Why It Is Called Reason Under Siege

Because reason did not vanish. It was surrounded. That distinction is the whole title.

People still think. Reason still works. The ground it works on was arranged before it arrived.

The side has been chosen. The victim has been recognized. The guilty party has been named. The sequence has been cut. The word already carries a sentence. The algorithm has decided what we see first. Belonging has settled which fact needs context and which does not.

Judgment stops being the conclusion of the sequence. It becomes the condition under which the sequence will be read. That is the siege.

Who lays siege

None of these forces on its own. Propaganda, ideology, technology, war, trauma, memory, religion, power, the media: any of them can work as a besieging force, and they do so when they narrow the ground on which judgment is still free.

Anticipated verdict and anticipated reason name forms of the siege. Reason Under Siege names the condition itself.

Why "under siege"

Better than captured or overrun, because a siege still leaves room to resist.

Reason keeps its instruments. It can reconstruct the antecedent. It can return a fact to its sequence. It can swap the names and test whether the principle holds. It can reconstruct the other side's account until that side recognizes it. It can tell explanation from absolution. It can refuse to grant our own pain jurisdiction over anyone else's humanity. It can revisit the verdict.

Twenty sages appear to keep those procedures alive when the surrounding conditions push toward the sentence that came first. The voice that follows is yours.

What is under siege

One distinction orders the rest: what is surrounded goes beyond the truth. It is the faculty of judgment.

The facts can remain in plain view. The siege works without erasing them: it need only break their relations, alter their order, select their antecedents, or impose in advance the category through which they will be read.

In June 1944, a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Danish government toured Terezín. That May the Nazis had deported seven thousand five hundred prisoners to Auschwitz so the ghetto would not look overcrowded. They repaired the streets, repainted the façades, raised a music pavilion in the park. The route was fixed in advance. Prisoners had been told what to answer and what subjects to avoid. There was a children's opera, and a choir of prisoners sang Verdi's Requiem.

All three delegates wrote favorable reports. None of them lied: they described what they saw. The sequence they saw had been built by those who received them.

Facts can survive while the sequence that lets them mean anything disappears. And once the sequence is gone, reason is left among conclusions already on offer.

The laboratory

In Israel and Palestine the pressure on judgment runs higher today than anywhere else. The title looks further.

The same siege appears in Athens, in power, in institutions, in corporations, in propaganda, in the archive, in the emergency, in algorithms, in the accusation, in memory. The book widens the diagnosis until the structure shows itself as general.

The book examines what happens when we can still reason, and the forces deciding what we see, in what order we see it, and what we are permitted to conclude arrive before our judgment does.

A way out, while the siege is still open.