Author: staceymeeker

There has been much talk recently in conservative circles about civil society, the set of institutions intermediate between government and the individual. The vagueness of the term is not fortuitous; civil society is defined negatively rather than positively, by the non-authoritative nature of its components in contrast with the organized totalities of government. The church in the United States is part of civil society; the medieval Church was not. Conservatives contend that devolution of influence to this decentralized matrix of institutions will produce a more disciplined, self-reliant, and morally developed citizenry than the liberal panacea of central government. Civil society provides a guarantee against the tyrannical rationalization that prompted Edmund Burke‘s condemnation of the French Revolution.

But there is a difference, even a contradiction, between the contemporary notion of civil society and its origin in Burke’s “small battalions.” Burke opposed a set of tried and true institutions to the totalitarian utopias of ideologues like Robespierre. (In the heroic days of modern rationalism, Descartes drew the contrast between an old city with its maze of streets and a planned city with a grid laid out from scratch–Washington DC, ironically enough, is the most celebrated example of the latter.) The old structures have been shown to work, and their density and redundancy insures that even a disastrous change in one will not bring down the others, whereas a totalitarian system must either work perfectly or collapse in chaos and tyranny, as revolutionary institutions have been doing every since.

Burke’s model is ecological; monoculture is less robust than polyculture. His appeal to conservatives reflects his insistence on tradition as a counterweight to revolutionary rationalism, but his idea of tradition is founded on trial and error rather than divine right. We need only relocate Burke’s model in a more dynamic phase of market society for it to become the social-Darwinist doctrine of competition and survival of the fittest. Today’s paleoconservatives, who rely on revealed truth rather than practice and reject Darwinian evolution even in the biological domain, are disciples of Joseph de Maistre, not Burke.

If Burke’s small battalions were opposed to the revolutionary monolith, what is contemporary civil society opposed to? To “monolithic government,” it might be answered. But modern liberalism, even in its worst moments, has little in common with the dreams of Saint-Just or Mao Zedong/Tse-Tung. What civil society is really supposed to shield us from is the marketplace, which, as Marx well knew, is fundamentally incompatible with traditional relations of any kind. When we evoke civil society as a remedy for pornography, drug abuse, and illegitimacy, we are asking it to do something quite different than protect us from big government, even from big government’s welfare system. The failure of this system is patent, but it would be disingenuous–and unfaithful to the principles of any kind of conservatism–to attribute the ills it fails to correct to its own failed design. If civil society were able to check illegitimacy, welfare payments would not generate it. And if today’s civil society is too weak to encourage moral behavior, the primary blame must be laid at the feet of market exchange itself, not its governmental superstructures. If illegitimacy is the fault of the welfare system, then what government program is to blame for the proliferation of drugs?–unless it be, as some libertarians hold, the attempt to forbid their consumption.

The circulatory nature of the market system breaks down the traditional barriers between moral and immoral forms of consumption. But since a certain level of moral self-discipline is conducive to successful activity in the marketplace, there is an essential tension between the productive and the consumptive operations of the market system.

The role of civil society in the market system is less to defend against big government than to preserve the values of production from the temptations of consumption–temptations which are generated by this very process of production. Civil society both resists and contributes, contributes by resisting, to the operation of the market system. It is the institutional interface between production and consumption, the set of institutions that perform the function that Marx called the reproduction of labor power. There is no way to insure that these institutions all defend the Protestant ethic without an imposition of purpose from above–such as existed in the Soviet Union–that contradicts the very concept of civil society. When we rely on civil society to resolve the moral problems of “capitalism” we make the unwarranted assumption of its own inherent morality.  Inner-city gangs and the Mafia are just as much institutions of civil society as the Salvation Army and the Rotary Club.

In a paradoxical conflation of de Maistre and Burke, it now appears that those civil institutions founded on the sacred deferral of violence in its most immediate forms–that is, in those ritual and doctrinal forms least susceptible to compromise with the ever-circulating values of the market–are the most successful in resisting the temptations of self-destructive consumption. The post-Burkean survival of the fittest leads to the unanticipated result that the most “irrational” institutions are those best suited to the mediating function of civil society in today’s rationalized market system.

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Civil society is a name for the human world that political thought cannot thematize. It is equally naive to see it either as a bulwark against market forces or as a mere reflection of these forces. Just as market society includes those institutions that resist it, the market model explains their necessity, their unique ability to survive where rationalistic attempts at moralizing fail. But it also explains why they cannot be imposed on society as a whole. As expected, we reach the paradox that universal moral values can function as such only locally, whereas in the larger society, they must operate within the give and take of the political marketplace. What have been called the cultural contradictions of capitalism are constantly being mediated by the market system itself.

The function attributed to the institutions of civil society by political thought is analogous to that of originary anthropological reflection for the individual within the market system. We cannot determine the effect of our thought on the system because its very enunciation adds a new degree of freedom to the system that makes it more powerful than the model we have constructed of it. But in turn, our awareness of this paradoxical operation strengthens our faith in the durability of our social order and thereby makes us more productive.

This parallel between originary thinking and civil society implies that the institutions of which the latter is composed should be understood as incarnating elements of the former, that is, as expressing anthropological truths inaccessible to the market system as a whole. This is particularly obvious in the case of the major religious institutions, but it is more critically true of the other components of civil society–of New Age cults like Scientology, and even of gangs and the Mafia.

Nearly a half-century ago, the French novelist Nathalie Sarraute described our postwar era as l’ère du soupçon–the age of suspicion. Discourse, particularly narrative discourse, could no longer be taken at face value: it had to be demystified. The horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima led to the extension of the demystifying techniques of Marx and Freud to all social relations, and to the political, judicial, religious, or literary discourses that, directly or indirectly, justified them.

