Latest / Infidels / The Pattern: A Quantum Physicist Decodes 2,000 Years of Jew-Hatred | David Deutsch
Transcript
- Richard Landes: Welcome to Infidel Awareness Month. For most of this month, we've named dangers that announce themselves. Today's is a stranger, older, and quieter danger, and my guest is the man who named it. The thing the world called antisemitism, he argues, is not what the word says it is, and we'll let him tell you what he means. a word about my guest because he's not who you would expect to be doing this. David Deutsch, one of the founders of the theory of quantum computation, the field that may give us the quantum computer, is a fellow of the Royal Society, a winner of the Isaac Newton Medal, and has two major books. One is the fabric of reality and the other the beginning of infinity. So, David, one of the striking things about your idea is that it's not like you were researching antisemitism. You came upon this almost by accident. Can you explain how David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: you came on the pattern and what it is? David Deutsch: Well, I came on it, one can never tell, one can never recall in my experience exactly when the first inkling of something happened. But I came upon this seriously when I was writing my current third book, whose provisional title is Irrationality. And I was trying to find common threads and like anti-rational memes which I've discussed before in my previous book and I realized that which had been growing on me for a while actually the idea that what is the persecution of Jews, the ancient libels against Jews and so on. The phenomenon which is called antisemitism is not what the prevailing theories of it say it is. They say that it is a form of hatred, a form of bigotry, a form of racism, a form of fear of the other or hatred of the other, xenophobia, number of things. The first thing I realised is that to classify what has happened to Jews over the millennia as an instance of that is worse than superficial. It's entirely misleading. Note that the word antisemitism was only coined towards the end of the 19th century. So before that, it didn't need a word because it was taken for granted. it was part of all cultures, including the Jewish culture, namely, or cultures, namely that it is legitimate to hurt Jews for being Jews. And when I say, I say hurt advisedly because it's not necessarily to harm Jews. If you think of Holocaust denial, it causes a great deal of hurt to Jews, Holocaust survivors and their families and so on. It barely harms anyone. It can be Richard Landes: Physically. David Deutsch: physically, financially in harm that could be the subject of compensation in a court of law. Richard Landes: I see. David Deutsch: The judge would say, well, what harm have you actually suffered? know, somebody has lied about you. Richard Landes: Horst. David Deutsch: has that affected your reputation? Has it affected your income? Slightly, yes, but that isn't the point of it. Similarly, the point of desecrating Jewish graveyards, the point of that is not to cause the Jewish community an additional expense of restoring the gravestones. That is not the point of it. The point is... how it makes Jews feel. And that is already different from almost all other forms of bigotry because with other forms of bigotry, if somebody hates a particular group, they would stop thinking about them if the group disappeared, if they succeed in exterminating the group or whatever, they would stop thinking about them. Whereas with Jews, it's almost entirely the other way around. It's remarkable. I remember, I said, you one of the things that I noticed before thinking about this seriously, right back in the 1980s, when I was watching the news about the Solidarity Movement and the attempts by the communist government to suppress the Solidarity Movement, and one of the government spokesmen said, and this was repeated in all seriousness on the British news, said that the riots had not been caused because of any grievance of the workers. It was Jews and antisemites who had caused this. Jews and antisemites. And I thought... Richard Landes: In other words, anything associated with Judaism. David Deutsch: Yes, and why did he say this? Presumably because he had a constituency that approved of him saying that and who thought it was true or something and could be persuaded to repeat this. As with many irrationalities, it's contagious. And it's weird because there were virtually no Jews in Poland at the time. Richard Landes: at the time exactly. So but let me let me ask you because i if I remember correctly, what you found that l led you to the pattern, you were looking for patterns of irrationality, and what you found was a moral irrationality. David Deutsch: Yes, so that's what I ended up realizing. The thing that accounts for all the rather strange features of so-called antisemitism or persecution of Jews or sidelining of Jews or that it is a moral theory, that is, it is a theory about what it is legitimate or right and wrong to do. But it's not about it being right to attack Jews or to expel Jews or to hurt Jews. That may sometimes happen because of the pattern. But the underlying thing, which doesn't change very much over the centuries, is the legitimacy of it. saying that something is legitimate or thinking that it's legitimate is a feature of one's morality. Morality can be thought of as the things that are legitimate, the things that that are contradicting them is taboo or contradicting them is not allowed or outside the overton window. Richard Landes: We're certainly considered immoral, right. David Deutsch: Yes, so my idea is that this, our Moral theories have been improving for thousands of years and they're still by no means perfect, but the moral theories that prevail in the West are enormously more advanced and truer than in previous times. But they're far from perfect. And one of the imperfections remaining in the West, as it also remains in many other cultures, not in the West, is the pattern. it varies in, for individuals, it varies in how strong it is, like whether it will just result in looking at a news broadcast like the one I saw and not realizing that anything odd has