Author: staceymeeker

The human as paradox and taboo

The notion of paradox may be said to begin with Zeno and Achilles never catching the tortoise, which we found in Chronicles 515–516 to be equivalent to Mahayana Buddhist Nagarjuna’s idea of the traveler who never travels: something obviously possible in reality becomes “unthinkable” when the language used to describe it is subjected to an arbitrary constraint, such as being obliged to list every step of an infinite series, or, as in the second case, simply describing all phases of an action from start to finish.

None of this, one might say, is relevant to real-life situations. But then one encounters real-life situations that lead not merely to intellectual anomalies, but to genocide—and one suspects that paradox is not confined to tricks of language. Although Zeno’s Western successors’ solution to his paradox of motion—to treat the infinite series as a mathematical construct rather than a series of necessary steps toward a solution—provides us with a satisfactory resolution of the Achilles-tortoise case, Nagarjuna’s more absolute conclusion implies that in order to fully guarantee us from self-destruction, language—and implicitly, all of human culture—must be banished to the realm of the profane, out of reach of the sacred, whose scene remains essentially unencumbered by the “illusory” worldly objects that become referents of human signs. And indeed, the practice of Buddhism, far more explicitly than that of the Western religions, counters human violence by rejecting its foundation in desire, which focuses on an object/referent at the center of the scene of consciousness rather than, as Buddhist practices teach us, on the sacred primordiality of the empty scene itself to which referential objects are merely contingent—sacrificing in the process the worldly dynamism that led the West to modernity.

One consequence of this contrast is that the Buddhist sense of the sacred is incompatible with the originary hypothesis, which describes the sacred as emerging along with language from an encounter with a common object of desire, which would be for the Buddhist an illusory intrusion on the purity of the scene. And the popularity in the contemporary West of Buddhist-inspired techniques of emptying the scene of consciousness reflects not simply the diminishing force of Western religion, but what I have long observed as a taboo on attempting to conceive the common origin of both our language and our sense of the sacred—what by the very logic of the phenomenon must be described as the first event, the first phenomenon to leave a durable impression in communal/historical memory—as anything but a gradual process with no clear beginning or end.

GA’s originary hypothesis of the origin of language describes the resolution of a hypothetical breakdown of the pre-human serial system of distribution in which each individual knew his place at a moment when the intensification of mimetic desire overcomes the inhibitions that had regulated this system. The solution, understood throughout the group as the command of a sacred will—a will external to the proto-human community—is to defer individual attempts to possess the desired object through the entire group’s designating or representing it by a common sign, the originary form of which is an aborted act or gesture of appropriation—pointing.

I have long remarked in these Chronicles on the taboo that seemingly prevents the originary hypothesis from being understood as a valid contribution to humanity’s efforts at self-understanding, having been struck by the utter lack of significant response to the theory of the origin of language that I first presented over 40 years ago in The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (UC Press, 1981). And, in an apparently unrelated case, I have experienced the same lack of response to the view of antisemitism presented in Adam Katz’s and my book entitled The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism (Brill, 2015)—a book whose publication, ironically enough, was sponsored by an organization specifically dedicated to the study of antisemitism, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP).

The general discomfort aroused by these two ideas hardly suffices to demonstrate any relationship between them, and for a long time I did not think of them as connected. But following the painfully revelatory experience of the Hamas atrocities of 10/7/2023 and the public reaction to it, the significance of this seemingly fortuitous connection now strikes me as an important contribution to the West’s self-understanding. For it allows us to define our era in no uncertain terms as one in which the West can no longer maintain its former unquestioned hegemony through technological superiority, but can only survive as a civilization if it can find a way to integrate its spiritual values into an increasingly global—and potentially hostile—culture.

The discomfort aroused by these two ideas is not simply a matter of unfamiliarity or indifference. To reflect on the connection between these two “paradoxical” origins: on the one hand, the emergence of humanity from the merely biological realm, and on the other, the emergence of the idea of the sacred as a single force governing all of humanity—what we call monotheism—forces us to reflect on Western civilization’s increasingly problematic role in the world. We cannot help fearing that what is in the process of replacing Western hegemony—always assuming that a catastrophic breakdown can be avoided—is a “globalist” human community within which what was originally Western technology is broadly adopted by an international collective hostile to the fundamental aspects of the West’s political values and their basis in its underlying Judeo-Christian religious culture. For at the same time as the West increasingly denies and even attacks the religious bases of its own culture, on the frontiers of which only an extremist Muslim variant fully maintains its self-confidence, its once-unique technological mastery has become increasingly accessible even to dictatorships as underdeveloped in every other sense as that of North Korea.

It was thought by many in the post-WWII era that the foundation of Israel, giving the Jews a nation in the Westphalian sense, a contiguous territory under their own jurisdiction for the first time since the last Roman-Jewish war in 132-6 AD, would resolve the problem of antisemitism by putting an end to the Jews’ anomalous situation as a people without a land. But as we have just seen, even after 75 years, the global result of Israel’s restoration of its ancient homeland has been rather the intensification than the evaporation of antisemitism; the world’s reaction to the October 7 massacre speaks for itself.

The very name of this millennial hatred is a paradox; Jew-hatred is a term no less unsatisfactory than antisemitism. To the extent that there is something that can be called Western civilization, this unique resentment embodies the very essence of historical paradox: the desire to perpetuate this civilization through the negation, not to say, the annihilation, of the bearers of its originary conception of the sacred—to consecrate the result by desecrating its origin. Now that the Jews have returned to their original homeland, Israel has become the unique nation in the world whose legitimacy is subject to constant denial. Thus we should be not at all surprised that the net result of Hamas’ barbaric assault, although inspiring revulsion in many, has rather been to grant a new legitimacy to the drive for a Jew-free “Palestine from the river to the sea.” The North-South colonial-native dichotomy has only been intensified by the fact that the Jewish “colonizers” are historically more native than the Palestinian “natives”; it is for that very reason that their rights to the land are denied by many and questioned by nearly all.

The first shall be the last. And in a very different context, the refusal to accept the origin of language and culture from mimetic desire expresses the same paradox—and René Girard’s refusal to accept this theory of origin as an all but necessary consequence of his own theory of mimetic desire partakes of the same perverse quality.

The source of the taboo that prevents not just the acceptation, but the serious consideration of the originary hypothesis is that by touching on human language, it touches on the sacred. As opposed to gradualist attempts to explain human language as a series of quantitative extensions of animal communication, this hypothesis has the audacity to situate in the real world the origin, in tandem with language, of the “other-worldly” category of the sacred.

Hence although I have many times cited Roy Rappaport’s prescient notion of the “coevality” of language and the sacred (see in particular Chronicle 282), it had never previously been attempted to explain the origin of language and the sacred as a simple extension of proto-human behavior. The transcendental relationship of language to worldly reality had inevitably been presented as a given that is at the same time external to the world of human experience. Language, like mathematics, had always been understood as having been discovered—or as I like to say, “downloaded”; and even when this is not explicitly stated, it is presumed.

In Chronicle 796 I discussed an attempt to claim that life itself, self-reproducing creatures, should already be understood as bearing meaning: that the genetic code’s construction of a new being was not simply an algorithmic mechanism but must be understood as semiotic. One might say that such thinking seeks to raise the level of biological processes to that of human thought. But what it really does is prevent us from grasping the essential difference between human thought and the genetic code—which is akin rather to a cybernetic process. That such an attempt at explanation is made at just the historical moment when AI has passed beyond the Turing test to put into question the specificity of human thinking is surely not coincidental.

But whatever the need to protect the specificity of the human from the dangers inherent in its mechanical simulation, it is irrelevant to the question of the origin of this specificity among hominins. The term that a scientific critic of the originary hypothesis would find least acceptable—if indeed any such critic could be found, as opposed to those who reject the hypothesis out of hand—would be sacred. Such an “otherworldly” notion, we must understand, has no place in the world of science. The preoccupation of early anthropologists with “elementary” religion is today understood merely by way of demonstrating that there is no such thing as primitive culture. Durkheim and his predecessors had sought through studying preliterate societies to trace human culture to its roots, but they had never attempted hypothetically to project this process back to the moment at which the “elementary structures” of religion emerged among creatures who previously had no such structures. Yet Rappaport’s intuition was valid: language and the sacred, like esthetic culture and religious belief and practice, are indeed the fundamental objects of anthropological science, and—like the phenomenon of faith itself—must be studied in worldly terms.

Coda

It has taken me over forty years from my first formulation of language origin in 1981 to appreciate the organic connection of language with the specificity of the human, and in particular, its connection to the sacred. If I understood the principles of generative anthropology as I do now while Girard was alive, I might well have been able to convince him that, far from betraying his intuition of the centrality of mimetic desire to the human species, the originary hypothesis is rather a demonstration and confirmation of it.

Given that the Jews’ proleptic revelation of the unity of human culture as monotheism, which is most simply understood as the unity of the sacred for all humanity, has been the source of this people’s over-generous portion of misery throughout the ages, this one Jew must be thankful that the taboo that bears on his thought has been accompanied not by hatred but by indifference. But it is more than ever my conviction that if we indeed share the desire for the continued flourishing of our species, the “way of thinking” of the originary hypothesis will provide the anthropological basis of the solution.

February 4, 2024
The uniqueness of human language

For Patrick Coleman

Patrick was the first professor I hired when I became chairman of the UCLA French Department back in 1974. He held his PhD from Yale, having worked with Paul de Man, and had a distinguished career at UCLA.

Patrick retired a few years ago and occasionally sends me a reference to a text that he thinks I might be interested in. The other day, he sent me an excerpt from a forthcoming book by David Bentley Hart entitled Leaves in the Wind (https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/reflections-on-life-and-mind-part-d1b?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=361195&post_id=140636799&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=em5wi&utm_medium=email) that seeks to apply the notions of meaning and semeosis to the complexities of the genetic information that is the basis of life on Earth.

This is the writing of a subtle mind impatient with the mechanistic/algorithmic calculations by means of which ChatGPT has recently passed the Turing test by appearing to reflect “thinking.” Since Hart’s attempt to assimilate the genetic code to language questions the very core of what I call generative anthropology, it provides a useful opportunity to make clear in what way the scenic element of human language makes it incomparable to any such algorithmic operation.

The ontological status of “the human” is the crux of all forms of the thinking about thinking that we call philosophy or metaphysics; and the minimal characteristic feature of the human is the possession of language. Hart begins by describing classical Greek thought as fundamentally ignoring the distinction between mental and physical complexity: as he puts it, “there was no mind-body problem.” Or in my terms, the metaphysical aspect of such thought was not itself an object of reflection, but was simply taken for granted. In other words, language was understood as a “natural” phenomenon, not requiring any particular hypothesis of origin—something that humans discover and so to speak “download” rather than invent.

And this explains why the Greeks, despite their understanding of logic and mathematics, never quite initiated modern science. If mind and matter were not dichotomized, then the modern ideal of the laboratory that maximally excludes unnecessary parameters to facilitate the establishment of natural “laws” could not emerge, and classical science could never develop beyond a sophisticated version of what Lévi-Strauss called la pensée sauvage.

But in Hart’s view, the separation of “matter” and “spirit” that permits the minimalistic constitution of physics and the other sciences is itself inadequate, because it fails to establish a basis for the “semeiotic” content of what natural scientists call “information.” Hart does not accept the idea that the complex codings that preside over the emergence of living beings can be understood as purely material cybernetic arrangements. Thus he speaks of the translation of the genetic code into living beings as a process of semiotic/linguistic communication, one that carries with it a burden of intentionality beyond the merely material.

. . . Until we have rethought “nature” at a far deeper level than we have so far succeeded in doing, the very notion of “naturalist” explanation is useless and really little more than a distraction.