One of the central themes of originary thinking is that we can go beyond the rhetoric of demystification toward a less sacrificial one founded on our originary intuition of the human. This is still something of a visionary claim; the rhetorical change that accompanies a new way of thinking is not easily brought about, and I am sure that my own writing still bears traces of the old polemics. But there is reason to believe that the age of suspicion is nearing its end.

 In the postwar era, it was urgent to denounce the openly discriminatory structures and practices that still flourished nearly undisturbed at the war’s end. On the maps of the world I knew as a child, British colonies in red and French colonies in blue covered most of Africa and a good part of Asia. As late as the early 1960s, when I was a graduate student in Baltimore–barely south of the Mason-Dixon line–blacks were not permitted in “white” restaurants or movie theaters.  Nous avons changé tout cela.

As feminism took up the torch from the civil rights movement, suspicion was cast on the apparently natural sexual division of labor, then on the still more apparently natural distinction between normal and perverse sexual orientations. But the clarity of the antisacrificial focus began to blur. The failure of the Equal Rights Amendment was not merely political; it reflected a new skepticism about the automatic application of the victimary model to human difference. A similar phenomenon is occurring today with respect to homosexuality; although the general public opposes discrimination for sexual orientation, it has not bought the argument that denying marriage to same-sex couples is discriminatory. Partisans may argue that resistance to these ideas is of the same type as that of old-line segregationists or misogynists, but I do not agree. Like Thomas Kuhn‘s scientific paradigms, social models and the rhetorics that go with them become problematic as they are extended to new areas ever farther from their original domain.

When new models replace old ones, the opposition between them is never one of horizontal symmetry.  Hegel‘s historical dialectic has been abandoned by metaphysics, but it makes a great deal of sense as anthropology. The end of the age of suspicion does not mean the return to previous modes of discrimination and social domination, but the addition of a new layer of reflection that transforms the binary persecutor-victim model into a subtler, more interactive one.

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It would be going too far to say that this post-victimary mode is already in place, but I think it we can see it emerging on the public scene in the current political debate over welfare. A relatively trivial budgetary expenditure, welfare is significant because it embodies the crucial ethical relation between participants and nonparticipants in the exchange system, one that by all indications has greatly deteriorated under recent policies. The now generally discredited liberal line expressed the Zeitgeist of the age of suspicion: we should seek out victims and compensate them. The weakness of this thinking is by now clear as well: by privileging the class of victims, we assure its perpetuation.

Let us take a step back to the original meaning of liberalism in the nineteenth century, one still current in continental Europe: that of laissez-faire social Darwinism. As a political view, this apparently coherent doctrine runs up against the paradox of what Derrida calls the supplement: if the economic market really sufficed to govern the society as a whole, there wouldn’t be any need for a political forum in which to affirm it. The very fact that politics exists in addition to the exchange system refutes the politics that we don’t need anything but the exchange system. Like the Sabbath, the market was created for man and not man for the market.

The victimary politics of the twentieth century cuts a far wider swath than liberalism, but the amelioristic liberalism that flourished in the postwar era is the most benign form of victimary thinking. Rejecting the utopian attempts to transcend the market system that lead only to more virulent forms of victimage, the liberal attempts to make this system less sacrificial by interpreting as victims those unable to participate in it successfully. The modern liberal is a dialectical improvement on the laissez-faire liberal.

But now that we have seen the limits of the victimary model, how do we deal with the human failures of the market system? Granted, these are not “victims” in some obscure sacrificial sense. The wealth created by the market does not depend on their poverty, as the zero-sum Weltanschauung still shared by many intellectuals would have it.

 (Permit me a digression on this subject. What is zero-sum in human relations is rank; in a linear ranking system, my gain is your loss. But this truism does not carry over to material wealth, or even to the domains of prestige, respect, and recognition. In Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, the slave’s recognition of the master, coming from one whom the latter considers less than fully human, is no recognition at all. In a society where all are prosperous and creative, all can have prestige in their own domain and respect in general even if ranking them by income would leave just as many in each percentile as before. Only through the eyes of resentment does my neighbor’s prosperity diminish my own.)

A sign that we are leaving the victimary era is that our policies are beginning to take into account the paradoxical structure of human interaction in order to defer as much as possible the perverse incentives they create. This does not necessarily mean spending less money, but it means making it as difficult as possible to act in anticipation of entitled benefits.

The most obvious way to eliminate perverse incentives is simply to eliminate the benefits that foster them. But claiming that the cold turkey approach might work (but that we are too “soft” to administer it) is not merely callous but naive. In human affairs, the end of eliminating sacrificial behavior–the production of victims–can’t justify the means, because the distinction between ends and means in human interaction is what defines sacrificial behavior. We have heard enough from both right and left in this century about final solutions. What is necessary is to create the effect of the cold turkey cure without actually administering it.

This is, I think, what recent attempts at welfare reform through workfare, benefit cuts, threats of cutoffs, refusal to pay for second children, etc. are reaching for. Whether or not benefits will really be taken away in 2 or 5 years is less important than making the recipient aware that they could be taken away because the very purpose of these benefits is to help their beneficiaries enter or return to the job market.

My point is not that such programs are bound to succeed, but that they incarnate a post-liberal viewpoint that is not a simple return to social Darwinism. I think the adoption in essence by both parties of this new attitude, which I would call neoconservative, but others might like to call neoliberal, represents a new stage in the political dialectic of market society that marks the waning of the victimary thinking of the age of suspicion.

The minimal core of what is being sought, found, and denounced in the victimary discourse that dominates cultural studies today is exclusion from dialogue. The repeated accusations of sexism, racism, not to speak of ableism, ageism, sizeism… reflect–beyond fashion and self-interest–the resentment of those who, whatever their concrete sufferings, were until recently not invited to participate in conversations concerning them. The withering sarcasm of many of these analyses demonstrates with vengeful joy that the formerly excluded can wield the rapier of polemic discourse as well as the former excluders.

