Author: staceymeeker

The recent decision of the Kansas Board of Education to remove the theory of evolution from the high school science curriculum has made creationism front page news.  Articulating the reaction of the intellectual class, the September 6, 1999 issue of The New Republic devotes two articles totaling nearly three full pages to the refutation of creationism. But these sophisticated rebuttals shed little more light on the matter than the pronouncements of the creationists. While it may be true that “[i]t is not truth for which the creationists hunger, it is meaning” (TNR 11), the unquestioned presupposition that religious “meaning” has no cognitive value reflects a religious epistemology that has remained stuck in the era of Voltaire.

I can cite a more personal example. In the chapter “Science, Religion, and Anthropology” of the recent collaborative “handbook” Anthropology of Religion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), James Lett misinterprets a passage in Science and Faith (1989) as proposing that we should “[accord] religious people respect and admiration” (113), and therefore presumably refrain from evaluating the truth value of their affirmations. In fact, the passage Lett quotes says nothing about respecting “religious people”; what I say is that anthropology should “demonstrate a far greater concern and respect for the form and content of religious experience” (Science and Faith, 1), in other words, that we should treat religion with respect as a source of anthropological truth. By making me sound like a candidate for the Kansas Board of Education, Lett illustrates the difficulty the scientific temperament has in comprehending the distinction between religion as a “personal belief system” about the facts of the world (such as the number of days of the Creation) and religious experience as a source of anthropological understanding–in simpler terms, in understanding the difference between cosmology and anthropology. Theology is often good anthropology but it is nearly always bad cosmology. What people say about God in relation to human interaction deserves our most serious attention; what they say about God in relation to natural phenomena may interest anthropologists, but not geologists or biologists.

Darwinian evolution in its general form is a model of scientific minimalism; indeed, it has so few presuppositions that it is difficult to conceive a serious alternative. The sole essential postulate of the theory of evolution is that creatures that can reproduce can also vary. But even if Darwin could be somehow shown to be completely mistaken, creation science still offers no alternative to Darwinism. Creationism is not an alternative theory because it is not a “theory” at all. The very term is an embarrassment, an admission that the truth of the Genesis narrative can only be affirmed in the face of the hypotheses of modern science by borrowing the outer forms of scientific expression. There are, to be sure, a variety of creationisms, some of which make more sophisticated use of scientific vocabulary than others, but it is the concept itself, not its implementation, that is spurious.

The conception of a God compatible with scientific discovery, who started the universe running and then left it to us to discover what “laws” he designed it to obey, is deism, not creationism. But if God is not merely the clockmaker but the ruler of the universe, then everything that happens in it takes place by his will; invoking this will does not explain the creation any more than it explains the weather. Although it has often been pointed out that the (first) Genesis narrative is in reasonably accurate correspondence with what is known of the evolution of our planet, the attribution of this “evolution” to God as its sole causal principle is the very opposite of scientific method, the point of which is to minimize rather than maximize causal assumptions.

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But if theology is often good anthropology, then there is at least one point in favor of creationism, one that inevitably gets lost because it is emphasized by neither the creationists themselves nor their critics. The real aim of creationism is not to count the days of creation or shorten the age of the earth or even to question scientific theories of the emergence of life. It is to object to the Darwinian explanation of the “descent of man.” However hostile creationists may be to evolutionary theory in general, what arouses this hostility is not the assertion that birds are descended from reptiles, but that humans are descended from monkeys. However slim its scientific credentials, this “theological” objection to Darwin may at least be said to fall within the domain of anthropology.

The emergence of the human cannot be explained by the theory of biological evolution alone, not because Darwinism isn’t good science, but because the defining human trait of symbolic representation is not a biological phenomenon (see Chronicle 173). The point of the minimal hypothesis or “little bang” is that human language and culture can only be understood as derived from the commemoration of an event, of other events that commemorate that event, and so on. This is an intuition that is preserved in religious traditions in the form of “creation myths.” The use of the condescending term “myth” is unavoidable because these stories are not minimal; they go into great detail in order to avoid taking on the appearance of hypotheses. Religious discourse, including that of Genesis, is not “theoretical” but revelatory, as the commemoration of an event of revelation must be. The starkness of the opposition between scientific parsimony and the deliberate “thickness” of religious language reflects the crucial nature of the subject under debate, which is no less than the nature of the human. Each side appeals to a higher principle than the human, suggesting that the human may be defined by the very trait of appealing beyond itself, but not whether one of the appeals allows us to dismiss the other.

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My respect for the anthropological value of religious revelation does not predispose me toward either skepticism concerning evolution or “equal time” for creationism. The decision not to require the teaching of evolution in Kansas high schools is rightly an occasion for condemnation and ridicule. It is a sad day when the religious intuition that there is more to human origin than the procedures of biological evolution can explain is made to justify the rejection of biology itself.

Like the efforts of creationism in general, the Kansas Board’s unfortunate decision points to an anthropological problem–the inadequacy of Darwin to explain the human specificity that is central to religion–but as a means of generating respect for religion’s anthropological content, its solution is worse than useless.

Here is an alternative suggestion. Rather than foolishly claiming that Darwinism is “unscientific,” it would be far more useful to probe its limitations by teaching pupils to reflect on what indeed separates the human from other species. Human language cannot be understood as a biological achievement; on the contrary, our biology–our brain, our vocal tract–is adapted to language. And what of the connection between language and religion? Since they are always found together, should we not assume that they emerged simultaneously, that they are in fact two modes of the same general phenomenon? When we become willing to deal with such issues, we can stop looking at religion as a set of unprovable beliefs that serve to separate us into members of different “cultures” and see it as a means for understanding the specific difference of humanity as a whole.

I am quite aware that the originary hypothesis pleases neither the scientists, who find it superfluous because we are essentially like other forms of life, nor the religionists, who find it superfluous because we are essentially different from other forms of life. But this symmetry tells me that the minimal terrain of Generative Anthropology, whatever name it may eventually go by, is the only one on which the two sides can meet. For the sake of Kansas’ schoolchildren, I hope the meeting takes place soon.

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To accept that the democratic market system is here to stay, that there is no more stable system available to human social organization than one that allows for the free exchange of goods and services on the one hand and compensatory resentments on the other, is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. The very openness of the market system that incarnates its highest value for us minimizes the predictability of future outcomes. Whence the misunderstanding that surrounds the term “end of history” that has been applied to the vision expressed in the opening sentence.

What Daniel Bell saw in his 1976 volume as The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism had been decried by the hyperrevolutionary Herbert Marcuse in 1964 as a sinister effacement of all contradictions through “repressive tolerance.” But consumer society is neither being torn asunder nor congealed into dead unanimity. Even hyped-up versions of the classical bread and circuses do not lead the consuming classes to become incapable either of working or of complaining. No doubt there is a “contradiction” between the sobriety required of the market producer and the inebriation he deliberately induces in his potential consumer. But the consumers are also the producers; they produce in order to consume, restrain themselves on weekdays in order to revel in weekend leisure–far more soberly than the nineteenth-century worker who could only drink to forget his misery. The fact that the average person lives the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” in his own life means both that the contradictions are not allowed to get out of hand and that the real tension between them is not forgotten.

These alarmist analyses fail to take into account the not merely quantitative but qualitative dynamism of the market system, the products of which cannot simply be extrapolated from present developments. They are analogous in their myopia to the early critiques of industrial society as producing at the expense of the workers ever-greater quantities of goods to fulfill human “needs.” In the long term, whatever the sentiments of the propertied classes, the market system cannot operate without generating desires for new products among the workers themselves and providing them with the means to possess them: the so-called consumer society. But in our age, the market system appears to be reaching a new threshold, where it is becoming able not merely to create new products to enhance our lives but to modify our genetic constitution and that of our potential children, to generate complete virtual realities on command–in short, to create and modify information on the same level of complexity as our genetic machinery and our brains. These new capacities not only pose ethical dilemmas of the sort that “ethicists” busy themselves with; they revive fears of social collapse.

The ages of market society are defined by new technologies but the human significance of technique is in its interaction with human desire. However reactionary and irrelevant the technophobia of a philosopher such as Heidegger seems today, our anxiety before the latest scientific advances demonstrates that every new technique for manipulating the natural world holds a potential danger for the human social order. As the market operates to satisfy our desires and to generate new ones, we unendingly play the role of the Sorcerer’s apprentice who risks getting more of his desire than he can cope with.

The first and most common disorder of modern consumption, which decades of exercise programs have not been able to contain, is obesity; because we tend to want more food than we need, the market produces it and we eat it. Overweight is rarely cited as one of our most serious preoccupations, but it offers a simple model of the paradox implicit in the technologically driven satisfaction of desire. But cloning and genetic manipulation pose problems far more challenging than overeating. They begin to impinge upon the limit of mortality that has always framed human desire. Our consciousness of mortality is not in the first place a solitary “being-toward-death” but is turned toward the potential of human violence. As is well known, in primitive societies, death is virtually always understood as a consequence of human or anthropomorphic intentions–a striking demonstration of the fundamental premise of Generative Anthropology. Even in more advanced societies, the equipotence of human violence and “natural causes” remains an essential determinant of our relationship with the natural world. Human violence can kill us, but we know we are fated to die in any case. But what if we remained able to kill each other yet, absent this or other accidents, could live forever? The possibility is no longer inconceivable. Life expectancies have gradually increased over the past decades, and older people (among whom I have begun to include myself) increasingly practice activities previously confined to the young. If even these gradual increases in longevity have become a source of worry for the younger generation, what would be the consequence of, say, doubling our life expectancy within a century?