A good deal of that rethinking should, it seems to me, concern itself with the coding of genomes in organisms and the use that organic systems make of that coding. By this, though, I do not mean simply that we need to examine the coding itself in all its complexity, or to draw conclusions from that complexity about, say, some external intelligent designer. I mean, more simply, that we should consider the code in light of the nature of semeiotic communication—of language, that is. (par. 81-82; my emphasis)

Without getting into the further details of Hart’s argument, we can stop here and observe that the problem he faces is the same one faced by all modern philosophers, that is, those who unlike Plato and Aristotle understand thinking as of a different nature than being. This is in effect a recognition of the difference between the human and the rest of the universe, a difference inherent in the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization—which begins, as the Gospel of John tells us, with the logos.

And it is a measure of the decadence of this civilization today that this distinction is no longer taken for granted, and is on the contrary treated by analogy with the post-colonial critique of the West’s long-term dominion over the rest of the world as one more example of unjust domination. Not that in the text that Patrick sent me Hart displays any sign of turning his analysis into a political statement. Nonetheless, he rejects the idea that human language is unique and incomparable to the mechanisms, however complex, by means of which living organisms translate the code of DNA into new living organisms. The following passage suffices to convey Hart’s point:

Life actually communicates itself from one organism to another, and that communication is a good part of what marks it out as a living system. But how does it do so? Given the way some theorists speak, one might think we were talking about the mere transference by contact of some periodic physical pattern—or quasi-periodic but largely regular pattern—producing something like the pretty images conjured up by cellular automata or the fractal ramifications of crystals. But in fact life replicates itself in organisms through a certain semantic content, which exists and has effects not at the level of the physical embodiments of syntactic structures alone—those are merely the medium of transmission—but instead by being intended and being understood. Here the issue really is “information,” in its most commonsense acceptation of the word. The genome is not a collection of small physical switches that work like springs upon the cell; its whole causal power lies in its legibility as intentional content to an interpretive and cognitive agency, . . . (par. 83; my emphasis)

In other words, unlike a digital computer following a complex list of instructions, the mechanism of life incorporates something very like, not to say identical with, human consciousness. But to speak of the “understanding” of the “interpretive and cognitive agency” that constructs a new organism from the genome of the fertilized ovum is in effect to return to the metaphysical a priori that made the Greeks incapable of making their rationalism the basis of what the modern world calls empirical science.

In point of fact, in reference to the operations of the genome, the terms “intentional,” “interpretive,” “cognitive” are so many metaphors. Meaning is a phenomenon unique to human language. For if indeed it exists already at the level of the genome, then what precisely is it that distinguishes human culture from that of bacteria?

What is of interest in Hart’s language is its undoubted power, if not truly to convince, then to reassure. Whereas the simple ideas of the originary hypothesis tend to be dismissed as signs of an antediluvian mindset, these metaphors comfort the taboo preventing this and any similar attempts to define the difference between what we humans call “thinking” and the activity of the double helix. The obvious reality that our thinking is incomparable to the kind of mental activity exhibited even in our most advanced primate cousins, let alone in the most elementary living organisms, has become a truth too painful to contemplate, like the “superiority” of one civilization over another. How much easier is it then to reject the postulation of human uniqueness as an example of the same kind of myth-making as Max Müller’s notion that the first humans, observing the power of the sun, designated it as their originary deity.

As a final example of the confusion of genetic coding with semiosis, Hart assimilates the complexity of a literary text, that is, a human creation, to that of a living organism:

The text of Anna Karenina is, from the purely quantitative vantage of its alphabetic sequences, utterly random; no algorithm could possibly be generated—at least, none that is conceivable—that could reproduce it. And yet, at the semantic level, the richness and determinacy of the content of the book increases with each aperiodic arrangement of letters and words into a coherent meaning. There is no way in which that intentional level of semantic meaning can be reduced to that physical level of inherently meaningless “paratactic” information-flow, much less generated by it; structurally the two levels continuously diverge from one another precisely to the degree that each becomes more coherent in its own terms, and so any algorithmic reconciliation of the two in terms of some more comprehensive notion of information is infinitely unattainable. And this presents something of a difficulty for a wholly physicalist account of life, because what is encoded in a genome and in the organic system to which it belongs, and so what allows for replication and variation, is a replete semeiotic economy, one that is quantitatively random and resistant to algorithmic compression at the syntactic level and yet utterly and exquisitely precise, meaningful, and determinate at the semantic level. (Par. 87; my emphasis)

The meaning of a linguistic message, whether a simple command or Anna Karenina, exists only for a mind. If we want to speak metaphorically of the “meaning” of an organism, it can only relate to its ability to react to different stimuli: to deal with the world in such a manner as to be able to survive and produce surviving offspring. But these complexities, no doubt equally admirable, have essentially nothing in common.

I do not think it is necessary to do more than juxtapose the two italicized passages to make my point; what is intentional in Tolstoy and what Hart calls “meaningful” in the genome may both be “exquisitely precise,” but there is no reader—other perhaps than God, who sees his creation as “good”—to judge it as “meaningful and determinate at the semantic level.”

No doubt the very existence of life is a marvelous phenomenon involving a code whose complexity is even now beyond that of any human invention. But this code is not comparable to language even in its most primitive form, such as the pointing gesture (“aborted gesture of appropriation”) that the originary hypothesis proposes as humanity’s “first word.” This gesture has no complexity at all; but it is a mode of communication that indeed involves meaning and intentional content. Speaking of the “intentional content” of one’s DNA simply ignores what language is; the communication of an intention is not the translation of a sequence of proteins into a living organism, but very simply, an individual’s sign to another of what he intends, a form of communication that animal languages accomplish only with instinctual and largely invariant signals.

The rest of Hart’s argument is in effect a rhetorical embellishment of this basic fiction. Once one accepts the fundamental equivalence of the complexity of the genetic coding that leads from the germ cells to a functioning animal with the generally far less complex usages of human language, one has denied from the outset the possibility that what differentiates language from such natural coding can be “higher” than it on the scale of being.

Which is why the originary hypothesis is not concerned, like Chomskian linguistics, with the emergence of a hypothetical language module, but with that of the minimal ostensive form of language realized in pointing. Animals do not point. They are unable to understand the great Zen precept that one should look at the moon and not at my finger that points to it. This is not a matter of “stupidity,” but of a categorical incapacity. Animals do not converse with each other. They do not, as we do, share scenes with one another; they cannot follow a narrative. It is these modest interactions, and not the infinite potential of syntactic recursion, that fundamentally characterize human language.

I can only hope that, rather than letting itself be destroyed in its primal desire to be rid of the founders of its unique relationship to the sacred, the West will come to its senses and once more accept the sacrality of the unique extension of biological life through which human language, along with meaning, cognition, and intentionality, came into being.

January 21, 2024
Anarcho-Tyranny, Thirty Years Later

In 1993, “paleoconservative” Sam Francis gave a talk entitled “Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.” that was reprinted in the July 1994 and more recently in the January 2023 issue of Chronicles magazine—not to be confused with these present Chronicles—having recently been brought to the attention of conservative circles by Tucker Carlson. (The reader who can bear the scatological leftism of Mother Jones can read about this history in a piece by Noah Lanard in the September-October 2023 issue entitled “Anarcho-Tyranny: How the New Right Explains Itself” .) Having read Francis’ talk, I was struck on the one hand by its similarity to my own analysis of the contemporary Democratic-progressive coalition, and on the other by a very sharp difference that Mr. Lanard not unexpectedly does not remark on, given his unique focus on the race question.

Francis’ own focus, whose racial implications must be extrapolated from his talk, is the contradiction within our political system between passing laws to “keep us safe” that wind up punishing peaceful citizens who run afoul of them, and simultaneously doing very little to keep real criminals off the streets. He opens with the example of a Mr. Sanders, who became Exhibit A in a police demonstration to publicize a new seat-belt law in North Carolina. The Raleigh police department was assigned to a campaign to make an example of a driver riding without his seat-belt, and poor Mr. Sanders was the chosen victim. In another example Francis mentions, Congress had recently passed several laws to increase the number of federal offenses that merit the death penalty; but as he points out, the federal government had not executed a single person since 1963 (the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, executed in 2001, broke that string, but Major Nidal Hasan, the killer of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, sentenced to death in 2013, is still among the living).

Francis’ choice of this second example, which is followed only later by others more relevant to our era, demonstrates the enormous change in our attitude toward crime over the past 30 years. In New York City, 1993 was the last year of Dinkins, to be followed by the era of Giuliani and Bloomberg. At the time, street crime in New York and other large cities was a scandal and would soon be reduced through proactive policing following J. Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” formula. (When was the last time you heard that expression?) And even if Congress didn’t really intend to enforce all these death penalty laws, at least they paid lip service to the “tough on crime” principle. The era of Wokeness, in this domain at least, had not yet begun.

Which is to say that although aggressively fighting crime had become an agreed principle, Francis was complaining that the police found it easier to focus on the law-abiding citizen who occasionally strayed by forgetting to buckle up than on those who made their living through crime and were as a consequence much more difficult and dangerous to catch. Hence the “tyranny” of restrictive laws that were easily enforced against white-collar criminals whose criminality was dubious and marginal was paired with the “anarchy” inherent in the ease with which the criminal underworld was allowed to function. That this anarchy would be greatly curbed over the next decade or so was something he could not have anticipated.

But all that has changed. One can only imagine what Francis would have said about Soros-sponsored DAs such as Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg who refuse for clearly ideological reasons to punish “petty” criminals even when arrested, dismissing charges or letting the accused go on his own recognizance without bail. While Mother Jones predictably judges opposing such efforts as “racist,” dismissing the fact that the large majority of crimes committed by minority members involve minority victims, this behavior from the legal authorities must be understood as anarchistic, no longer simply in effect but in principle: it is a key component of the desecration of Western civil society that is the conscious aim of Wokeness.

As his conclusion makes clear, Francis’ primary purpose in this piece was less an overall critique of the government than a plea to maintain the Second Amendment and above all for each individual to exercise his or her right to bear arms. Today this right must still be defended, but clearly the specific reason for the revival of Francis’ piece today is that “anarcho-tyranny” has come to describe a problem far broader than law enforcement’s preference for easy targets over real criminals. As I suggested in Chronicle 784, today the ideologically based refusal to target the latter goes far beyond the kind of negligence referred to by Francis and constitutes one of the focal points of “progressive” government: the alliance between globalist billionaires and what used to be called the lumpenproletariat against the “poor but honest” working and middle classes. The scandalous open-border policy of the current Administration is transparently a means both of supplying cheap labor to the first group and adding Democrat voters to the second.

But the most significant aspect of this policy is, as I pointed out in the previous Chronicle, its deliberate undermining of civil society, the essential “middle-class” reality that used to unite virtually the entire population, including the black population even in the days of segregation, in what might be called “respectable” attitudes and behaviors: family formation, serious child-rearing, respect for law and order. The blacks who marched with M. L. King had far more in common with his white supporters than any of today’s pro-Hamas demonstrators with the archetypal law-abiding citizen. Not that the latter do not continue to exist, and indeed still form the majority of the productive population. What has been lost is not their numbers, but their exemplarity.

And it is this loss of exemplarity in the face of such phenomena as “smash and grab” robberies and unimpeded shoplifting that is the real sign of decadence, which is nothing more than the loss of community. Those who decry the decline of organized religion generally make use of theological arguments to describe what is indeed a desecration; what generative anthropology helps us to understand is that the function of religious beliefs, as the etymology of the word “religion” makes clear, is to bind together communities to resist the anarchy of detached individuals. The term civil society refers to the everyday interactions among people who encounter each other casually in public places or businesses. As an example of its violation, the idea of allowing shoplifters to pursue their activity without interruption goes well beyond anything mentioned in Francis’ article; it constitutes not only criminal activity but a violation of the communal norms of civil society. Aside from the loss to the business in question, ordinary shoppers encountering such behavior suffer from their crime as law-abiding citizens forced to witness an outrage to their sense of decency.