 In the process, the historical parameters of failures of reciprocity tend to be given short shrift. Historical justifications, however plausible, lack conviction in our post-historical times. The postmodern era begins with the Holocaust, which demonstrates the obscenity of making historical excuses for antisemitism. But the same argument can be made for colonials, people “of color,” women, homosexuals… Equanimity in the face of denial of reciprocity is no longer acceptable. The ethics of past and present must be held to the same moral test: the linguistic reciprocity of the originary scene, the free and equal exchange of signs.

The enduring contribution of contemporary victimary discourse is to force the reframing of our cultural conversation to include everyone. This trend reflects with new clarity the originary moral truth that discursive reciprocity is the de facto horizon of all cultural discourse, including political discourse. This does not imply economic equality, although the presence of all parties in the political debate surely influences economic policies. The radical change in the economic sphere is not that inequalities of status will be abolished, but that they will henceforth have to be explained, and in a sense, justified, to those who are disadvantaged by them.

This new understanding of public conversation is no abstraction; it is currently being imposed by the legal system. To choose an example from my own sphere of activity, University personnel dossiers that in the past contained confidential documents are now open to the party under evaluation. The principle is if you intend to fire me, you have to tell me exactly why.

The model of the social order this suggests is radically different from anything we might have conceived even a few decades ago. Status has been detached from conversational exclusion. We appear to be demonstrating that the moral reciprocity of the exchange of signs can be indefinitely extended without the nightmares entailed by attempting to impose the distributive equality of things. The right to participate in the conversation is not tantamount to political equality, let alone economic equality. But if it does not mean the elimination of all injustice, it does signal the expulsion of sacrificial, victimary structures from modern society.

 This means a return to civility; arguments concerning perceived injustices should no longer impute exclusionary intentions to one’s opponents. But less obviously, the abolition of cultural restrictions to dialogue also implies that market values will increase in importance. Only the criteria of the marketplace can provide material for the objective evaluation of an employee who can read–and contest–the contents of his or her personnel dossier. Once all cultural values are equally “appreciated,” the only remaining criterion of evaluation is that of the market–not the monopoly capital monolith of nineteenth century socialism, but the fragmented and indefinitely proliferating market of our own era. Our debt to the Holocaust and to the ensuing postwar liberation struggles tends to make us forget that the conditions for a post-sacrificial society are economic as well as social, and that only our consumer society‘s production of wealth provides the material mediations that allow us to respect each other’s cultural diversity.

It is in this context that we should situate the current debate on education. The fundamental institution for transmitting to the next generation the means to enter into the general dialogue–the schools–is in crisis. It is significant that the education issue divides the two political parties more neatly and more programmatically than any other.

The Left wants to educate children directly for the newly universal cultural conversation. Hence it gives priority to fostering unconditional reciprocal recognition through such policies as including handicapped children in ordinary classrooms, promoting understanding for “non-standard” life-styles, emphasizing minority contributions to history, avoiding competition and hierarchy, making class advancement automatic, attributing failure to “learning disabilities.” Ideally, these policies should be implemented in an all-inclusive public school system, so that the incipient dialogue include all children. Given the decline in the public teaching environment, however, most parents with money or ambition send their children to private schools, leaving the cultural emphasis of the public schools as a compensation for lack of achievement.

 The Right’s idea of education is limited to building a foundation for marketable skills (“the basics”) while inculcating cultural knowledge and values that stress the unity and the underlying non-sacrificiality of the national culture. In order to make this agenda available to the general population, the Right favors voucher programs to permit pupils to attend private (or enhanced public) schools of their parents’ choice.

For the marketplace to function effectively, it must operate within a society that not only shares a set of general norms, but has evolved means of negotiating cultural differences. But the Left’s emphasis on mutual recognition over educational content neglects the mediations required between the (cultural) exchange of signs and the (economic) exchange of things. Differences in abilities should not be denied but encouraged. The value of ranking pupils in a given discipline includes helping the lower-ranked to find their place in another. But even if this is not possible, sacrificing the learning potential of the more gifted generates not mutual respect but resentment.

The decline of our educational level with respect to other industrialized countries should suffice to convince those not yet persuaded that it is urgent to invest our energies in preparing children for the marketplace. The postmodern Zeitgeist–and the continued expansion of consumer society–are far more effective than the schools in teaching not mere tolerance but cultural interaction. Those white kids with their caps on backward that I talked about last week didn’t acquire their taste for minority culture in the classroom.

The very openness of its racial and ethnic tensions insures that the United States will remain a model of polycultural integration. Our cultural conversation is arguably richer than any other; we must educate our children to profit from these riches in the world marketplace.

When I go running late Saturday afternoons I always listen to Garrison Keillor‘s A Prairie Home Companion, a sophisticated show designed to be heard out on the prairie by college-educated exurbanites from places like LA. Keillor’s spoofs of private eyes and cowboys, his fake ads for animal calls, “duck” tape, Mournful Oatmeal, and rhubarb pie are so clever that I often burst out laughing in the middle of San Vicente Boulevard. The highlight of the show is the weekly narrative of life in Lake Wobegon, his fictional home town. These gentle satires of small-town life in Lutheran Minnesota nearly always succeed in making the listener reflect more in love than resentment on the ironies of desire.

 Keillor’s program is also a variety show. The other day, he introduced a young woman from Greenwich Village who had metamorphized herself into a Nashville-style country music singer and gone to live in the South. And then she sang a song about a girl who left the South to go north to the Big City but weeps with nostalgic longing for the Mississippi she left behind.

Toute notre culture est là. The lament of the displaced Southerner in the big city is culturally correct, but not the longing of the New Yorker for roots in a folk culture to which she doesn’t belong. Yet there are probably fifty New Yorkers in the second case for every Southerner in the first. This cultural adoption of the victimary position is nothing new; it has its crude antecedents in those blackface minstrel shows that–it’s hard to believe today–were still popular in the 1930s. But the difference between the prewar and postwar varieties is that the postwar generation wants to keep playing the role after the show is over.