I have always been skeptical of futurists, having lived long enough to witness many examples of the unpredictability of technological progress: copy machines, ball-point pens, microcomputers. (I still remember an Isaac Asimov sci-fi tale from the 50s that portrays “future” computers as having grown so large that they occupy entire asteroids.) But whatever the effects of this or that innovation, that we are becoming able to modify the information-transferring functions that during the early phases of industrialization still remained the exclusive province of biology is an epoch-making development. Barring a catastrophic return to more primitive conditions, we will continue inexorably to generate techniques that will increasingly permit us to transcend our biological limitations.

These limitations have already long been exceeded in the negative direction by the invention of weapons of destruction powerful enough to destroy all human life. Our success for over fifty years in preventing use of these weapons has been remarkable, and although we should not blithely assume that this success will continue indefinitely, at least we understand what has to be done. In contrast, the constructive possibilities are not only harder to control, their very nature is unpredictable. As yet we have conceived no non-catastrophic mechanism for stemming or even stabilizing the continual generation of new and increasingly powerful capacities for human self-transformation. The social order doesn’t control our weight and, even at its worst, euthanasia à la hollandaise provides but a mild brake on longevity. Yet we can hardly tolerate this laxness in the case of self-cloning or virtual immortality. As the market becomes increasingly able to satisfy our “impossible” desires, stricter forms of regulation and rationing would seem inevitable.

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A modern improvement on the traditional paradigm of decline from a golden age, the sociological model of social decadence most significantly associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau opposes a “natural” social order characterized by a minimum of social intercourse to one corrupted by the increased circulation of desire. Rousseau understood (quite correctly, I think) the causes of this circulation to be les sciences et les arts of civilized life rather than technology as such, but the interactive basis of the model is the same. Today we tend to smile at the pseudo-Rousseauian figure of the “noble savage,” but our reaction to, say, cloning obeys the same structure as Rousseau’s critique of civilization: to put it in GA terminology, a point exists beyond which the satisfaction of human desire interferes with the deferral of violence that culture operates to maintain.

The biological and anthropological knowledge we have gained since Rousseau’s time has added surprisingly little grounding to our sense of the “natural.” In the case of overeating, we have learned to blame our “paleolithic” physical constitution: our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have supermarkets. But when similar biologically based explanations are given for modern anomie, urban violence, the decline of the family, and what have you, this is just Rousseau spiffed up with some Darwinian vocabulary. Sociobiology offers interesting analogies, but analogies between human and animal societies not only lack ethical force, they have little value as a source of practical suggestions.

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Whatever the future shape of the ethics of cloning and genetic modification, I see no reason to lose our faith in the resiliency of the democratic market system. It is no accident that only in democratic nations has there evolved sufficient coordination between science and industry to create these highly complex technologies. The very pessimistic horror aroused in democracies by the extreme possibilities of genetic technology is a strong indication that any applications of such technology will fall subject to the self-protection mechanisms that limit the access to the market of goods and services that might undermine the functioning of the system as a whole.

But the very need for “self-protection” in this context constitutes a historic change. What would it mean for us to possess a technology that could render us virtually immortal yet whose very power made it as unusable as the hydrogen bomb? The analogy is more significant than appears at first glance. The perception that in Hiroshima and Auschwitz human violence attained a maximum from which it had to retreat if the human race were not to destroy itself defines what we call the postmodern era. For the first time, humanity possesses weapons it cannot use and increasingly refuses to enforce hierarchical differences among human groups. Decolonization, the civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation, the rights of the disabled are all products of this ethically motivated renunciation of the technologically possible.

We cannot do more than speculate about the new era that would be defined by the necessity of restraining constructive rather than destructive technology. Surely it would be pervaded by a sense of the limitations of our manipulation of nature, including “human nature,” as means of solving the problems inherent in the human condition. This suggests that this condition itself might come to be understood in more generative terms. The necessity of renouncing our ability to “play God” would reinforce not simply religious faith but a deeper understanding of the anthropological function of this faith than that common today among either believers or nonbelievers. In last week’s Chronicle, I reaffirmed my conviction that, despite the popular view of postmodern thought as nihilist ideology, authentic postmodern thinking is originary thinking. But perhaps only in the still unnamed age defined, not by the Holocaust and the Bomb, but by mastery of information-processing and the genetic code, will the need to view the human in the light of the “little bang” of our origin prove inescapable.

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Most conservative publications use the term “postmodern,” often in association with “deconstruction,” as if it belonged wholly to the Left. In this perspective, the postmodern is less an objective historical period-concept than an ideology disguised as one, less a time than an ideological space in which all values are relative and all cultural edifices are deconstructed, including that of history itself. The postmodern agenda is to eliminate from the past as from the present all objective criteria of social reward, to the benefit of those who would substitute resentment for productive ability. Difference is reduced to domination and domination to sacrifice; whatever the game, losers are victims who deserve compensation, winners are victimizers who deserve condemnation.

Although there is more than a grain of truth in this portrait of postmodern thinking, I do not accept it. I think the term “postmodern” refers to a problem rather than a solution. To recognize the specificity of this problem is to be able to separate the necessary deferral of victimary resentment from the vision of reality that this resentment proposes. Although the end of Soviet communism has convinced almost everyone of the fallaciousness of the socialist ideal, neither the Left nor the Right have yet digested its consequences for their view of history. Postmodernity may well be precisely the period marked by the “end of socialism,” by the reluctance to accept the statistical tyranny of the market as lighter and more forgiving than the most enlightened despotism that could conceivably replace it. Once the necessity of this acceptance has been fully digested, the term “postmodern” will presumably no longer be necessary. But this prediction does not come with a time limit. Perhaps market society will remain forever in mourning for the socialist illusion without which it cannot conceive its own freedom. This is something we can hardly know while we ourselves remain in this phase. At any rate, if a catastrophe occurs to take us out of it, we will know of that soon enough.

If this view of the postmodern is correct, then the truly postmodern way of thinking is not deconstruction or any of its victimary avatars but Generative Anthropology. Yet neither GA nor mimetic theory in general has been integrated into mainstream thought. What then is the situation of its discourse with respect to the general social dialogue?

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Popularity is no index of truth in mathematics or the natural sciences. Thomas Kuhn‘s “paradigms” may not be subject to immediate falsification a la Karl Popper, but the need to test hypotheses against real-world data allows us to be reasonably confident that over the long haul scientists will find the most effective paradigms in their various domains.

The situation is different in the social sciences, not because data cannot be obtained and hypotheses tested and falsified, but because there is no fundamental agreement as to the significance of the results. We know what questions to ask the natural world because our place in this world generally makes it clear to us what manipulations, whether practical or merely theoretical, we desire to exercise on it. Among the social sciences, the field of economics, where we can count on nearly the same degree of unanimity, is closer to the natural sciences than are sociology or anthropology, where academic tradition (the “history of the subject”) plays a predominant role.

The academic discipline of Anthropology can be counted on to ask and answer a fairly well-defined set of questions about human behavior. These are not, for the most part, the questions addressed by Generative Anthropology, whose roots lie not in the social sciences but in the Humanities, in a fuzzy critical domain known today simply as “theory” and that appears to be in the process of dissolving altogether. Historically, GA may well be the last significant attempt to understand the human on the basis of the textual perspective that defines the Humanities, and whose current decline presages the end of the Humanities’ claim to a shaping influence on the public dialogue. By subordinating the textual to the contextual, the current shift of emphasis toward cultural and intercultural studies deprives the Humanities of their raison d’être. I recall hearing many years ago a professor of European history reproach the French Department for teaching Proust, who was little known during his lifetime, rather than Romain Rolland, whose works were influential best-sellers. This old dispute between the historian and the literary critic has, generally speaking, been resolved in the historian’s favor. Today, the contemporary works studied in a (Humanities) literature department will most likely be the same as those studied in a (Social Science) area studies program; indeed, the field is likely to be represented in both programs by the same faculty member.

GA originates in reflection on the literary text reduced to the minimal dimension of the first linguistic sign. Its difference from other ways of thinking stems from its insistence on the cultural and therefore “literary” significance of this sign. Deconstruction, and post-structuralist “theory” in general, puts language at the center of all things. So does GA, except that for this child of René Girard‘s deviant, extra-Parisian brand of “French theory,” language is not an independent force but a distinctively human activity.

None of today’s social sciences, anthropology and linguistics included, concern themselves with originary scenes. Empirical science requires prudent hypotheses that stick close to the data. GA insists on the “minimality” of its originary hypothesis, but minimality with respect to prior suppositions is not the same as empirical prudence. Prior to any attempt at empirical justification, the originary hypothesis affirms the absolute originality of the language-world. The first sign as the name-of-God inaugurates the new notion of significance as applied not simply to objects of great appetitive interest but to the object of an interest so great that it cannot lead to an appetitive praxis. That the sacred is accessible through representation alone is the central truth of all culture, one that leads us to spend money and time on religion, tragedy, and pornography. But the explanation of culture that derives from this truth, however evident it might seem to the readers of this Chronicle, is not that of the majority, who either prudently adhere to one of the anthropologies proposed by the social sciences or, dissatisfied with “secular humanism,” prefer one that is religion-based. Yet the latter generally suffer in inverted form from the same blindness as the former: they think the affirmation of God’s preexistence absolves us from attempting to understand how we gained access to his transcendental realm.

