There is nothing new under the sun

When the sun is too strong - sometimes the bottom gets burned. The story of a column in Haaretz Magazine

Sun, bring the sun - if my skies are cloudy, I close my eyes - but the sun is inside (Source)

My partner and I always joke about how in "Haaretz" sections written by openly gay writers will always contain a supposedly refined allusion to this fact ("Under the Sun" [Translator's note: "Tachat HaShemesh" in Hebrew, where "tachat" can mean both "under" and "bottom"], or "Rear Window"). "Under the Sun" is therefore our private window into the (endangered?) species of the brilliant white gay intellectual. It must be said immediately: this is the best regular column in Haaretz Magazine, and in particularly weak supplements, it is sometimes the only thing worth reading. It almost always brings a unique perspective, sometimes even innovative, but there's a catch: the perspective is always - and miraculously without exception - mistaken.

"Under the Sun" has a fascinating and unique quality, some idiosyncratic distortion of thought, which consistently causes it to understand and draw absurd conclusions about the phenomenon (almost always interesting and important! to its credit) it deals with. This wonderful performance is put on anew every week, and often reminds me of our seminary head, who said about another well-known rabbi that he has a wonderful quality that allows one to know the correct reasoning in any issue - and this quality is to always, always arrive at the opposite of the truth. To get to the bottom of a difficult issue, all one needs to do is read what the rabbi with the inverted mind says - and understand the complete opposite.

"Under the Sun" is like a distorted prism, creating an interesting image out of everything, precisely because of the consistently skewed thinking through which its subjects pass. My beloved argues that this is some inherent tendency (which gains the prestige of "courage" or "innovation" in certain circles) of radical-critical thinking to reach, through a process of escalation, absurd ad absurdum results. I, on the other hand, believe it's a more banal mutation, seemingly, but in practice much more crucial in our contemporary intellectual sphere: a complete lack of quantitative thinking, prevalent in the humanities, and in contrast, a huge surplus of qualitative thinking. "Under the Sun" has no quantitative understanding whatsoever of the phenomena it deals with, and therefore marginal vectors become mountains of fate, while decisive factors are ignored: the shadow of mountains appears to it as mountains, and mountains become shadows, and the result in projecting to the future is nonsensical, so that every reading of the column begins with "really interesting" and ends with "oh dear".

But all this would not have earned "Under the Sun" even a bark from the Bitch, were it not for the phenomenon that has recently been revealed in the column, which is often the end of chaotic dynamic systems (for in "Under the Sun" there is no difference between a butterfly's wing flap and a hurricane): the convergence to a fixed point. This is the phenomenon of thematic fixation that has brought down no less diverse writers in the past (I think, for example, of Ayelet Shani, who was once an excellent interviewer - empathetic but penetrating and striving for the point, investing in research, surprising in her choices, personally involved but without bullshit - and at some point completely lost it with a fixation on tree huggers and refugee bodies, and even when she freed herself from it, she didn't return to her former self, and recently even attacks interviewees at low points, usually uninteresting ones).

"Under the Sun" has an issue (very understandable psychologically) with children. And without (or rather with) connection to that, "Under the Sun" has some desire to believe that the world is approaching its end, and what's easier than clinging to a fixation about climate blah blah and the environment ho-hum. There is zero understanding regarding the severity of the phenomenon on a scientific level, as always (requires serious treatment, not a global catastrophe, except in extreme scenarios that are currently far from scientific consensus). In the past, the skewed thinking started each week from a new starting point from the margins of our world, and therefore was an interesting take-off regarding reality, while here it seems that the skewed thinking is beginning to replace reality and constitute a starting point. And this is already a dangerous place for a column - and boring for the reader. The absurdity begins to collapse into itself, long before the collapse of the Earth. We enjoyed it more when each week they brought us a new trend from German academia, a flash from esoteric discourse circles, or from the goings-on in humanities faculties. It's better to leave the natural science faculties to those who understand them.

It seems that "Under the Sun" would prefer to end with a final column in the last supplement of "Haaretz" where all the prophecies of doom have come true, and nothing remains "under the sun". But meanwhile, the vanities we amused ourselves with, which in the original Ecclesiastes are the eternal occurrences "under the sun", are evaporating in the all-consuming heat of global warming, and we arrive at a situation where the column repeats itself, there is nothing new, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. And perhaps, as my beloved claims, the critical-radical thinking in our world is reaching its mystical stage: a phenomenon known in messianic cults is created, where discourse focuses for years and decades on the imminent end, thus introducing an element of exciting tension to the dull reality of life, but the end - stubborn as it is - does not come. Then, a strange need arises to explain precisely why the daily reality around us still looks quite normal, and refuses to comply with the apocalyptic dictates, and so the messianic discourse reaches its point of annihilation - its end is in the denial of reality itself. "So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun" - this is the cloak of the Angel of Death (Ecclesiastes Rabbah).