The history of philosophy is not a history of ideas: it is a history of problems*

Ideas are problems. 

The idea that a liberal democracy can call itself that, even as it re-commences modern manoeuvre warfare on a human population corralled into a narrow terrain beside the Mediterranean Sea is a problem of politics.

UNICEF reports that 14,500 children have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, more than the number of children killed in 4 years of wars worldwide. 25,000 children have been injured. Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. 17,000 children have been separated from their parents or find themselves unaccompanied. Over a million children have been displaced. 

These are terrible figures. The war has destroyed almost all essential infrastructure. Sunday newspapers report the finding of a mass grave, where Israeli forces buried 15 paramedic and rescue works near Rafah. 

These figures arise from a programme of terror.

The idea of a liberal democracy responding to terrorist actions in that manner is a problem for humanity. Will the perpetrators survive such an idea? Will humans survive such an idea?

The idea that leading world liberal democracies advance their economies by manufacturing and exporting weapons of war used in the programme of terror on Gaza is a problem.

These are problems of politics and justice. And philosophy. 

The philosophical pursuit of wisdom involves facing into general and fundamental problems.

The idea that mercantilism, as driven by the current US administration, led by President Trump, can provide an approach to world affairs in the 21st century, when it failed in the 18^th century, is a problem of economics. And philosophy.

What philosophy is behind the switch from globalisation with limited tariffs and light regulation to full-on tariff-setting and tightening of export-import regulations? High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods, are a feature of mercantilist philosophy. And a problem.

It is a re-working of Trussonomics: the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy makes economies grow in the long term, regardless of pressure from the casino capitalists in the international stock markets. And that pressure is mounting.

The idea that resources such as land, sea, minerals; great tracts of fertile terrain; large numbers of human beings, can be sacrificed for conversion into profit in the practice of mercantilism is a problem foreconomics. And for philosophy.

The idea that a globally successful tv drama on Netflix called Adolescence could be used to push back against the behaviour the drama presents has taken hold in many countries. This idea is a problem of child-rearing and of the philosophy of education.

Teachers have just called off strike action where I live, in an effort to address problems with their work-load. Appeals to broadcast Adolescence in schools, in an effort to educate young people away from asocial and violent behaviour, are publicly made. The appeals pay no heed to the workload problems well-documented by teachers. 

Netflix’s interest’s are commercial. The idea that one of their programmes would alter behaviour away from violence is mistaken. Individual artists working on programmes for the platform may have other interests, such as education and social change. Netflix gains by having such ideas associated with their commercial interests. It uses AI-reinforced algorithms to tailor the advertising of content for each of its over 300 million paying viewers worldwide. 

Netflix is a grand scale influencer. The idea behind an influencer is to gain subscribers, who will use products uncritically. This is a problem of social harmony. And philosophy.

Influencers used to be called publicists or advertisers. In this and many other cases, they use fear as a means of controlling behaviour: fear that if I don’t view the platform I will miss out on something; fear that I will not be cool; fear that I will not learn something vital to my life and to the lives of my children.

Clockwork Orange (Heinemann, 1962) by Anthony Burgess and Cathy Come Home by Ken Loach (BBC, 1966) are historical instances of art proclaiming against the social problems of youth violence and homelessness. That both youth violence and homelessness persist today points to a problem of art. And of philosophy.

My theatre sequence Plays in a Peace Process (Guildhall Press, 2008) dramatised problems in the Northern Ireland Peace Process. The fact that these problems, though diminished, still persist is a problem of the philosophy of applied dramatic art.

Ideas are the problems. Solutions are ideas too. 

More philosophy?

* The Years Of Theory: Post-war French Thought to the Present Day

Frederic Jameson, Verso, London, 2024

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TWO TRIBES GO TO WAR …

… and then they ceasefire … 

When two tribes go to war

A point is all that you can score

(Score them all, score them all)

When two tribes go to war

A point is all that you can score

(Working for the black gas)

Frankie goes to Hollywood got it partly right in their 1984 ‘straight to No 1 in the UK Top Ten’ anti-war hit, When Two Tribes Go To War. Forty years on, ‘War’ is still about the ‘black gas’ – oil, gas and lucre. 

The term ‘Tribes’ is a misnomer. The number ‘Two’ is simplistic. ‘Score no More’, however, hits the bulls-eye. 