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I have often reflected on Doug Collins’ explanation for the failure of the originary hypothesis to win general acceptance. For Doug, if I understand him accurately, postmodernism merely prolongs modernism’s strategic flight from the center. The modernist understood that in order to occupy the center in reality he had to renounce any claim of charismatic attraction, presenting himself in advance as unworthy in a mode Collins calls “prehumiliation.” GA’s own prehumiliation is the “little bang” of its minimal hypothesis; but minimization of the positive attraction of the center is not its (strategic) denial.

That I am a dix-neuviémiste rather than a vingtiémiste reflects my distaste for high modernism’s snobbish disdain for the “bourgeois,” marked not coincidentally by a certain antisemitism (Eliot, Pound). (We should note that the truly great modernists, Proust, Joyce, and Kafka, were equally obsessed by the “Jewish question.”) Thus I prefer to see postmodernism, with its roots in the Holocaust, not as a prolongation of modernism but as its repudiation, not as a strategic avoidance of the center but as a demystification of it in the service of decentralized dialogue. Thus far, no doubt, postmodern thought has followed Collins’s definition rather than mine; GA is reproached with arrogantly imposing its own centrality at a time when the proper thing for Western thought to do is to accept a (falsely) humble role on the periphery. The alternative is the less hypocritical institutionalized modesty of the social sciences, where the question of significance that defines the study of cultural texts has been excluded in advance.

It is as though (tout se passe comme si, to borrow the formula of poststructuralist irresponsibility) in taking the first human word, however minimally, as not merely signifying but significant, the “little bang” hypothesis goes beyond the bounds of logical thought to appeal to our esthetic judgment. The attribution of significance to an event, however minimal, necessarily involves esthetic participation; we must imagine ourselves as part of the event, sharing the desires of its participants.

For Kant, esthetic pleasure is “disinterested” and the judgment of beauty it provokes is universal. Two centuries of cultural experience permit us to refine these assertions. The Platonic idea of the “Good” is such that its very existence as a universal concept demonstrates its non-conflictual nature. Apostles of selfishness such as Callicles (Gorgias) or Thrasymachus (Republic) are refuted as simply illogical: it can never be in my interest to do what is not Good, even if I seem to benefit from it. (See “Plato and The Birth of Conceptual Thought.”) The “disinterested” concept of the Beautiful takes over where the Good leaves off. In the ethical realm, Kant does not argue that to follow the “categorical imperative” is to act in my own interest, but simply that human reason requires it; in contrast, to experience beauty is to find non-conflictive pleasure in a universal value–because, I would add, the enjoyment is mediated through representation.

In the Renaissance, Hobbes and others demystified the Platonic Idea of the Good with its a priori assumption of the harmony between individual and collective interests. The model of the “social contract” explains my abandonment of my personal desires for the common good in terms of my own self-interest. Today, I would submit, we can deconstruct the Kantian concept of beauty in an analogous way. My identification with the imaginary desiring subject of the artwork is no more automatic than my concurrence in the universal Good; I relinquish my own subjectivity only through an “esthetic contract” under which I receive the catharsis or purgation effected by the work.

Once the originary hypothesis is considered, however minimally, as the potential object of such a contract, it becomes easy to explain its lack of wide acceptance. Its very minimality makes it incapable of competing esthetically with either the historical particularity of religious discourse or the textual mystique of deconstruction, yet it nonetheless requires a contract of participation that the hypotheses of positive social science do not. The logically valid argument that to refuse a minimal hypothesis implies the acceptance of a far more content-rich set of empirical “facts” about human language, religion, and ethics is irrelevant in this context because, precisely, implicit acceptance is not a “contract.”

What then might lead to a broader acceptance of originary thinking? I can think of only one answer: the partial verification by positive science of the esthetic intuition it expresses. My enthusiasm for Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species (see Chronicle 168) reflects its adoption of a scenario for language origin tantalizingly close to that of the originary hypothesis. Another quantum leap of this kind would not only make the hypothesis more acceptable, it might stimulate a real dialogue between GA and neuroscience that would be beneficial to both parties.

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Chronicle 178 dealt with the first paragraph of the second part of Condillac’s Essai sur les connaissances humaines (1746), the preliminary description of his famous thought-experiment in which two children generate human language. Aside from the biblical example of Adam and Eve, this scenario was no doubt inspired by Herodotus’ well-known anecdote about the Egyptian king Psammetichus who, in order to discover the most ancient language, has two children brought up in a language-free environment. Their first observed “word” being the Phrygian word for “bread,” Phrygian was credited with being the most ancient language. Condillac’s experiment is more radically conceived as a model for the origin of language itself.

Here are the details of the experiment. As with the previous selection, I am using Thomas Nugent’s 1756 translation, slightly modernized:

[Chap. 1] 1. So long as the abovementioned children lived apart, the operations of their minds were confined to perception and consciousness, which never cease to act while we are awake; to attention, which must have taken place whenever any perceptions affected them in a particular manner; to reminiscence, which was when they recollected some circumstances that had struck them before they had lost the connections formed by those circumstances; and to a very limited exercise of the imagination. For example, the perception of a particular want was connected with that of the object which had contributed to relieve it. But as this sort of connections were formed by chance, without deriving any strength from reflection, their duration was but short. One day the sensation of hunger put these children in mind of a tree loaded with fruit, which they had seen the day before; soon after this tree was forgotten, and the same sensation revived the idea of another object. Thus the habit of the imagination was not in their power; it was no more than the effect of the circumstances in which they were placed.

This passage reflects Condillac’s thesis that the acquisition of knowledge is impossible in the absence of signs. Associations of ideas in the absence of “reflection” are, in his view, confined to what we now call the “short-term” memory. In determining the content of these mental operations, Condillac sees the human being, as befits the children’s “fallen” state, not as a Lockean perception machine but as a needy organism. What is perceived is, in the first place, a lack; in a secular version of the Fall, the absent fruit tree becomes the object of the first common memory, but one which, in the absence of signs, cannot become an object of long-term knowledge.

2. When they came to live together, they had occasion to enlarge and improve those first operations because their mutual converse made them connect with the cries of each passion the perceptions which they naturally signified. They generally accompanied them with some motion, gesture or action whose expression was yet of a more sensible nature. For example, he who suffered by being deprived of an object which his wants had rendered necessary to him did not confine himself to cries or sounds only; he used some endeavors to obtain it, he moved his head, his arms, and every part of his body. The other, struck with this sight, fixed his eye on the same object and perceiving some inward emotions which he was not yet able to account for, he suffered in seeing his companion suffer. From that very instant he felt himself inclined to relieve him, and he followed this impression to the utmost of his power. Thus by instinct alone they asked and gave each other assistance. I say by instinct alone; for as yet there was no room for reflection. One of them did not say to himself, I must make such particular motions to render him sensible of my want, and to induce him to relieve me, nor the other, I see by his motions that he wants such a thing, and I will let him have it, but they both acted in consequence of the want which pressed them most.

This paragraph describes a prelinguistic “state of nature” where the “passions” are expressed by natural or “indexical” signs (sighs, tears) equivalent to animal “calls,” as well as by gestures. The author’s insistence on the children’s “endeavors to obtain” the object of desire by moving head, arms, etc., serves to emphasize that these signs are not simply involuntary; they reflect an intention to appropriate the appetitive object. I am able to understand such signs not only because my instincts would produce the same cries in similar circumstances but because my own physical efforts to appropriate the object would also be analogous to my companion’s. Yet the difference between voluntary and involuntary natural signs is not graspable by reflection in the absence of language.

Let us note once more the relevance of Condillac’s reference to the Genesis story.  This originary scenario is not based on sensation but on “needs.” The association of the two children, not otherwise motivated, is cemented by their sharing of “passions.” And however physical their “needs,” Condillac describes their mutual assistance in mimetic terms: “He suffered in seeing his companion suffer.” When he asserts that they act “by instinct alone,” he refers of course to their prelinguistic, prereflective state, but this state is implicitly distinguished from similar states in animals by its proto-human mimeticism. One does not aid the other by interpreting his actions, but “both acted in consequence of the want which pressed him most.” The only coherent reading of the last assertion is that, as a result of witnessing the other’s “need,” each acquired this need for himself, making it “the want which pressed him most.” A further turn of the mimetic screw would lead us directly to the familiar triangular impasse of mimetic desire, since the two “wants,” now equally pressing, could not normally be satisfied without conflict.

3. And yet the same circumstances could not be frequently repeated, but they must have accustomed themselves at length to connect with the cries of the passions and with the different motions of the body those perceptions which were expressed in so sensible a manner. The more they grew familiar with those signs, the more they were in a capacity of reviving them at pleasure. Their memory began to acquire some sort of habit, they were able to command their imagination as they pleased, and insensibly they learned to do by reflection what they had hitherto done merely by instinct. At first both of them acquired the habit of discerning by those signs the sensations which each other felt at that moment, and afterwards they made use of them in order to let each other know their past sensations. For example, he who saw a place in which he had been frightened, mimicked those cries and movements which were the signs of fear in order to warn the other not to expose himself to the same danger.