I am old enough to remember the beginnings of this phenomenon. In the mid-50s, the age of rock ‘n’ roll began with Elvis, Bill Haley, Little Richard et al. Adolescents who had never been west of the Hudson River nor south of Staten Island suddenly started to talk, or at least to sing, with a Mississippi accent, just as a generation or two later they would put their caps on backward and pretend to be homeys from the ‘hood. In contrast, the black teenagers who imitate the styles of whites do so chiefly for economic, not cultural reasons.

These narratives illustrate the paradigmatic opposition of culture and the market. The Southern girl comes North to work; she moves from periphery to center. But whether she prospers or not, she regrets the folkways of the backward area she has left behind. The Northern girl goes South to find herself culturally, by adopting a folk identity she can sing about. (In the process, she is able to make a career for herself, and more money than she could have made by staying in the North, the economy of which seems to be slowly going South in any case.) The white kid envies and emulates the culture of the black minority; the black kid envies and, if he has the chance, emulates the socioeconomic advantages of the white majority. As with love and cards, one can’t be lucky in both culture and the market; or rather, the “lucky” in the cultural marketplace are those who can market original or borrowed victimary stigmata.

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The elusive but anthropologically real difference between high and popular culture is nicely caught by their respective sensitivities to the irony of the New Yorker going South to sing of being haunted by Mississippi memories in the Big City up North. Think of what deliciously sinuous sentences Proust would have crafted to describe this situation. But today, there are no more Prousts, not even any Becketts; the difference is rather between pop culture and postcultural irony. What is increasingly held up as the suite of high culture is victimary discourse, edifyingly resentful tales of domination.

Seinfeld, who would have caught the irony, is closer to the spirit of high culture than any of this. But Seinfeld is no Proust. The paradoxes of desire from which Proust patiently built his cathedral are today the stuff of a half-hour TV episode. High culture is made by ironizing unreflective desire, whether it be that of Oedipus seeking his father’s murderer, or Hamlet, Dmitri Karamazov, or Stephen Dedalus doing pretty much the same. But the irony has to inspire us with fear and trembling as an originary revelation of the human. Our Greenwich village friend and those white boys with the backward caps are killing their fathers too, but we’re no longer building cathedrals to house their tombs.

 Today’s Kulturkampf is a battle over the place of the victim.  The deferral of violence through representation, like time and tide, wait for no man. No solitary individual, however profound his agony, can compete for the victimary spotlight with whole classes of people whose resentments, if left unchecked, would pose urgent problems to the social order.

As culture becomes a minoritary province, we are duty-bound to help it lose its sacrificial edge and become the vehicle for a dialogue to which we can all contribute. Once we become aware of our own sociohistorical particularity, we realize that we’re all minorities, which also means that we’re all equally valid examples of the human universal, heirs of our common scene of origin.  Garrison Keillor‘s folksy sophistication, his ironic affirmation of his small-town roots as a cultural source rich as any other, show us that white Northerners don’t have to sing their uniqueness in a Southern accent–but that they shouldn’t turn up their noses on those who do: American culture is one of different strokes for different folks. I imagine that’s why I always listen to A Prairie Home Companion while running on Saturday afternoons.

I turned fifty-five this week—the fateful age at which they begin to offer you senior citizen discounts and call you fifty-five years young. As a little compensatory birthday present to myself, and hopefully to you, dear reader, I thought I’d forget about resentment for a week and return to the primary and more pleasurable theme of these columns, love.

 Love is our private experience of transcendence. There is nothing in our personal relationship with God that cannot be understood as a relationship with the beloved. It is not clear which one of these transcendental experiences has the most to teach the other.

Christianity has recognized this parallel in the equation God is love. God as a person—or three—is equated to love, an interaction. In the language of originary anthropology, God is not merely the central object-victim that brings the human community together, but the interrelationship mediated by this object between the members of this community. When we truly love each other in God, he no longer occupies a “center” that distracts us from each other. Yet to say that God is love is not merely to say, “the center is the periphery,” but to recognize that without the center the periphery would never have existed.

Yet although a reading that appeals to our originary intuition for an explanation of what/who God is is useful anthropologically, it does us little good existentially. Among the modes of love that maintain solidarity in human communities—affection, friendship, sympathy, solidarity, parental love, fraternal love…—there is one that we call just love tout court, “romantic” love, the kind of love we don’t merely feel but are in. Can we take God is love to express the association of this intense feeling of love with God?

Since love, like any transcendental experience, is paradoxical, it is easy to denounce it as illusory. If you read enough social science, you begin to think that transcendence of any kind is an illusion, that there are only things and more complex kinds of things, that even thinking about things is just creating new kinds of things. Social science doesn’t explain transcendental phenomena like religion—or love. But it doesn’t have to explain them; they are just empirically observed behaviors like any others, subject to natural selection. And our very desire to understand why we believe in God, or why we fall in love, is just another behavior, and the discourse that declares it a behavior, still another behavior… When the old metaphysics of Plato and Descartes was faced with the early stages of this kind of thinking, Husserl invented phenomenology, to which Heidegger gave the vocation of thinking the transcendental. And now we have in generative anthropology the means to integrate the transcendental with the empirical —

But I digress (it’s my birthday, after all).

 

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How does human love differ from love of God? It’s too easy to say that religion talks about unverifiable beings and love does not. Love means treating another person as an unverifiable being, as something infinitely different from oneself. But not as an object on a pedestal; true love is not worship. Or rather, true worship is love; only sacrificial idols belong on pedestals.

