Merchants of Nuance
Western commentators often claim that the Israel Palestine conflict is too nuanced to reduce to simple moral observations. They are, put simply, full of shit.
“[T]he tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.”
- Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé (2015)
In 2010, the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway published a book called Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. The book investigates the actions of a powerful and conservative group of scientists, identified by the authors as “merchants of doubt.” Typically, we associate scientists with their dedication to uncovering facts about the world. They formulate hypotheses, seek evidence, and, based on the solidity and consistency of collected evidence, proceed to confirm or refute their initial assumptions. This is the scientific process as we understand it at the most rudimentary level. The product of this process, we believe, is truth. However, the scientists who Oreskes and Conway scrutinized in their book were offering a different product.
Their commodity was doubt. Recruited by multi-billion dollar industries, these scientists were tasked with merchandising doubt in an effort to suppress scientific facts. For instance, the tobacco industry knew the dangers of smoking as early as 1953. By the 1960s, the scientific community had reached a consensus on the matter. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the tobacco industry began to lose cases in court, and not until 2009 that the U.S. Congress finally authorized the FDA to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug. Why did it take so long, one might wonder? Because, while doubt is crucial to the scientific process, it can also be taken out of context to “create the impression that everything is unresolved.” That is what these merchants were selling. They manufactured doubt in order to weaken the truth.
This article isn’t about the tobacco industry. Rather, I want to talk about the merchandising of another product that, much like doubt, can create the impression that everything is uncertain, complicated, and therefore unresolvable. This product is nuance. In the West, particularly in America, the merchants of nuance operate to obscure one particular issue–the issue of Palestine. Much in the ways that merchants of doubt produced studies casting doubt on the harms of tobacco or the risks of global warming, Western commentators have become merchants of nuance, insisting again and again that Palestine is an issue too complicated and multifaceted to either understand or to solve.
The Nuance Industry
The merchants of nuance often disagree on important topics. Some of them believe that a woman’s right to choose is sacrosanct, while others vociferously maintain that abortion is an eternal sin. Some believe gun laws are too permissive in the US, while others maintain that the right to possess firearms is a constitutionally enshrined one. Some believe that climate change is an existential threat to the future of our planet, while others maintain it is an exaggerated issue. In short, merchants of nuance often disagree on important and hefty questions. In spite of such profound disagreements, they are unified in one unshakable and core commitment. They all subscribe to the belief that the ongoing moral and political catastrophe in Palestine is really, really nuanced and complicated.
They are encouraged to do so in part because the nuance industry is a highly lucrative field of employment. The professional class in the nuance industry comprises a splendid array of esteemed practitioners from various personal and professional backgrounds. Some accomplished journalists belong to this class, as well as popular politicians. Barack Obama is part of this industry, as are many of his colleagues in the Democratic Caucus, including the progressive Bernie Sanders. The likes of David Brooks, the famous political commentator and sandwich connoisseur, are also employed within the nuance industry.
According to the merchants of nuance, it is the mark of a good thinker to be able to see subtle differences and complexities where others see stark juxtapositions of right and wrong, good and bad, truth and falsity. The nuanced thinker, on the other hand, can recognize the fine-grained shades of difference between one situation and the next, details that ordinary people are bound to miss with the naked eye.
The merchants of nuance, as the sociologist Kieran Healy observes, do this by insisting that they are making our understanding of social reality richer and more sophisticated by adding layers of complexity. The world is a complex and rich place, therefore all angles must be considered, all perspectives included, all eventualities gamed out before we can settle on a plan of action. The complexity of the world demands nuance, these people suggest.
According to Healy, however, the insistence on nuance is often just an intellectual cop out, a kind of holding maneuver:
It is what one does when faced with a question for which one does not yet have a compelling or interesting answer. Thinking up compelling or interesting ideas is difficult, so it is often easier to embrace complexity than to cut through it.
Healy’s analysis primarily focuses on exploring the role of nuance in constructing good theories, especially in the social sciences. But I think his arguments—ultimately yielding the provocative conclusion “fuck nuance”—are salient to understanding how simple observations in many scenarios can be rejected under the guise of demanding nuanced explanations.
Merchants of nuance, according to Healy, can inhibit theoretical clarity in three ways. These are the tricks and traps that they employ to obstruct access to the truth. First, there is the nuance of the fine-grain, where simplicity is rejected in favor of increased detail and accuracy. Second, there is the nuance of the conceptual framework, where theory is continually expanded to the point where it becomes impervious to empirical challenges. Lastly, there is the nuance of the connoisseur, where nuance is celebrated as a unique sensitivity to the richness and texture of social reality; a skill reserved for the select few and deemed inaccessible to the everyday person. Examples of these nuance traps can be identified in much of the contemporary mainstream discourse about Palestine, particularly in discussions about the ongoing violence against Gaza.