Which is to say that the most significant change from 1993 is that today not only are criminals not being punished regularly and severely as they should, but the very idea of punishing “petty criminality”—and not so long ago in a number of places, the very idea of having a police force at all—is no longer taken for granted by the reigning ideology. While in contrast, behaviors previously considered deviant, such as drag queen exhibitions, are not only tolerated but held up as exemplary even in elementary schools, where children risk being taught that the very notion of “normality” is a sign of racism.

As for the political implications of Francis’ talk, what was at the time implicit has become explicit in ways he could hardly have anticipated. What might have been called occasional harassment of the middle or respectable class has become its active denigration as the bearer of “white privilege,” a privilege that does not apply to Wokeness’ wealthy sponsors if only because they have virtually no contact with the general public. How often does one encounter a billionaire in the everyday world of the middle class? Back in the 1960s, first class airline tickets were something like 150% the price of coach; now they are more like 1000% and involve seating and service of an entirely more elaborate kind; and the same can be said for luxury goods of all kinds, from restaurants to clothing to automobiles…

Thus Francis’ concluding recommendation that Americans all learn to “fight for themselves” on the example of The Magnificent Seven will hardly do the job; there is a lot more to fix in our republic than “taking back [our] own streets [our]selves.” What underlies Francis’ call for self-defense is his sense that the official guardians of order have stopped caring about us; he could not have anticipated that thirty years later, the police themselves would have come under attack as agents of the racist clingers and deplorables—in contrast to the higher echelons of police power like the FBI arresting the “insurrectionists” of January 6, whose multiyear sentences, unlike those of common criminals, let alone the seldom disturbed Antifa rioters of recent years, reflect tyranny rather than anarchy.

And yet, for the moment, in the life of the average citizen, “anarcho-tyranny” is still a phenomenon of isolated incidents, tragic for those who suffer from them, but not sufficiently pervasive to have displaced or even deeply perturbed the civil society that surrounds the average middle-class life, while the troublesome signs of national weakness revealed in Iran, Afghanistan, and Ukraine remain on the fringes of our lives.
Yet this sense of security shows itself every day to be a bit more illusory. Not just the US but the entire West seems unable to supply Ukraine with sufficient armaments to progress against Russia, whose GNP is a fraction of ours. For the real sources of power are increasingly indifferent to local conflicts; globalism needs only the degree of order that permits production, exchange, and profit. What Francis called “tyranny” is less about legally harassing arbitrarily selected individuals than promoting virtue-signaling climate boondoggles in societies of increasing delinquency and drug abuse—passively encouraging the atomization of civil society in the face of technological gigantism.

But our malaise should not distract us from the core of the West’s increasing danger: the de-structuration—the desecration—of the hierarchical edifice of human community from the family to the nation and beyond. If this structure cannot soon recover the strength to reproduce itself from one generation to the next, its fabric will continue to dissolve. And we cannot avoid fearing that our enemies will before long take advantage of this dissolution to create, first anarchy, and then tyranny tout court.**

**For a not altogether improbable nightmare scenario, see Kurt Schlichter’s “Our Incompetent Elite Is Opening Up America to Attack”

January 13, 2024
Community and sacrality: a proposal

For Matthew Schneider

As the domination of those who privilege resentment and victimhood continues to increase throughout the domain of Western civilization (not however without some recent healthy European reactions), those who deplore this trend, when asked for its fundamental cause, are likely to evoke the decline of religious belief in the Western, Judeo-Christian sense to the profit of pseudo-Marxist leftism on the one hand and an atavistic “post-colonial” Islamism on the other. This increasingly dangerous red-green alliance has become what strikes many as the most dangerous and potentially explosive coalition since the Axis.

The usual remedy begins by explaining loss of belief in God as a product of growing hedonism and materialism, and then seeking ways to restore or recreate traditional religious institutions that will foster this belief. With the decline of traditional childhood religious training, a more radical mode of adult social conditioning is often proposed, for example, Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” or similar modes of “new monasticism.”

Independently of the success or failure of such ventures, what this approach begins with is an avowal that the conditions of modern Western society are increasingly incompatible with religious belief, that is, with the sense of the sacred. Yet the recent raucous demonstrations in support of Hamas in various cities and campuses are clear demonstrations of the contrary. The demonstrators are not defending their personal interests and are in most cases only vaguely aware of the issues involved, but the one thing that cannot be denied is that they consider it a sacred duty to express their support for Hamas and the Palestinian cause and their hostility to Israel. And in relation to the long history of antisemitism in the West, the anti-Zionist animus of the current hostility is directed more broadly at Western civilization itself—in sharp contrast with Nazism, which saw itself rather as preserving this civilization from Jewish infiltration. During WWII the Mufti of Jerusalem was a dependent of the German Reich; today, it is the Western true believers who take their watchword from the Islamists.

Such expressions of passionate religious conviction in the West demonstrate that today its chief sign of civilizational decay is not the forgetting of the sacred, but the rejection of its Judeo-Christian forms to the profit of the most radical form of the third and most problematic member of the Abrahamic Trinity, militant Islam, identifying less with its renewed drive to world conquest than with its savage violence toward the Jews as both the original source of Western religion and the “colonial” usurper of the Holy Land. The Islamists exploit the post-colonial vocabulary of the world’s “South” as a secular translation of their view of Israel as a blasphemous abomination, occupying the sacred Muslim land in which Jerusalem is destined to become the capital of the Umma’s world-wide Caliphate.

To hear the cries of “gas the Jews” and continue to bewail the decline of religion is to be guilty of a dangerous naivete. No doubt there is little danger of concentration camps dotting the American countryside, but this new passion, whose power we are only now beginning to find more dangerous than absurd, requires that we make the effort to understand the sacred in terms far broader terms than attending weekly church services.

It also demands that we give thought to possible means by which the communal basis of the sacred can be restored outside of religious institutions. I will suggest such a possibility in the conclusion to this Chronicle.

The October 7 Hamas pogrom that brought the inherent antisemitism of victimary Wokeness out of the shadows also made clear the real focus of the Woke revolt against “privilege.” Affirmative action originally meant giving extra help to those whose backgrounds or handicaps prevented them from making full use of their intellectual and/or physical capacities to perform effectively in their places of work or study. A child whose school background was inadequate could receive supplementary training to bring him up to the norm met by those from more satisfactory backgrounds. Race was not a criterion in itself, at most a possible indication of inferior schooling. The clear purpose of affirmative action was to provide an even playing field for all candidates for school admission, occupation, or advancement. The DEI approach is, needless to say, very different.

Given the racial divisiveness of this procedure as well as its detrimental effect on performance, one might wonder why so many of those in privileged categories enthusiastically insist on its virtues, as the term “virtue-signaling” suggests. But virtue is merely another word for obedience to the sacred will. Just as renouncing the last canape models the originary deferral of appetite in deference to this will, so presumably is insisting that members of victimary classes be compensated for their sufferings at the hands of the privileged.

Yet the fact remains that assimilating DEI policies to virtue is inherently divisive: it privileges ascriptive identity over the needs of the human community. In the face of extreme assertions such as claiming that even mathematical correctness is “white,” we must assume that scholastic tests and the like are generally valid measures of the potential benefit of a given individual to the community; making “inclusion” the overriding consideration functions to its detriment.

Why then have, under the stimulus of a reminder of the Holocaust, these pseudo-Christian precepts of “the last shall be the first” provoked an outbreak of antisemitism linked to the jihadist destruction not just of Israel, but of Western civilization?

In the context of this association, the recent case of three university presidents unable to condemn antisemitic demonstrations in principle is anything but an anomaly. No doubt Jews tend to do well in intellectual and related activities, but so do various other national groups; why then is the most consistently persecuted people in Western history the obvious target of “antiracism” protests? One can say that it is the fault of Israel, but the Nazis were able to make the same case for exterminating the Jews in the absence of any such nation-state— indeed, for the very reason that no such state existed to which the Jews could be deported.

Antisemitism cannot be explained by such superficial criteria; its core is resentment of the firstness of the Jews in Western religion as the revealers of its One God, against whom first Christianity and then Islam defined themselves. Today, the rapprochement of Christians and Jews has been facilitated by the Woke identification with Islamism as post-colonialism: the alliance of the internal and external enemies of the oppressive West. And indeed, in recent years, Muslim persecution has made far more victims among the “Sunday people” than the “Saturday people,” although even the most destructive anti-Christian hatred lacks the particular venom of antisemitism, which finds resonance in Christian as well as Muslim countries.

It is no doubt an oversimplification to claim that antisemitism is the originary model of DEI, but it is far from insignificant that the “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations sparked by October 7 have found favor with the majority of DEI supporters. The key point is that whereas DEI purports to be a means for helping “victims” to catch up with their “oppressors,” it is in fact, as ideologues such as Ibram Kendi are not afraid to assert, an instrument of “antiracism” in the sense of vengeance, perpetuating racial conflict rather than seeking the de-differentiation that was the goal of such leaders as Booker T. Washington and M. L. King. The natural sympathy of DEI for antisemitism makes this point more clearly than statistical analyses.

What the Woke have awoken to, in a word, is not the egalitarianism of originary society that rejects the primate Alpha-Beta hierarchy, but the preemptive resentment of young people whose identification with the purported victims of discrimination is based less on a desire to efface the traces of such discrimination than on identification with their victimary credentials. Emulation abolishes ascriptive differences through shared activity; resentment fetishizes them into impenetrable barriers. Whence the ubiquitous crybullying phenomenon of “feeling unsafe.” Instead of competing with others toward a shared goal and an ultimately communal focus, the crybully seeks to win the game by calling a foul.

I have previously referred (see in particular Chronicle 566) to the fact that life in past times was seen far less as a source of pleasure and more as a “vale of tears” than it is today. As a result, we tend to judge the faith of the past, with its apparent focus on the afterlife, as an illusion: “pie in the sky when you die.” Pascal’s probabilistic notion that given the inevitability of death, even the smallest chance of eternal salvation is worth betting on is based on the intuition of death in the absence of such salvation as the eternal suffering of damnation; but in the premodern age, the intuitive model for damnation and hellfire was but an exaggeration of the pains and diseases of everyday life.

I have often wondered in what sense the Christians of the past “believed” in this alternative: to what extent they expected to “live” after death in either eternal pain or bliss. It is all too easy to imagine the reality in our own imaginations of beliefs that must be understood in their own religious context.

But whereas my eternal bliss or suffering can never be more than an abstraction, faith in the “afterlife” makes sense not only for the human species but for the human collectivity on every level: family, community, metropolis, nation…. The idea of “life after death” should be understood less as a prolongation of my individual existence than as a way of participating in the human future to which our lives have led. Thus we do not find it unreasonable for the armed forces to ask their members to be ready to make the “supreme sacrifice” for their country without pretending to guarantee them eternal life in Heaven.

The Christian sacred that guarantees this faith in the West offers Jesus’ crucifixion as exemplary precisely insofar as he died unaware of any prior promise of resurrection. To follow his example is not to be assured of salvation, but to seek to merit salvation, whether by one’s deeds or by the faith that motivates them. Faith in resurrection is no doubt imagined as eternal life, but the source of its power is not this imagination, but the assurance of Jesus’ love for those he presumably gave his life to “save.”

As Matt Schneider once defined in a word the fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism, HaShem cares for humanity and wants it to flourish, but Jesus loves you—he gave his life for each of us personally. I think that it is above all this Protestant-toned sentiment that keeps Christianity alive today, in a world for which a promised eternity of lifelike pleasures is no longer a powerful incentive, whereas the promise of one’s loved ones’ survival makes dying less painful. I think the sense of human immortality must always be understood in the context of the perpetuation of the human community, whether defined as a family, a local community, a tribe, a nation, a culture—a language—or a species.

