Israel’s ambassador to Norway, the disagreeable Miryam Shomrat, continues her campaign to stir up outrage over a satirical cartoon in the Oslo tabloid Dagbladet. As I noted in a previous post, she has filed a complaint with the Norwegian Press Trade Committee, claiming that the cartoon — which portrays Ehud Olmert as a smiling Amon Göth from Schindler’s List — exceeds the limits of free speech. Now the ambassador makes her case in the New York Sun:

Is it a crime for a European paper to be critical of Israel? Did Der Stürmer come out in 1956? And lastly, who is now making tasteless comparisons?

Israel’s objection to freedom of expression in another country is nothing like the Muhammed protest because Israel is fighting a war? Since the New York Sun can hardly be suspected of anti-Israel bias, presumably the ambassador is accurately quoted. And it boggles the mind.

Israel used to be adept at propaganda as well as war. What went wrong?

Not depressed enough by the world situation? The existential pessimist and philosopher of tragedy, Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990), is here to help.

For more by this unjustly neglected thinker, see my Philosophy category.

It is said that the spirit is like a flickering fire in the night; thus we must be humble with regard to all that we cannot fathom. Whatever paroxysms of self-vaporising humbleness should not then be expected of sheep, or oysters? We “know that we know nothing”, yet the charting of our ignorance has in time become respectable. Rather, we are over-endowed when it comes to posing problems; even our flair at solving them has brought us to the brink of disaster.

It is said of the nihilist that ”to him, nothing is sacred”. He might reply that at least he does not sanctify the lie, the common compulsory living-lie; be it expressed as optimism about civilisation or as the falsettos and tightened throats of those who must hide the disconcerting facts to children, so these are not frightened witless even at the outset.

The sooner humanity dares to harmonise itself with its biological predicament, the better. And this means to willingly withdraw in contempt for its worldly terms, just as the heat-craving species went extinct when temperatures dropped. To us, it is the moral climate of the cosmos that is intolerable, and a two-child policy could make our discontinuance a pain-free one. Yet instead we are expanding and succeeding everywhere, as necessity has taught us to mutilate the formula in our hearts. Perhaps the most unreasonable effect of such invigorating vulgarisation is the doctrine that the individual “has a duty” to suffer nameless agony and a terrible death if this saves or benefits the rest of his group. Anyone who declines is subjected to doom and death, instead of the revulsion being directed at the world-order engendering the situation. To any independent observer, this plainly is to juxtapose incommensurable things; no future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will. It is upon a pavement of battered destinies that the survivors storm ahead toward new bland sensations and mass deaths.

So you ask whether I would choose to be unborn? One must be born in order to choose, and then the choice involves destruction. But ask my brother in that chair over there. Indeed, it is an empty one; my brother did not get so far. Yet ask him, as he is travelling like the wind below the sky, crashing against the beach, scenting in the grass, revelling in his strength as he pursues his living food. Do you think he is bereaved by his incapacity to fulfill his fate on the waiting list of the Oslo Housing and Savings Society? And have you ever missed him? Look around in a crowded afternoon tram and reflect whether you would allow a lottery to select one of the exhausted toilers as the one whom you put into this world. They pay no attention as one person gets off and two get on. The tram keeps rolling along.

It is no cure for tooth-ache to get ache in four more teeth. ‘Progress’ is a matter of quantity. In order to provide the multiplicants with a living, a place in the brooding box, and continuous clamour in their spare time, nature is crushed and put on sale. A new generation will discover that it was the landscapes of our minds we were demolishing. Preserves are not to be countenanced; a desolate island is a crime. Every municipality has but a single goal: to multiply. To multiply profusely. To multiply the most. And so what?

An experience-based ethic arises naturally from our predicament as prisoners of a cosmic concentration camp. In the blind law of transience we have a common enemy. Hence our model should be the ethics of the life-boat. Those who wish to die shall be allowed to. But whoever steals from the water cask makes himself a collaborator with the enemy, and only ethically irrelevant love can prevent his extradition to his new master.

Above all, we must make the reproductive question ethically relevant. A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness. Nobody flinches – except when saying cootchie-cootchie to the treasure in the cradle, little Hjalmar Alexander.

Besides Ibsen, especially Henri Fredric Amiel has made a profound impression upon me. He possesses that complete meditative relaxation which allows thought to sink, as heavy as lead, to the great conceptual depths – depths inaccessible to anyone whose attention is burdened by concerns with everyday welfare. But this discerning, generous, self-reflective and self-forfeiting type – a noble dreamer, impaled on the needle of the now – is naturally defenceless in a society that only acknowledges measurable value. And a nation of such refined minds would be haplessly abandoned to any blind, gluttonous conqueror. Cheaply victorious, he bids the broken mimosa a scornful farewell, oblivious to this being humanity bidding itself farewell. Some of the dreamer’s states of mind are ideal heights at which I look askance from the debasement of necessity. But this ideal is void of any future. A famous editor in Kristiania said to his son: “Are you still pursuing that nonsense.” Well then, he was only witnessing his own spiritual demise. But how can a planet hirsute with six billion vehicles of the flesh, all bellowing out their needs, have room for those who merely wonder and despair? Who dares demand of this panic-prone, surging avalanche, this oceanic breaker wave of jaws and claws, that it direct its power inwards, consider the dead and the tormented, and don every morning, in trembling, the mercy of chance?