It would be easy enough to deconstruct this model of the birth of the “symbolic” sign; if habit alone could transform the children’s instinctive cries and practical-instinctive gestures into signs, habit should do the same in animals as well. Only the children’s prior God-given humanity can justify this difference of outcome. Nor is this a satisfactory model of the origin of the linguistic sign. Words cannot be derived simply from the “cries of the passions.” Although we can–not without difficulty–voluntarily approximate our prelinguistic “cries” or “calls” such as laughter and tears in order to arouse a desired response in our interlocutor, such action, generally frowned on as dishonest, is very different from using language. (The difference is the point of the gag about the group of old friends who, having learned each other’s jokes by heart, decide to save time by numbering the jokes and just saying the number.)

Condillac’s scenario is nonetheless a groundbreaking contribution to the modern understanding of the origin of human language. By situating this origin specifically in the passage from the natural-indexical sign of need to its “arbitrary” linguistic counterpart, it focuses our attention on the possible motivations for this passage. Nor is it by chance that, in the unique concrete example of the just-quoted paragraph, what the speaker points out to his companion is not a source of food, as modern theoreticians such as Bickerton typically propose, but a place of fright and danger. It suffices to attach this fear to the “want that pressed them most” of the preceding paragraph to generate the originary hypothesis.

Condillac’s cooperative model of language refounds the fallen human species on the family begun by his two children, whose own child is the first “native speaker.”  Condillac suggests that the new baby, finding himself–not unlike the child in Lacan’s “mirror stage”–unable to perform the practical gestures of his parents, has recourse to verbal language more readily than they; whence what he describes as a gradual evolution favoring spoken over gestural language. This speculation anticipates our view today, with habituation to the “arbitrary” sounds of language replaced by the evolutionary development of the vocal tract. For Condillac as for Rousseau, language as the exemplary means of human communication is a “supplement” to the “lack” engendered by the Fall.  If in Condillac the critique of the “misuse” of language never puts in doubt, as it does in Rousseau, its essentially beneficial nature, this is because the human cooperation it promotes never itself becomes, as it does for his successor, a source of mimetic conflict. Yet, as we have seen, the elements of this conflict are present in germ even in the most constructive moments of his text.

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In passing from Condillac to Rousseau, we reach the culmination of Enlightenment anthropology and the beginning of its transformation into the more paradoxical human vision of Romanticism. Where Condillac, like the General Semanticists of recent times, sees human conflict as the result of preventable misunderstandings of signs, Rousseau understands that any use of signs bears the potential for mimetic conflict.

The theoretical centrality of Rousseau’s ideas on human origin, as expressed in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) and the posthumous Essay on the Origin of Languages, reflects his situation at the threshold of true modernity, just before the French Revolution and the rise of the modern market system. This central battleground of postmodern theorizing remains dominated by the deconstructive thinking of Jacques Derrida’s 1968 masterwork De la grammatologie [On Grammatology], which takes the Essay as its focal text. The deconstruction of Rousseau’s anthropological model may be seen as a supreme attempt by the postmodern heirs of the Enlightenment to deny significance to the historical lessons of Christianity and of the modern exchange system by equating Rousseau’s critique of language-as-“writing” with that of Western metaphysics in general. Yet whatever its political motivations, this analysis cannot be countered, as academic conservatives often seem to think, by yet more blatantly political gestures in the other direction. Derrida’s critique of Rousseau suggests despite itself a fundamental anthropology that can be countered only by a yet more fundamental anthropology, one that understands the historicity of human thought, including “metaphysics,” as characterized by the elaboration of ever more highly articulated and more “enabling” models of its own genesis. In coming weeks, I will attempt to define Rousseau’s contribution to mimetic anthropology as the key enabler of the Romantic illusion that mimesis is unnecessary to anthropology.

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Although not one of the big-name philosophes, L’Abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) has a claim to the title of the most significant philosopher of the French Enlightenment. Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines [Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge] (1746) naturalized Locke’s epistemological sensualism in France shorn of its moral and political baggage. The principle that “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses” stands at the head of Hobbes’ Leviathan, and Locke had worked out its consequences for the genesis of our ideas. Condillac’s most fundamental difference from Locke was his refusal to grant the human intellect an autonomous power of “reason” independent of the sense data it accumulated. In Condillac’s model of the human mind, it is not enough to postulate that our senses provide us with the raw material of our knowledge, memory, and imagination; they must also provide the material for signs. Our “ideas” for Condillac are not, as in Locke, independent of the linguistic signs with which they come to be associated.  Condillac anticipates contemporary neurocognitive research in his contention that thought without language, such as animals are capable of achieving, is effective only in its immediate context and leads to no long-term acquisition of knowledge. This reliance on the sign as, one can almost say, a neuronal focus for thought, is also a major step in the direction of originary thinking. Following the logic of this position, Condillac was the first thinker to go beyond generalities about the sensation-based language of the “first men” to construct a minimal scenario of the origin of language.

In Chronicle 176, I suggested that the Enlightenment may be defined in anthropological terms by its atomistic model of human relations. Hobbes’ and even Rousseau’s “state of nature” consists of isolated individuals–males with unmentioned families in Hobbes, both sexes including “single mothers” in Rousseau–whose only human relations beyond the immediate family are with strangers. The mimetic conflict within the minimal social group that the originary hypothesis makes the motivation for human language is excluded from the Enlightenment model. Hobbes, who understood the primarily communicative function of language, could not theorize it as the originary manifestation of human transcendence–whence the unarticulated textual conjunction I described in Chronicle 176 between the author’s description of our “infinite” appeal to the name-of-God and his reliance on the Genesis creation-story as the source of human language. In Locke, the human cognitive apparatus of ideas and signs is detached from human interaction altogether; the human individual is constituted as an idea-maker and language-user independently of any encounters with his fellows.

Condillac’s scenario too takes Genesis into account but, unlike Hobbes, Condillac conceives linguistic transcendence as reemerging after the Fall in a strictly earthly context. His scene is widely alluded to but goes largely unread and misinterpreted; above all, the generative intent of the scene is ignored. Although nearly any educated French person will express familiarity with Condillac’s scenario of “two children on an island,” few recall that the two children are explicitly designated as of opposite sexes, and that somewhat later in the discussion they themselves have a child.

Condillac is a disciple of Locke; the statue of Le traité des sensations (1754) that acquires its ideas along with its senses is an illustration of Locke’s tabula rasa (“Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? . . . To this I answer, in one word, from experience. . . . Our observation employed either about external, sensible objects or about the internal operations of our mind. . .” Essay Concerning Human Understanding II, 1, 2) Both men consider (with Hobbes) the senses to be the sole origin of our ideas. But the experiential context of the sensations and, consequently, the ideas privileged by Condillac is very different context from that found in Locke, a difference summed up in the word that makes Condillac’s title something other than a translation of his model’s: the word origin. Locke is interested in how the senses write upon the paper of the mind; his concern is with the source of a given idea in our sensations. Condillac, in contrast, sees the biological individual as an “originary” being and seeks to trace the origin and progress of his knowledge. The contrast is visible in their respective descriptions of our first ideas:

First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several perceptions of things, according to those various ways, wherein those objects do affect them. And thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet . . . (Essay II, 1, 3)

Let us consider a man at the first moment of his existence; his mind/soul feels at first different sensations such as light, colors, pain, pleasure, motion, rest: these are his first thoughts. (Essai I, 1, 3)

Locke’s conception of sensation is passive and unmotivated. His list of ideas is an arbitrary sampling of the senses, from sight through taste; sound and smell are excluded, the former no doubt because of the possible confusion with the sounds of speech, the latter because there are no simple terms to describe its “perceptions.”  In Condillac, on the contrary, “sensation” is understood not as mere perception but as impingement on a living, appetitive being. Although he was no doubt inspired by Locke to begin with sight, he is concerned not with specific ideas (yellow, white) but with what affects the organism and provides it with its “first thoughts.” Similarly, where Locke’s considerations on language emphasize the cognitive separation of individual speakers whose uses of the same word reflect the different “ideas” of each, Condillac’s originary hypothesis of language is founded on the speakers’ intent to communicate vital needs.

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Let us turn to Condillac’s originary scene. I have used and occasionally modified the only available English translation, that of Thomas Nugent, published in 1756(!) and reprinted in the 1970s.

[Part II, sec. 1] In Adam and Eve, the habit of intellectual operations was not the effect of experience; for immediately after their creation they were rendered capable, by the extraordinary assistance of the Deity, of reflecting and of communicating their thoughts to each other. But suppose that some time after the deluge two children, one male, and the other female, wandered about in the deserts, before they understood the use of any sign. I am authorized to make this supposition by the fact above related. And who knows but some nation or other owes its origin to an event of this kind? Let me then be permitted to make the supposition, and the question* will be to know, in what manner this nation first invented language.

* “In judging only from the nature of things,” (says Dr. Warburton, Divine legation, Vol. II. p. 81) “and without the surer aid of revelation, one should be apt to embrace the opinion of Diodorus Siculus (lib. ii.) and Vitruvius (lib. ii. cap. 1.) that the first men lived for some time in woods and caves, after the manner of beasts, uttering only confused and indistinct sounds, till, associating for mutual assistance, they came, by degrees, to use such as were articulate, for the arbitrary signs or marks, mutually agreed on, of those ideas in the mind of the speaker which he wanted to communicate to others. . . .[T]hough, continues Dr. Warburton a little lower, it appears that God taught man language, yet we cannot reasonably suppose it any other than what served his present needs, he being now of himself able to improve and enlarge it: consequently the first language must have been sterile and narrow.” All this appears to me very judicious. My motive for supposing two children under the necessity of inventing even the first signs of language is because I did not think it sufficient for a philosopher to say a thing was effected by extraordinary means but judged it to be incumbent upon him to explain how it could have happened by natural means.