The original focus of Christianity as an extension of Judaism was to transmit to those of the pagan world the Jewish sense that one’s life will always matter—to God, but as witnessed by one’s people—by explicitly equating this people to the human race. Yet the specifically Jewish sense of community has survived its many catastrophes, and continues to evoke hatred in its quest to establish itself once more in the land of its origin. As the idea of the Westphalian nation-state as a unified realm of shared language and custom becomes problematic in our globalizing age, Israel’s very success has intensified Jew-hatred in countries that witness the fraying of their own national solidarity, often under the pressure of increased Muslim immigration from former colonies.

Whence the increasing attractiveness of the red-green link between Islamism and what was once the Marxist ideal of socialist revolution but has increasingly become an alliance between a globalist billionaire class and the “minorities” whose elites they finance and whose poor they subsidize (while ignoring and even encouraging crime and dysfunction in their communities), supplemented by college-age youth and young adults indoctrinated with a Woke ideology that rejects the work-ethic and related values conducive to a harmonious civil society. This allows market society to continue (more or less) to flourish—putting aside its worrisome decline in military readiness and patriotism—notwithstanding its tendency in the cybernetic age to create vast and unprecedented disproportions of wealth. If religion be defined as the use of a shared conception of the sacred to reinforce the solidarity of a given human community, the faith that binds together this “progressive” class is an anti-religion in the sense that it places the defense of individual “human rights” above any family and communal values, seen as obstacles to the smooth functioning of the global apparatus.

The fact that “human rights” in this coalition has a purely negative relation to communal structures, the same relation that promotes the deliberate failure to punish criminals or protect women from the excesses of “transgender” men, explains the irrelevance of the critique that the Woke’s Islamist allies have in fact zero tolerance for victimary groups such as “liberated” women or homosexuals. For how the Western antinomians and the Middle-Eastern theocrats would find their ultimate modus vivendi remains for the moment a side issue given their common aim of undermining the civilization of the West.

The anti-Western resentment that is the sacred core of this alliance explains—as the Hamas pogrom revealed—its unification around antisemitism, as in Germany 90 years ago. Taken for granted in this program is the continued productivity of the world economy, whose increasing cybernetization and globalization may be left in the hands of its billionaire masters. In a word, the red-green agreement on the decadence of Western civil society implies the perpetuation of the global economy within a post-national and post-communal order.

Such a society, increasingly lacking a sense of human community, would presumably no longer have need for the sacred, leading to an unpredictable and perhaps fatal conclusion. But for the moment the world is not yet ready for either the Brave New World or the World Caliphate that the success of the red-green revolution would imply.

Conclusion: Family Policy?

Given the division between political parties and the voters that elect them, it seems obvious that, for example, directly attacking DEI and similar policies might gain a few victories but will do little to restore the sense of national community that its presence denies. In reference not only to the US but to all Western-style nations, what less conflictive policy, rather than espousing the political convictions of one party or the other, can have some hope of restoring this sense over time?

Given the primary function of the sacred to insure the continuation and flourishing of our species, the clearest indicator of social health in normal circumstances is the maintenance of the human population. Falling birth rates over more than a short period are clear signs of societal decline, and should receive far more attention than they currently do. That the European tendency over the past decades to replace reproduction with non-European immigration has led to severe social problems is all too easy to explain. And the current tendency throughout the industrialized world for marriage and childbearing to occur later and less frequently and increasingly less in synchrony, insuring the decline of the native population over time, is not one that societies can afford to leave to chance to resolve.

This suggests that policies that encourage marriage and childbirth—policies that in themselves can hardly be described as partisan—should be at the top of the list of desiderata. That Israel is the only Western-style country with a clear reproductive surplus is a clear indication that modern civilization has lost sight of what we should not hesitate to call its sacred purpose: to reproduce itself as a human community successfully indefinitely into the future.

This focus allows us to put such phenomena as gay marriage in their proper perspective. A social norm such as marriage and reproduction need not exclude or stigmatize exceptions such as homosexual relations, although it should go without saying that acceptance should not reach the point where the victimary status that adheres to these exceptions results in their privileging above the norm. Understood as a tolerated substitute for marriage, gay marriage in fact reinforces the marriage norm, in significant contrast to what was once the standard of male homosexual relations: unlimited promiscuity maximally separating sexuality from family formation.

There is no doubt a tension, especially in the lives of women, between childbearing and seeking success in the world of economic exchange. But the unique example of Israel demonstrates that the desire to produce children not simply as future atoms of a global society but as members of a self-conscious cultural community is sufficient to stimulate the modest population growth sustainable under any foreseeable conditions of the world economy.

No doubt we cannot command the reconstruction of the national values that sustained the Westphalian system that had spread throughout the world from Europe, and that today appears to have entered a phase of decline. Theorizing about the love that binds the members of national communities does nothing to create it. But I can assert with some confidence that a policy of investing in families and “family values” offers a potential means for rebuilding communities on all levels from the bottom up—in contrast to the increased bureaucratization of child-rearing, which has reached the point in the US where parents are forced to resort to home-schooling and/or to protest the use of the public schools for increasingly intrusive indoctrination, political and even sexual.

To strengthen the family is to provide the basis for strengthened community at every level, as well as providing religious belief with a population that has acquired through the experience of child-rearing a taste for both love and authority as the indispensable twin foundations of any community. And what makes me at least slightly optimistic about such a policy is that, however many battles may be fought over the details, the proposition that family formation and stabilizing national population is nearly always a good thing is in itself without political bias.

January 7, 2024
The scene of culture and consciousness III: The Fall of Man

For René Girard on his 100th birthday

The Genesis account is distinguished from other creation stories by an intuitive imperative of minimalism, of which the reduction to One God is only the most obvious feature. In Chronicles 675–676, by way of appreciating the sharpness of biblical anthropology from GA’s minimal perspective, I discussed in some detail the anthropological content of the notion of “original sin” and its consequences in the first books of Genesis. My purpose was to focus on the key moment of the fall of man in relation to GA’s originary hypothesis in order to understand the anthropological significance of the order of events and their attribution to the different personages of the Biblical narrative. This Chronicle is an attempt to deepen this perspective.

We may assume that the success of the originary event in preventing conflict and allowing the egalitarian distribution of the central object of the scene produced in the originary community an “Edenic” effect of universal harmony that, beyond permitting peaceful alimentary satisfaction, would suggest to the participants that the unanimously experienced sacred interdiction had henceforth abolished all conflict.

The fruit of the tree of knowledge is not temporarily but permanently interdicted; this interdiction must be, yet cannot be obeyed. Like the awareness of sexuality and death that this disobedience implies, the new human society cannot avoid it. Making this knowledge the result of disobedience of God’s interdiction may be seen as the narrativization of the effect of puberty—the awareness of biological nature and its inevitable mortality—in human self-consciousness. The human adolescent’s discovery of his or her own sexuality is involuntary, yet cannot be achieved without a personal awareness that is at the same time its affirmation and/or rejection. The shame felt by Adam and Eve following the eating of the fruit reflects the guilt attendant on sexual desire/desirability, a new appetitive feeling for which the couple—no longer conceived atemporally as adults, but in time, as adolescents—are not prepared. This knowledge, seen from the perspective of adulthood, is the end of the child’s illusion of immortality, his or her entry into a world of aging and death, the sign of the worldly imperfection of mortality that cannot be transcended but merely suspended for a moment in the utopian-sacred world of the rite and feast embodied in the originary scene.

What this suggests is that, in contrast to the alimentary desires that can at least in principle be reconciled peacefully in the scenic setting inaugurated in the originary event, it is the sexual desires aroused at adolescence that pose the definitive challenge to the originary interdiction. For these desires, given their newly imperative power in combination with their interpersonal nature, cannot be fully subordinated to the sacred will that suffices to regulate the distribution of goods. The narrative’s insistence that even in the absence of a surrounding human community, the couple once made aware of their sexuality would feel shame at displaying before God the sexual traits that attract their partner’s desire cannot be demonstrated as a necessary effect of the originary event, but from a Girardian perspective, it is easy to see that even in the absence of third parties, the mimetic intensification intrinsic to sexual desire must be understood as incompletely controllable by the différance that resolved the problem of distribution. Once the self can itself become an object of desire, the sacred interdiction that permits communal distribution can no longer reliably be applied.

Hence once language and the sacred transform mimetically driven appetite into desire, the effect of desire on the sexual self is not occasionally but necessarily beyond the control of the sacred as a force of communal/sacred will. No doubt this conclusion, made clear in Genesis, does not justify Freud’s notion that sexuality supplies the energy of all desire, but it comforts his basic principle that sexual desire is desire in its most problematic, paradoxical sense, and consequently the most obvious source of psychopathology.

The Tree of Life, whose fruit would grant the couple the extratemporal existence of divinity, is in this context a paradoxical representation of the omniscience of sacred Being, making the liminality of Eden into a permanent residence and thereby abolishing the mimetic tension that the sacred exists to defer. For had Adam and Eve not eaten the fruit, we may presume that they would not have known sexuality and death, in which case their only cognitive difference from God would be their lack of knowledge of “good and evil,” of sexual difference and the mortality it implies. The paradoxical nature of God allows Him alone to be aware of mortality, which is to say of worldliness, of historicity, without experiencing it. But in Eden, we, as well as the authors of the Creation story, would never have existed.

The sexual shame felt by the couple is presented as the result of their disobedience of God’s command, in effect making them responsible for humanity’s need for reproduction and death—which is to say, its biological reality, which made the sacred necessary in the first place. Like God’s subsequent adjustments of the terms of human life (the Flood, the Tower of Babel…), we should understand this “evolutionary” modification of God’s original plan as the first and most fundamental of several “learning experiences” in which the divine embodiment of scenic harmony discovers the limitations of its ability to reproduce itself in the real world.

If we come to ask in this context how or why God already knew language although he could have no need to communicate with other beings, we may well find ourselves immersed in the kinds of kabbalistic speculations referred to in Chronicle 774: How does God create a non-sacred world out of himself; does it require his “shrinking” to create a space ejected from himself, etc. I think it is better to avoid crystallizing these paradoxes into an ontology. The contradiction inherent in a perfect being’s creation of something imperfect has no real-world equivalent and so cannot help us to understand its anthropological implications, but rather risks the same distraction from the search for human self-understanding as philosophers’ discussions about Being.

For what these reflections make us realize is that—independently of the existence of a self-contained sacred being—to the extent that it would need to know (human) language for the purposes of its own self-consciousness, the very concept of such a being is paradoxical; it would itself need to be subject to the sacred deferral of its “appetitive” will. We might say that the sacred could “know itself” in its own terms, not those our experience of human language provides for us. But given that we can only conceive “knowing itself” on the model of our use of language, there is no basis for further speculation.

From an anthropological perspective, we should understand the sacred as an intuition retrospectively guaranteed by the “perfect” resolution of the originary scene, and the task of human religion as reminding us, through worship of its divine embodiment, of the persistence of the foundation of this perfection in the imperfect world of human desire—which provoked into being the sacred scene of its deferral.

God could not have created Adam as a baby and let him grow into adulthood without raising the question of his biological etiology, which would imply a limitation on God’s power to create him in the first place. Adam and Eve must be created as adults because the adult stage is the “permanent” stage of life, which paradoxically implies both the bracketing of temporal movement (adulthood as insulated from both birth and death, thus not understood in terms of growth or decline) and at the same time, insertion via sexual maturity into the world of temporality. The time-based identity of the child and the post-reproductive adult then reveal themselves as “defective” modes of existence whose reality must be supplemented by adulthood to allow us fully to understand their participation in their species’ continuity in time.

