and metaphors. For example, if I wanted to say someone was stupid, I might say, "He's not exactly Mossad quality". "He could be Mossad" is a way of describing someone who is very smart, and circumspect, and perfectly normal, yet anomalous, lacking back-story, a mystery. In a few weeks of binging TV shows, I saw this trope turn up twice, on Elementary and The Americans, in which "We're Mossad" is a big reveal, of the "suddenly this all makes sense" genre.
Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First is a fascinating, frightening history of Mossad. Bergman describes the 1965 murder in Paris of Mehdi Ben Barka, a Moroccan opposition leader. Mossad had no skin in this game-- Ben Barka was not a terrorist nor an enemy of Israel. Mossad was simply doing the authoritarian Morrocan government, an ally, a favor. Mossad provided intelligence, poison, passports, and a safe house, and disposed of the body. Nobody knew what had happened to Ben Barka until Bergman reported the story in 2018.
In the current emergency to which I am devoting my full time pro bono, we movement lawyers believe that much of the impetus, guidance and funding for groups advocating the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech is coming from Israel. My first guess was that Mossad was the instrumentality, which meant we might not know for another fifty years. However, I have in twenty minutes been able to trace a money trail, on the public Internet, from the Israeli government, to an Israeli nonprofit, to an American one, to a lawfirm suing people who speak out for Palestine. That's because the money is not handled by Mossad at all, but by the "hasbara" (propaganda) operation politically and (a)morally affiliated with the haredim and Ben Gvir. Leadership of the venerable, once-respected Anti-Defamation League, has placed parallel statements on their website, one claiming that all pro-Palestinian expression is antisemitic, and the other vaunting the tactic of suing antisemites not to win cases but to create "massive disincentives". An organization which has been doing just that for more than a decade even thoughtlessly named itself "Lawfare", again illustrating a mindset which doesn't think that any Mossad-style indirection is needed.
I was raised believing that Jews were smarter than the average bear (and, bragging alert, I am a very smart Jewish person). Much of the attention I have paid to ethical spectacles in these pages has centered on the question, how do smart people render themselves stupid? This is, as I have noticed, why Western civilization falls, nothing gold can stay, and we can't have nice things.
For an example which has nothing to do with Jewish people, Israel or Palestine, I offer for your consideration Donald Rumsfeld, a highly intelligent Secretary of Defense who foolishly convinced himself that the invasion of Iraq could be accomplished with a handful of soldiers, mostly contractors. (The President he served, however, was an idiot.)
I have some sense of how the Haredim and Ben-Gvir became stupid. They live in an echo chamber, reinforcing each other and perfectly insulated against anyone who might offer a different perspective (or even a vision of Official Nicety to imitate). In Israel, they are the beneficiaries of a historic 1947 compromise (seen even by many Jewish Israelis as a terrible mistake), which privileged them over all other Jewish citizens, including a monopoly on marriage, private court systems, and an exemption from serving in the military. About half of haredi men study the Torah their entire lives, supported by working wives and state subsidies (I am carefully quoting Israeli and Jewish sources on all of this, for obvous reasons). The education they choose lacks math, science, foreign languages, or any outsider perspectives-- also resulting in a learned stupidity.
That the haredi exist is unremarkable-- they are a classic fundamentalism, very similar to Christian and Muslim ones. What is so striking is first, the degree to which they have been permitted to dominate a nationstate where they are a small minority of the population; and second, the degree to which their mindset has reached out into secular American institutions.
For example, Columbia University, where the following you-can't-make-this-shit-up incident occurred. A former Israeli soldier, a student at Columbia, disguised himself and infiltrated a pro-Palestinian demonstration, spraying the protesters with a substance which the victims believed to be an Israeli military crowd control “skunk spray” (to which some of them had previously been exposed, in the West Bank). Some victims went to emergency rooms with symptoms such as difficulty breathing, nausea, and vaginal bleeding. Columbia suspended the perp-- who promptly sued the university claiming that suspension was an excessive sanction for what he characterized as a harmless prank and an act of free speech, claiming that the substance used was a “harmless fart spray” deployed to express his disapproval. Columbia, to its undying shame, settled this case, reinstating the plaintiff-- and paying him $395,000. (What is skunk spray anyway, if not "super-spit"?)
Every ethical spectacle requires a punch-line, so here goes.. At Georgetown University, a Muslim staff member was fired when the hasbara forces disclosed that, as a college student half a lifetime before, she had posted on social media a photograph of a spitting haredim. And, earlier this week, I represented a New York college student in a discrimination investigation, in which one of the charges involved his posting a photograph of a strikingly similar looking haredim (expression of rage and arrogance) in IDF uniform, pointing an automatic weapon at a Palestinian woman in the West Bank. We live in a society in which the haredim are privileged to hate, but anyone who says "The haredim are hateful" is an antisemite.
Sheesh. "Another world is possible". My goal is to get there, but also to try to force anyone not haredim, but apparently content to live in haredim-world (Mr. Rubio? Columbia?) to explain why.