At the present time, if I were Jewish, I could imagine feeling that kind of creeping paranoia. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is sold openly across the Middle East, and faced with increasingly effective opposition, Israel looks progressively more like Constantinople in the mid-1400s, just before that last dwindling bastion of the Eastern Roman Empire finally collapsed under Turkish assault. It is still, officially, under U.S. protection, but people in western nations increasingly wonder if it is the source of Middle East turmoil and Islamist anger. It is, partly, but the idea that all would be peachy if Israel were assimilated into some new State of Palestine is silly. Regional rivalries and sectarian squabbles between Alawites and Shi’ites and Sunnis would soon fill the void. I think Israel’s arrogant cruelty towards the Palestinians, whom its various governments will never concede as having been wronged, has produced hardships for its non-Jewish subjects that disgrace Israel’s original conceptions and vision; but to cite these as the sole source of turmoil in the region is naïve.
One thing both De Winter and Sharansky spurn is multiculturalism, which is a favourite whipping-boy of conservative pundits in the U.S. I always end up unsure what to say in response to the “obvious fact” that multiculturalism doesn’t work, because I live in a city where, quite obviously, it pretty much seems to. Torontonians are keenly aware that it’s fragile: our sometimes painfully earnest political correctness is a way of ensuring that it doesn’t fracture to the point it could be broken.
Canada is a special case, in that unlike Britain, or Germany, or even perhaps the U.S., it is a recently formed society. I would further argue it isn’t formed. My last piece was about Toronto being a place where we are all perpetually seeking or arriving at, and while it remains like this, it can continue to absorb Somalis and Filipinos, Mauritians and Nigerians, Chileans and South Asians. Perhaps it will continue to be so long enough that it will be perpetually capable of taking in any group of people who want to re-establish themselves. I don’t know, but it appears to have a collective will to do that.
Living in such a city colours my own thinking. I don’t live on a kibbutz three miles from the West Bank, in range of Katyusha rockets. I’ve never had to dive for cover, or fear a suicide bomber. But to say I therefore don’t know what I’m talking about is to miss the point. This city and its outskirts has tens, and probably hundreds, of thousands of Muslims, and many tens of thousands of Jews. Someone occasionally daubs swastikas on a synagogue or mosque, but it’s almost invariably young men of European Christian extraction who do it. We keep hearing the refrain that “One day, it’ll happen here,” meaning the bombs will go off, and I don’t necessarily doubt it. What I do question, and strongly, is whether such a bombing would reflect a mass sentiment, or the efforts of frustrated outsiders trying to create one.
I could argue this point for dozens of paragraphs, but it always seems to me that there’s another dimension to my thinking. The Process had an aphorism that “blame is the detonator all evil.” Blame in this context did not mean the recognition that someone else had performed a destructive action, so much as the action of “making wrong” – of focusing on condemnation and of separating oneself from the perceived badness of another person. Blame was not the “wrongness,” but the making of a subjective attitude of seeing such wrongness. This saying was a corollary of another precept: “Faith is the innate knowledge of the fundamental rightness of all things, whether positive or negative,” which implied an overarching oneness (“rightness”) in which individual events of all kinds had an appropriate place. How did this square with the Holocaust, or the gassing of Kurdish villagers, or a Srebrenica massacre? From a human viewpoint, it couldn’t. I would say it came close to a Muslim acceptance of the will of a supreme being whose purposes are beyond human ken. Christians and Jews have the same concept, but Islam seems more able to maintain that perspective. Its shadow side is the militant “martyr” (a poor use of the English word, since martyrs have lost the power of choice over their fate) but it has a wider and less violently intended usage in the general Islamic worldview.
I found a similar perception when I came to read about Thelemic concepts, and got past the initial self-indulgently superficial forms of Thelemic ideas. “Every number is infinite; there is no difference,” says the goddess Nuit in the opening of the Book of the Law, setting the scene for an upending of conventional ideas of what’s good and bad, right and wrong. The whole book, you might say, is about taking the aspiring reader beyond such limiting and destructive views.
This doesn’t play well with a De Winter or a Sharansky, who both argue for immediate safety over mystical notions of ultimate unity. In a face-to-face argument, I could lose to either man, except on one issue: given that Israel has attained immediate safety dozens of time since 1948, does it have a real answer to the question of its plight? Because however cowed or despairing its enemies might become, such a situation of immediate safety can reverse itself very rapidly.
I’m avoiding my own point here: I’m trying to justify my position to a hypothetical reader, omitting the Processean precept that while blame is making wrong, justification is making right. I also think I might lose that argument with the two men, not because I don’t have a case, but because, walking a would-be Rosicrucian path with a Thelemic road-map, I don’t unreservedly value reason as a tool. “Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite & unknown; & all their words are skew-wise,” says the second chapter of the Book of the Law, and I find this inarguable (pun intended, albeit probably in a Freudian sense).
I don’t have a perfectly articulated philosophy, and I possibly never shall have. You might even say I wrecked my chances of developing one when I decided, decades ago, that any form of predetermined morality was provisional at best, and often actively destructive to a true vision of reality. Pursuing a theurgic path for a dozen years or more has left me further unable to believe in any set conceptions of right and wrong, while not bringing me to the fulfilment of an overarching gnostic or mystical realisation. All I know, in my moments of stillness, is that what I am doing, and how I view existence, is right from a standpoint where the ultimate self-responsibility for every star – every man or woman – is visible. Not to see things this way is not “wrong,” but it is limiting.
It is intrinsic to Thelemic understanding that the entire world will, in the course of time, come to an acceptance of such a perspective. There is no empirical proof this will come about until it has come about, so it falls under the category of articles of faith. One day, I simply found a critical mass within myself accepted this was possible, and worthwhile, and that others are working for this to happen. We all know that De Winter and Sharansky and the myriad others who think and fear like them are “right” in the short term. And increasing numbers of us see they offer nothing for the long haul.
Toronto, while hardly a “Thelemic city,” perhaps offers a more viable template for the decades to come.