The spirits that I summoned, I now cannot rid myself of again. Johann Wolfgang von Goeth in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, as quoted by Yuval Noel Harari in Nexus.

The dog barking at you from behind his master’s fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built; essentially, they both see the area as their territory and are protecting it, even if the dog doesn’t fully understand the concept of ownership like the human does. Robert Ardrey in The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (1966)

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image. Joan Didion in The White Album (1979)

Michele and I watched the VP debate last Wednesday. I know the debate was on Tuesday, but we had long-standing plans to see Yuval Noel Harari. I’m a big fan of Harari, though, to be accurate, I should really say that I am a big fan of Sapiens, Harari’s first book (I did not get through his second book).

Harari has a new book out, as do many of the other speakers in the same series of talks, and I think that is largely the reason for his being on the speaker tour. The book is Nexus, subtitled A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, and, from his talk, the book sounds interesting, if not very optimistic. One thing that Harari said that was both interesting and frightening is that Israel is using AI to pick targets in their wholesale killing of the indigenous Palestinians (I keep reading that it is called the Israeli-Palestinian War, but with the overwhelming superiority of the Israeli weapons, and an estimated death toll of about 1,706 Israelis to 41,431 Palestinians this fight can not be called a war). Harari pointed out that humans still pull the trigger, but only after AI tells them where to shoot. He did not say it like it was a good thing.

Watching the debate the next day, after reading the reviews, so to speak, was more like doing homework than “Oh boy! Let’s watch the debate”. Vance was very polished and has the ability to make some of his and Trump’s crazy ideas seem almost normal. It seems obvious to me that Vance has done a lot of debating. I kept thinking, Hum, I guess the elite schools are better; Yale, Vance’s alma mater, is better, at least in preparing people for debates, than Chadron State College, Walz’s alma mater.

The first question was something like, “Governor Walz, if it was up to you, would you support or discourage an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran?” Walz didn’t answer the question, saying instead that Hamas attacked first and that Israel has the right to defend itself, and Vice President Harris will provide steady leadership. I understand the Harris/Walz Campaign’s problem here; the Jewish population is a big demographic and a bigger donor pool. On the other side, Michigan and Minnesota, which are both swing states and could go either way, have a lot of Muslim voters, which the party does not want to lose.

Next, one of the moderators asked Vance the same question. The Republicans have a different problem; they lost most of the Muslim vote after President George W. Bush senselessly attacked Iraq (before Bush’s attack, a plurality of Muslims, who are pretty socially conservative, voted Republican). Vance, who is new to the national scene but already disliked for some of his past comments like, “Cat ladies are unhappy and trying to make everybody else miserable.”, said, “I want to answer your question, but, first, let me tell you about myself.” He came across as a nice, reasonable guy. At the very end, he said something to the effect that Israel can do whatever they want. I started to worry that this would be a bad day for the Democrats. Still, as the debate went on, Vance seemed to misrepresent various Republican and Democratic positions and, in the end, refused even to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election, leaving me feeling better. 

In the background, the threat of war in the Middle East is ramping up, and Israel is increasingly seen as the bad guy, which, in my opinion, it is. That’s not good. Not good for Israel or for Jewish people around the world who are mistakenly tarred with the same brush as Israelis. I say mistakenly because Jewish people who were born and live outside Israel and Israelis are not interchangeable, and many Jewish people, especially younger Jewish people who consider Israel the dominant power in the region, think the Israeli government is in the wrong.

I’ve been interested in human evolution for a long time, probably since 1966, when I first read The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations by Robert Ardrey. Robert Ardrey was not a scientist; he was a playwright and a screenwriter who was also interested in human evolution and became a science writer. He was a very controversial science writer in 1966, but most of what was then controversial, like humans evolved in Africa and not Asia, is now considered obvious. Ardrey also wrote that we evolved from animals and were still, in large part, run by our animal roots when the prevailing wisdom was that animals acted out of instinct, and we were different because we acted through our power of reasoning (which, of course, animals didn’t have).

Ardrey postulated that one of the instincts that we are controlled by is our animal instinct to acquire land and defend territory. He further postulated that the Nazis were able to round up and slaughter the Jews because they did not have any territory to defend, and if they did own territory, they would have fought back.

Now, both Israelis and Palestinians think that the land between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean is theirs, exclusively theirs, and both are willing to fight to the death to keep it. I think that it is a problem without a solution. One of my many doctors is an Israeli who moved here from Israel because she did not want to raise her children in a country that treated the Palestinians so cruelly. Off and on, when I have an appointment with her, we end up talking about Israel and Palestine, although neither one of us has a solution.

On one of those visits, I suggested that the only solution was for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people to learn to live together in a single state. She snapped back, “No way, we would never let that happen.” It was the most animated I’ve ever seen her. Much more animated than either Vance or Walz in the aforementioned Vice Presidential Debate.

That debate was, for the most part, a civil, lowkey affair. I don’t mean that as a compliment. It would be a compliment if Senator Vance or Governor Walz actually debated their different takes on the issues, but they didn’t. Both debaters were excellent at not answering the questions, although Walz did it better. I think Vance hurt himself when he started, several times, with, “I don’t want to talk about the past, I want to talk about  the future.” Maybe, in the end, that is the good thing about AI. I read that different AI programs make up answers – called hallucinating in the trade – but they haven’t yet learned to equivocate.