been said. that sort of at a minimum like the pattern will make you blind to absolutely ridiculous things so you don't see how ridiculous they are. At the other extreme, it is possible for the pattern to trump every other moral consideration in a person's mind and at that point they become something like the Nazis or So there's Nazism and there's Palestinianism and in earlier times there was the Spanish Inquisition where it was no good arguing to the King of Spain that actually the Jews didn't do this because Richard Landes: Yeah. David Deutsch: morality is more important than facts and in a person's mind. And so that wouldn't have persuaded him. And similarly, and if you'd said, you know, Spain will lose out tremendously in economic Richard Landes: Checking out it. David Deutsch: terms, in philosophy, in science, and you name it, Spain will, he would say, how can that persuade me about matters of right and wrong? I mean, he wouldn't have said that because Richard Landes: Okay. David Deutsch: To say that very thing would be to admit what the pattern is and it hides itself. Richard Landes: So so if I right. So if I understand you're essentially saying that even people who don't necessarily want certainly to hurt Jews, but even David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: might say, I don't even want to harm Jews in the sense of, well, no, no, you're talking about hurt. I don't want to he's they're not gonna harm Jews physically or economically, but they w they would even say I w wouldn't dream of wanting to hurt a Jew. David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: to hurt their feelings. On the other hand, they somehow feel compelled to allow others to legitimize hurting Jews, and they feel compelled, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, not to oppose that. David Deutsch: Exactly. this issue of what is legitimate and what you would do yourself is well known to be different. Somebody can be in favor of the absolute right of a person to emigrate. And then you say, well, do you want to emigrate? They would say, no, I don't want to emigrate. I just believe it's legitimate to emigrate. I believe it's legitimate to marry someone of the same sex. I believe it's legitimate for all sorts of things which I have no desire to do. In fact, even I would oppose someone doing it. I would say, you sure that's wise? you shouldn't do it. But I wouldn't. Yes. Exactly. Richard Landes: But if you want to, sure, right. Right. And so and so here they're saying I I and no, they're not actually saying it. They're they're they're silently obeying a kind of rule that says do not stop other people from accusing Jews and legitimizing hurting their feelings. David Deutsch: Yes, like in the Polish case. Richard Landes: Right. So now let's take the case that you're the the sort of general moral is it fair to call it a moral a glitch in moral reasoning? David Deutsch: Yes, you could call it a glitch, although when it's big it's more than a glitch, but it's Richard Landes: It's more than David Deutsch: often just a glitch, yes. Richard Landes: Right. I mean it's you know, there was an expression when I was working on millennialism, somebody said, well, you know, that the if the the line was there is no millennialism before the twelfth, thirteenth century. And I would say, Well, what about this? And they say, that that's as common as fleas. Well, the thing about fleas is that they're common, but sometimes you get an outbreak that can be deadly. David Deutsch: Yeah. Richard Landes: So, okay, so we're dealing with that. But but what is the moral glitch? What is it that What is it that specifically people feel compelled to allow Jews to be legitimately hurt that they wouldn't do for other people? David Deutsch: Yes, well, I don't know fundamentally, I don't know what the mechanism of transmission of this meme is. It is a meme, but first of all, it's not inborn. Nobody is born with the pattern in their brain. So it has Richard Landes: Okay. David Deutsch: to get transferred to them somehow, by their parents, by their culture, by their peers. Somehow it has to be transferred, not by teaching, although it is often taught. teaching is very much less effective than the transmission of the pattern. The transmission of the pattern is near 100 % effective. If the people around you have the pattern, you usually Richard Landes: It's very hard to David Deutsch: acquire the pattern. Not always, not absolutely always, sometimes you acquire it at a lesser level, sometimes at a greater level than them and so on. So that's one thing. And another thing is it unlike other memes, it's very rarely explicit. As I said, it is when people act on the pattern in pogroms and so on, they don't have to say why they're doing it, except in the sense that whatever the ostensible morality is, they have to justify it in terms of that. They have to justify everything they do in terms of that. and not necessarily honestly. So when the Medici lent money, they didn't say that they were usurers. They just lent money even though it was ostensibly, it was nominally against the morality that their society endorsed. And similarly, the Polish guy that I keep coming back to, he didn't know that He had an agenda here, which was more important to him than the facts, more important to him than how he would look to historians, even more important to him than what would advance his political aims. this is another thing that the pattern does. Because it's moral, even a small amount of it can do enormous practical harm because it distorts people's view of what the facts are. if you think that COVID is caused by the Jews, then you will not pay any attention to... Richard Landes: That's the problem with escape. David Deutsch: Yeah, to... With scapegoats, yes, yes. Richard Landes: You claim the wrong if you blame the wrong person, you don't fix the problem. David Deutsch: Yes, so that's another thing. also they don't behave consistently even in regard to Jews. in especially the Middle Ages, but it's happened both before and after that, that Jews are expelled from somewhere on the grounds of some hideous reason, which is actually a rationalization. Post-Hoc rationalization Richard