I might not be good at very many things but I am good at thinking and writing—and isn’t the trade secret that these are one and the same skill after all…?

By some unfathomable luck I happen to be employed in the business of thinking and writing (and teaching others to think and write—a thing I am also good at and which I take great pride and pleasure in). But more unfathomable to me than my unfathomable luck at finding myself in this line of work is the phenomenon of those who find themselves in this most blessed and unlikely profession and who are happy to hand over the work of thinking and writing to software.

And it isn’t just any software. It is Bastard Clippy. It is infantilized and infantilizing, insolent in its over-resourced idiocy, threatening to unmake the last shred of autonomy we could exercise over the Domain of the Digital. What a waste. What a senseless and slovenly waste of something that was once functional—to say nothing of its emancipatory potential.

This all is only to preface something of a declaration, being that, so long as I may live, I will be thinking and writing on my own behalf. I will never attempt to publish under my own name work which I have not myself penned; my name will not become a nom de plume for any software. I consider myself incredibly lucky to be paid to sit around and think all day and to attempt to wrestle those errant thoughts into words a sane person could understand. I will continue, as I have always done, to employ technology only towards the automation of mindless minutiae.

This has implications for my scholarly output, namely, that I will continue to publish at what is at this point in time a moderate to high volume for a philosopher and a piddling rate for nearly every other discipline. Expectations concerning research output are likely to change abruptly in the coming years. My research output will not. This is on account of the fact that I conduct my own research because 1. I enjoy it and 2. it is my job and 3., most importantly, it is essential to the production of knowledge which is the thing that I am nominally supposed to be doing.

Yes, I think that the business of knowledge production involves thought and understanding. I take it to be self-evident that there is no knowing without knowers. Any properly epistemic activity involves an epistemic agent—a cognitive being. In fact I believe that the work of science involves a lot more critical thinking than the modern institutions of science allow for, and that the industrialization or taylorization of science, the culture of maximizing assembly-line style production and the wholesale sidelining of theoretical work have come at the expense of genuine scientific progress. To do good science we must be at liberty to be surprised. To do good science we must be at liberty to experience confusion. Above all, to do good science we must be at liberty to be wrong.

Here is a thing about being good at thinking. Being good at thinking involves the ability not only to recognize your own stupidity but the ability to be patient with it, to stay the course and thereby navigate yourself out of the nomansland of confusion. Being good at thinking involves traversing the pathways that veer crazed and illogical and clearing yourself a trail back out of them. It involves pouring out one’s milk on the nursing of a few bad ideas which must be abandoned before the prodigal son is birthed. It involves a lot of stewing in one’s own mental mess.

It also involves knowing one’s limits—knowing when to stop banging one’s head against those internal cranial walls and ask a stupid question of one who knows more than you. Figuring out how to present a stupid question to someone you do not want to think you stupid is also a necessary component of thinking and learning. Dressing an encyclopedia up in a clown suit and doing roleplay will not fulfill this function.

And to the young people or the scared people—I promise you that anyone who is not themselves an imposter wants to receive your stupid questions and to give you the best answers they possibly can, because they are in this because they love to think, they are in it because their greatest joy in life is to assist you as you, too, fall in love with thinking in all its messiness.

I think that any member of the professoriate class willing to forgo thought ought to seriously consider whether their position might be better filled by someone who takes seriously the duty of thinking in the work of pedagogy and in the work of knowledge production.

I want to express the following in no uncertain terms: If your political agenda is to perpetuate the unending cycle of violence in which we currently find ourselves, then you benefit from the identification of Jewishness with the Zionist project, the Israeli state, and Bibi’s corrupt regime. If you benefit from the colonization of Palestine, you benefit from the equation of Jewishness with the Zionist project. If you are benefiting from the genocide of the Palestinian people that we are currently witnessing and which has been executed intermittently since 1948, you benefit from the equation of Jewishness with the Zionist project. If you benefit from conspiratorial beliefs about Jews and antisemitic violence, you stand to benefit from an equation of Jewishness with the Zionist project.

It is no accident that the most fervent, and most effective efforts to end this genocide have come from Jews. I do not know a Jew alive today who has not spent a formative part of their life grappling with the question raised by the Holocaust, the question of how the world could have allowed such a thing to happen. I believe there is nothing more essential to the modern Jewish identity than the conviction that such a thing can never be allowed to transpire again. The violence we have witnessed for the past two years---or, for those who pay attention, the past 77 years---could not be a more perfect affront to, and negation of Jewishness.

Let us not then forget how the Israeli state came about. Let us not then forget how so many Western nations, who might have taken in the refugees of the Holocaust, proclaimed that “we have no current race problem, and are not desirous of acquiring one.” The Israeli state that we know today is not a product of Jewish ideation, it is a colonial project foisted upon us because, in the early years of the twentieth century, its existence stood to serve the imperial and military interests of the British Empire. It is a project that Jews clung to because it offered hope for the survival of our people at a time when that prospect seemed very slim indeed.

The Israeli state as it exists today now serves the political and economic interests of a number of Western nations, none more directly and more obviously than those of the United States. It is no accident that Netanyahu has commanded power in Israel for nearly 20 years, although few Israelis are deluded enough to believe that he acts in the interest of the Israeli people. It is no accident that Israeli citizens were brutally massacred on the verge of a coup d’etat against this wildly unpopular and corrupt coalition. The slaughter of Jews is as alike to the slaughter of Arabs, to the slaughter of Christians, in the eyes of a regime whose only purpose is to cling to its power, a regime propped up and animated by a few imperial puppetmasters who stand to lose too much real estate in the global marionette show by its defeat.

Most Americans and Europeans alive today have not lived to see the level of suppression of political speech to which we are currently subjected. I have seen young student protesters arrested and jailed for the crime of holding a sign reading “I oppose genocide.” I have seen tenured professors fired for providing their expert testimony against genocide. I have seen frail women in their seventies brutalized for attending a rally in condemnation of genocide.

Let us face it. We all have something to lose. Many of us are being threatened into silence and submission. Those of us who are Jewish have only managed to reconcile our agonizing relationship to history with the assurance that we would act with courage, given the opportunity. I will let you in on a secret: it would not have been any easier in 1940s Germany than it is now. But it is a rare and beautiful thing when life offers you a moment of perfect moral clarity. To exhibit political courage is to bare one’s neck to the guillotine. Enough with cowardice.

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