It would be wrong to interpret Condillac’s opening sentence as a mere sop to the Church. Leaving to God the responsibility of the Creation avoids the problem of anthropogenesis that would become accessible to scientific thought only with the emergence of theories of evolution in the next century. No doubt the children’s status as full-fledged humans precludes the construction of a model of hominization as the acquisition of language. But the preexistence of the Genesis story gives Condillac’s model the advantage over the “natural” pagan one cited by Warburton in the note of avoiding the trappings of “woods and caves” that serve as mere alibis of prehumanity. By reducing the opposition between isolation and communication to the minimal terms of the  couple, Condillac articulates the terms of the “mutual assistance” that in the ancient scenario is simply taken for granted as the result of our emergence from the “state of nature.”

Condillac’s point in the note against Warburton–Bishop William Warburton, 1698-1779, famous for his work on language The Divine Legation of Moses (1737), which included a study of hieroglyphics translated into French–is not to dismiss the religious tradition but to propose a more epistemologically sophisticated mode of transition between the Judeo-Christian creation story and the modern scientific perspective. Warburton’s way of reconciling the religious tradition with the needs of secular thought was to suggest that God gave man an elementary form of language that he was expected to “improve and enlarge.” In Condillac’s model, what God had done in the Garden of Eden, man was required to do after the Fall; the point is not to integrate the two stories but to separate the (divine) creation of the human being per se from the construction of a model of human communication in our “fallen” state. We may reproach Condillac with failing to take the mimetic nature of our “fallenness” fully into account; but his emphasis on desire and lack, in contrast to Locke’s passive cognitivism, is already a creative–and creatively “Judeo-Christian”–step in this direction.

The remainder of Condillac’s “originary scene” will be discussed in the following Chronicle.

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At the time of the Littleton episode, I felt I had nothing to add to a discussion that, however necessary, also seemed necessarily incapable of defining the “real” problem. But seeing the other day the front page of the Los Angeles Times occupied by stories on two independent mass murderers–one in Yosemite, the other in Atlanta–makes me think again of Herostratus (see Chronicle 87), who is said to have burned down the Temple of Diana at Ephesus–one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World– in order to become immortal, and who has succeeded so well that we no longer know whether he ever really existed as a mortal human being.

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Are there more mass murders now than in the past, or is the increase an artifact of journalistic attention? One feature of the phenomenon is the impossibility of defining it in statistical terms. After Littleton, Generation Xers pointed out that today’s youth is collectively less violent than in the past, that our schools are collectively safer. The rash of middle-class massacres is not equivalent to a “crime wave” provoked by a surge in criminal motivation, as with the introduction of a new drug or the loss of entry-level jobs in a recession. The murderers no doubt feed on each other mimetically, but they feed as well on the complacency of a safe and prosperous society. One can base a “critique of pure fairness” on the idea that the better and fairer things become, the more intolerable the situation is for “losers” who fail to benefit from these favorable conditions: a stock trader who loses money in a bull market, for example.

The attention we devote to mass murderers offers two lessons in human mimesis: the obvious one of our preoccupation with our greatest danger, man-made violence, and the only slightly less obvious one that killing a dozen people is the only way the average person has of making it to the front page of the newspaper. A curious mimetic relationship exists between the mass murderer and the general public. Leaving aside the unbalanced few who would follow the killer’s example, his act fulfills for the public at large something like the function of ritual sacrifice in traditional societies. Our “mourning” for his victims, whom we come to know only after their death, relieves our own aggression. This relief may be psychologized in a number of ways: as the fulfillment of unconscious impulses, the projection of hostilities, or, as I prefer to put it, the deferral of resentment. But the sacrificial model is the most parsimonious and therefore the most anthropologically valid. This “positive” function of violence–like that of the Holocaust on a larger scale–depends on our cultural ability to recuperate its effects through sacralization, purging our imaginary complicity in the murders that made them sacrificial in the first place. But this is how sacrifice has always functioned. Nor is the fact that we have neither selected nor killed these victims any stranger to sacrifice, where responsibility for killing is often avoided through the use of aleatory or collective procedures or by entrusting it to a “sacred” individual on the margin of the community.

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The modern market system is characterized on the one hand by the circulation through “product-signs” of the “natural” use-values that cannot themselves be exchanged within it, and, on the other, by the recycling into productive activity of the resentments generated by the failure to obtain these signs. Mass murder brings these two features together in the most radical–and scandalous–manner. The value created by the circulation through the system of the “natural” element of death defers resentment in defiance of morality. Yet the scandal of the mass murderer is that, as the author of a genuinely (as opposed to representationally) irreversible gesture, he cannot be recuperated by the system but, on the contrary, can discount his own scandalous value within it. Herostratus serves a function within the social order and, aware of this, can anticipate, even if he does not live to see it, the reward of publicity that society cannot deny him. The naive cynicism of Oliver Stone‘s Natural Born Killers expresses the self-serving critique of an “outsider” to the system–as though the film’s portrayal of mass murder as entertainment were not the worst kind of pandering to the phenomenon it purports to denounce. The mass murderer is not a “hero”; but his ability to frustrate the system arouses a grudging admiration that, in more cases that we care to admit, is acquiesced in rather than fought against. The Unabomber, for example, is at least a semi-hero for many to whom the marginally political inspiration of his murders serves as pretext to deny, or simply forget, the innocence of his victims.

Herostratus blackmails the system by taking to an inhuman extreme the founding premise of the human social order: the primacy of the mimetic over the appetitive. Thus he sacrifices his life, in principle at least, to the pleasure of being recognized–recognized not within the standard market publicity apparatus, which offers only representations of the “natural,” but as one who, by accepting his own mortality, has turned his back on this apparatus. Like the 1997 Heaven’s Gate suicides (see Chronicle 89), he is a dandy, but one who, like Lacenaire in Carné‘s Enfants du paradis, understands that the most scandalous demonstration of the dandy’s superiority comes from killing others rather than himself.

Since the classic supply curve suggests that the publicitary attractiveness of acts of mass murder would grow with their increasing rarity, stamping them out altogether would require the eradication of the Herostratus syndrome from the entire population–hardly a realistic assumption. This does not make any less clear the ethical imperative we as individuals and collectivities should follow to prevent them: act so as to defer resentment. In most private cases, to implement this ethic is simply to follow the moral model brought to the fore by the Judeo-Christian tradition. But on a broader scale, implementation is a matter of serious policy decisions. It might help just a bit if policy-makers, who read the same headlines as the rest of us, were more clearly aware of this goal.

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The recently revived inquiry into the origin of language has its roots in the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century saw numerous works explicitly devoted to the origin of language(s) and still more, such as Condillac‘s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), that were centrally concerned with the subject. Most of these works were not founded on anthropological or even linguistic research; they were thought-experiments that sought to understand how perceptions and sensations could give rise to signs. (The most authoritative scholarly reference is still Hans Aarsleff‘s papers collected in From Locke to Saussure, Minnesota UP, 1982.)

Equally characteristic of the Enlightenment are the attempts, begun somewhat earlier, to conceive of the origin of human society. Two of these, Thomas Hobbes‘ Leviathan (1651) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), may arguably be considered as defining the intellectual and chronological limits of the Enlightenment as an active intellectual force.

Hobbes and Rousseau are traditionally viewed as exemplifying opposite conceptions of human nature. For the first, the “state of nature” is one of universal strife, the war of all against all; for the second, it is an idyllic world not yet contaminated by the evils of human sociability that civilization brings to the fore.

Although this contradiction is well grounded in the works of both writers, the traditional view nonetheless reflects a superficial understanding of the problem of human interaction that their thought serves to illuminate. On the fundamental issue, Hobbes and Rousseau are essentially in agreement. Both anticipate and at the same time fall short of the mimetic model of human interaction that is the basis of Generative Anthropology, which situates the essential problem of human violence within the minimal social group (e.g., a hunting band), at a level intermediate between the family and the potentially hostile “state of nature.” The excessive optimism of Enlightenment social thought is a consequence of its failure to situate the human potential for mimetic violence at the very core of human interaction.

Despite their differences, Hobbes and Rousseau were more acutely aware of the phenomenon of mimetic desire than any theorist before René Girard. (Leviathan I, 13: “if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies”; Discours II: “the sociable man, always outside himself, only knows how to live in the opinion of others.”)  Both understood that it is the mimetic nature of human desire rather than scarcity or even inequality that causes the particular problems of human society, and both made the need to hold this desire in check the sine qua non of a viable polity. Yet both Hobbes and Rousseau expel mimetic desire and its attendant potential for violence from the central core of the human community into the “state of nature” of external relations among men–the gendered term “men” is necessary, as I will show below. The difference between Hobbes’ famous description of life anterior to the contractual establishment of “commonwealth” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (ibid) and Rousseau’s picture of the healthy, happy “savage” is entirely attributable to their very different assessments of the intensity of these external relations. For both understand “society,” whether Rousseau’s société commencée or Hobbes’ commonwealth, as constituted by the coming together of isolated individuals rather than as the already-existing matrix of humanity.