The creation of the human couple “without sin” was in effect a contradiction not simply in ontological but in narrative terms. To make them children who discover at adolescence their sexual attraction as in Paul et Virginie (or The Blue Lagoon) would be to confuse the sacred’s primary role as the source of the deferral of desire with an embodiment of Darwinian evolution. The dialectic between God and Man as it unfolds in Genesis confronts God’s providential care for his human creation with the implications of the power he must confer on this creation in order that it be conceived as recognizing—that is, representing in language—God’s existence, and consequently its own.

In the terms of our anthropology, what humanity recognizes as sacred is in the first place the interdiction of the object of common desire and the need to represent it, to the other humans but also to oneself, and in the second place, the realization that this interdiction is not reflexive but conscious, subject to the will—hence to disobedience.

And concerning the temporal separation of these two experiences: interdiction and power of disobedience, although the tale might seem better constructed were the two elements reversed, so that the interdiction put an end to conflict (as we assume actually happened in the process of our species’ emergence), clearly the human story could not be told that way. Whether or not God could have anticipated “the fall,” the story can only be told starting with the sacred as a providential power beyond human will, so that the introduction of sin, of desecration, could only follow.

The contrast between the respect for the sacred that God decrees and its violation can only be realized as disobedience to a prior imperative: Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor; “I see the better and approve, and follow the worse,” as Ovid’s Medea puts it. And indeed, in human protohistory, following the successful resolution of the division of the spoils among the nascent human community, there may well have been a moment when human conflict as such might appear to the entire community to have been abolished. Throughout history such illusory moments of—shall I call it the end of history?—have periodically manifested themselves.

As for the fruit and the snake and Eve’s female resentment of her “lateness,” discussed in Chronicles 675-676, these fabulistic elements need not detain us if we understand the inherent limits of sacrality itself. As the miracle of the loaves and fishes suggests, if we obey the sacred, material needs will as a rule take care of themselves. But although divine providence allows humans to accomplish great things, it does not change physical reality; it defers and limits human conflict, but does not eliminate it, and indeed by transforming appetite into desire it may intensify it. To call the first sin felix culpa is guaranteed in Christian doctrine by the happy end of history brought about by the Second Coming, but eschatology is outside the province of anthropology.

The sacred as experienced by humans is not “perfection,” but merely the différance of desire, deferral to the need of the human community to avoid mimetic conflict. Animals have no need for the sacred because their inhibitory mechanisms provide them sufficient protection from self-destruction.

Why then, might we ask, do we attach our sense of the sacred to a Being invulnerable to biological mortality? The simplest explanation is that the divine will embodies the will to immortality, in Darwinian terms, of the species to whose perpetuation we as individuals contribute. The paradoxical inconsistency that distinguishes us from other living creatures lies in the human’s ability to represent this transtemporal will within his own mind, not just as an “intuition” but as a scenic reality articulable in language, that is, sharable on the communal scene of representation with any and all of his fellows, under one of the many names for the sacred. If we consider that consciousness of the scene is the first specifically human consciousness, in contrast with animal consciousness whose scene cannot be shared and communicated, then, simply on the example of the party guests and the last canape, although we experience the sacred force of deferral as the effect of an external will, its attribution to “the community” fails because this “community” cannot be conceived as a single interlocutor. The identification of the sacred will with that of the community by, e.g., Durkheim, can only be understood from an external, “theoretical” perspective.

If we say that “God speaks with the voice of the community,” this “voice” is a figure of speech; even a unanimous chant expressing ritual concordance can be no more than that of a mass of—mortal—individuals governed by the sacred will. Whereas even if the notion of the sacred being be as crude as the figure of the central desire-object itself, its will strikes the participants from without. It can be conceived as embodied in a fetish or a place, but what makes the notion of God paradoxical is that however the sacred being is conceived, what convinces us of the sacred’s power over us that we feel within ourselves cannot be expressed or understood in language for the simple reason that the language that we use, externally or even internally, does not have such power over us. The very fact that we “use” it is proof of the contrary. And just as Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s original interdiction, God’s word has over us only the power of persuasion, as we witness in all the great moments of revelation, from Eden to Mt. Horeb and from the Annunciation to Paul on the road to Damascus.

To be part of the human story, in a word, God can be only a character in a narrative. All of theology, we may say, consists in the attempt to reconcile this narrative persona with the omnipotence and omniscience we attribute to Him. Or as the Jews call him, to HaShem, the name.

December 26, 2023
The scene of culture and consciousness II

We may say that the scene of consciousness, or scene of representation, is in itself paradoxical. For if consciousness is an individual phenomenon, such that its extension to groups is always metaphoric, the scene, on the other hand, is essentially collective, so that a scene in which there is only one subject is itself something of a metaphor.

What marks the foundations of human thought as always edged with paradox is the simple fact that the use of a sign, a medium of communication that can only be defined in a linguistic community, makes the idea of a single human engaging in thought paradoxical. I can sit alone and read and even talk to myself, but I cannot pretend that my use of signs is wholly dependent on myself. For even in the sense that animals are self-sufficient, humans are not; their means of communication, unlike the chemical signals of ants or even the vocalizations of higher animals, are wholly dependent on intercourse with fellow humans, a fact of which the sad cases of “wild children” raised without human parents suffice as proof. To think is to manipulate signs whose ultimate source is the human community in the broadest sense; the very notions of solitude, of solipsism, are situated on a mental scene whose presence depends on the deferral or différance that defined the originary instance of human in contrast with animal interaction.

The question of exactly where the “human community” must be inserted in accounts of individual consciousness is only formulable and answerable on the basis of Generative Anthropology/GA’s understanding of the origin of language as a phenomenon that can only have originated within a community, which it defines via the shared memory of its scene of origin. Needless to say, we cannot reconstitute the details of the originary emergence of such a community in the absence of concrete evidence, but we can attempt to construct a plausible minimal hypothesis of the terms of this emergence.

In particular, in reference to the object/referent of the originary sign, however the signing process may have begun, it could only reach a satisfactory solution if the entire group were to become able to share at least passively in the performance of the sign, and in the understanding that it designates its referent as, minimally, of (appetitive) interest to all members of the group and for that very reason interdicted to each single member, forbidding any individual attempt to appropriate it. Indeed, we may consider this sense of unanimity, insured by the unanimous enunciation/communication of the sign, as the first communal manifestation of the sacred. It is this model of the originary scene of language that also allows us to understand how humans formed the notion of the sacred without being obliged, or even able, to presuppose its source in a transcendental divinity. This originary scene provides the model for all the scenes of human culture.

Like the sign, the interdictory presence that defines the sacred always transcends our individual consciousness, even when it manifests itself in solitary experiences such as God’s self-revelation to Moses on Mount Horeb. Which is simply to say that the sacred can never be understood as an experience restricted to an individual human subject. Whatever visions or experiences it may encompass, these are by the very use of the term sacred conceived as belonging to the human community: minimally, the local group who shares the ritual feast and “speaks the same language,” and maximally, humanity in general. And this last, “monotheistic” idea itself could only emerge at a stage of human development where it had become possible to contrast a number of other communities with one’s own, in order that the understanding might emerge that the sacred phenomenon is everywhere one—conceived as the “One God”—regardless of local differences.

The reader of these Chronicles will already be aware of the details of GA’s originary hypothesis and its justification as motivated by necessity rather than chance, and by the constraints of social interaction within a group that has attained a level of mimetic intelligence that has made the inhibitory mechanisms that had functioned to avert conflict among our pre-human relatives inadequate. I need only recall the importance of the Derridean notion of différance, deferral, which can be interpreted to explain as an interdiction of appropriative action the néant that separates the Sartrean pour-soi or human consciousness from that of other creatures.

But neither Sartre nor Derrida explains why such deferral is not merely a chance occurrence but a necessity; it is Girard’s foregrounding of the danger of mimetic conflict that answers that question. And I have also explained in these Chronicles the quasi-synonymity of the sacred, the “will” that interdicts to us the attempt to appropriate an object of common desire, and the significant, which assigns to this object a sign by which to designate it in place of appropriation.

The question then arises: since I first presented the basic form of these ideas in The Origin of Language (TOOL) in 1981, which even received a certain degree of publicity, why is it that they have been simply ignored by the community of those who study the origin of language, not to speak of the sacred—a subject which I began to consider much later? To understand what I do not hesitate to call the taboo that surrounds this approach to the subject of what we may call originary anthropology, the genesis of GA must be placed in its intellectual context, the world of literary-humanistic social science that for a few decades bore the name (commonly heard in Comp Lit and English departments) of French Theory, that is, the intermarriage of the techniques of literary analysis with those of the social sciences that endured roughly from the 1960s through the 1990s.

The GA taboo

The principle that allows GA to claim to deal with the origin of human language and culture more objectively than the empirical analyses that have largely replaced the humanistic social science of the era of French Theory is that GA insists on defining a behavioral scenic origin for all the phenomena of human culture, that is, those which depend upon language and more broadly, on representation. (That this word has itself become taboo in the social sciences and humanities, as though it implied something like the sacks full of objects that Swift’s Academy of Lagado proposed we carry on our backs to avoid using words, is itself a derivative of the taboo on language origin.)

Thus rather than seeking the origin of language and the sacred in the individual psyche as presumably their most “objective” point of manifestation, GA takes the scene as the starting point for all such phenomena. Language did not originate in the individual mind in any useful sense; it is always at least implicitly a social or communal phenomenon, just as my knowledge of a language is necessarily mediated by my speech community. And this is yet more obvious in the case of the sacred, whose interdictions and commands are received by an individual in the context of his communal existence, even if such a command may require him to abandon his local community for another, at a minimum the desert solitude of the anchorite. The key aspect of both language and the sacred is that their primary and necessary function cannot have been simply to facilitate the practical activities of life, but to prevent/defer mimetic conflict. It is in understanding our origin and its perpetuation through “human nature” that we must never forget the key notion that necessity is the mother of invention.

To remind us of how far GA’s originary hypothesis is from today’s standard explanations of how human language came into existence, the following is a passage from a representative recent work, Mind Shift: How culture transformed the human brain by John Parrington, Associate Professor in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at Oxford, published by Oxford in 2021:

If sustained tool use was the initial defining feature of humanity, how did this translate into a capacity for language and accelerated brain development? [my emphasis] Engels believed that increasing use and design of tools made possible by the bipedalism of our proto-human ancestors was a key step in the development of language. As he put it, communal tool use ‘helped to bring the members of society together by increasing the cases of mutual support and joint activity… Men-in-the-making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other.’ During this process, ‘the reaction of labour and speech on the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of conclusion, gave both labour and speech an ever renewed impulse to further development.’ (Chapter 2, “Tool and Symbol”; accessed online)

Parrington quotes Friedrich Engels, not to express solidarity with Marxism, but because he considers Engels to have been ahead of his time in articulating what his own text makes clear has remained the accepted theory of the origin of language. In this theory, the main drivers of the creation of language and culture are not the most fundamental human interactions, but rather the necessities of toolmaking. That is, the efficient cause of the “culture” that transformed the human brain and created its unique mode of consciousness was not defined by the need to avert the possibilities of conflict inherent in the social activities of the proto-human community by restraining the divisive forces of desire, but by activities centered on secondary objects, those whose function is instrumental rather than appetitive. Just as the steam engine may be said to have created the Industrial Revolution, so hand axe-making transformed us from apes to humans.

Citing in 2021 this explanation borrowed from Engels’ Dialectics of Nature implies that reflection on the question of human origin has not advanced beyond what used to be called “dialectical materialism,” for which labor defines the stages of human history. That such explanations are still taken for granted today, with no alternative proposals being worthy of mention, seems to me the clearest advertisement for generative anthropology.