A perverse calculus operates at the moment of ceasefire. It is based on Judith Butler’s insights into the unequal precariousness and grievability of lives. All loss of life is tragic. Some are considered more tragic than others. Over 40 000 Palestinian lives lost. Almost 1 800 Israeli lives lost. The conflict is assymetric, even in death tolls.

From an early stage, following the atrocious Hamas attack on October 7^th 2023, in which 1 139 people, mostly Israelis, were murdered and over 200 people were kidnapped and held captive, commentators within and without of Israel have said that the Israeli regime is using that atrocity to sustain itself, extend its reign and change regional geo-politics in its favour. 

At least 14 of the dead on that day were killed by members of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The regime is not keeping score. Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the regime, said: “if we don’t fight, we die”, from the safety of his office in a bunker in Tel Aviv.

Since that date the IDF, not a ‘tribe’, but one of the world’s most lethally-armed military forces, right up to and including nuclear weapons, initially developed in the mid-1960s, with the support of French regimes and, more recently, full-frontal support from US and UK regimes, has visited war from land, sea and air, with weapons of mass destruction, blockades and sanctioning of food, water and medicines and the displacement of peoples, kettling them into smaller and smaller enclaves, in Gaza and, latterly, in Lebanon.

The Israeli developers of the nuclear programme insist it is necessary to forestall another Holocaust, the genocide of European Jewish communities, perpetrated by the Nazi Regime in Germany in the 1940s.

Opposition to the IDF comes from Hamas and Hezbollah, heavily armed groups, with Islamic ideologies, supported by the regime in Iran. The IDF is a state army, with Jewish ideologies, backed by regimes infused with Christian ideologies such as USA, UK and France. Hamas and Hezbollah are registered as ‘terrorists’ by a number of countries, but not by the UN. They have contested political support in Gaza and in Lebanon, just as the Netanyahu regime’s political support is contested in Israel. 

Though they are not equivalent, all three military groups - IDF, Hamas and Hezbollah – engage in mass and indiscriminate killing, as well as tactics aimed at raising terror in populations. Consider the exploding mobile phones and walkie-talkies created by the IDF and used in Lebanon.

Part of the prologue to Frankie’s thumping rock and dance anthem is a patrician male voice-over saying:If you hear the airplane coming, you and your family must take cover.

This note foreshadows edicts from the Israeli regime that people in Gaza should move in advance of targeted IDF assaults. Such edicts, often delivered by leaflet drops, were extended to the blue-helmeted soldiers in UN peace-keeping outposts on the Israel-Lebanon border.

The Israeli state is: 

at war with Hezbollah, which has sent a barrage of rockets into Israel almost daily since October 7th 2023;

at war with Hamas, which continues to hold hostages captive; 

at war with Iran and its so-called military proxies from Yemen, Syria and Iraq.  

The people of Israel are gripped by an existential fear.

A colonial irony underpins that fear. 

For over 100 years, the expulsion of an indigenous people, Palestinians, at the behest of Turkish, British, Zionists and American imperialists, sets the political agenda. The release of hostages, a central demand of the Israeli war effort, complicates that politcal agenda.

Rashid Khalidi is a professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York. His family has been involved in negotiations with colonisers in Palestine throughout the 20^th century. His seminal book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, provides a vivid account of the period. He took part in the negotiations for the Oslo 1 Accord in 1993, aimed at setting up a framework for a settlement of the future of Palestine and Israel.

No such settlement has been achieved.

Khalidi writes, in April 2024

… a peace based on acknowledging painful historical realities and dismantling structures of oppression, and grounded in justice, equal rights and mutual recognition, does not appear to be on the horizon. However, I still retain the hope that my grandchildren, whose number since this book was first published has grown to four, will see such a lasting peace, marking the end of this war.

I echo his hope, for my own four grandchildren, for Rashid’s family and for the families of my friends in Israel and Palestine.

When Two Tribes Go To War, pop song, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ZTT Records, 1984

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHFqSzuqLSc

The Hundred Years War on Palestine, book, Rashid Khalidi, Profile Books, 2024

Precariousness and Grievability, blog, Judith Butler, Verso Books, 2015

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/2339-judith-butler-precariousness-and-grievability?_pos=3&_psq=Butler&_ss=e&_v=1.0

The Human Toll of Israel’s war on Gaza, news report, Al-Jazeera, January 2025

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/15/the-human-toll-of-israels-war-on-gaza-by-the-numbers

Hostage deal divides Israel as first captives return home, opinion, Susan Hattis Rolef, Jerusalem Post, January 2025

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-838241

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