This construction of human society, contrary as it may be to the ideas of modern anthropology, appears somewhat less radically atomistic if we attend to the gendered nature of the term “man.” A “man” in Hobbes’ terminology and even–less consistently–in Rousseau’s is not simply an atomic human being but the implicit head of a family, as is borne out by Hobbes’ description of the nuclear family as a miniature monarchy (II, 20: “Of Dominion Paternal, and Despotical”). However abstract may be Hobbes’ description of the “state of war,” we should imagine it as existing among patresfamilias rather than among humans in general. The model of the Western nuclear family is to blame for the failure of Enlightenment social thought to include potential competitors within the minimal social group. When rivals meet, it is as strangers, members of different (family) units. In Hobbes’ model, based on his own developed and demographically dense society, one comes upon strangers so regularly that one lives in a state of perpetual terror and hostility. In Rousseau’s model, which takes from preromantic ethnography the vision of a simpler and sparser world, one meets others so rarely that mimetic vanity has no opportunity to develop. The words seul (alone) and solitaire recur constantly in Rousseau’s description; he reproaches Hobbes with having situated in the “state of nature” the mimetic problems that, in his view, belong exclusively to constituted “society.”  In an anti-Hobbesian example, Rousseau’s “savage” confronted by an aggressor prefers abandoning his meal and finding another elsewhere to fighting for it.  But beneath their disagreement, the “social contract” functions similarly in both writers to unite persons only externally related to each other. It is no accident that their models of the constitution of human society focus on its highest-level structure, the state. Hobbes shares with Rousseau the Enlightenment’s characteristic failure to appreciate that the minimal human group must solve the problem of deferring internal mimetic conflict before an external “state of war” among groups or individuals can come into being.

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Hobbes, as the founder of Enlightenment political thinking, is not concerned to create a scenario for the origin of language. His remarks surrounding the “invention . . . of speech” (I, 3 – 4) nonetheless already reveal the generative paradox that Rousseau will make explicit. (The glosses in brackets are from the original text.)

Those . . . faculties . . . which seem proper to man only . . . proceed all from the invention of words, and speech. For besides sense, and thoughts, and the train of thoughts, the mind of man has no other motion; though by the help of speech, and method, the same faculties may be improved to such a height, as to distinguish men from all other living creatures. [Infinite] Whatsoever we imagine is finite. Therefore there is no idea, or conception of any thing we call infinite. . . . When we say any thing is infinite, we signify only, that we are not able to conceive the ends, and bounds of the things named; having no conception of the thing, but of our own inability. And therefore the name of God is used, not to make us conceive him, for he is incomprehensible; and his greatness, and power are unconceivable; but that we may honour him. . . .

[Chapter 4: Of Speech] [Original of speech] But the most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of SPEECH, consisting of names or appellations, and their connexion; whereby men register their thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves. The first author of speech was God himself; that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight […]

To sum up these consecutive paragraphs in Hobbes’ text, we find

(1) speech is what sets us above other animals;

(2) the name of God–the first “name” or word mentioned in the text–does not designate a concept but serves to “honor” or worship God;

(3) without speech we would not have the “peace” of human culture but would live in a state of violence like wolves;

(4) God is the source of speech.

A superficial reading of this passage with regard to the origin of language, seeing only (4), would dismiss Hobbes as a “creationist,” but the humanistically trained reader will note that before God “authors” speech in (4), he has already been named by humans in (2). The symmetry of the two references to God is accentuated by the fact that (3) is only an elaboration of (1) that makes more explicit language’s role in deferring violence. (4) follows naturally from (3): having been told that speech was a “noble . . . invention,” we expect to learn whose invention it was. (2), in contrast, does not follow from (1) at all. It concludes a chapter (I, 3) entitled “Of the Consequence or Train of Imaginations,” where Hobbes discusses what he calls in the quoted passage our “train of thoughts”; (2)’s raison d’être appears to be to conclude the chapter with discussion of an unimaginable entity, the infinite, as a limiting case. But the infinite is the only “imagination” in the chapter to become associated with a “name,” that is, with a speech act, the capacity for which distinguishes man among all creatures.

Thus, in the order of the text, the God who is the author of speech has already been named by us, not as a concept, but in a vocative–we may say, an ostensive–act of honoring. The connection of these ideas is, to be sure, not elaborated into an explicit anthropological model, but it is sufficiently rigorous to warrant our “honouring” Hobbes himself as the first substantial predecessor of Generative Anthropology.

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By the time the question of the origin of language reaches Rousseau, the “sandwich” between the two mentions of God in Hobbes’ text has been tightened into a paradox. This most anthropologically sophisticated of Enlightenment thinkers was far more aware than Condillac or Maupertuis of the paradoxical difficulty of the task of reconstructing the origin of the sign without presupposing what one is attempting to generate. (Discours I: “If men needed speech in order to learn to think, they needed even more to know how to think in order to find speech.”) By making this paradox explicit, Rousseau makes it clear that the significance of language origin for the Enlightenment in its mature, post-Lockean phase is to permit opening up a space, unavailable in Hobbes, in which the human can be defined prior to the emergence of mimetic desire. The equation of the origin of the human with the origin of language thereby allows the construction of a parsimonious “secular” model of the emergence of human difference to replace the revealed creation story of Judeo-Christian tradition–the anthropological value of which we should not make the Voltairean error of dismissing.

If Hobbes is not yet concerned to open this prelapsarian space, Rousseau is interested in the space as humanity’s true habitat rather than in its function as the locus of (language) origin. Condillac’s straightforward Enlightenment atomism can only be conceived in a primordial utopia. This sets the stage for the nineteenth century’s turn away from a priori models to more narrowly historical, and national, conceptions of “origin”–a phenomenon already visible in Rousseau’s own posthumous “Essai sur l’origine des langues.”

*  *  *  *  *This discussion will be continued over the next few Chronicles, in which I intend to deal with Locke, Condillac, Rousseau, and Herder as theoreticians of the origin of language.

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There is something to be said for the pragmatist notion that no ideas are true or false in themselves, that what counts is whether they “work.” The real question is what counts as “working”? Many ideas appear to “work” for large groups of people to which it doesn’t seem useful to assign a truth value. An article in the July 23 Los Angeles Times described the Chinese government’s persecution of the Falun Gong sect, seen as a potential threat to the regime. This cult, whose leader Li Hongzhi resides in New York, has several million adherents in China. Is Li truly the “savior” of these people? His doctrine appears to bring its followers something of the inner peace traditionally granted by sacrificial ritual in a world where ritual is no longer practiced. The power of any cult over its adherents comes from its ability to translate these originally collective violence-deferring practices into terms accessible within their daily lives. If the idea of a Wheel of Law spinning in my abdomen is to bring me inner peace, it must project the assurance that I am not a potential victim of mimetic violence. Although it appears easy for outsiders to separate the content of such an idea from the anthropological truth it incarnates, this becomes more difficult in the “higher religions” where a specific historical event, such as the preachings and crucifixion of Jesus, is the occasion for a much more complex anthropological vision.

How should we deal with this question at the very highest level, that of the minimal notion of the human as hypothesized by generative anthropology? Is this construction, however minimal, ultimately just a means of experiencing a more intellectual variant of the peace provoked in the Falun Gong by attending to the Wheel of Law in their bellies, or does it convey a useful anthropological truth? But how is the context of “useful” to be defined? If we think of ourselves as human scientists, then what is useful is what allows us to construct a logically consistent anthropology in the peaceful realm of “theory.” But we may equally well see ourselves as humanists whose vision of the human is subject to the paradox of culture that defers violence without ever freeing itself altogether from violence. I have always conceived generative anthropology as standing in the interface between the scientific and the humanistic visions, making itself as nearly punctual as possible in order to avoid occupying territory on either side.

Why then do we need to postulate an “originary scene”? The emergence of modern homo sapiens in the ancestral line that split off from the common ancestor of the chimpanzees some four million years ago comprises many stages, at any one of which we may declare that “humanity” has come into being: upright posture, permanent tools, fire, hunting… and, of course, language and ritual. And even if we consider language the essential quality of humanity, since fully-developed language capacity probably emerged over some millions of years, why is it necessary to fix on some particular moment as “originary”?

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An example of the latest scientific thinking about language is Sydney Lamb‘s Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language (John Benjamins, 1999), which constructs a detailed and plausible model of how the operations of language might be realized in the brain. In this “neurocognitive” model, language is a set of connections between sound-production and -detection systems on the one hand and conceptual meanings on the other. Lexical units or “lexemes” are not symbolic entities “stored” in memory and “retrieved” for use, but “nections” or nodes in a network, “recruited” by experiences of association; our linguistic memory, unlike that of a computer, has no existence outside the processing network itself. From the standpoint of this model, as Lamb affirms, to speak of an origin of language is naïve–the very notion of “language” is naïve. There are merely connections, and any “mutation” in which Darwinians might be tempted to locate the origin of language is just one among countless thousands through which the hominid brain has evolved to its current level of connectivity. For Lamb, the defining moment of origin that linguist Derek Bickerton calls the “magic moment” or the “Rubicon” (see Chronicle 167) and that brain researcher Terrence Deacon feels obliged to justify by a mutation of the protohuman social order (see Chronicle 168) is an illusion based on our reifying as “language” what is merely connectivity. As Lamb puts it, the human brain handles language not as the stomach digests food but as the right foot operates a car’s accelerator. Hence although language generally involves the left brain and phonology, it can be implemented by the right brain and by hand signals. Connectivity is all, and the qualitative difference between human and animal communication systems reflects a gradual, genetically selected increase in connectivity over thousands of generations.