As I have previously stated in these Chronicles, the idea of exploring the origin of language and of the human as something problematic, not explicable by a linear improvement in our dealings with the practical problems of the outside world, but dependent rather on the specifics of human appetite as it impinges on our interactions with our fellows, is never raised for consideration. If this is not evidence of a taboo, then what is?

GA has no pretensions of displacing the “hard,” empirical sciences. It is a humanistic discipline, closer to philosophy (and even theology) than to field-work-based anthropology. As a consequence, we can make a case for it as dealing with a “field” that is essentially empty.

As mentioned above, GA is an offshoot of the para-anthropological domain of French Theory—apropos of which we should not forget that, independently of his own writings, René Girard as the leading French scholar at Johns Hopkins had a major initiatory role by co-sponsoring the historic 1966 conference entitled “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” that brought the major French theorists to the US. And now that French Theory, with its fashionable politics and yet more fashionable—and not altogether frivolous—obscurities, is no longer active, those who regret it will find its fundamental concerns perpetuated by GA, a more sober and potentially more productive endeavor.

As a new way of thinking, proposing a hypothetical minimal basis for anthropology, GA outlines a behavioral point of departure for the human sciences in general, particularly for those that deal with the cultural domain. Its fundamental elements are phenomena of the human scene: language and the sacred. It is surely no coincidence that at the moment when human language is beginning to be generated cybernetically, the sacred as a category consciously affirmed by human communities has known in the West a precipitous decline. Yet this decline, instead of resulting as Marx expected in a new “materialist” realism, has spawned a plethora of bastardized sacralities that have corrupted the intellectual life of our schools and universities, and that have in their favor only the important lesson they have taught us: that the expulsion from our culture of the higher religions leaves not a world of rational-scientific enlightenment, but one of resentment and immorality, as the recent pro-Hamas demonstrations on our campuses so ominously demonstrate.

In this regard, I take as a strong sign of GA’s potential influence that it is not unpopular but invisible. We should realize that this invisibility offers a genuine advantage to those of us who are willing to reject the standard anthropology illustrated by the passage above while disagreeing with the emphasis on human sacrifice in Girard’s own pioneering version of “mimetic theory” and to develop, free from the distractions of publicity and polemics, what I do not hesitate to call generative anthropology’s new way of thinking.

To be continued…

December 10, 2023
The scene of culture and consciousness I

At a time when the AI world is looking forward to reaching not merely superhuman intelligence but “sentience,” it seems useful to seek in the originary hypothesis a minimal model of human consciousness.

My original aim in writing The Origin of Language (UCPress, 1981, henceforth TOOL) was to create a minimal hypothesis for the origin of human language by putting aside all philosophical baggage. Philosophy from its very beginning as a formal discipline with Plato is founded on the basic principle of metaphysics, that the foundations of mature language—language as we know it—are independent of human origin: whence the Ideas whose shadows we see on the walls of the cave in Plato’s Republic.

On the contrary, from the minimal standpoint of generative anthropology (GA)’s originary hypothesis, the Ideas are in the first place words, human signs existing only posterior to the emergence of human language, and existing in the first place in human utterances.

GA’s hypothesis is that the first sign originated as an aborted gesture of appropriation, such as would occur, for example, when two people reach for the last canapé. This sign is an ostensive or pointing reference, presumably with a vocal accompaniment, that would remain in the memory of the human community as referring specifically to the designated object and/or the fact of its designation. Once this non-possessive and apotropaic gesture came to be expected and interpreted as a sign, the need for variance in its performance would follow as a matter of course to distinguish among possible referents, a process in which we must assume that the verbal accompaniment would become the principal vehicle, as it is in virtually all human languages. The focus of TOOL was on the origin of the syntactical forms of utterance, from ostensive to imperative and thence declarative/interrogative, but that is not my subject here.

For although it was not foregrounded in TOOL, the hypothetical circumstances of the emergence of the sign are inseparable from our understanding of language. Linguistics stricto sensu as the study of mature languages need not take them into account, but their neglect has prevented reflection on the originary identity of sacrality and significance, and more broadly, on the key factor that made the invention of language necessary, which is to say, in René Girard’s terminology, mimetic desire.

The originary hypothesis postulates that what made necessary the invention of language was the need to resolve a crisis brought about by an intensification of mimetic tension that accompanied the increase in proto-human intelligence. (See Chronicle 770 for a more detailed discussion.) As a result of this intensification, the process of serial distribution of common goods whereby the Alpha animal takes possession of the whole and removes his share, then passes it to the Beta animal, and so forth, would begin to break down, leading to a state of crisis making necessary the emergence of a new system in order to maintain the group’s cohesion.

Although the phenomenon of mimetic desire was hardly a new discovery, it was Girard’s insight to view it as key to “the human story”—first in the mature narrative form of the novel in Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961), and then, beginning with La violence et le sacré (1972), as the foundation of a new anthropology.

Animals too experience rivalry, but as Pavlov discovered, they are able to avoid conflict by means of reflexive inhibitions that prevent them from seeking to satisfy appetites that would subject them to risk from a more powerful fellow. But beyond unconscious inhibitions such as that which makes us pull our hand away from a flame, humans experience interdictions of which we are consciously aware, dictated by what we call our “conscience” or “superego,” and which are experienced as expressions of an external will, as exemplified canonically in the Ten Commandments. And as the Genesis account of Creation tells us, we are capable of disobeying such interdictions, with frequently disastrous results.

In GA’s originary hypothesis, the behavioral context for the emergence of language and human consciousness is the scene of representation, which emerged as a means for countering the breakdown of the old Alpha-Beta serial distribution system. According to the old system, the hominids would be assembled in a quasi-ritualized configuration centered on an appetitive object—for example, a large animal scavenged or hunted—but this activity would become a scene only once the serial appropriation of the object came to be deferred by what we may call after Jacques Derrida the différance of appropriative activity toward the object (see his “Différance”; Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1982]). The participants, no longer guided by the serial distribution mechanism, would first, like our partygoers before the canapé, seek tentatively to appropriate the object without daring to terminate their gesture, and this aborted gesture of appropriation would gradually come to be interpreted as a sign referring to the object as one that could not be immediately appropriated. Through the mutual communication of this gesture, the group could then come to the point where they would share the object equally among themselves, as in tribal ceremonies that exist to this day.

Once this solution has been found, and the mutual communication of the aborted gesture as the opening phase of a ritual feast has come to be expected, we may consider the gesture to have become an element of language: an ostensive sign pointing at and referring to the object without seeking to appropriate it. This analysis explains the curious fact that apes, who lack the category of the linguistic sign, do not point as we do, that is, as a mode of communication inciting the “joint shared attention” of their fellows.

Derrida understood différance in the context of mature language as permitting the speaker to choose within a preexisting paradigm of signifiers. But prior to the establishment of any such paradigm, différance as deferral is already necessary to permit the differentiation between a worldly act of appropriation and the performance of a non-appropriative sign. This phenomenon is equally understandable as an act of sacralization resulting from the interdiction of appropriative activity, making the referent of the sign for the duration of the scene no longer an object of appetite in the real world but a scenic object of contemplation. Before we can even begin to think of an “idea,” the sign (signifier) for the thing (referent) from which its “idea” (signified) can be retained in the mind must have been invented in the interpersonal context of the scene.

In all human societies there are multiple categories of scenes, which include collective events such as religious ceremonies, stage productions, or speeches, as well as everyday conversations between two or more individuals or, at a minimum, a single individual conceiving or thinking about an object or idea, contemplating an artwork, reading a novel, watching a film, etc. In all these cases, the scenic configuration is characterized by the deferral of the immediate, “appetitive”/appropriable reality of the referent and its removal to the sacred/untouchable status of the referent at the center of the scene.

The scene of representation is the minimal element of what we may call “culture,” the ultimate extension of the domain of the sign. In this configuration, a sacred interdiction cuts off the designated object from the world of action and makes it, whether a thing or an idea, an object of contemplation. This “cultural” or contemplative structure of the scene was prefigured in L’être et le néant by Sartre’s figuration of the pour-soi or human consciousness as a thinking self, separated from its object by a néant or empty space permitting contemplation—in contrast to the non-thinking world of the en-soi, which Sartre figures by the lack of such space, all things being “crowded together.”

Scenic presence, in other words, is mediated by absence. Animals, although able to evaluate their environment and communicate with each other via signals, while learning by Pavlovian means to avoid certain objects, are not capable of the scenic attitude of presence—as one can witness in attempting to get a cat to watch a movie. This is not to deny that animals are conscious of their experiences in the sense of being able to derive information from them that affect their responses as other than reflexive reactions; like Kohler’s ape, they are on occasion capable of discovering through reflection the solution to a problem. But they have no means other than physical demonstration to communicate their consciousness to others, whereas the signs of language allow the human individual to re-present the scene both to himself and to his fellows.

Once the sign has become unanimously recognized by the community as referring to its referent in the scenic configuration, we can truly say that language has come into being. At this stage, the potential speaker will realize a scene of representation within his mind, making its referent present to himself preliminary to bringing it to the attention of his audience by means of a sign.

However vague the first humans’ sense of exactly what is “meant” by the sign, at a minimum, it represents the referent’s scenicity, which as we have seen, is another word for its sacrality: its separateness from the world whose objects are accessible to appropriation. The famous beginning of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Logos, is a capsule account of the origin of humanity and its language.

To my knowledge, generative anthropology’s originary hypothesis is the first attempt to model this minimal human/cultural configuration in behavioral terms. Anthropology’s status as an empirical science has discouraged the attempt to trace all such configurations to a minimal model. As a counter-example to GA, we may compare Freud’s father-murder scene in Totem and Taboo.

It is easy to see that this configuration realizes the essential synonymy of sacred and significant. The referent is sacred insofar as it is removed from the real world and situated on a scene invulnerable to worldly action; and its significance, in the sense of worthiness of being signified (by a sign) cannot indeed be defined otherwise. The communal feasts typical of hunter-gatherer societies and, in a multitude of variants, of our own, depend on the collective, and at root, scenic distribution of the material to be consumed, a distribution whose orderliness was at the origin of humanity guaranteed by the symmetrical renunciation of appropriation for the unanimous utterance of the sign.

Philosophers have often proposed scenes of the origin of consciousness that begin with a single individual somehow coming to focus his attention on some object, after which he will recall it, even invent a word for it, and so on. But this sort of thought experiment violates Ockham’s razor by offering no necessary cause for this supposedly world-changing action, beyond a presumed increase of overall intelligence (measured, let us say, in number of neurons and synapses). Whereas the originary hypothesis explains in plausible evolutionary terms the necessity of the invention of language and the consciousness that supports it, in terms not of the isolated individual but of the proto-human collectivity, which ex hypothesi could only have survived if it had found a way to become, via the exchange of signs, a community capable of self-consciously sharing its resources. The model of the collective feast is the source of the egalitarian idea of morality that underlies even the most unequal human ethical systems.

Within the human community, the philosopher’s scene of contemplation may then be understood as a derivative of the originary scenic configuration. Having acquired the model of deferral of appetitive action and its substitution by a sign that leaves its object untouched, the individual human can then make use of the scene as a source of personal attribution of significance, one that can subsequently become a topic of conversation with his fellows. As a result, our individual attributions of significance can come to be tested in the real world, leading to the pensée sauvage of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and eventually to science in the modern sense.

To be continued…

December 3, 2023
Threats to civilization?

A Nov. 17 article on Newsmax.com by Marisa Herman titled “High Levels of Solar Activity Could Knock Out Internet for Months” reminds us that solar flares, which are a regular occurrence, are capable of wreaking the same damage on our electrical systems as a dreaded EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack from China or elsewhere.