 Love is infinite care, reverence for what is vulnerable to time. The real object of this reverence is not the mortal body but the immortal soul, the essence that incarnates itself in the body. What does it mean to say we have a soul? Love grants us a concrete experience of the paradoxical opposition that our use of representation opens up between the empirical and the ideal. The relation of tenderness is the care for another that senses and seeks to repair the tension between ephemeral body and eternal soul. The paradis artificiel of the “afterlife” hides rather than reveals the nature of this tension. The immortality I see in my beloved is now, not hereafter. When I make her the goal of my action, I regard her being, her soul, as eternally significant. The one paradise we can really imagine is the paradise of love, extrapolated from the experience of eternity we have in those privileged instants when we are so close to each other that the clock stops… Instead, our dreams of an afterlife lamely attempt to convey the existential sense of immortality as a temporal experience of atemporal being in a paradise we cannot conceive without boredom. 

In the days when the Church was a dominant social institution, the emulation of divine love by human love suffered from a disequilibrium. The doctrine of divine love was already fixed by the church fathers; only a few not-always-reputable mystics made it an object of direct experience. Human love alone was virgin territory to be explored. The Neoplatonists saw in the latter little more than an inkling of and an incentive toward divine bliss. Des Grieux’ argument in Manon Lescaut that human love, because it can be conceived in the imagination, is a transcendental goal better suited to us than eternal salvation is perhaps the first expression of open revolt against this institutional priority. (See Chronicle No. 17: “Perfide Manon”.)

Today, when religion is an individual experience and churches have no power beyond the collective will of their members, the experience of human love can teach the unbeliever—and perhaps the believer as well—what it means to love God.  God as love is as vulnerable as humanity. The infinity we see in our beloved’s eyes is something the lover of God must supply from imagination, at the risk of adoring an image. I prefer to think of God as the presence in which the two of us are present to each other, the guarantee that each ephemeral look or touch bears its meaning of infinite tenderness for all eternity.

Despite recent high-profile incidents, the United States remains relatively invulnerable to terrorism. No terrorist can hope to modify our governmental system or even our foreign policy. Terror in the USA is a naked expression of resentment, an attack on an enemy with whom one is in secret complicity, for its demonized power provides an irreplaceable explanation for one’s own failures. In the absence of a clear and feasible political goal, the creation of a climate of terror becomes an end in itself.

 One often hears it said that “the terrorist always wins” because his act makes the rest of us more suspicious of one another. Terrorism exemplifies the contagion of violence, not in the acute form of the lynch mob, but in a more insidious slow-growth mode. Viruses that kill off their host, as in last year’s Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire, are far less deadly than those like HIV that let the host survive long enough to spread them. The fear the terrorist generates cannot be purged by his capture or even by that of an entire network; we can never be sure that others are not already infected. In the past, terrorist groups claimed credit for their attacks, even appropriating incidents perpetrated by others, on the reasoning that the claim spreads fear of the group and leads ultimately to the satisfaction of its demands. The recent Pan Am, World Trade Center, and (apparent) TWA bombings have broken with this rule. Terrorist groups, like horror film directors, have learned that terror is greater the less its source is defined. When terrorists remain anonymous, they collectively reap the fear generated by their violence. They can do this even when the violence is not theirs at all. If the Pan Am 103 bombers had not kept silent, we would probably be far less ready to believe–in the absence of any evidence–that TWA 800 met the same fate.

The contagion of violence is no news to students of René Girard. Indiscriminate violence is just what the human social order exists to protect us from. In our relatively, perhaps maximally peaceful world, the terrorist brutally reminds us that we are never as far from crisis as we would like to think. Our peace is shattered less by the violent act itself than by the realization it forces on us that human violence can never be eliminated, only deferred.

I think we speak too quickly when we grant the terrorist an easy victory. By returning us to a state of originary crisis, contagious violence leads us to reassert the universal human solidarity that alone can hold it in check. An unavowed source of the passion behind the search for life on Mars and elsewhere is the dream of uniting all humanity against a common enemy, as in the recent action film Independence Day. A similar point may be made about terrorism. The terrorist, like the alien invader, is the enemy of us all; whatever his political aims, his actions are directed at an entire nation, ultimately, at all humankind. Even as the terrorist makes us suspect each other, his act unites us more than it divides us. The annoyance of heightened security measures is accompanied by a sense of pride in making a small sacrifice for one’s country.

 

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But because he is not an alien but one of us, the terrorist reveals the limits of human unity. The terrorist brings violence to places where we do not expect to find it; he flourishes in a world without real war. It is no accident that the fountainheads of terrorism are civil rather than national conflicts: Northern Ireland, the Near East, Afghanistan. The Intifada began when it became clear that open warfare by the Arab countries against Israel was impossible.

In the global village, all war is civil war. The more we act alike, look alike, are alike, the more our remaining differences risk provoking resentment. The fanatical hatred that sets the terrorist off from the common soldier is a sign of belonging despite himself to the same world as his enemy. The terrorist cannot be controlled by normal incentives; he risks death, even gladly accepts it: God is on his side. As Israelis know, there is no good defense against a suicide bomber; once he is wired for death, the damage is already done.

This sobering fact should not lead to despair or fatalism. It suggests rather that the only long-term response to terrorism is the same as modern society’s response to the other ills of resentment: finding means to recycle resentment into the exchange system. This is no easy task. The religious motivation of most terrorists is a form of resistance to the circulation of the market. Terrorists are the most fanatical of paleoconservatives; their hatred of the Jews, or the West, or the federal government is above all a fear of the universal exchange system that threatens the cultural identity of those not well adapted to it.

The marketplace has obvious enticements for the potential terrorist in the universal youth culture that gives adolescents the opportunity to dance and role-play away their victimary sentiments. But it is not enough to meet traditional values head on. In order to defer the resentment that leads to terrorism, the market system must find new degrees of freedom that will allow it to integrate within itself the upholders of these values. The American experience offers some useful examples; perhaps we should send a delegation of Mormons to Teheran.

