What I cannot understand is endorsing, validating, or standing in solidarity with war crimes. That so many student organizations did so is stunning. It commits them to positions anathema not only to the conservatives they often tangle with but to left-leaning liberals and progressives, many of whom now perceive a frightening difference in core values that too many had scarcely pondered before.
Simplistic moralistic thinking finds a way to justify the unjustifiable. It justified the Spanish Inquisition. It justified the French Terror. It justified the Cultural Revolution in China. The people who commit the worst atrocities are those who think they do it in defense of or inspired by some moral principle, and they believe that their actions serve justice and truth and that history will prove them right. The more moralistic the justification, the more brittle the thinking, and the more brittle the thinking, the greater the need to double down and to embrace an emotional fanaticism that blocks out all criticism.
I have used my phrase 'ontological dizziness' most frequently to describe the kind of vertigo into which people with traditional values have been thrust in response to the dissolution of the customary cultures into which they were born. They blame Liberals for this, but the post WWII consumerist society and its media are the real cause. These Americans shaped by Middle American customary culture embraced this shift into consumerism because they accepted that it was all a part of what made America great even as it has slowly dissolved the social infrastructure that supported their customs and traditions.
People in such a vertiginous state will grab onto whatever is near at hand to steady them, so they grab onto a guy like Donald Trump, a classic American huckster in the P.T. Barnum mold, and a guy whose gaudy faux success is a parody of the old American Dream. Perhaps there is a kind of comfort in being conned by Trump. What could be more American?
But we see how the Cultural Left is affected by ontological dizziness in more subtle ways. The Cultural Left seems, relatively speaking, to be more sane because they are better adapted to and so benefit more from the values world shaped by Neoliberalism and its consumerist understanding of freedom. It's harder for the Left to truly grasp the underlying metaphysical nihilism that shapes this values world because their lives are so comfortable in it."I'm not a nihilist," they say to themselves. "I'm a good person who plays by the meritocratic rules, and I have all the socially approved, politically correct attitudes. What's nihilistic about that?"
Only the most self-aware intellectuals on the Cultural Left embrace their nihilistic presuppositions as a basis upon which to develop a politics and public morality. In the postmodern milieu that is still hegemonic for such thinking, there is no possibility for a transcendentally based morality; some other basis must be found, and the result over the last couple of decades has been the emergence of a new juxtaposition of desire (freedom to consume) with the unjust plight of the marginalized (those whose desires are culturally-politically thwarted). This leads to ham-fisted political moral judgments where the only salient moral criterion is where you sit in the hierarchy of marginalization.
The response to Hamas's butchery in Israel by campus groups influenced by this desire/mariginalization moral logic will, I hope, lead to its eventual intellectual and moral de-legitimization. For anyone with a sliver of basic, genuine moral sense, the fundamental vacuousness of this kind of Leftist moralizing has been exposed because until now it has seemed to many people of good will to be moral-ish. What is their moral-ish logic? They will say that, yes, Jews have been historically marginalized, but the Palestinians are being marginalized by the Jews, so Palestinian marginalization counts for more; therefore any horrific thing Palestinians do to fight against their Jewish oppressors is justified. Does the moral reasoning here get more complicated than that?
Now it remains to be seen if Israel's response will sink to the same level of nihilistic moral reasoning: They started it, so we'll finish it. Will they? 6000 bombs in a few days? Cutting off power and water? Is this strategic or is it just vengeful lashing out?