Do you have something else to wear? And other Christmas greetings.

I thought I'd throw out a quick blog for Christmas. Merry Christmas! And I thought I'd respond to one of your comments, Lauren, about Jews. That is, you mentioned that

Liberal Jews (probably excluding Israelis) acknowledge that the conquest of Israel/Palestine is an expression of symbolic capital: Jews are expressing their strength, mainly in military and wealth.

Interesting thought. I would think there are a number of Israelis who are liberal, and so probably recognize that 1) Israel/Palestine has been "conquered" and that 2) this is a show of strength. But it's an odd bind, isn't it, to be both socially liberal and to be supportive of a militant government? I guess that "socially-conscious" doesn't necessarily mean unconflicted. I wonder about the internal identity of "jewishness" (let's call this habitus, per Bourdieu, and say it is complex, multifaceted, sensitive to suffering) and the external reality (field) of a militarily-dominant nation run by Jews.

I remember reading A Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood when I was in high school, and at that time in my life, I was anything but a pacifist in my mind. I thought about killing men (especially military men) all the time. Weird, huh? It's like I wanted to beat them at their own game - it's not enough to hate them for what they do to the world, you want to give them a taste of their own medicine. I suppose I don't feel so different today about Dick Cheney; I think that he deserves what he has done to the world. And yet ... and yet ... is it true? Would it destroy my own identity as - whatever I am - to inflict physical violence on another, or to wish it done? What are Jews doing to themselves in this perpetual war? How is their habitus changing? I think that humans can easily hold contradictory beliefs - "I am a pacifist," "I wish harm on another" - and yet, at a certain point, I also think that these contradictions manifest in decisions, in action. With the Jews, I wonder if some of the peacefulness of the culture, the cultured-ness of the culture hasn't died a little with the actions against Palestinians.

One of my favorite (?) stories of the holocaust was about the existential philosopher Viktor Frankl, who surviving the holocaust emerged with a theory about love and the inherent goodness of man. I heard about Nazi soldiers throwing his writings out in the snow, and he went out, barefoot, running around and collecting them. Another time, he was marching through the ice when he had this thought: "Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love." How did he not want those Nazis to suffer as he had?

This is not to say that Viktor Frankl represents all Jews, but has Jewishness, in some way, survived through a culture of generosity and love in the face of hate, and has Jewishness diminished because of Israeli's institutionalized hatred and military might? Could the nation of Israel, in its pact with the military might of the Americans, be devouring some of the good of Jewishness? Or is it just another opportunity for individual agency to shine through the evil of particular structures? How can "good" individuals survive amidst the greater culture of military strength and material excess? This is, of course, not limited to Israel or to America or to any other country. Perhaps part of my problem is in conceptualizing countries as monolithic, when in fact they are structures upon structures, fields within fields, with agents running around and through them, combining them and separating them.

Another interesting thought, courtesy of my dad: when Bourdieu talks about trading symbolic capital for economic capital (as when a businessman buys a piece of art), he is actually talking about infusing the symbolic with economic capital. That is, the piece of art that is bought for $1 million is now worth $1 million. It is an investment, and because this symbol (this painting) now is worth this much, the businessman has commodified it (yay Marx!) and it is not just a symbol of his wealth and taste, it is an investment, a reservoir of economic capital.