Landes: Right. David Deutsch: of what they wanted to do for some existential internal reason. And then a generation later, the Jews are invited back. it's not that people have realized that Jews weren't in fact poisoning every 10th person. They still believe that. Well, I say believe. They still... have the compulsion to say that by way of legitimizing what people do to Jews. But when it comes to hiring a Jewish doctor, then they still hire a Jewish doctor and then go and write in their book that Jewish doctors kill one-tenth of their patients, of their non-Jewish patients. Richard Landes: So so one of the things that you say in your paper is there's no reason to believe why Jews would be immune to this pattern. David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: And by saying that it seems to me that and here, you know, you're the physicist, it's almost like you're not describing a meme, you're describing a kind of twisted moral imperative. David Deutsch: Yes, but as I said, it's not one that we're born with. Because its features are so consistent over centuries and millennia, you can Richard Landes: Right. David Deutsch: see that it must have been like there were blood libels in the 12th century, whenever Richard Landes: Interesting. David Deutsch: it was, and now there are blood libels in the 21st century. Richard Landes: Right, right. David Deutsch: And you can see that the pattern, that's why I call it the pattern, you can see the pattern continuing. And that pattern is not in our genes, it is in our cultures. Richard Landes: Well, why do you say it's not in our genes? I mean, there's something o from what you know, as I read you, David Deutsch: Well, the genes, the genes don't. Richard Landes: I get the sense that this is a a sort of hardwired attitude that people can't escape. David Deutsch: well, this can certainly escape it. I have certainly diminished it in my own mind by thinking about it. And there are certain people, heroes, who have actively campaigned against it and denied it. Richard Landes: All right. David Deutsch: It's not the sort of thing that is in genes because we don't know how to recognize a Jew. The people who demonstrate in the streets that the Jews caused 9-11, they can't tell difference between a Jew and a non-Jew who passes them in the street unless they're ultra-orthodox or something. Or they look at someone's curved nose and they say that's a Jew and actually it's an Arab. And so the genes don't know how to distinguish. They don't know that there is such a thing as Jews. Richard Landes: Okay, we can come back to that, but for the moment, let's stick with the point that you're making, which is that there seems to be this very powerful drive, and it's it's a moral glitch. And one of the ways you describe it is to say when Israeli politicians accept from the outside world. demands that reflect the pattern, they are in fact accepting the pattern. And the example you give is, you know, here's Israel sending in aid into Gaza to prove to the world that it's not trying to starve the Gazans to death, which would be the normal military strategy of any siege in earlier history, certainly pre-modern history. And their acceptance of this, and in fact feeding their enemy because Hamas is collecting this aid and then distributing it to their friends and selling it, and they're they're literally supporting their enemy in order to live up to a moral demand which reflects the pattern and not the the actual or the the consistent morality of the rest of the world. Is that David Deutsch: Well, I have very little to say about the actual practice of sending food to the Gazans. That's a different issue. It's how the Israeli government and Richard Landes: Mm. David Deutsch: left-wing Zionists in particular justify to themselves what they're doing. Sometimes they say, We're the most moral army in the world and that's what the most moral army in the world does. And that's fine by me. But also, there has been, ever since the beginning of Zionism, there has been a tendency to say, we must prove to the world that we are not what they say we are. We must prove to the world that we are ordinary people who can till the soil and build factories. and defend ourselves in war and do all the things that ordinary people do, which the non-Jews have mocked us for not being able to do. so that was the pattern in left-wing Zionism. There's also a pattern in right-wing Zionism. There's also a pattern in religious. Richard Landes: Wait a minute. And and and hold on, hold on. And and that left wing pattern reflects this moral distortion in which no other people in the world have to prove to the world that they're normal. David Deutsch: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And that no one notices this. Richard Landes: Right. And that no one and no one and no one notices that nobody else has to prove it and nobody notices David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: that the Jews have to prove it. Or they notice it, but they just take it for granted. Of course the Jews have to prove this. David Deutsch: Yes, and on the whole, the right-wing Zionists do not notice it either. So that is not the focus of their attack on the left wing. So they, in the tradition of right-wing Zionism, it was more like they accused Zionism of violating the rights of of the Arab population of Palestine. Well, we have rights too. And if they object to that, of course they're going to object to it. We would object to it exactly the same way if the tables were turned. And that's not true. Nobody objects. to anybody in the way that the Arabs object to Zionism. That's not a thing. That never happens. when the right-wing Zionists say, of course that happens, and well, fuck them, we're going to do it anyway, that is accepting the premise that it is legitimate, that the Arab objection to Zionism is legitimate. if you look back to, as I've recently been doing, to the history of Britain in Palestine, in 1920, 21, 22, the British were continually baffled when they would say to the Arabs, well, we realize you have just concerns and Here's how we're going to meet them. You're going to have your property protected and there's going to be economic growth