Television is a strange and seductive medium. If you want to know what it's like to ski the Austrian Alps you can tune into a travel program and get a wealth of information. Likewise driving a fifty ton truck, or planting a perfect vegetable patch. Cookery programs are a personal favorite, although I rarely cook anything more adventurous than soup. It's just nice to watch the marvelous transformation of ingredients from uncooked foodstuffs to finished dish. What is missing, of course, is the experiential element of cooking, that of handling the produce, of smelling and tasting the dish. There is a strong, but not unchallenged, argument that says no matter how much _information_ we have about a thing; we do not know everything until we have experienced it firsthand. I can, for example, know everything there is to know about the ingredients and cooking methodology of a good curry, but until I've actually *tasted* it, I'm missing something. Actually, if it's a *good* curry, I'm missing a lot.
I recall an essay of Thomas Nagel's I read some time ago, called "What it is to be a bat" or something along those lines. If my memory serves me, and Lord knows, I hope it doesn't serve anyone else, then the essential thrust is this; that I can imagine what it is like to be a bat, I can imagine what it is like to fly, to echo-locate, to eat moths, but until I actually *am* a bat, the best I can do is to imagine what it is like for *me* to be a bat. I can never understand 'batishness' until I have *been* a bat. Even if I flew and took up eating moths for lunch, I still wouldn't be *any* closer to knowing what it's like to be a bat. I'm still just acting in a bat-like way. It's just me doing what bats do.
There is, in the end, a sense of what it is like to be something that is unavailable to anything other than that thing. It all sounds obvious, but the implications for us poor social animals are rather serious.
About a month ago, Valentines day as a matter of fact, I arrived at work on time, around 7am. At roughly the same time, halfway around the world, Ala Khalil Abu-Ulbeh accelerated his bus, the same bus he had driven for ten years, to about 50mph. He then drove up onto the sidewalk and through a crowd of off-duty Israeli soldiers and civilians, killing eight instantly and injuring twenty. He was described as a 'family man' and a solid worker with no known connection to a terrorist organization.
It was not an isolated incident, nor has it passed without repercussions for the Palestinian community.
It's very easy to watch events like that unfold on TV and to hold an opinion on "what should be done." In fact, the people who present such news would like you to feel not only that it's possible to hold a valid opinion, but also that it's your moral obligation. They are in the business, after all, of selling you the feeling that staying informed is important, vital even.
Obviously, it's permissible, _required_, some might say, to hold a moral opinion on the act itself. Driving a bus through a line of teenagers is unacceptable whatever your personal reasons. So is putting a guided missile through the rear doors of an ambulance. What is not so easy is to address the motivations that lead someone to behave that way.
Clearly there is a great difference between my ability to imagine myself as a bat and my ability to imagine what it is like to live on the Gaza strip. Nevertheless, _imagining_ is exactly what I am doing in both cases. I'm not a Palestinian. I'm not an Israeli. They are not I. I can watch hours of demonstrations and mortar attacks and blood smeared sheets on CNN, but in the end I will be no closer to knowing what is motivating the people involved or forming a useful opinion of how to change them.
What saddens me is the number of people who are apparently prepared to stake their political credibility on pretending they can. Quick fixes get votes. They look good on TV. They make the people back home happy and in the end, they're the one's who vote. It seems one administration after another wants to try to 'fix' Palestine.
You know, the British did a great job already and they didn't even have CNN to make sure they looked good in the press conference. Just ask Mr. Abu-Ulbeh.