 The ultimate weapon against terrorism is dialogue, and the horizon of this dialogue between those eternal enemies, culture and the market, is the shared understanding of our common origin. The road to peace and to originary anthropology are one and the same.

Last week’s column on sports narratives touched on a subject that it is worthwhile to explore in more general terms: the central or originary function of narrative. As we have become increasingly aware that we are always telling stories, the story-telling model has come to dominate the human sciences. This is a good thing, a triumph of humanism over positivism. But just as no one ever explains why religion exists, no one ever explains why we tell stories. Readers of this column might guess that the two explanations should have something in common.

 Let us begin from last week’s example of those sudden-death Aztec basketball games. The games entertain by providing a motivation for the ensuing sacrifice; the losers having proved their unworthiness to live, the sacrificers are relieved of responsibility for their death. We should not equate responsibility with an internal sense of guilt. Killing makes one unclean because of the mimetic contagion of murder; letting the victims select themselves reduces the contagion. If the Bulls play the Bears to see who furnishes the sacrificial animal, the principle is the same; the victim is always a “person,” an incarnation of the divinity. Human sacrifice is an extreme form of animal sacrifice where the players play themselves; the Aztecs‘ fondness for it has been explained by the lack of protein-rich animals in Central America.

There are faster ways of choosing victims than a basketball game. We say the game has a narrative structure because the motivation of sacrifice is revealed not instantly but in time. Narrative in the broadest sense encompasses all forms of entertainment, including sports and the circus. Watching a circus performer arouses the same vicarious danger as an adventure tale. The esthetic is a postponement or deferral of sacrifice, and narrative is the exemplary esthetic form because it thematizes deferral, makes it explicit. This was not understood in premodern times, when esthetic reflection focused on the objet d’art as the heir to sacred representation. The plastic arts are no longer at the center of our esthetic consciousness because the circulatory movement of the market system erodes the artwork’s aura; paintings tend to become collectibles. Narratives, on the other hand–the same is true of music–cannot be reduced to objects; they can only be apprehended in time.

The point of originary thinking is to strip away uncritically posited “faculties”–for religion, for art, for storytelling–to examine the minimal conditions for their existence. Like zero-based budgeting, our vision of the human must start with the absolute minimum; the originary scene of language. In order to add a storytelling capacity, we must show that it is necessary to satisfy the minimal criterion of deferral of violence through representation. The originary representation of the central object saves the community from danger by “blaming” it for the scene of mimetic crisis; the extension of the sign into a story extends this moment of safety. If my story motivates the choice of victim, it lessens the danger of my going next. (Remember Scheherazade.)

 So long as the story lasts, the “blame” has not yet been placed, the crisis has not been resolved. In the imaginary world of the story, we are still in danger. But in the real world where the story is being told, we remain out of danger by the very fact of the narration. Whence the two-tiered form/content nature of esthetic experience: we feel the emotions of crisis–the content of the story, but know that for the duration of the narrative, we are protected from crisis by the barrier of esthetic form.

All culture is sacrificial. Culture covers a lot of ground, from bear-baiting to attending a performance of Saint Matthew’s Passion, but whether we savagely revel in the victim’s sufferings or identify with them in the depths of our soul, culture is founded on them. The discovery of this central truth defines our postmodern era. But the postmodern end of culture is not its abolition but its universalization, made possible by the exchange system.

The market has its origin in the centered world of ritual, but market exchange takes place on the periphery; the free market has no scenic center, only a communication network. We can tell stories about the market, but market activity is not structurally equivalent to a story. Goods in the market do not remain, like the sacred victim, in the ritual center. They circulate like signs, whose effortless multiplication among the participants of the scene prefigures the victim’s division into the multiple portions of the sacrificial feast. Things always will be scarcer than signs, but the circulatory drive of the market makes them ever more alike. And as goods become like signs, we increasingly construct esthetic statements from them. We each become the protagonist of an ongoing tale of consumption within which the esthetic experiences we choose play a privileged role; our story includes the stories we read, the paintings we see, the concerts we attend.

 

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This leads me to a final thought about stories in a more formal sense. The heroic era of the novel ended with the great modernists, and that of the cinema in early (pre-1968) postmodernity. But cinema continues to evolve with respect to the convincing recreation of reality. Every development of film technology: sound, color, hand-held cameras, more sensitive film stocks, computerization.., has been in the direction of provoking a richer sensory experience in the spectator. This capacity need not be used in the service of evoking the world as it is. All art, including music and abstract painting, creates a virtual space-time in which we experience the work from within. But some space-times are more inclusive than others.  Wagner‘s pre-technological ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk conceived a “total” artform that would include all traditional esthetic experiences–music, drama, plastic art (decor). But the sound film, the realization of a double dream of the nineteenth century, is a Gesamtkunstwerk of a kind Wagner could not have envisaged. The Wagnerian totality was placed at the service of ritual; the cinematic totality provides a deliberately new experience.

Thus far, cinema, even with morphing, remains wholly passive. In contrast, the sine qua non of virtual reality is interactivity. The continual recomputation of the spectator-participant’s place in virtual space-time makes the experience of it no longer esthetic in the traditional sense; nor is it the constrained participation that ritual provides.  Virtual narrative involves the active participation–whether physical or wholly mental–of the spectator. Thus the passivity of the couch potato–a term that reflects the extreme decadence of the medieval ideal of the via contemplativa– will be increasingly superseded by some form of interaction. No doubt the media stars of the future will be interactively gifted, Sandra Bullocks rather than Greta Garbos. As television, computers, and communications merge into that one big screen on the wall, mere vicarious spectatorship will decline and we will become the heroes and heroines of our own electronic stories. Some day Forrest Gump will shake hands with us.