and there's a whole list of things and all of which will be good for you. And then they say, no, we reject it because Jews. then the British, whoever it is, the negotiators or the diplomats, come back to London and say, well, the Arabs object. No, the Arabs didn't object. They didn't have any objections. We met their objections. So, yes. And then there's the religious Jews of different kinds. I'm not an expert on religion, but Richard Landes: Right. David Deutsch: the same pattern appears in their rationalizations too. Yes. Richard Landes: People like Venture Carta, right? Okay, so so if I understand, one of the arguments you're making is that in what I call normal time, not apocalyptic time, but normal time, generation follows generation, in normal time the pattern can be relatively recessive. In other words, David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: you can just have a situation in which everybody understands it's illegitimate to hurt people, but to to hurt Jews, but people don't necessarily avail themselves of that legitimate option. They David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: don't feel the need for it. But there are times where there's a kind of panic, a moral panic, in which the feeling is the pattern is under attack and it must be defended at all costs. And it's those David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: conditions that lead to these what I would call apocalyptic explosions of violence and hatred. David Deutsch: Yes. So the, if you like, the paradigm example of that is the Enlightenment, where all sorts of irrationalities were being dropped systematically. In some cases, only ostensibly, but you know, people like to say that they were being driven by reason and practical considerations and so on. And so many people thought that just like this was the end of judicial torture, and the end of persecution of women for being witches and all sorts of bad things, Richard Landes: Irrational. David Deutsch: they assumed that Jews would be fine in this new and all the different versions of this new thing. The Enlightenment claimed that antisemitism would end. And what actually happened is there was a tremendous upswing of persecution of Jews. The main proponents, for example, of the French Enlightenment, virtually Richard Landes: Right. David Deutsch: all of them were virulently, as it's normally said, antisemitic. They had virulently anti-Jewish strands in their philosophy and they absolutely didn't see that this was inconsistent with the rest of their philosophy. They had to invent things, like the Jews Richard Landes: Right. David Deutsch: are inherently something or other. Richard Landes: W one of the interesting things about that, it's it's something of an aside, but I can't resist it, is one of the people who is the most consistent about being about applying the the rules of the Enlightenment to the Jews was Robespierre. In seventeen eighty-nine, David Deutsch: haha Richard Landes: Robespierre is in full favor of the emancipation of the Jews. And yet, four years later, he turns into his own kind of moral monster, not going after the Jews, but going after the aristocrats and the and the traitors to the revolution. So it it it's almost like it he was consistent about the Jews and his morality, but then somewhere else his morality had to melt down. David Deutsch: that as I sometimes say, it's like when you're doing a jigsaw puzzle. If you were Richard Landes: Right. David Deutsch: to do a jigsaw puzzle by gluing the pieces down on the table and you Richard Landes: Right. David Deutsch: glue one piece down in the wrong place, well, if you're lucky, all you'll do is make a small wrong picture. But if you're unlucky, it will affect the whole picture. will destroy the whole picture. Richard Landes: Interesting. David Deutsch: That's a general feature of building up logical systems or systems of thought in general. Richard Landes: Uh-huh. David Deutsch: It's a thing one has to look out for. Richard Landes: All right, so now one of the ways that I applied your theory was to the year 2000, that at the approach, if Arafat had agreed at Camp David, it would have been a major blow to the pattern because one of the ways that the pattern survived after the Holocaust was through Palestinianism. The the Palestinians had a legitimate gripe against the Jews, if there was violence against the Jews, if there was hatred, any of those things were okay as long as they were done in the name of Palestinianism. But if the Palestinians said, okay, we give up our grievance against the Jews, that really would have been a major blow to the pattern, which would not have had an outlet. David Deutsch: Maybe I shouldn't say this, but my guess is they would have thought of something. Richard Landes: All right, they would have thought some but no, but I'm working on your theory about the anxiety that's produced in people who David Deutsch: Yes, yes. Richard Landes: are afraid that the pattern is going to be lost and how important David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: it is to hold on to it. And so the reaction of the media, Arafat says no. Arafat starts the antifada, and the reaction of the media is to side with him. Almost David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: as if they shared this anxiety that if he did say yes, it would be I don't know the end of history. David Deutsch: Yeah, well, the end of the pattern, at least the creation of Israel was the, I think, most extreme danger to the pattern in history. The second, yeah, and still is, the Richard Landes: And still live. And still. Yeah. David Deutsch: second most extreme one was the Enlightenment. Richard Landes: Yeah. David Deutsch: especially the British Enlightenment. The real point at issue between the Zionists and the anti-Zionists is the pattern. The theories, especially theories in Western politics about how to solve this thing is, as I said about the British in the 1920s, how to solve it is to say, what are the grievances? Let's see how we can... meet those grievances so that they are reduced or go away and the other good things are substituted in return and that's how the problem is solved. The actual