Common Bonds, The Original (Jewish-Israeli) Intersectionality, and the Entropic Faustian West
Let's start with something about polities that I'll draw out by analogy to the enterprise forms - or 'firms' - about which I teach. Something I think helps explain a new Western psychosis about Israel and its broader community - the Jewish community.
It won't be as boring as that might at first sound. How could it be, with Israel and Goethe's Faust both poised to get in on the act?
One way to think about all enterprise forms is as co-ops. Every firm is a co-op whose participants share what is known in the credit co-op (or 'credit union') world as a 'common bond.' The common bond is in turn the kind of contribution or stake that gets you ownership and control rights in and over the firm. There are producer versions and consumer versions, though the former are more familiar.
Among producer co-ops the labor co-op, for example, is a productive enterprise owned in virtue of and in proportion to labor contributions - hence by its workers. A capital co-op, a.k.a. 'corporation,' is owned in virtue of and in proportion to money-capital contributions. A partnership is owned in virtue of and in proportion to combined labor and capital contributions. An agricultural coop tracks grain or other crop contributions. And so on.
Among consumer co-ops, which are a bit less familiar now than they used to be, ownership and control rights track how much one purchases or requisitions from the organization. Buy more, gain more or influence more - you see echoes of this arrangement in today's rebates and volume discounts. But the main idea remains much as it was in the earlier 20th century and before - more at stake, more compensatory control or other benefit.
In both cases, contribution or stake, the shared 'common bond' among those whose particular form of involvement gives the firm form its name - labor co-op, ag co-op, consumer co-op, etc. - is important. It not only binds the firm's constituents, but in so doing it serves as the element that holds the whole operation together.
It is here that the analogy to states that intrigues me becomes interesting. If you think about it, successful polities through time have involved stakes, contributions, and 'common bonds' too, much like firms. And it looks as though 'failed states' just are those polities that lose, or in some cases never have had, sufficiently spread stakes, contributions, or common bonds to sustain them.
In the modern era, of course, one conspicuous common bond has been 'nation,' usually construed along ethnic, linguistic, or even cultural lines. In earlier eras, some empires were something like this too - when for example they spread or were built upon shared ethnicity, religion, or religion-plus-culture.
Other polities, however, used allegiance to some royal dynasty as common bond, where the rulers in some cases were viewed as personifying their subjects in the person of one divine or heroic leader or family. In other, more recent cases, some secular creed sometimes has stood-in for earlier sacred creeds, or loyalty to the creed has supplanted or substituted for attenuated loyalty to monarchs or dynasts.
The US, of course, has long thought of itself in this latter way, as what we can call a secular-credal state. Its creed (often said to be embodied in 'the Constitution' or 'the Declaration') has been its common bond, a bond reinforced for a long while by limitations on ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity up till the later 20th century.
European states, intriguingly, began and to some extent remain ethno-linguistic nation-states, but have also picked up bits of American-style credalism to fill in for 'nationhood' as their demographics have diversified with influxes of peoples whose lands they not long ago colonized. So their common bonds have been receding nationalisms partly supplemented by classical-liberal credalisms.
But here's the rub ...
What seems to have been underway for some decades now in 'the West' is a sort of 'one-two punch' pursuant to which (1) ethno-nationalism has been made to look less respectable by classical-liberal creeds themselves, while (2) classical-liberalism itself has been made to look boring at best and a mere power-hiding sham at worst by academe-popularized 'critical theories' of all stripes, each one focused on some particular characteristic which characterizes but a minority of any given society.
Thus now, your 'common bond' with others in the West is your shared specific minority ethnicity, your shared specific minority religion, your shared specific gender- or sex-orientational-identity, etc. And hence now 'identity politics' as that form of entropy now dissolving most states, and 'intersectionality' as that form which futile attempts to reconstruct something larger of what has been deconstructed into things that are smaller now takes.
These developments have brought much disquiet, insecurity, and outright strife.
Enter here Israel and 'the Jews' ...
To start with the latter, the Jewish People have had to do 'intersectionality' of a sort all their own ever since that great scattering known as the Diaspora commenced first with the Babylonian ethnic cleansing of 2,500 years ago, then with the Roman ethnic cleansing of 2000 years ago. Spread among so many peoples across so many places as they had been ever since until 1948, the Jewish People's languages, cultures, and physical features have diversified somewhat over the years, forcing their nationhood's common bond to transcend those more surface-seen characteristics without in so doing disrespecting them.
For a long while - and to an important extent even now - what I above called credalism has served as the substitute. Rabbinical Judaism, as religion, is a powerful common bond. But (a) this creed itself includes a national component ('Next year in Jerusalem'), and (b) many members of the Jewish People are of course secular, yet still feel as bonded to 'the Tribe' as they would were Samuel or David now leading it.
How does that work? Well, it seems to me it's the ultimate in 'intersectionality,' or what I'd rather call overlapping in this case. There is shared creed among many. There are shared lingua franca, Hebrew and Yiddish and Ladino especially, among just as many. There is shared haplotype among nearly all, with Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi sharing more genetic endowment than either does with the populations among which it has sojourned. There are shared cultural values - justice, mercy, learning, hard work, ... - transmitted across space and through time in virtue of that meta-value which is Family. And of course there are memory, determination, and determined memory, which ensureboth 'Never Again' and 'Never Fortget[ting].'
This unique form of overlapping Common Bond, I think - this unbreakable rope made of so many distinct and strong criss-crossing fibers - awes and astonishes many who aren't Jewish. Among healthy, strong, confident people - people who seek and see happy futures both for themselves and for others - the Jewish Common Bond is an object of great admiration, veneration, and respect, something to be lauded or even emulated.
Among sick, weak, and deeply frightened people, by contrast, the Common Bond is a source of envy. It is something to be attacked and destroyed for its functioning as a sort of unflattering mirror to the sick who gaze into it.
This explains much, I suspect, about politics in the contemporary North American, European, and associated polities. These polities' old common bonds, 'national' and credal alike, are dissolving.
Partly in consequence and partly as symbiotically reinforcing driver, the citizens of these polities seem to be individually dissolving as well. They do not or cannot form families or even 'relationships' at the rates they once did. They can't even fix their attentions, hence keep their minds, as they once did. Social disintegration seems both to drive, and to be further driven by, individual disintegration now here in 'the West.'
How can they not, then, but envy the People among them who still integrate, who still thrive and produce both as people and as A People, along with the state that exists for that People - the state of Israel, the only state in 'the West' with still rising family-formation and birth rates? Israel's all that the Westerners once were - 'and moreso.' It has all that they've lost - and 4000 years more. That drives them batty. Some of them, anyway.
There is a memorable moment near the end of Goethe's Faust (Act 5 of Part II) when the good doctor, upon hearing chapel bells and encountering an old couple inhabiting its neighboring cottage who still embody the world that Faust has been busy destroying, rather 'loses it' in a moment of frightened nostalgia and threatening sentimentality. Finding these feelings confusing and unbearable, Faust in his hysteria demands the couple's and chapel's removal, which results in a fiery holocaust that inadvertently both burns down all that remains and kills the old couple.
This is now, I think, effectively how the weakest and sickest among us here in 'the West' are orienting themselves to the Jewish People and the Jewish State.
Their tragic irony is that this is now their 'common bond,' their only remaining solvent - the bond of envy and negation.
Like all negations, this one will yield nothing. Those bonded by it will go nowhere.
But one fears they're burn much more here before they burn out.
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