The Olympic Games supply an appropriate occasion to think about the cultural importance of sport. You didn’t get to see much sport in NBC‘s coverage, but that too is relevant to our discussion.

Epic narrative, the account of glorious founding deeds, is the oldest literary form. Yet although the Renaissance reinvented tragedy, it could not resuscitate the epic. In Schiller‘s terms, epic was a naive form irreproducible in our sentimental, subjective age. Neoclassical tragedy internalizes the protagonist’s relationship to the stage; it is always about playing roles, a play within a play. The epic could not lose its public focus without self-parody. Narrative was henceforth condemned to prose in both form and content, to the novel of everyday life. In the early nineteenth century, the personal narrative voice of Balzac or Dickens did its best to describe the complexities of market society in quasi-heroic terms, but in the great culminating masterpieces of the genre, from Flaubert to Proust and Joyce, this voice becomes the locus of an ironically “failed” totalizing operation that both reflects and transcends the limits of individual life in the market system.

In contrast, sport is not ironic but heroic; it renews the epic relation between narrative and critical action. In its origin, sport was a ritual procedure for designating sacrificial victims, as in those Aztec basketball games where the losers had their hearts cut out. Athletic contests, like games of chance, add an element of unpredictability that entertains the community of sacrificers by removing their collective guilt. But entertainment is just another word for narrative. All entertainment tells a story. We are entranced by the skill of an athlete, a juggler, a tightrope walker, because we experience over time the constantly renewed fragility of his mastery. Miss the shot, drop the ball, fall off the rope, and, as they used to say in Tenochtitlán, you’re dead meat. By motivating the sacrificial mechanism, narrative renders it more effective in deferring mimetic conflict; the other secular arts emerge from ritual in essentially the same manner. Before becoming, as the cliché goes, a metaphor for war, sport is in the first place a metaphor for the mimetic conflict that cultures come into being to avert.

An athletic contest is structured like a narrative, but unlike a story with a known ending, the very unpredictability that makes it entertaining makes it incapable of “telling itself” as an esthetic totality. The sportscaster who comments on the events cannot know their significance in advance (“that missed extra point in the second quarter is starting to loom very large”). Whence the supplementary pleasure of a narrative constructed after the event. Sports, like battles, arouse in their witnesses a powerful hunger for narrative. Not only do many fans bring along radios and portable TVs, they devour the evening news highlights and the story in next day’s newspaper. The heroic world of sport, like that of the conquerors of Troy, must have its bards; the witnesses of its feats must experience their significance through narrative.

 

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But increasingly in recent Olympic coverage, and strikingly this year, each victory and defeat is surrounded by so many backgrounders and interviews that the athletic event itself is reduced to a moment in the athlete’s own narrative, his–or more often, her–biography. The rationalization of the sports market has turned most of these biographies into single-minded quests for medals. The hothouse training of young athletes that used to be exclusive to the “People’s Democracies” is now the free-market choice of the children and their families; the fame and cash that go with a gold medal justify sacrificing all else. This provides a narrative framework so strong that the story of obtaining the medal, or failing to obtain it, comes to dominate the athletic event that provides its dénouement.

It is not coincidental that this biographical tendency is strongest in judged rather than directly competitive sports, particularly in gymnastics and figure skating, the primary summer and winter sports féminins. The contestants’ youth exploits female biology to good narrative effect: sports suited to pre-adolescents become metaphors for initiation rites. (How many people care about the 30-year-old runners of the women’s marathon?) Because the child training long hours for a shot at the gold has not yet entered either adulthood or the marketplace, hers is the most inspiring–and market-share-attracting–story.

In the competitions themselves, the subjective evaluation procedure sets the lone performer against the impersonal judges, like a fairy-tale heroine performing feats to win the prince’s hand. We watch her (and her quasi-parental coach) nervously awaiting the verdict, then reacting with predictable emotions that more dignified societies would keep off camera. One suspects that the judges themselves, aware of the narratives swirling around them, act now and then to improve them.

 This feminization of sport did not originate as a ratings ploy by NBC, although the network has shrewdly exploited and encouraged it. The sports market exemplifies the corrosive effect of rationalization in the cultural domain. Culture and the market are opposed not by ideology but by structure: culture has a center, the market does not. Selling culture always desacralizes it, and sport is no exception. Until little more than a decade ago, professional athletes reaped only modest rewards from their role in creating cultural narrative, making salaries comparable, considering their necessarily early retirement, to those of other highly skilled professionals. But a new breed of lawyer-agents convinced them that they deserve to be, and can be made to be, paid not just for their skills but for their cultural role, the way Hollywood stars are paid. The general disillusionment inspired by million-dollar salaries is based on more than simple resentment. It reflects the intuition that to discount by salary their sacrificial role in the cultural narrative devalues the narrative itself. We used to be able to experience vicariously the athletes’ desire to win the Series or the Super Bowl; now that they are compensated for the drama they create, we have difficulty finding more in this desire than the quest to add another few million to next year’s contract.

And so, disaffected from masculine sport narrative, we contribute to NBC‘s record ratings by turning to the feminine version, where athletic performance is endowed with personal meaning as a rite de passage into the marketplace. The feminization of sport narrative is just one more illustration of the principle that, in a rationalized exchange system, cultural significance is generated only at the margins.

When I was working on The Origin of Language in the late 1970s, the material available gave so vague an idea of the relation between language and human evolution that I decided to omit all discussion of the issue. In retrospect, that was a mistake, because it gave readers the impression that the originary hypothesis had no relevance to the scientific study of human origins.

For various reasons, this seems like an appropriate time to attempt a dialogue between GA and empirical anthropology. I am therefore presenting in the informal context of this column some preliminary and tentative conclusions. Those with expertise in the empirical study of human origins are invited to respond either via the GAlist, or by personal communication. The greatest benefit of the Internet for human thought is surely its growing capacity to make ideas accessible beyond the boundaries of academic specializations.

