Seeing an unfamiliar face, we sometimes tend to liken it to someone familiar and think to ourselves: “like father, like son” or “he clearly got that from his uncle”... The same happens with politicians we like or dislike: if someone admires an emerging politician, they could, depending on the person’s political and ideological orientations, say that his rise reminds them of Charles de Gaulle, or that he is a John F. Kennedy in the making, or another Gamal Abdel Nasser. Despised rising politicians are similarly likened to other, more famous and long-established disliked figures to remove the obscurity of the unfamiliar and render the new figure familiar, and therefore, easy to understand and conceptualize.
The Romanian–American historian and philosopher Mircea Eliade (who could perhaps have been the twentieth century’s most important historian of religion and ritual) taught us that novel phenomena that cannot be linked to a chain of well-known precedents seem difficult to understand, even meaningless. This is especially true for those who have a cyclical view of history and believe that there is never anything “new under the sun;” the present is merely an extension of the past, and nothing changes but forms.
These remarks are made in reference to the labels of the Lebanese government, which has been presented as a “Vichy government” or a “government of shame”- that is, to efforts to associate it with precedents of national betrayal or acts “that bring shame.” Since these labels are coming from the spokespersons of Hezbollah, it is worth taking a moment to consider both the party behind the label and the party being labeled, as well as their respective experiences and views of the world, of knowledge, and thus of responsibility.
The party being labeled, the government, is a new phenomenon- entirely new, at least in the Lebanese experience. Its ministers combine integrity, seriousness, and expertise, and they have devoted themselves to their ministries despite the extremely dire conditions, working tirelessly, amid suffocating political constraints, with the meager material resources they have. In fact, for the first time, a Lebanese writer or journalist need not be embarrassed to say a kind word about their government.
More importantly, many of these ministers (including the prime minister himself) have a long history of supporting the rights of the Palestinian people throughout their political and academic careers, and of confronting the Israeli narrative with its various forms and shifts. Without necessarily abandoning their longstanding fundamental political stances, however, they have accumulated and are accumulating the experience that comes with direct contact with reality and the balance of power, compelling them to accept notions like direct negotiations with Israel. Mind you- broad segments of the Lebanese population consider the government excessively lenient and insufficiently committed to pursuing this desired path.
In fact, there is no precedent for this state of affairs in Lebanese political life, and there is therefore no precedent of policy built around reality and the balance of power. This comes at a time when reality itself is receding, the balance of power is profoundly skewed as the specter of occupation rises amid the erosion of Lebanon’s capabilities, and the challenge posed by commitments to preconceived notions. Because this is the case, the government’s opponents have concluded that they must render this situation into one that is familiar and conceived of with the intellectual tools shaped by the past and its flimsy binaries of resistance versus surrender, honor versus humiliation...
Here, decisiveness prevails, even when it is not grounded in concrete experience nor responsibility for the fate of millions. It is an unequivocal determination made a priori and, therefore, has no need for experience in the first place. As for reflection, hesitation, and efforts to align ideas and reality, they are things the critics’ intellectual apparatus is incapable of comprehending as anything but betrayal.
It thereby becomes apparent that certainty offers a form of psychological security that links those who are certain to a familiar past in which rigid thinking and a closed system of answers prevails. Confronting ambiguity or complexity creates a sense of instability, and, because this confrontation raises questions that have no ready-made answers stored in the vaults of the past, it presents an existential threat. Moreover, these answers are not the product of an internal struggle, but an integral part of one’s very being and identity; accordingly, when the questions at hand are presented as difficult to answer, the identity of those who believe in ready-made answers comes under threat. And when it is said that several (perhaps even contradictory) answers could be given, those who already have the answers experience a kind of epistemic breakdown as they are overwhelmed by fears of losing control over the simple world around them.
Those who claim to have solutions seem stronger and more esteemed than those who say they are striving to formulate one, just as the person who says “I know” appears stronger and more esteemed than the one who says “I am not sure.” And what applies to individuals also applies to ideological systems, whose claim becomes knowledge that becomes state ideology taught to students in schools and relayed by state media, rendering it an obstacle to renewal and creativity.
The case at hand, however, is too convoluted to be reduced to a coherent, linear intellectual position. Those who call this government a “Vichy government” continue to be represented by two ministers in this very government. The less ammunition they have and the more at odds with reality they become, the further they take their insults. Moreover, as countless precedents have shown, Iran’s needs are the driving force behind its action, not the situation in Lebanon. From this position, they pounce on a government that could be criticized at length for all kinds of reasons, but not with this defamation whose proponents sometimes call “critique.”