No minimalist thinker can dismiss this radical attempt to abolish the reification of language and its origin. But can we meditate on the implications of language as a proliferation of connectivity without some idea of what drove our species toward this proliferation? Lamb would presumably reply that, in the study of brain function or the modeling of linguistic processes in the brain, such speculation is a distraction; to attempt to tell exactly at what point the neural network becomes “human” is to set up an artificial boundary that corresponds to nothing in the network itself. Whatever motivations in hominid social structure there may have been for this cognitive development would be irrelevant. The challenge raised by Lamb’s model is not so much to find a place within it to situate our “originary scene” as to show how doing this is relevant to the model.

Let us then imagine the prelinguistic state of the brain. It contains conceptual links or associations between perceptual traces; it also contains links between such traces and vocal productions or “calls.” Although Lamb does not make the distinction, the brain pathways for calls must be distinguished from those for words. Humans have a few “calls” of their own–laughter, sobs, gasps–qualitatively different in both form and operation from the signs of language. Hence the question of the origin of human language is not evacuated by a description of the multiplicity of its connections in the brain. Even if Lamb’s gradualism is justified with respect to the conceptual nodes that exist in primate (and lower mammal) brains as well as ours, this cannot be the case for the lexical nodes that link the conceptual nodes to centers of phonological production. Lamb’s concern to establish human continuity with the prehuman on the “higher” conceptual plane seems to have led him to overlook the problem that the origin of language poses on the “lower” physical plane. A chimp is mentally equipped with concepts and, although lacking in human speech organs, physically capable of creating linguistic signs. But what is lacking in the chimp, and what he can only acquire at the most elementary level through intense special training by humans, is a set of “nections” between the signs, be they vocal or gestural, and the concepts.

Researchers have succeeded, on a modest scale, in teaching chimps and bonobos to use language. But the demonstration of this possibility, far from disproving the originary hypothesis (as some have claimed), only corroborates it. No one contests that the human brain is far better adapted to language than the bonobo’s, nor that this adaptation is the result of (at least) hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, at the outset of which our gifts for language must have been far more limited than they are now. If we assume that it was language that made humans diverge from the ancestral lines that eventually led to chimps and bonobos, then at the origin of this divergence, our language abilities must have been pretty much the same as theirs. Let us grant, for argument’s sake, that those of the protohuman line did not exceed those of the bonobo today. But bonobos don’t use language in their natural environment; they do so only when trained by humans. This implies that it is not their “natural endowment” that led humans to invent/discover language, but the particular circumstances in which they found themselves. If protohuman and bonobo do not differ in language ability, some other explanation must be found for the difference in their use of language. Teaching chimps to use signs only reminds us of this; it doesn’t tell us why we talk and chimps don’t.

I don’t pretend to have any particular insights into the evolution of the cerebral cortex. But it is clear a priori that a model of language that cannot discriminate between a call and a word or “lexeme” is inadequate. Whatever the nature of the linguistic sign, its use involves a new kind of withdrawal from the world of appetitive association–Bickerton’s “off-line processing”–that requires explanation.

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The fact that we can now model specific operations of the brain where previous generations had to be content with the old metaphysical vocabulary of “thinking” and “willing” does not preclude the need for an originary hypothesis to explain the emergence of human language. On the contrary, by making more precise the nature of the brain’s linguistic function, recent research–as Deacon’s book suggests–makes such a hypothesis all the more plausible. But this research makes it incumbent on those of us who work with this hypothesis to take these latest discoveries into account. It may still be a bit premature to attempt to describe our internal scene of representation in terms of neurons and synapses, or even of “nections,” but we should prepare ourselves for the day when a hypothesis that lacks such a description will be dismissed as the product of an outmoded way of thinking.

I would not end on a negative note. Lamb’s book dismisses the origin of language, yet it is not uncongenial to GA’s minimalism: one explains all by mimesis, the other, by connectivity. The originary hypothesis describes the genesis of language in a mimetic crisis; how could this genesis have created the first linguistic “nection” in the brain? What makes such “nections” possible and necessary in the brain can only be what makes the linguistic sign possible and necessary in the originary scene: an inhibition of “horizontal” appetitive associations of the sort possessed by calls, but not by words. Before there could have been “language areas” in the brain, Wernicke‘s or Broca‘s, there was created a new kind of “nection” between a concept and a sign that suspended rather than provoked appetitive action. Whatever the phonic and/or gestural substance of the first sign, its connection with its “signified” or concept must have been mediated by the necessity of substituting for such action the communication of the signer’s renunciation of it to his fellows. I will leave it to brain researchers to tell us how this was implemented neurocognitively, but I find it hard to imagine what finding of theirs could persuade me that it was not.

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One way of defining the end of history is as the moment when it becomes impossible to tell stories about humanity as a whole, what Jean-François Lyotard called “master narratives.” The source of this impossibility is the incompatibility of narrative with dialogue. While I’m telling a story, you can’t intervene. While we’re having a conversation, there is no “story.” At the end of history, dialogue is all, history nothing.

The end of history is nowhere more apparent than in Western religion. Although not long ago each religion claimed to tell the uniquely true story of the world, today such claims are considered in poor taste. To insist that my religious tradition alone lends meaning to history makes me unfit for dialogue with members of other traditions. Dialogue is conceived as transcending the particularity of religious history. But maintenance of this dialogue depends on excluding the basic fact of its own history, which is that this substitution of dialogue for history arose and is still centered in the Christian West.

In religious dialogue we refer to the origin of our beliefs and practices in specific revelations: Mohammed was told–and told us–this, Moses that. But because the dialogue cannot reflect upon itself as a historical reality in its own right, it cannot function as a Hegelian dialectic progressing toward a new synthesis. The separate histories that enter into our conversation reveal not the truth of the world to which the beliefs and practices give meaning, but only that of the beliefs and practices themselves. Although I can tell you their historical source, I cannot claim that my beliefs are “truer” or my practices “better” than yours.

This mutual tolerance emerges nonetheless in a competitive marketplace where the worse is constantly replaced by the better, the falser by the truer. Unlike the dialogue of belief, market exchange generates a historical dialectic. In its early days, the West’s economic superiority was accompanied by imperialist arrogance. The assurance that its system was destined to replace all others served to justify colonization and the acquisition of spheres of influence. Yet there arose in tandem with this arrogance a fascination with other religions “in themselves.” If today’s “multicultural” dialogue–with its denial of Western Christianity’s privileged status–began anywhere, it is with the “imperialist” founders of modern anthropology such as Tylor and Frazer. It was rather the anti-imperialist Marxists who maintained the Hegelian vision of religion as destined by the historical dialectic to transcend itself in “philosophy.”

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In the imperialist age, religion was alternatively a primitive mode of thought destined to pass away and a transhistorical set of anthropological themes. The pathos of early ethnography is founded on the idea that “we” of the West are rapidly destroying the ecological conditions on which primitive societies depend. We need to engage in dialogue with these societies, yet such dialogue is not really possible. This tragic mode reaches its apogee in Lévi-Strauss‘s Tristes tropiques.

Modern multiculturalism takes a different tack. In a world already wholly penetrated by the Western exchange-system, it insists that all extant cultures participate in dialogue rather than in the “master narrative” of Western triumph. In the domains of artistic and religious practice, this dialogue produces local syncretisms that in turn contribute to the variety of “Western” culture. But the ineffable triumph-narrative that haunts the postmodern enterprise continues to trivialize all other narratives. It is not that we “can no longer tell stories,” or even that we no longer believe in them; we “believe” in our own so well that we fear to hear it.

Our fear is not unjustified. The market system can progress only by making all cultural elements equally marketable. The multiculturalist who proclaims his disdain for Western “imperialism” is unknowingly the most effective agent of the penetration of non-Western cultures by Western “values,” primary among which is the meta-value that cultural phenomena should be understood as incarnating values rather than laws of uniquely correct behavior. Those who best grasp this paradox are not the golden liberals of multiculturalism and their “third-world” adjuncts but the Islamic militants who fanatically reject all commerce with the West because they understand that once the dialogue is engaged, the “West” wins by definition: “dialogue” is a Western concept, the equivalent of market exchange in the ideological sphere.

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The usual understanding of the end of history is as the attainment of the final state of human organization, as Francis Fukuyama describes liberal capitalism. Fukuyama shares Hegel’s idea of the end of history as the end of the dialectic and therefore of all essential discourse. In Marxist terms, this translates into the “realm of freedom” where history ends because we have been liberated from causality; if my choices at moment B are not limited by my prior decisions at moment A, then I have no “history” and my life is a series of independent moments. And although the absolute liberation of socialism is a chimera, the market system liberates relatively by providing a constantly expanding set of options. The story of this year’s trip to France has an ever-diminishing narrative value both because nearly everyone else has already been there and because I can go nearly anywhere else next year.

The end of history is not an achieved state like death but an ever-open frontier between the historical and the posthistorical age. On the one hand, the end of history defines an opposition between winners and losers; in this respect, it is not the least but the most historical of moments. This is the tone of Fukuyama’s famous article and of his subsequent writings on the subject. But on the other hand, the end of history is also the end of the historical structure within which events are given historical meaning. Thus as soon as we say that the West has “won,” we abolish the very idea of “winning”: the world becomes just one big decentered exchange-system. This does not prevent us from creating narratives, but it undermines their pretension of being “history” rather than arbitrarily selected partial series of interactions. The complacent proclamation of the death of the Subject in Postmodern “theory” is an unconscious paean to the marketplace where outcomes are determined through interaction rather than by a central ego.

