I’m not a subscriber to Liberties, the journal, so I can read only a bit of this article by Susie Linfield, “The Politics of the Hardened Left: The Left Since October 7.” I’m not complaining. Having read a fair amount of Linfield’s work over the years, I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of what she thinks. And what she’s going to think. Never many surprises there.

Which is why I want to comment on this opening statement of her article:

Cataclysmic world events — the fall of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, September 11, Donald Trump’s ascendancy — should cause cataclysmic, or at least fundamental, changes in thought. To be an intellectual, or a citizen, means to respond to history, to think anew, rather than be beholden to one’s oldest, fondest, but no longer useful ideas. The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 was surely one of those history-altering events; so is the war in Gaza.

As I said, I usually have a pretty clear idea of where Linfield is going to go in any piece, which is usually where she already has gone in her previous twelve pieces. From the little I can gather from what follows in this piece, she doesn’t break with expectations here. She goes after Pankaj Mishra and Peter Beinart for their anti-Zionism.

I should say that I usually don’t comment on pieces I haven’t or, in this case, can’t read. But there are two points I want to raise that go beyond this piece, so it seemed fair enough to break with my normal rule.

First, I saw Linfield appear on a podcast with Beinart, where she repeated this line about everyone having to rethink everything after October 7. Ever polite and ever politic, Beinart asked her, plainly, what specific beliefs of hers she has had to revise since October 7. You won’t be surprised to learn that she couldn’t cite a single one. So, pot, kettle.

But, second, I’d like to take on this idea that big events should cause “cataclysmic, or at least fundamental, changes in thought.” I’ve been hearing this kind of thing since I can remember, at least the fall of communism, and I wanted to think it through, aloud, with all of you here.

At first, it sounds appealing enough. Big events, big changes in our thinking. It sounds like the intellectual’s credo.

But walk with me through Linfield’s timeline of big events that should have changed how we think about everything:

1979: Iranian Revolution

1991: fall of the Soviet Union

2001: 9/11

2016: Donald Trump

2023: October 7

2023: Gaza

So, every ten years or so, each of us is supposed to undergo some “cataclysmic” change in our thinking. I don’t know about all of you, but when I think of people who change their entire ideological and moral and political orientation every ten years, I don’t think to myself, ah, deep thinker, profound witness to the horror or light of our times. I think: intellectual sociopath.

I may have said this before, but I feel like people are afforded one, at most two, major transformations in their gestalt over the course of their lifetime. Anything more than that, and I start wondering whether there’s something more going on in their heads beyond the Keynes (alleged) aphorism, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” My mind drifts instead to another apocryphal story, this time about Voltaire. Supposedly De Sade asked Voltaire to attend an orgy, which he did. Then he asked Voltaire a second time. Voltaire demurred, replying, “First time, philosophy. Second time, perversity.”

So I don’t begrudge Susie Linfield’s not fundamentally changing her position since October 7 or the war on Gaza. I don’t even begrudge her going down with the ship of state that is Israel. I doubt much of anything could convince her otherwise. I just wish she, like so many intellectuals, didn’t feel the need to lecture us about the need to completely overhaul our thinking every time something happens, which usually means, think more like me, think more like I’ve been thinking for the last however many years.