Re-Reading Hege (if not Marx) on (on former Greek) Dialetics

Submitted by Robert (United States), Sep 29, 2022 at 20:19

Dear Dr. Daniel Pipes,

We all know that you're not a Marxist, But how about some Hegel: (1) Thesis, (2) Antithesis, (3) Synthesis?

Hint: the famous French existentialist (Sartre) recognized that the Synthesis of Being and Nothingness is Becoming.

1. All refugees deserve refuge.

2. Some Refugees do not. (i.e., Not all refugees do).

3. I leave to you to express the Synthesis. (Hints: Europe or European Union, Culture Zones).

I know you are aware of the slow drift to the right of European parties. This are the parties that have Fascist (if not Nazi) roots. And these are the parties that are most supportive of Israel. They now recognize the threat to their egalitarian liberal progressive system. They now begin to acknowledge the Islamist in Islam which they as well as Jews in Israel face.

You are focus here on the European Cohort which expounds the Thesis. But you spend no time presenting the Antithesis: what reasons are given on the Right, not Left, for the disparity.

Elsewhere, you cited Kuhn (Structure of Scientific Revolution) as well as Kant in the disparity between Israel and the Europeans (effectively the Western countries of the EU). And you picked up the notion of the Paradigm Shift ("Immanuel Kant vs. Israel" as I recall). The Israeli author you cited who brought Kant into his discourse did discuss different cohorts (generations). However, unlike us Americans who followed in the footsteps of the British with Bertrand Russell giving us Logical Analysis and/or Analytic Philosophy and we honored Willard Van Orman Quine, the Europeans did not have an aversion to Karl Marx.

It's Lenin and Stalin and McCarthy who gave Hegel and Marx bad names. I surmise that that's why you go back to Kant and Kuhn who was a read (not "red") intellectual when you were a college student at Harvard and I was one at the City College of New York - the (Jewish) "Proletariat Harvard."

I do not subscribe to the application of Marx's 19th Century "ideology." However, I recognize that it was two Jews - Marx and Freud - who uncovered the Irrational at work in the human sphere. Freud was the first Psychologist who produced Psychoanalysis, that attempt to analyze how human individuals think when the are not merely contemplating crossing a street to get to the other side. Marx, on the other hand, recognized that people fall into Classes (this was before Set Theory, haha), and their ideological views (if you will) are not objective, but reflect their interests. We have some of idea in our legal notion of conflict of interests. We also have it in political parties which often reflect different interests.

Maybe we should re-consider sending out Europeans and Jews to fix the "failed states" from which the refugees are fleeing? But that, at best, would be Colonialism. Or is there a "Synthesis" to make for something historically new here? Or do we need a war? But I got a suggestion. Why not give IT jobs over the Internet? So Economic Refugees could stay at home in their own "culture zone" country? let's hire Gazans in Europe while working in Gaza? Would that be a(n acceptable) Paradigm Shift?

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