In an article just published by Fathom on the Pattern and the addiction of Western journalists to lethal journalism about Israel, even when it’s also Own-Goal journalism about the West, I had a section on my explanation for Deutsch’s Pattern. I place it here. At some point, in another article on the Pattern, I’ll come back to this analysis. I welcome comment.
Part 6: Shame-Honour Dynamics, the Stigmatised Witness, and the Pattern
I taught a course at ISGAP with Deutsch, and in the final seminar I tried to explain the Pattern as a manifestation of shame-honor dynamics, a cultural matrix in which public criticism poses an existential threat to a “man of honor”: them’s fighting words. The legitimacy of hurting Jews protects non-Jews from the possibility that the Jew might say something that damaged his honor.
To an atheist, at least in principle, the Christian doctrine of the stigmatised “witness,” in which the degraded and miserable Jews, the Christ-killers, testify to the Christian “truth” of the divinity of Christ (which Jews stubbornly and inexplicably refuse to recognize) would not carry any conviction. And yet, so bold an atheist as Voltaire, managed to replicate Augustine’s approach: they deserve the eternal hated of mankind. “Still, we ought not to burn them.” So when at long last in the 18th century, “grown-up” Europeans who rejected Christian teachings finally had a chance to speak with other, even older critics of Christianity, they mostly preferred to adopt the teaching of the religion they otherwise rejected, thereby preserving the Pattern.
The dhimmi code in Islam serves the same purpose as Christian “Witness Doctrine,” providing a legal institution enforcing the need for triumphalist Muslims to dominate the public sphere. Jews and Christians and other infidels were “protected” from Muslim violence as long as they accepted their debased status. They must not “blaspheme Islam” or insult Muslims, they must not try to throw off the Muslim yoke. If they did, they were worthy of death, all of them. The Armenians, the Slavs under Ottoman rule, all suffered not just genocide, but the sadistic cruelties Hamas once again demonstrated.
Today, most people know all about the acute Jewish ability to criticise from the many examples of self-criticism by Jews so committed to taking responsibility for what goes wrong in the world, that they expend enormous energy and ingenuity accusing their own people of misbehaving. This is currently a great fashion among “progressive” Jews: “We are racists, Israel is apartheid, we are committing genocide!”
But that acute ability to analyse and criticise also testifies to an exceptional Jewish talent for discerning flaws and follies everywhere. Freud was afraid his ferociously introspective “science” might remain entirely Jewish (and Jung proved him right). The Frankfurt School and Derrida developed some of the most penetrating techniques of critique, of deconstructing the idols of the mind. The Jew is the child in the crowd who, seeing that the emperor has no clothes, speaks up.
In this sense one might even argue that progressive Jews affirm the Pattern because, like a defeated male cowering before the triumphant alpha, they can thereby reassure the non-Jews that they would never turn their critical skills against them. Heaven forbid! And certainly, the gentile enactors of the Pattern welcome their highly-prized service: confirming the legitimacy of hurting Jews.
Imagine, for example, what someone gifted in biblical criticism (i.e., tearing the biblical text to historical shreds) might come up with when turning the critique on the New Testament, or (gasp!), the Qur’an. Imagine what someone who had studied the ease with which modern egalitarian revolutions, threatened by outside enemies, devolve into totalitarian terror that devours their own, might say about the 75 years during which the Zionist revolution has maintained democracy under an existential threat not to the revolution but the entire people. Imagine someone with the critical acumen of a Derrida deconstructing anti-western grand narratives or psychoanalysing “oikophobia.” Imagine a Jew having the nerve to claim that antisemitism is a toxic form of envy? Or talk about the small-mindedness of goyische kopf’s zero-sum thinking in public?
It is not by accident that the Arabs who hate the Jews most are those who hide their shame of failed supremacy with their Pattern-enacting victim narrative, even though the last thing a man of honor wants to show is weakness. Nor is it an accident that the Palestinian’s most fervent amen chorus in the West, the “progressives,” think they are the global moral hegemon, and then use social media to cancel critics. No wonder both “identities” revel in heaping abuse on the Jews and respond with indignation when criticized in return. These are the classic patterns of shame-honor cultures in which no one should dare criticize a man of honor.
The perdurance of the Pattern, I therefore argue, is testimony to a limbic fear of public humiliation. As long as Jews are free to speak, everyone is in danger of being rebuked (i.e. in their minds of being shamed). As long as the Pattern rules, however, as long as people comply with its prime directive to legitimate hurting Jews, even when they have nothing against the Jews, even when they like Jews, then Rousseau’s dream of Jewish free speech will not materialise.
The cancel-culture of the 21st century began in earnest at Durban in 2001, just before 9/11, with an NGO resolution to make Israel a pariah, beyond the pale. The Zionist voice must not be heard; to do so would be to “normalise” evil. Independent Jews were the first target of 21st century cancel culture. And when that assault on the legitimacy of the Zionist voice gains traction, as it has over the last two decades with the development of social media, it threatens the free speech of all. We witness the formation of another persecuting society, like the Pattern-governed one set in motion exactly a millennium ago, in the early 11th century. But note: it only begins with the Jews, and it takes generations if not centuries to dig ourselves out of that pit, if we do at all.