 All the recent research confirms the existence of a watershed between Middle and Upper Paleolithic culture at about 35-40 kya  (thousand years ago) when traces of art and ritual appear along with more sophisticated tool-making. It is generally agreed that this watershed involved the emergence of a new form of language and associated “symbolic behavior.” Although this linguistic newness is generally described as the achievement of syntaxical complexity rather than as a scenic revelation as per the originary hypothesis, clearly no “revolution” in syntax can explain the birth of the symbolic behavior of representation. It is striking that all the digging has not unearthed a single unambiguous piece of evidence for human representation before the Upper Paleolithic. Some pieces bear scratches that may be interpreted in various ways, but there is not one image, whereas the Upper Paleolithic abounds in imagery, culminating in the cave-art that bears comparison with the products of advanced civilizations. The anthropological literature never addresses the fundamental theme of GA, the essential connection between language, representation, and religion as components of human culture.

One of the reasons that led me to reformulate René Girard‘s hypothesis of origin was the absence in Paleolithic art of images of the creatures that in his hypothesis would be first to be sacralized, that is, (male) human victims. Instead, the sacred figures are almost exclusively animal, and the occasional female figurines suggest rather private fertility charms than sacrificial images. But this is a minor objection to a theory to which we owe the groundbreaking theoretical insight that the crucial and therefore the originary function of human representation is the deferral of mimetic conflict. Sadly, empirical anthropology does not attempt to refute or even dismiss this idea; it is simply absent from the bibliography.

 

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Although I have just begun to examine this material, for the purpose of stimulating discussion, here are a few suggestions for associating the central insights of GA with the empirical data:

1. I have at times been tempted by the hypothesis that the origin of language took place in two historically distinct stages: (a) (100 – 200 kya) elementary language: ostensive + imperative; (b) (35-40 kya) mature language: declarative. But I think the data force us to reject this hypothesis, and to deny to the earlier forms of homo (pre-)sapiens the use of human language. “Anatomically modern” hominids predate the watershed event; the “modern” anatomy includes the wherewithal for speech and suggests that these hominids were selected for sound-articulating capacities. These creatures were far more advanced in areas like tool-making, hunting and gathering, and child-rearing than the apes of today. But their lack of a scenic intuition of representation is clear from the absence of any unambiguous evidence of graphic figuration or of ritual activity. Early hominid language must have been a complex signal system, not a language nourished by the scenic imagination derived from our hypothetical originary event. Their language must be considered prehuman, not because of its syntactic simplicity–although this was surely the case–but because its users lacked the human operation of representation.

2. The so-called Out of Africa or Eve hypothesis, founded on mitochondrial DNA  (mtDNA) measurements, posits the total or near-total replacement of the Neandertal and related populations by “modern” African populations within a few thousand years of the watershed event. The radicality of this replacement creates difficulties in the minds of those who have examined the archaeological remains, many of whom adhere to the traditional multiregional evolutionary hypothesis. But the difficulties of the African hypothesis may be considerably reduced if it is understood that the true humans were characterized not simply by better genes but by a radically new form of social organization based on language and ritual culture. The qualitative nature of this change is more easily appreciated in the context of the originary hypothesis: a far higher level of mimetic activity, and therefore of economic and military power, is sustainable within a population that possesses mechanisms for the periodic deferral of mimetic violence. The persistence in modern populations of archaic local anatomical traits pointed to by the multiregionalists may be explained by hybridization with the prehuman population, since these populations’ disappearance was due more to cultural than to genetic inferiority.

3. The relatively rapid dispersal of the early humans can be explained more easily if the tensions due to mimetic rivalry are taken into account. The reproductive success of dynamic human communities would generate population movements not merely for ecological reasons, but because the greatest danger to humans comes from other humans.

I will close with a caveat. Examining the results of empirical social science leads me to reflect on how GA differs from it.  GA stands on the frontier between the humanities and the social sciences, in a place where until now only religion has been found. But only at the ultimate horizon of human thought can originary thinking wholly reconcile the intuitions generated by cultural phenomena on the one hand and scientific data on the other. I have always maintained, in the face of skepticism and worse, that the originary hypothesis is worth “believing in” in the sense that, as I recall, Paul Feyerabend advocated believing in scientific hypotheses: to call one’s hypothesis merely heuristic makes it no less arbitrary, and it certainly makes one less disposed to expend energy in verifying it.

Yet the originary hypothesis is formulated as an a priori construction rather than a falsifiable prediction. What can justify such a formulation? Let me call it the foxhole principle. There are no atheists in the foxholes because in crisis we are returned to the critical origin of culture, the originary union of language and the sacred. The same principle, in a less immediate form, applies to the creation of ideas. Religion impatiently explains natural phenomena by means of the anthropomorphic analogies at hand because its responsibility to human order cannot wait for a better explanation. GA‘s impatience is confined to the scenic realm of human self-understanding. Paleontology keeps bringing us new data; but postmodernity cannot wait for the definitive story of human evolution before attempting to bridge the gap between what C. P. Snow long ago called (from a sociological rather than an intellectual perspective) the two cultures. Nor do we have any reason to believe that, even once this story is told, a non-scenic “objective” knowledge of the human will become conceivable. I am less disturbed by the criticism that GA sounds like religion than I would be if it sounded, as do so many empirical studies of human origins, like the print-out of a data-base. The origin and nature of meaning can never be explained by reducing them to structures of the meaningless.

The originary hypothesis has an empirical core: empirically, we humans exist, and our existence is coextensive with our desire to understand ourselves. Human language and culture originated at some point in space-time, and rigorous reflection on the minimal conditions for this origin is as important in determining the nature of that point as the discovery of a Paleolithic site. Whence my hope that this column might help begin a fruitful dialogue between the students of humanitas and those of anthropos.