Back in 1859, at a time when electronic communications had just begun, the Carrington Event, a “coronal mass ejection” or CME, “took out the telegraph system,” electrocuting some telegraphists. And although the solar atmosphere has apparently gone through a quiet period throughout the birth of the internet and satellite communications, this period is now coming to an end. The sun is entering a “more active time,” and heightened activity is expected already in 2024.

The passage that most struck me was the following:

In 2013, the late Peter Pry, who served on the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack from 2001-2008, told Newsmax that the “time for action has long passed.”

“We know how to protect the grid,” Pry said. “We should be doing things to protect the grid and not just playing games. We’ve known for 50 years how to protect against both nuclear EMP and natural EMP from the sun.” [my emphasis]
Pry was raising the same concerns years later, writing for Newsmax in April 2021 that “U.S. electric grids and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures, that sustain 330 million Americans, have never been protected from EMP.”

Under [George Mason U. Professor Peter] Becker’s proposed early warning system, he contends satellites could be placed in a “safe mode” and transformers could be taken offline from the grid so they don’t “fry.”

As the world spends vast quantities of energy and money fighting climate change, nothing of note seems to have been done to respond to Pry’s 2013 warning. Assuming that his assertion that we’ve known how to protect the grid for 50 years is correct, the most likely reasons why this far greater and more specific danger has simply been ignored are that (1) unlike climate change, it has no potential for progressive political guilt-mongering and virtue-signaling, and (2) largely for these very reasons, it provides no obvious opportunities for profit-making boondoggles like subsidized windmills and electric cars. With no clear possibility of impact on the consumer market, the possibility of a CME’s having a devastating impact on global humanity could hardly be “monetized” for either vanity or profit; what products could we possibly buy that would replace and/or protect the internet, the power grid, and communications networks such as the GPS system that sustain our daily lives?

Given that whatever is done to the power grid will presumably have little direct effect on either consumer spending or political and personal one-upmanship, this danger seems likely to receive little publicity and even less public attention and funding—until some disaster occurs, after which the CME crisis will dominate the news cycle, assuming one still exists.

This suggests two further reflections.

(1) Does this failure to address such a world-class problem reveal a limitation of the ability of liberal democracies to defend the world’s population, dependent as they are on attracting public and political support by promoting “virtuous” self-sacrifice that at the same time allows the government to pour billions into firms that finance elections?

(2) But given that China, technologically our near-equal, is presumably run by rational bureaucrats relatively insensitive to the interests of consumer society, why has China not been spearheading research in this area? (Assuming it could not do so in such a manner that we would be unaware of it.)

The first question may also be asked a propos of serious if less dramatic problems of Western-style societies, such as keeping the public order in an era of demographic change, particularly striking in now multicultural Europe, but certainly relevant as well to the US, where central cities are full of crime, drug dealing, and homeless encampments, concomitant with the decline of marriage and other manifestations of societal cohesion such as religious congregations.

Some will say that these and other symptoms of the breakdown of the voluntary systems of the liberal social order suggest the necessity, even the inevitability, of the replacement of the liberal democracy that has heretofore dominated Western society by the more authoritarian forms of social order typical of socialist/communist or Islamist dictatorships or “democratures.” But how then explain the neglect in both liberal and authoritarian societies of a will to develop systems to counter possible and eventually probable catastrophic CME damage to the internet and to power grids, and in consequence to advanced societies and their economies around the world?

Does this not seem to demonstrate that in the age of advanced technology, the human tendency to mimetic rivalry is now finally showing itself stronger than the forces of différance, language and the sacred that for tens of thousands of years had been able to temper it? The only sign of US concern mentioned in the article is a grant of $13.6 million to George Mason University and the Naval Research Laboratory. The energy and money (ultimately two measures of the same thing) spent on a threat as vague as “climate change,” which in the worst-case scenario does not risk ending or even deeply damaging human life on Earth, probably dwarfs the grant’s total by a factor of a million—although no doubt not the cost ultimately required for genuine EMP/CME prevention.

As we despair of the cultural nastiness stirred up by the 10/7 Hamas pogrom, highlighting the viciousness of human rivalry after all these centuries of civilization, we might paradoxically find some element of consolation in the realization that, unlike this attack and the hatreds underlying it, the international community’s apparent reluctance to heed Pry’s ten-year-old warning is grounded not in deep and barbaric communal hatreds, but in a combination of self-serving virtue-signaling on the one hand and greed on the other—the same combination that we observe in the alliance between Wokeness and the Western market system (see Chronicle 784) for, to give an example, combating climate change.

Can it be a mere coincidence that the desacralization of human language implicit in the proliferation of AI chatbots has coincided with the revelation of the widespread support in the “civilized” Western world for Hamas’ barbarity? And is it not obvious that what horrifies us, less in the barbarity itself than in its endorsement, is just a more dramatic version of the lack of communal human self-love that lowers our concern for a genuine danger to our species once it affords no immediate hand-holds to either personal vanity or corporate profit margins?

November 26, 2023
New antisemitism for old: Western oikophobia returns to its root

Whether we like it or not, the Jews are the sacred people of Western civilization, which remains for the moment the world’s dominant civilization. And just as the word sacré in French means both sacred and cursed, it should be no surprise that the most outrageously inhuman acts of the past century have been perpetrated on the Jews.

Victimary thinking, now called Wokeness, divides the human community into oppressors and victims, and compels those of the “privileged” oppressor group to purge themselves of guilt by identifying with the resentment, real or presumed, of the latter. As we have seen in the recent pro-Hamas demonstrations, this vicarious resentment is meant to be interpreted as a sign of virtue that allays the “white guilt” of those who flaunt it, in contrast to peers who fail to do penance for the immoral privilege of their social role.

The status of victim in this schema implies a right to rebel against the oppressor, while at the same time removing the rebel’s burden of agency. Thus when on October 7 Hamas savaged its Israeli oppressors, the very uncivilized brutality of the attacks was taken as a demonstration of the terrorists’ state of oppression. To the extent that their actions could be called inhuman, this only proved that the Israeli Jews had deprived them of their humanity.

Similarly, on a much lower level, the victimary status of street criminals in New York makes it impossible for them to be held to civilized norms of behavior and consequently deserving of punishment. These criminals, to the limited extent to which they are party to the decisions that concern them, have no reason not to accept this passive role that absolves them of any need to justify or excuse their conduct: in effect, the criminal justice system as conceived by George Soros and his allies does the work for them.

The case of Hamas and other Islamist groups is very different. However much they seek to turn any accusations of brutality against their adversary, their position, whose fundamental principles they have no wish to hide, is one of conquest. “Palestine” is part of the Islamic waqf or inalienable sacred trust given to Islam, and the Israelis are interlopers whose ruling presence within it is scandalous and illegitimate. No limits may be imposed on the holy warriors who seek to chase the interlopers from their land “from the river to the sea,” and by extension, to exterminate all Jews wherever they are.

Thus it is no surprise that Hamas’ American and European supporters, as multiple demonstrations and acts of violence following October 7 have demonstrated, are stimulated rather than inhibited by the shamefulness of their deeds. Would this murderous enthusiasm be so easily transmitted to third parties if the jihadis’ adversaries were not Jews?

Calling Hamas’ behavior “antisemitic” reduces to a banalized label a behavior pattern with a long history. And when we stop to explain why this term, invented a century and a half ago, has become the universally recognized standard for the millennial phenomenon of Jew-hatred, we are struck, beyond the avoidance of the word “Jew,” by its outdated nineteenth-century racialism.

The latter suggests an obsolete prejudice, not a serious current problem like racism. The application of this latter term to prejudice against blacks, which interestingly enough does not have its own specific name, only increases its power: racism, as our “anti-racists” solemnly insist, is at the very base of the evil of capitalism in general and of the United States in particular, and it has come via its “intersectional” extension to cover many forms of discrimination that have nothing to do with race. Antisemitism, in contrast, cannot similarly be made into a socio-psychological category. It has eternally been viewed as a unique phenomenon. Before the Holocaust, Jews often spoke of Jew-hatred in ironic, almost affectionate terms, as “the prejudice” or “the disease.” I doubt if blacks have ever spoken in this manner about racism.

Although antisemitism had not previously been a focus of Woke demonstrations, it is no accident that it sufficed for Hamas to set off a conflict through actions of unspeakable brutality against helpless Israelis to spark a uniquely hate-filled series of marches and incidents. For Jew-haters have long conceived Jews as the real victimizers of their eventual persecutors, notably since the rebirth of the “blood libel” in England in the 12^th century.

The ease with which today’s Woke leftists, with not a few Jews among them, have picked up antizionism should not surprise us. As the oikophobic elements of Western white guilt intensify, it is natural that its perpetrators should return to Western civilization’s founding sacrificial myth in its elemental form. And it is notable that the demonstrators who identify with Palestinians as victims of the Jews include believing Christians as well in their condemnation, particularly those who see the Jews’ return to Jerusalem as a sign of historical fulfillment.

As always in the ambivalence of the sacred, les extrêmes se touchent. But the strength of Islam lies in the fact that submission denies any value to such paradoxes. Allah is greater, and killing Jews is by no means conceived as “sacrificing” them. They are sons of pigs and dogs, or as the Nazis preferred to call them, vermin (Ungezeifer): objects of hostile attention but of no regard, yet more repulsive than dangerous.

What this unanticipated new outpouring of antisemitic hatred suggests is that in the West, the epistemology of resentment, which is focused not on external but internal enemies, had so to speak been awaiting the moment when the diffuse (self-)hatred of whites, which had been able to be purged only symbolically—and in the American context could not easily be focused on any particular group, given that the “deplorables” were the vaguely defined “flyover” population who served as the “other” for urban professionals—could be given a more specific target. And so the conflict in Gaza has allowed oikophobic whites to ally themselves with all the victimary minorities and focus once more on the one group within Western civilization that constitutes a pre-defined sacrificial unit.

That the Muslim Brotherhood, as the organization that transformed what began with Ataturk as Islam’s modernization into a return to its originally resentful conquistatorial roots, would seek to profit from the affinity of its revolt against what could be conceived as Western colonialism with Nazi Jew-hatred had already been demonstrated by Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini’s attraction to Nazi Berlin. For postwar Israel, a concentration of the world’s Jewish population that can at the same time be viewed as playing a “colonial” role in the Middle East, is the perfect target for both Islamists and Westerners whose Wokeness had heretofore lacked a well-defined villain. Hence the ironic inevitability with which the most repulsive human actions in memory touched off a wave of enthusiasm among those whose most prominent previous target, the police “murderers” of George Floyd, had offered few real sacrificial opportunities, merely permitting a vast expansion of minor criminality that could only give self-hating Westerners the satisfactions of petty Schadenfreude.

The Zoomers who cheer along with Palestinian students on American campuses are not about to gleefully rape and slaughter American Jews; unlike the soldiers of Allah, they have no stomach for sacrificing their lives for a cause. The possibility of such acts by unvetted immigrants is another story; one thing of which we can be certain is that today’s Western world contains many friends of Hamas and Iran who would indeed enthusiastically participate in a terror campaign against the Great Satan.

Whether or not this unanticipated surge of antisemitism in the face of American weakness will encourage the new anti-Western Axis to intensify its challenge to our hegemony, it should certainly make us realize the necessity of toughening our defenses and ending our indulgence to Iran… although it is hard to imagine that Western diplomacy will ever renounce its hypocritical adherence to the “two-state solution.”

And hopefully this new challenge will make us less indulgent as well of the decadent nonsense of which TikTok is the most egregious showcase. I continue to hope—or is it pray?—that Western civilization has not yet gone over the edge.

At the very least, these Hamas-supporting riots have done us the service of revealing the foundation of Wokism in Western culture in the millennial (self-)hatred embodied most profoundly in The Jew, the diabolical self-image in which the resentful fringes of our culture cannot bear to see themselves.