thing that was in dispute, there were no grievances, the actual thing that was in dispute was whether it was legitimate to hurt Jews, for being Jews. Richard Landes: Okay, so you're arguing that not only is this unconscious, in other words, people adopt it without realizing that they've adopted it, David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: but even more, it must remain unconscious. You can't bring it to consciousness because that would expose the the glitch, the inconsistency, the the irrationality. David Deutsch: Yes, have been mostly people who are compelled to do something in support of the pattern or to act on it or to explicitly invent rationalizations. Such people usually don't know what they're trying to hide. However, Richard Landes: Yes. David Deutsch: it has been known and I think one interesting case is Wagner, who wrote this diatribe against the Jews where he invented really amazingly silly stuff about the Jews and music and Jews and music not being compatible. Yeah, Richard Landes: Voltaire Voltaire did the same thing, right. Yeah. David Deutsch: yeah, yeah, Voltaire, yeah. So he says, unlike Voltaire, he says, we don't know why we're doing it. It's just, I forget whether he says it's an instinctive thing, but it's just a thing that is in our minds, regardless of our opinion about things like emancipation. Voltaire was in favor of emancipation. You tell me that Robespierre was also in favor of Jewish emancipation. That's really got nothing to do with it. You can have emancipation and it's still be legitimate to hurt Jews. And that was the prevailing view for a couple of hundred years in the continent of Europe. Even in Britain, the reason that there haven't been pogroms in Britain until now is not that the pattern was weaker. in Britain, although I think it was a little bit weaker because the pattern is inconsistent with pogroms. because the British political culture did not accept political movements adopting violence to get their way, It could not accept a pogrom and also it could not accept violence that was not authorized by the state. Richard Landes: Okay. David Deutsch: So if people had a riot against the Jews, the police would arrest them in Britain. And this is not because the British were somehow well disposed towards the Jews. It was because the British were well disposed towards themselves. They thought of themselves as having certain rights and duties and privileges and ways of doing things and this pogrom was more or less the ultimate in alienness to the British way of life. So there weren't pogroms and I think even today the pogroms that have suddenly broken out throughout the Anglosphere are not very much legitimised by people who identify with British political culture. It is the enemies of British political culture and Anglosphere political culture who Richard Landes: So somebody like somebody like what's his name? Jeremy the the No, not Corbin. David Deutsch: Corbin, Jeremy Corbin. Richard Landes: The the one who's the head of the BBC Middle East. David Deutsch: I don't know. Richard Landes: anyway, he he's the one who said that Al Achli Hospital was flattened. David Deutsch: Mmm. Richard Landes: and when and when told it wasn't, he said, I I don't care. So David Deutsch: Yeah. Richard Landes: You know, he's he's clearly a prisoner of this kind of thinking. But what David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: what it seems to me you're getting at here is you're saying people have put the cart before the horse. People have been looking at antisemitism in terms of its visible manifestations. But really underneath there's something that must be addressed. And until you address that. You're basically misdiagnosing and therefore mistreating. And one of your examples is the degree to which foreign policy is affected by the pattern. And w the example you give in your paper is about Iranian nuclear ambitions. Can you explain how not getting the pattern leads to self-destructive, David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: I call it own goal diplomacy? David Deutsch: Yeah, so I think Richard Landes: All right. So you said if you can get away. David Deutsch: a clearer example because it's further away from present considerations Richard Landes: Okay. David Deutsch: is what was happening after the Balfour Declaration. I just said a few minutes ago that the British were stuck in treating this problem of enmity as if it were about grievances or about aspirations or that kind of thing, whereas it was about the legitimacy of hurting Jews. It wasn't about anything else. And everything else was a rationalization of that. So the British at that time basically decided to go back on the Bulfa Declaration. And the first thing was to reduce Jewish immigration into Palestine, which was, if we go back, if we go forward another couple of decades, that greatly enabled the Holocaust. The Holocaust would have been much less severe if the British hadn't stopped immigration. Now, what would have happened? So first of all, as I said, This was based on a fantasy that the Arabs had a grievance and that they would, if this grievance were met, appeased, then the Arabs would befriend the British. But the Arabs were never going to befriend the British. But the British needed the pretense that they were going to in order to rationalize their decision to do a completely ridiculous thing of basically abandoning the Bull for declaration. There were some people who saw this at the time, but they didn't manage to make their case. Even Churchill, Churchill was kind of equivocal about this. He was a Zionist. He was in favor of Jews immigrating because he thought of it in historic terms that this was a historic achievement which was called for and there was no reason to oppose it. But what he didn't do is oppose the fantasy that had gripped the Foreign Office and the whole British establishment, which wasn't true. If they hadn't gripped that fantasy, there would have been mass immigration of Jews into Palestine. Israel would have been formed sometime during the 1930s. And by the time it came to the Second World War, there would have been a massive pro-British army in Palestine, in one of the most