Readers of these Chronicles will have noticed that in the past year or two they have been largely focused on the phenomenon of the sacred—the second, along with language, of the two “coeval” elements that, in his Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999), Roy Rappaport hypothesized as the basis of humanity’s uniqueness.
I had long ago written The Origin of Language (California, 1981) without the least ambition of founding a new branch or mode of linguistics; my aim had been to provide a minimal hypothesis of how language must have arisen among creatures who lacked it. And necessity being the mother of invention, this minimum had to be the most likely necessity that would oblige humans to create a means to defer potential conflict-generating acts of appropriation focused on desirable objects by interposing reference to them by means of signs that would leave untouched the desire-objects themselves. In short, humans learned to share signs, or words, in preparation for distributing their designata.
Our task with regard to the sacred was to understand it in the same context of evolving mimetic desire that attaches to objects or conditions whose desirability, however defined, makes them potential sources of danger to the community. And like language, the sacred must be approached from an originary perspective that seeks to minimize—as it were, to Occamize—the foundations of our anthropological understanding. Religious phenomena, like those of language, are products of the newfound neural complexity required to deal by means of conscious deferral with the dangers of mimetic desire, which humans could no longer handle as did their animal ancestors by means of conditioned “Pavlovian” reflexes. And just as it seemed obvious that language emerged in order to prevent conflicts arising over the distribution of scarce and desirable goods, so the sacred would likewise find its source in the need for a shared imperative that would enforce within the proto-human community the a priori equality that is the fundamental principle of morality.
But there was no need for me to define this principle. The great rabbi Hillel—a near-contemporary of Jesus—had already done so with his “golden rule”: “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn.” We should note that Hillel’s version of the rule is less ambitious than the modern, Christian version, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
I find frankly astonishing that this ancient teacher of the Torah had anticipated so closely the aim of Generative Anthropology: the reduction of the distinguishing categories unique to human culture to their minimal components, once more based on the need to defer potential conflict. This rabbinical formula, which does not mention God, is a minimal anthropological formulation of the sacred. As with language, the sacred too—and, we might say, God himself—arises in the first place in order to enforce the sacred principle of moral equality that guarantees peace within the human community.
And just as the explanation of the emergence of language was our need to recoil from a potentially conflictive act of possession to one of sharable designation, so that of the emergence of the sacred is essentially the same. In both cases, the objective is to defer selfish acts that risk damaging the human community by creating the potential for hostile reactions in others.
The Christian version of the Golden Rule reflects Christianity’s drive to go beyond mere deferral of conflict toward Imitatio Christi— the imitation of Christ’s love for mankind. Yet the primitive core of this act remains the need to avoid treating another as less worthy of consideration than oneself.
And of course the assertion that the entire text of the Torah, which Hillel had spent his life teaching and interpreting, can be summed up in this one sentence is by no means meant to diminish this text’s importance. On the contrary, it is because the study of the Torah and its commentaries is so important that it is all the more important to understand—very much in the same spirit as GA—its minimal moral core: not to treat another as one would not like to be treated—the same principle illustrated—but not articulated—in our scenario of language origin by the necessity of deferring what had begun as a selfish gesture of appropriation.
Thus the founding idea of GA, that the first signs of language originated as aborted acts of appropriation—acts of deferral—brings together the minimal and maximal degrees of the significant: from what we personally find at a certain moment desirable, to the ultimate, divine source of significance itself.
And on this example, we may hypothesize as the transcendental origin of the universe’s guiding principle what was summed up much later as the Darwinian law of “the survival of the fittest”—the law that dictated the increasing fitness of the material and then self-reproducing forms that led, over billions of years, to the emergence of a creature that could understand the principle of morality in its own terms, and thereby come to value the existence of its fellows as in principle equal to its own.
As to whether or not the Christian recommendation to think first of the other’s welfare should remain as a “supplement” to Hillel’s admonition, it seems to me that both are necessary, and that, even in a truly Christian world, the perpetuation of the “remnant” of Judaic focus on self-preservation is a necessary feature.
It is upon this foundation, which I have striven to define in this Chronicle in the clearest and most minimal terms, that Anthropoetics has maintained itself over thirty years of biennial publication, with nearly two hundred articles, and that our annual GASC conference, where dozens of papers have been delivered, has been held every year (save the COVID year 2021) since 2007.
This joint account of the origin—coeval, as Roy Rappaport had intuited—of both language and the sacred thus completes the outline of the foundation of what I have been calling for so long Generative Anthropology.