What are the implications of the “end of history” for narrative? I would not be so presumptuous as to claim world-historical status for my own increasing impatience with fiction in any form more challenging than film. Individual lives still have their constraints and their goals, their comic or tragic outcomes. But–this is the insoluble problem of the novel since Proust–the consistency of character that lends concreteness to fiction is constantly menaced by the author’s implicit assertion that all that matters in life as in art is the reader’s submission to the narrative discourse itself. Novelistic characters who once shared normal worldly goals now simply want to be “famous,” to interest us in their story; to the extent that they do not, their desires are trivialized or sentimentalized like those of ethnic characters in the movies. I think we have gone too far along the road of Mme Bovary, c’est moi! for narrative fiction to remain a mode of anthropological discovery.

The end of history, as readers of Hegel will recall, is also the end of art, religion, and even philosophy. It is the end of cultural or “humanistic” discourse, but not of discourse as such; that of science will only be encouraged by the elimination of its traditional competitor.   In this light, we can understand both the finality and the relative obscurity of generative anthropology’s little bang. Originary thinking as the final mode of “theory” evacuates all the classical philosophical problems at precisely the moment in which they cease to be of interest. But better a little bang than a big whimper.

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Ever since Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976) floated the idea of a cultural unit called the meme analogous to the biological gene, the term has been used in many places with about as many meanings. A number of GAlist members have wondered about the similarity of the memetic to the mimetic and the value of the various attempts to build a theory of memetics.

A supposedly scientific term whose usage shows no sign of converging on a publicly accepted definition should arouse suspicion. Pseudo-science always relies on the suggestive power of words rather than models. That memes turn up in the writings of pop psychologists and in the motivational hocus-pocus of such doctrines as spiral dynamics–about which I was privileged to learn (until my patience ran out) at the recent COV&R meeting in Atlanta–hardly reflects well on its scientific credentials. Although most writers’ idea of a typical meme is a minimal snatch of music such as the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, the spiral dynamicist presented memes as the (color-coded) mental equivalents of the stages of human social evolution, roughly from terror before the supernatural through submission to reason to self-governing freedom. Whatever truths about human organization may have found their way into this Comtian scheme, the word “meme” added nothing to their perspicuity.

Recently a friend recommended to me a book that made a more intelligent use of Dawkins’ concept: Cultural Software by J. Balkin (Yale, 1998). But rather than persuading the reader of the value of memetics, this book supplies its reductio ad absurdum. Balkin is a serious, well-informed writer, and his functionalist software metaphor allows him to score points against “postmodern” thinking a la Foucault that fetishizes “discourse” into an independent controlling force. But Balkin fails to realize that while pointing out the failings of fashionable social theory, he is putting nothing in its place. Although he deals in cogent detail with a wide variety of cultural phenomena from the aesthetic to the political, because he lacks a concept of the fundamental operation of culture, he can say nothing substantive about any cultural process, let alone about any individual “meme,” other than that its fitness has been demonstrated by its survival.

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Darwinians fascinated by their hero’s “dangerous idea” (Daniel Dennett) never seem to realize that its strength lies in its emptiness. That the “survival of the fittest” is a tautology because “fitness” is just another word for “survival” is not a quip: it is the simple truth. Of course “fitness” means reproductive fitness–surviving without offspring to the age of 100 does nothing for your genotype–but exchanging the survival of the fittest to survive for the reproduction of the fittest to reproduce does not make Darwinian doctrine any less tautological.

Let the reader not surmise from this that I am a “non-believer” in Darwin: on the contrary. Aside from the detailed observations that make The Origin of Species doubtless the most readable of major scientific documents, the genius of Darwin’s theory of evolution is precisely its lack of presuppositions. In its most general form, the theory is by no means limited to life; any system will tend to evolve in the direction of more “survivable” states, which, as Ilya Prigogine in particular has pointed out, are just the opposite of entropic states of simple equilibrium.

Life is unique in that living creatures reproduce themselves, and the particular merit of Darwin’s theory, as opposed to Lamarck‘s “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” is that it makes reproduction a necessary factor in evolution. If we could inherit acquired characteristics, we could just as well be immortal creatures “evolving” through time; the usefulness to the species of death and sexual reproduction, as immortalized by Freud‘s eros and thanatos or Bataille‘s l’érotisme et la mort, would be unclear. The advantage of sexual reproduction is the generation of variance, and the usefulness of variance requires the testing of different forms in different conditions. Implicit in the tautology of “the survival of the survivors” is the idea that survival is not guaranteed, that life is a competition, as expressed in the other great Darwinian (more precisely, Spencerian) phrase: struggle for life. We have heard so much irony directed at the “social Darwinists” who once drew crude parallels between competition in market society and competition through natural selection that we forget how strong the parallel really is; we take for granted or even denounce the fact that by forcing economic entities to participate in something like a “struggle for life,” the market system has created by far the most productive economies ever known.

In the Darwinian context, the search for the gene as the unit of evolution reflects the need to understand how the elements of variance are transmitted from one generation to the next. Darwin implies Mendel because, where Lamarckian inheritance is the transmission of a homunculus who changes along with the body that produces it, Darwinian variance requires only the transmission of a mixture of each parent’s original information with the addition of a small amount of random variation, supplied in genetic theory by “mutation.” But if Darwin implies Mendel, the latter’s construction of the gene in abstracto and the much later decoding of the genetic material are genuine scientific discoveries. Genetic decoding associates specific protein chains with specific phenotypic traits. If I belabor these obvious points, it is because what makes the gene useful in biology is precisely what makes the meme appropriate for spiral dynamics.

The meme promises by analogy a hard-headed genetics of culture. Just as the biblical “origin of species” by arbitrary divine command has been replaced by Darwin’s supremely parsimonious hypothesis–creationism being essentially a rearguard action–so the proponents of memetics promise to reduce the apparently arbitrary diversity of culture to its basis in evolutionary logic. What the memeticists fail to realize is that the criterion of cultural survivability is truly a null hypothesis. To claim that the cultural elements now in our brains have survived competition and must therefore possess certain traits that have ensured this “fitness” is not only a tautology, it is too vague a tautology to serve as a working hypothesis for the study of culture. Even the traditional literary scholar who proposes we wait a century before deciding which works “stand the test of time” has a more concrete notion of cultural fitness.

Scientific activity begins not with the empty hypothesis that fundamental cultural traits or “memes” exist but when we begin to make testable conjectures about the nature of these traits. Darwin himself could have posited the “gene” as the minimal component of evolutionary change, but the idea in itself would have had no content. The gene was born as a scientific concept when Mendel discovered its combinatory properties; it acquired a physical counterpart only decades later when the discovery of DNA led to the analysis of its chemical composition and structure–at which point the gene’s isolation from its surrounding genetic material is no longer an absolute a priori. Those who would analyze culture in terms of memes would similarly have to discover, first, rigorous rules of combination and, ultimately, some physical correlate, presumably wiring patterns in the brain, that can be experimentally isolated and recombined under the proper conditions of human interaction to “generate” culture.

Some readers may find this an intolerable prospect. I do not, because the history of science, as opposed to that of scientism, demonstrates that greater rather than less freedom accrues to societies that discover and exploit new laws of nature, including, to the extent that it is possible, human nature. My hostility to the concept of the meme is directed not to its ultimate scientific potential but to its use in pseudo-science. If you take the meme seriously, the last thing you should be doing is to seek it in such things as tunes that run through our brain. Such examples of cultural survival may well provide interesting material for study, but to call them “memes” is even more inept than confusing the gene that stimulates a fruit fly’s wing development with the wing itself. If the four-note beginning of the Fifth is a meme, what is it a meme for?

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A more profound difficulty of the application of Darwinian theory to the evolution of human culture emerges in the discussion aroused by such books as Francis Fukuyama‘s recent The Great Disruption (Free Press, 1999). When we reduce morality to an evolutionarily advantageous trait, are we not eliminating the spiritual content of morality in favor of its pragmatic value? How then can we defend moral action, as we all do, at times when its pragmatic value is not immediately apparent? The “little bang” of the originary hypothesis provides an answer to this question. The originary scene of language supplies the originary model of moral reciprocity, just as it supplies the originary model of religious transcendence. Durkheim‘s idea that God is a projection of the community as a whole is valid only if we understand this “projection” not as an illusion of mediated desire but as a necessary condition for the constitution of the human, both as an object of (“anthropological”) thought and in reality.

Not long ago it was fashionable to explain moral behavior by means of an “altruism gene.” Tomorrow it may become popular to speak of a “morality meme”–indeed, this would be an improvement over most uses of the term. But although morality has indeed been “selected for” in the sense that we as morally aware creatures exist, calling the kernel of morality a “meme” adds nothing to our understanding of it in the absence of a hypothesis concerning the specific process of selection–irreducible to that of biological evolution–for this and other cultural traits. Because the originary hypothesis offers the only non-religious, that is, minimal depiction of such a process, we have reason to assume that it will eventually be adopted in some form by those engaged in fundamental human science. At that point, it might well become useful to assimilate the individual moments of the originary event to something like “memes.” For the moment, however, I think this assimilation only confuses the central issue of distinguishing human origin from the biological origin of species.

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