strategic locations of the Second World War, who would have been fighting in North Africa, fighting to defend the Suez Canal and so on. And they wouldn't have had to bring ANZAC forces from halfway across the world Richard Landes: Right. David Deutsch: and leave strategic interests in the Far East unprotected or less protected and so on. It would have been a massive boost, rational Richard Landes: Rational. Right. David Deutsch: just from the point of view of of imperial interests, imperial British interests. Richard Landes: Your per person imperial interest. Okay. So but but the the argument that they would make is this has nothing to do with the pattern. The reason that we're appeasing the Arabs is because they have the oil. David Deutsch: Yes, the thing is, this is a rationalization. they have the oil, it envisaged as a world that has never existed. It's a world in which the Arabs can switch oil on and off and which we are dependent on their cheap oil. in fact, whenever they've switched it off, which has happened very rarely, the West has recovered very fast and the market always recovers from things like that, just as the market recovers from... Richard Landes: Need us as much as we need them. So the British Foreign Office and the American State Department and the French, Kid Dorsay, they all accepted this argument that we have to appease the Arabs because they have the oil, even though that was both self destructive in terms of foreign policy and and not true in the sense that they were in a much stronger bargaining position. They they adopted a lost bargaining position in order to conform to the pattern. David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: Yeah. Okay. All right. So let's there are a couple of things I want to get at before we we turn to some kind of a conclusion here. But one of the things that I'd like to deal with is The idea y you say it's not genetic, but it seems to me that when I think about the pattern, the the unspoken and the reason it must be unspoken is it's so embarrassing. The unspoken driving force behind it is I need to be able to put down the Jews because they make me feel insecure. David Deutsch: Yes, morally insecure, The moral universe that I wish to live in is threatened by the illegitimacy of hurting Jews. The moral universe which I'm okay with is one in which it is okay, in which it's legitimate to hurt Jews. Richard Landes: So one of the things that my father used to say to me, and I remember as a teenager, I really disliked it, but I've come to learn that he was right, is you don't make yourself look bigger by making other people look smaller. And yet the pattern is literally, it is legitimate to make Jews look smaller because even if it doesn't make us look better, bigger, it makes us feel better. David Deutsch: Yes, I don't think it has anything to with wanting to feel bigger. People say, you know, the pattern is one of the many theories of antisemitism. It's caused by envy. Jews are successful. But the Richard Landes: Right. Right. David Deutsch: pattern has existed in lots of places where Jews were spectacularly unsuccessful. Richard Landes: Like what? David Deutsch: Like in the the dockyards of Greece before the First World War and after and in the Pale of Settlement. Richard Landes: Salonique. Right. David Deutsch: So when Jews were dirt poor and were not the richest people in their communities and so on, exactly the same rationalisation happened. and pogroms happened and again the pogroms... Richard Landes: Okay, but that's but but but you're pointing to economic well being as the source of envy. And I I'm I'm working off of your argument that this is this that this is moral envy. David Deutsch: Yes, so I've also heard the theory that the Jews invented morality, the Jews invented morality as we know it and it has... Yeah, Richard Landes: Right. And the world has never been able to forgive us. David Deutsch: yeah. Now, whether that's true or not, I think there are a number of fallacies in that argument, but even if it's true that the Jews invented morality and gave it to the rest of the world, most people don't know this. Most people are completely unaware of it. When people go out in the streets and smash the windows of Jewish shops, it's not because the Jews invented morality, not because they think the Jews invented morality. People like Nietzsche and so on have made a big thing, you know, in his case, was Jews invented Christianity and we'll never forgive them for that. And yet there are people repeating Nietzsche's tropes in the streets smashing those windows. I don't think it makes sense to adduce a logical reason, even one rooted in bad emotions. Richard Landes: Psychology. In psychology. I th I think we're gonna have to disagree on that one. because I I really do think that you know, one of the ways I look at it is if you think of the idea that there's a famous Contested letter from Napoleon to the Jews saying, come back. And and his phrasing I think is genuine. I think it's a genuine enlightenment moral statement, which is come back and repossess the sovereignty which the nations have until now so shamefully deprived you of. So he's talking about how both Christianity and Islam. Have made it at the core of their ideology that there cannot be an autonomous Jewish state in this area between the river and the sea as shameful. They're shameful expressions of this, what my father would call making yourself look bigger by making other people look smaller. So he comes around and he makes this very clear statement about it's shameful to deprive you of sovereignty. And yet, what I see, particularly in the 21st century, with sort of horrifying clarity, is it is really hard for people to live with the idea of free Jews. That Jews should have sovereignty, that they should be allowed to defend themselves, seems to be almost an affront to people. So you get the Jews defending themselves against jihad. And people are sc a genocidal jihad and people are screaming at them for being genocidal. David Deutsch: Yes, ostensible reasons are never the actual reasons because the ostensible reasons are rationalizations. And to some extent, rationalization survives better as a meme, the more