Those who accept Christianity, those who accept a forward-looking Islam—simply, those who have more love than hate for themselves and their fellow humans—have no need for antisemitism. But we must not view with equanimity the proliferation in our own culture of believers in nothing, unable to bear the sight of the One God staring back at them from the mirror of their soul.

November 20, 2023
Why Generative Anthropology? In defense of speculative thinking

In my work in generative anthropology (GA) over the decades, I have emphasized the necessity of referring to the originary hypothesis as providing a model for the basic forms of human culture. I am quite aware that GA cannot be a rigorous, let alone an axiomatic system, but the principle that has dictated this effort has been that the fundamental structures of specifically human interaction, as differentiated from the analogous interactions of animals, can most sharply, that is, most minimally, be understood as taking place within the scenic configuration inaugurated in a hypothetical originary event. The historical uniqueness of this event need not be hypothesized; it suffices that its fundamental configuration can be seen to be reproduced in all specifically human, or in other terms, cultural interactions, whether a simple conversation between two individuals, the sharing of food in a common meal, a concert, a lecture, or the meeting of a political body.

When I am told that the linguistics community cannot consider my theory of the origin of language because I “cannot prove” it, this meta-criticism only renews my faith in the originary hypothesis and the theory of language origin that derives from it. I can only respond that as I understand the scientific method, a theory can only be refuted by a better theory. And in order to refute my theory of language origin, one would have to propose an alternative hypothesis that purported to explain the emergence of the basic utterance forms found in all human languages.

Is the idea that the first utterance was an ostensive true, false, or meaningless? I do not think the latter is a reasonable assertion. The Chomskian language universe is an absolute monarchy in which Chomsky’s periodic revisions of his theory are contested only from within, whereas any theorization of language that does not depend on the genetically transmitted “language module” is simply ignored as irrelevant. But from an anthropological perspective, it would seem that whatever the interest of studying the structure of mature languages, the most fundamental thing about language is how and why it got started, and that an anthropology of language cannot avoid the question of its origin.

In the 40-odd years since the publication of The Origin of Language (TOOL), I have focused my attention principally on the cultural phenomena that the originary scene of language has given rise to, literature and the arts as well as theoretical/philosophical discourse. More recently, I have turned my attention to the domain of religion, which organizes human communities around concepts of the sacred.

Philosophy has as its basis philology, the love of words. Rather than following the pre-Socratics in seeking to define the “elements” of worldly reality, philosophy proper begins with Plato/Socrates and the Ideas. This procedure makes sense from the standpoint of discovering the laws of logical reasoning, using language to derive new truths from those previously established, while reflecting on the principles that regulate the human community, taking the polis as its model.

Yet it seems clear that such efforts cannot discover the origin of language in human behavior, for the simple reason that the passage from no language to language, from no words to the first word(s), cannot be described from within the human experience of language itself. Nor can attempts to derive human language from animal communication produce anything but vague suggestions. For the fact remains that animals do not possess any system of communication analogous to language in the human sense; they exchange not signs but signals, and these activities, whatever their interest in themselves, can provide no explanation for the emergence of what is a wholly new system of communication.

This is not the place to expound in detail my theory of language origin, the latest version of which can be found in The Origin of Language: A New Edition. New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2019. My purpose here, as throughout these Chronicles, is to point the reader to a “way of thinking” that I believe is most relevant to our need for human self-understanding. It is, in a word, to do anthropology in the broadest sense of the term, prior to defining it as a “field.”

In order to understand the origin of language and of the related cultural forms that depend on it, we must begin with an assumption that no previous study of the question seems ever to have formulated.

With the exception of lucky accidents, necessity is truly the mother of invention. But since language is so “useful,” this point is easily forgotten. We imagine language as making life easier even for the most primitive speakers. Being able to tell others that “the food is over the hill” is clearly easier than having to use sign-language—and strange to say, apes don’t do this either! Thus theories of language origin begin with the idea of language as a useful tool that one or more proto-humans tried one day and discovered that it worked.

On reflection it is truly surprising that previous discussions of this topic have not gone beyond this level. If indeed necessity is the mother of invention, how then did the invention of language become necessary? Or to put it more strongly: how did some group of hominins diverge from other related groups by becoming unable to survive without language?

Very simply, humanity is the unique species that needs language and its cultural derivatives to survive. It is only once the source of this necessity can be defined that we will be able to elaborate a truly fundamental anthropology.

What then could demonstrate to a group of hominins the necessity of inaugurating an entirely new form of communication? To ask this question and propose a hypothetical answer arouses a reaction more of pity than hostility. How could we possibly provide evidence for such a demonstration? Any attempt to answer it would be mere speculation, reminiscent of past exercises in what I called the “scenic imagination” (see The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. Stanford University Press, 2007), such as Freud’s Totem and Taboo.

Hence more recent books that deal with the origin of language understandably avoid proposing any such scenario. Can language not be explicable simply as a product of Darwinian evolution? In the past there was indeed talk of a “language gene,” and some even pointed out the necessity for the gene to spread to at least two individuals in order for human speech to get started…

GA’s originary hypothesis is ignored, whereas the “language gene” has quite a bibliography. But it seems obvious that if our use of language has indeed benefited from Darwinian evolution, this evolution must have been subsequent to the emergence of language rather than prior to it. Only once language has become a key factor in human communication would genetically derived superiority in language performance be selected for.

Hence defining the hypothetical occasion or “scenario” of the origin of language is a matter of considerable importance. Why would a group of hominins need to find a new mode of communication?

As a student of René Girard, I remain persuaded by the foundational principle of his “fundamental anthropology,” which is the specifically mimetic nature of humanity, a point already remarked upon by Aristotle in the Poetics. As Girard understood, the more intensely mimetic nature of human desire than animal appetite is the source of a particular danger brought about by the intensification of rivalry for its objects.

But at this point, I part company with Girard’s anthropology, in which the human proper originates in the practice of “emissary sacrifice” of a member of the proto-human community. I nonetheless consider this a secondary matter, since the true foundation of Girard’s definition of the human is our enhanced proclivity for mimesis, and as a consequence, for mutual violence generated by the ensuing rivalries that human desire generates.

We may assume that the pre-human growth of hominin intelligence resulting from the difficulties of survival would intensify this threat of mimetic violence. The discovery of mirror neurons in primates that allow them to “internalize” the actions of their fellows gives proof of the evolutionary advantage procured by this mimetic tendency, while also suggesting the danger that it would eventually pose to the orderly distribution of such things as food and sexual favors among the group.

Apes who kill or scavenge animal prey have been found to distribute it by a serial process, in which the members of the group, or perhaps only the males, establish a fluid hierarchy through individual combats, such that each is so to speak assigned a rank, which we designate as Alpha, Beta, etc., and that according to this rank, each ape will take possession of the prey, appropriate whatever portion it likes, and pass it on to the others.

Given this point of departure, it is easy enough to predict that as the mimetic/rivalrous element grows stronger, at a certain point this serial distribution system can no longer operate; for example, the lower ranked apes might no longer wait their turn but gang up on the higher ranked animals. Whence the increased probability of “mimetic crises” perturbing the food-distribution process, and as a consequence, the growing need for a new solution.

This brings us to the key event of the originary hypothesis: the emergence of what in a somewhat different context Jacques Derrida called deferral or différance: that in reaction to the possibility of violence as presumably attested by previous experiences, at least one member of the group will defer, that is, abort his attempt to appropriate the food object, and this aborted gesture of appropriation will come to be understood by the others as a sign pointing to the object but not appropriating it: a gesture of non-rivalrous renunciation, hence of non-violence, that would come to be copied by the others.

This gesture, expressed as pointing at the object without seeking to possess it, that is, as designating it, is a phenomenon that, however we find it difficult to believe, does not occur among apes, who do point to things, but not in the human mode of “joint shared attention” in which the pointing is a communication between human beings.

This procedure once shared by the group would put an end to fighting over the object, and we may assume that it would lead by stages to the egalitarian mode of food sharing that we still observe among hunter-gatherer tribes. The resulting food-sharing ceremony or communal feast brought about through the sharing of the sign—the pointing gesture, presumably accompanied by vocalization—may then be considered the prototype of language, and the source of the semiotic culture of the human community.

Reflecting on this collective renunciation, we realize that unlike the inhibitions learned by Pavlov’s dogs, it depends in each individual on a conscious decision, but one that is at the same time experienced as an interdiction dictated by a “conscience” or “superego” that we feel to have been imposed on us from without. It is this feeling of imposition by an external force that I have called our sense of the sacred. This term allows us to talk of the sacred without reference to the supernatural beings or forces in which the various religions have embodied it.

I defend the plausibility of this hypothetical scenario simply by appealing to our common sense, that is, to the facility with which we can imagine such a phenomenon taking place. But today’s social scientists have become very suspicious of such common-sense intuitions. When I attempt to present an outline of the originary hypothesis before a scholarly group, the common response is not to judge its coherence or its probability, but to reject it out of hand as unverifiable.

When Sartre claimed that (human) existence precedes essence, or Heidegger spoke of Sein zum Tod, no one questioned such concepts as unverifiable; these are philosophical statements, whereas anthropology and linguistics are sciences. Because the philosopher situates his discourse in a framework that makes no claims of worldly verification, it cannot be rejected as unverifiable, only as not corresponding to the reader’s intuition. But in this way, phenomena such as language—and the creatures defined by its possession—can never be given a truly anthropological definition. To do so, we would presumably have to await some revolution in paleontology that would permit us to reconstruct from concrete evidence a prehistoric event of language origin.

Thus when the churchmen remonstrated against Darwinism, they were reasoning in terms more grounded in anthropology than one might have thought. The Bible, after all, tells us about the origin of language; however inadequate we may find its narrative, it is able to situate this origin in history by conceiving it in the framework of divine creation. But once Darwin appears, in the absence of paleontological evidence, the emergence of such prehistoric phenomena can no longer be conceived at all. And the result of this is that all we are left with are unscientific accounts of language origin in works for the general public. Indeed, TOOL’s appearance in 1981 may well have been the last time a university press published a book on the subject under the impression that it was actually a serious work of “linguistic science.”

No doubt it is not unreasonable to note a similarity between GA’s originary hypothesis, however minimized, and the “just so” stories that take their inspiration from the world of legend and myth. But what this suggests is that, without taking religious texts as examples of scientific discourse, they should be seen nonetheless as attempts to convey anthropological truth. And what this implies concretely is that we must recognize the importance of the sacred per se in human evolution.

I have long been struck by the fact that Roy Rappaport’s insistence in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge UP, 1999) that language and the sacred emerged coevally—and with them, humanity—is never quoted in writings on language, since it seems to smack of contamination of scientific discourse by the “irrational.” It seems to me that Rappaport’s intuition allows anthropology to build on the studies of elementary religion by such thinkers as Durkheim by focusing on the origin of language as the key moment of the emergence of the human in which language and religion are so to speak identical. For the designation of the common desire-object, the food to be distributed, is at the same time its sacralization.

Postulating the originary event of humanity is not creating a myth. It is disciplining thought to find the minimal scenic kernel from which could have emerged language, religion, culture, and all the rest of what is unique to the human community. I make no claim that the current version of the hypothesis is not subject to revision. But I do claim that we must accept the principle of an originary hypothesis, for to reject this principle out of hand is to put an end to humanity’s attempt at fundamental self-knowledge.

Unless, as a younger conference participant once amiably pointed out to me, the very idea of seeking such knowledge, however characteristic it may have been of my generation, is no longer considered by his a valid scholarly project. I can only respond that, if this be truly the case, then with the passing of my generation, human self-reflection in its most fundamental sense will have passed from this world.

November 12, 2023