Complicating A Simple Story
First, there is the nuance of the fine-grain. This is where simplicity is continually rejected in favor of heightened accuracy and increased detail. This tactic is frequently employed in the mainstream discourse about Palestine. Pundits and politicians in the West insist that this is a very complicated situation, a delicate matter that is too nuanced for the average person to understand. “If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity,” former President Obama recently said in an interview. But what exactly is so complex about the slaughter of 25,000 people? It seems clear as day to many observers, including scholars of the Holocaust, that what we are witnessing is a genocide in process. Complexity is not always the enemy of clarity, but invocations to “an admission of complexity” are too often employed these days to defend the indefensible. Ultimately, these are moral holding maneuvers, allowing the powerful to shield themselves from public accountability.
Second, there is the nuance of the conceptual framework, where you complicate a theory so much that it is divorced from reality and thereby becomes unresponsive to real-world challenges. In regards to the Palestine question, this effort has been ongoing for decades. Writing in 1984, Edward Said warned about a “disciplinary communications apparatus” that both naturalizes Israel’s day-to-day conduct and punishes those who seek to report on the facts. Such frameworks have grown so expansively and intricately in recent years that any criticism of the Israeli state is instantly muted through mechanisms that depress the voices of dissent–including firings of pro-Palestine activists, anti-BDS legislation, or European laws that criminalize criticisms of Israel as attacks on the memory of the Holocaust.
As regards the latter, consider the ways that Israel’s actions are so often placed under what Masha Gessen calls “the shadow of the Holocaust.” “Israel has waged an incredibly successful campaign in setting the Holocaust outside of history by weaponizing the politics of memory,” Gessen said in a recent interview. Actions whose justifications fall outside of history, however, cannot be understood through historical analysis, or any kind of analysis that requires engaging with reality. As such, Israel can do as it pleases in the eyes of the West because its actions are always situated within complicated historical narratives that cannot be challenged through present-day, real-life grievances.
Lastly, there is the trap of the connoisseur, where experts insist that the average person cannot comprehend the nuances of some situation because they do not possess the same specialized intellectual sensitivity to nuance and complexity. “The intellectual poverty that would reduce human history to a battle between the oppressed and the oppressors is also just plain lazy. This part of the world is complicated,” Alexis Grenell wrote in The Nation. This is paradigmatic of the attitude that Western commentators often adopt toward the plight of Palestinians. “It’s too complicated, you wouldn’t get it!” Amongst Western observers, this has become the de facto justification for normalizing Israeli aggression. They routinely exclaim that the situation in Palestine is too complicated for the average person to understand. There’s a deliberate logic to this exercise. Invoking complexity positions you as an expert on some issue, but also intimidates the non-experts who do not possess the same sensitivity to the textured and multilayered complexities of the issue in question.
Against Nuance
Imagine you’re born into a city where the borders are completely sealed. Your access to the outside world is severely limited; you may die never having the opportunity to leave. Jobs are scarce in your city, and a blockade on trade and importation of key technologies has hollowed your city’s economy. These restrictions on movement also impede your access to healthcare and life-saving medicine. Effectively, you live in what is commonly described as an open-air prison. On top of it all, every now and then, an advanced militarized force enforcing this siege bombs your city into oblivion. They do this with total impunity. In fact, other countries give your captors funding and weapons to conduct military campaigns against you and the two other million people trapped in your city. Over the years, despite sporadic humanitarian resolutions, the international community has done little to alleviate your suffering. Astonishingly, when you try to shed light on your circumstances, international observers dismiss your pleas - after all, the situation is far too complex to be dealt with.
Of course, what I’m asking you to picture here is the city of Gaza and the plight of its inhabitants. Likewise, the phenomenon that I have described—in which onlookers dismiss the gravity of an injustice by insisting that it is too complicated and nuanced to be reduced to simple moral claims—is the nuance-mongering and nuance-trapping that I described above. It is the unscientific insistence of Western commentators that Palestine is a complicated and multifaceted issue where demands for moral clarity, as one writer recently put it, undermine complexity.
In a recent interview, the author Ta-Nehisi Coates noted that the situation in Palestine is often portrayed in the Western press as a complicated issue that requires years of advanced studies to fully understand. Direct experience, however, can very easily dislodge this elaborately constructed narrative. Having spent 10 days in the Occupied Territories, Coates was struck by a deep tension between representation and reality:
The most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is. Now, I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated. History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. But the way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights, including the right that we treasure most, the franchise, the right to vote, and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand.
The tension that Coates is trying to articulate here–between what is real and what is represented–is not an accidental feature of how the West portrays Palestine.
The insistence on complexity and nuance has been carefully crafted as a political ploy over the years. It is employed with the aim of punishing and intimidating challenges to the official narrative, which deflects criticism of Israel and its allies by appeals to nuance and complexity. It is questionable whether this narrative, which has lodged itself deeply into the psyche of many Westerners, can be dislodged anytime soon. At a minimum, however, we must reject the appeals to complexity and insist that the tale of Palestine is a straightforward story of dispossession, oppression, and genocidal violence.