ridiculous it is because then it becomes a badge of membership of the group which is denying which is asserting the legitimacy of hurting Jews. Richard Landes: So call it genocide, and if you don't call it genocide, you can't run for office. David Deutsch: that's right, or stage a music concert or anything. But I don't see how this big, small dynamic would work in the case of Jews themselves. You would have to say that it's some Jews who subset Richard Landes: Well, so wait a minute, wait a minute. Right. No, so let me say something because one of the things I noticed, and you know, when I first started working on the Aldura affair back in two thousand and three, the people who were working on it were furious with the government because the government wasn't doing what they wanted. and I remember I started, you know, I began to realize that there's a whole bunch of people out there who are major critics, Jews, who are major critics of Israel. Because Israel isn't doing what they think it should do. And in that sense, it is making themselves look bigger by making the Israeli government look smaller. I know, and if they listen to me, then things would be right and there would be peace. And because they don't listen to me, they're awful. Wouldn't that comply with the pattern? David Deutsch: Yes, I think there's an additional thing happening. So we haven't even mentioned the rise of woke. So this is another thing that has happened to Western culture. And one of the things about woke is that it also has this identitarian character where you have to be a member or not a member and so on. And it is a general feature of the pattern. that anything that gets sufficiently evil merges with the pattern. So, woke arose as a rather silly interpretation of epistemology and became a political movement and so on. And therefore it became more more evil because it was advocating against Western values and against science and against truth and so on. there came a point when Richard Landes: So the the silly epistemology is postmodernism and there is no objective truth and everything is relevant. David Deutsch: Yes. When the strength of that exceeded a certain amount, virtually every member of this movement had the pattern very high in their moral agenda. Richard Landes: Yeah. David Deutsch: It is almost impossible to be woke nowadays. It was once possible, but nowadays it's almost impossible to be woke and for example, be pro-Israel. And you say critics, Jewish critics of Israel, I think there are very few critics of Israel. very rarely see, sometimes I see on X or something, I say, good heavens, it's an actual criticism of Israel. But Richard Landes: Mm-hmm. David Deutsch: usually it's just libel. And what's more, it's not just any old libel, it's ridiculous, absurd libel. Richard Landes: It's it it's sadistic libels. You're you're you're David Deutsch: Yeah, sadistic as well, yes. Richard Landes: mass starving this population when you've been mass starved. You're committing David Deutsch: Yes. Yes. Richard Landes: genocide when you've been genocided. David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: So there's something sadistic about the moral assault on Israel, and you're right. And and I think that's one of the reasons why you have the IRA definition of anti Semitism, including attacks on Israel, because so much of the attacks on Israel have nothing to do with reality. Okay. Wow. So, all right, let's conclude. If we were to attack, if we were to focus on the pattern rather than on its epiphenomenal manifestations, David Deutsch: Mm-hmm. Richard Landes: what policies, for example, in journalism, would we would we adopt? David Deutsch: Well, two things, I think. One is just to expose the pattern. If I'm right, then it's important Richard Landes: Right. David Deutsch: to expose that the pattern exists and what it is, so that it makes it harder for people to construct rationalizations. Richard Landes: Okay. David Deutsch: But the other thing is that like woke, and I think they maybe can't be separated anymore now, they've merged quite a lot. The woke is an attack on the Enlightenment. It's an attack on Western values and particularly on Anglosphere values. And the Anglosphere has gone into a funk and has adopted a policy of absolutely not opposing this. Richard Landes: Right. Right. In fact adopting it. David Deutsch: So yes, adopting it. Richard Landes: Mm you wouldn't say Milibend is obeying the pattern? David Deutsch: He's definitely obeying the pattern, but I said the pattern comes in degrees. There's the degree of Mr. Miliband, but the degree of Mr. Goebbels is higher than that. But as I said, the other thing that obviously needs to be done is to defend Western values, to defend Anglosphere values in particular. So you talked about newspapers. Newspapers have an ostensible ethos of seeking the truth and speaking truth to power and so on. And they have detailed recipes, policies to follow to ensure this critical, Richard Landes: Proc David Deutsch: to ensure that errors are corrected and so forth. and they've been absolutely set aside in regard to Israel. And now it has become that they are also set aside in regard to Jews, in regard to Jews not in Israel. defending British values, defending Anglo-Soviet values and Western values ought to be a no-brainer, as they say. mean, the culture is... under attack and it's going to fail if it's not defended. Richard Landes: And so that gets us, I mean, in a sense, one of the things that as I listen to you, I I imagine somebody who's got a compass and he's slowly spinning a a large globe, and the compass is telling him where north is, and then when it hits Israel, it starts spinning wildly. His moral compass. And and it David Deutsch: Yes. Yes. Richard Landes: it just, you know, some people call the Israel derangement disorder. so this kind of disorder, but it's so common, it's so assumed that you can have a whole profession of journalists more or less taken over by observing by by observing the pattern, by making it legitimate. So if a if a Palestinian source, even Hamas, says Israel killed 500 people in a hospital, then you repeat that. And then later you apologize, mumble an apology or not, for having gotten it completely wrong that it was a a a jihadi rocket and it killed maybe a dozen people at most. So David Deutsch: Yes, yes, you repeat it, not just repeat it by way of being gullible, you repeat it with anger, with rage. Richard Landes: Right, right, right. Indignation. David Deutsch: Indignation. Richard Landes: Whew. So wait, I mean in some senses. take us out of the pessimistic spiral downward spiral that you're describing. Does it have to be that the Jews get the you know what kicked out of them before the pattern is willing to relax its grip and start over? Or can they do without David Deutsch: And. Richard Landes: without the Jews getting smashed? David Deutsch: I don't think there's anything the Jews can do more than anyone else, any other decent person can do, namely to oppose the pattern. First of all, to recognize, as I said, to recognize that the pattern exists, that it exists in ourselves. None of us are really entirely free of it because it's in the culture, it's in the air we breathe. and we can oppose the manifestations of it. As I said, the manifestations, namely pogroms, I use the word pogroms widely to refer to violence, actual violence against Jews spurred by the pattern. Suppressing the pogroms has been extremely effective at suppressing the pogroms. So there's a start, one can start there. And I think that the couple of hundred years of, no, more than a couple of hundred, I think within Britain, there hasn't been a pogrom between when Oliver Cromwell readmitted the Jews until the murders last Yom Kippur. Richard Landes: Well go go back to twelve eighty nine before they got kicked out. Right. Since they were kicked David Deutsch: Yeah. Yeah. Richard Landes: out in twelve eighty nine in a pogrom, that killed a bunch of them. There hasn't been, David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: and now there is, but it's mostly immigrant Muslim population. So David Deutsch: Yes, yes, and woe. Richard Landes: right, and woke urging them on. So David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: I mean, you know, one thing is here are the Jews who have this idea that everybody should be treated equally, equality before the law, dignity of manual labor, everybody's a moral agent, you want to empower the people and stuff. All of these are good liberal principles that get worked out in secular form, but come from particularly the Hebrew Bible more than the New Testament, which has a a much more Extreme version of these values. So you have a situation in which countries not thinking that it comes from the Jews adopt these values, these egalitarian principles, which then, in principle, they should apply to the Jews. But they can't do that. There's something that makes applying David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: to the Jews. Makes them stop in their tracks. David Deutsch: Well, yes, that's the most, you know, that's level seven or something of the pattern. It doesn't Richard Landes: Ha ha. David Deutsch: always make them stop in their tracks. More commonly, Richard Landes: It doesn't get that way. It doesn't get that far, right? David Deutsch: it perverts and warps things and including non-moral ideas and so on. As I said, sometimes with disastrous effect, more usually with just a slight effect. So, yes. Richard Landes: Yeah, I mean, as you say in your paper, you know, the because of the pattern, Westerners have been slow to view threats to Israel as threats to them. So David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: Iran is allowed to have nuclear weapons because they do if you believe that they want to use them, they'll only use them against Israel, which isn't true, but which David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: does produce a policy that allows them to get nuclear weapons. I mean one of the things maybe you have some thoughts on this. You're you were of the same age. We remember that up until the nineteen nineties, you know, the anti war the a the anti-nuclear movement was really powerful. And then when you get in the in the twenty first century, you get Arab countries that want nuclear bombs, we didn't hear a peep from the anti nuclear, you know, the when Did was there ever, you know, the anti nuclear gang out there to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? You would have think they'd have been eloquent. David Deutsch: Well, one could infer that there never was an anti-nuclear movement. There was only an anti-Western movement which seized upon the anti-nuclear issue as part of it because that's what, for example, the Soviet Union wanted to happen. They wanted the West to unilaterally disarm so that they couldn't be opposed. Richard Landes: Right. And that's and that also explains Judith Butler saying we embrace Hamas because they're anti-imperialist. The only imperialism that Hamas opposes is American imperialism and their imagined paranoid paranoia about Israeli imperialism. But but not you know, here she is embracing the most ferocious imperialists on the planet as her ally David Deutsch: Yes. Richard Landes: because they they're against America. The anti war movement was against America at war. It wasn't against Saddam Hussein. It wasn't against Yasirar. David Deutsch: Yes, So woke is anti-West, the woke movement is the anti-Enlightenment and anti-Western movement. It has not been caused by the pattern, but it has merged with the pattern as evil things always do. Richard Landes: Phew. Any last words of encouragement? David Deutsch: It's up to us. One can't prophesy the future. One can only try to correct errors as one finds them. And it's all too playful. All we have to do is decide that it shall end and it will end. Richard Landes: Well, I think that's possibly excessively optimistic. But we've got your essay up at the website. We welcome people's responses. we welcome, you know, formal responses, not just, you know, tweets and thumbs up. But thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your time. And I must say I found your paper to be one of the most interesting and challenging ones I've read. Thank David Deutsch: Thank you for having me and thank you for that. Richard Landes: Welcome. All right. Very good.