Author: staceymeeker

Why should we take mimesis as the specific difference of the human? Doesn’t that imply that we all just copy each other?

 René Girard will go down in history as the person who rediscovered this concept that reveals the unity of the human. Girard reminded us that mimesis generates difference as well as sameness, rivalry as well as harmony, indeed, that its intense human form falls so easily into rivalry that harmony becomes problematic and we create for ourselves a culture to defer it.

The richness of our culture and technology testify to the creativity of mimesis for good and for evil. We cannot all copy each other because that way lies mimetic crisis. On the contrary, because we copy each other so well, we must endlessly differentiate; this is the path that only our species has taken.

The simplicity and elegance of these basic ideas are signs of their power. But as mimetic theory tells us, power provokes fear. The empirical mind-set of the social sciences, concerned with collecting data on various behaviors in order to predict them marginally better than before, corresponds to the ancient wisdom of ne quid nimis, nothing in excess.  GA, in comparison, by making global claims, sets itself above the marketplace of consumable ideas. Its simplicity inspires the fear that there might be nothing left to think. But understanding the centrality of mimesis brings order to our self-knowledge, not limits. Given the tool of originary thinking, our best minds would build we know not what edifices. If this mode of thought has enabled so few to say so much about so many things, how much more would a whole profession, or even a reasonable subset of it, be able to accomplish!

The question is whether we desire to understand how the real world of appetite and the other world of signs and culture are joined, or whether we prefer the existence of the latter to remain explicable only through faith, or simply left unexplained.

The social sciences tell us that a sign is simply one thing substituted for another. Signs are used by animals as well as humans; our sign system is merely more elaborate, not different in kind. We have religion because we are weak and observe the strength of the forces of nature, we are mortal and observe the permanence of the world beyond our death. And as for culture, animals too make beautiful displays, birds sing lovely songs, and who can say that whales don’t tell each other stories…

Our choice is between these worthless explanations and originary thinking: there is no other unified explanation of these phenomena.

Signs “imitate” their object as we imitate each other. But the being that sustains the sign, its Idea or Signified, is not subject to the temporal decay of worldly objects. No materialist monism can deal with this truth. Ideas are mental objects, but they are not the equivalent of their correlate in our brain cells, any more than our words are equivalent to their expression in print or in sound. There is a mystery to the origin of language and signification from a prelinguistic state that natural science cannot explain. To comprehend the mystery is not to eliminate its leap of faith, only to reduce it to its minimal core. Every science takes such a leap, clothed as it may be in the language of rationality.  First principles cannot be demonstrated. We think of this as a merely formal necessity, without remarking that it is of the same kind as the undemonstrability of the existence of God. The mental world of signs subsists only within the human community of their users. It cannot be guaranteed by anything out there in the real world, yet we must seek the most plausible hypothesis for its emergence.

What stands behind the sign is not its immediate referent but an atemporal being that the referent incarnates. The one word that is most significant in all languages is a word whose referent can never be concretely instantiated: the name-of-God. Why would such a hypothetical being ever become useful to us? or conversely, why would God reveal himself to humanity?  GA offers the first explanation of the emergence of the God-concept from the imitation of worldly behavior.

 

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Mimesis is the key to understanding the sign-world because it provides the link between it and the world of nature. It is entirely understandable that higher animals can make marginal use of language through the use of their near-human mimetic powers. Our near-relatives are not far from being able to make the mysterious leap that separates them from the human. Their use of our linguistic symbols shows how close they can come. Animals, even plants have concepts in the sense of slots into which some phenomena fit but not others. A dog who sniffs my socks can distinguish me from anyone else; he possesses a Gans-concept. Chimpanzees can be taught to use sign-language to manipulate such concepts. But animal sign-manipulations are not only unspontaneous, they do not take off into culture. If language were merely an evolutionarily advantageous development, why is it not taken up and elaborated further by those chimps who learn it? Whatever level of sophistication they attain is possible only in communication with humans, not with other animals. Their mimetic capacities allow them to learn a repertory of manipulations that we reward, but never to experience the sacred fear of mimetic conflict that originally made these manipulations necessary.

The chimps’ use of language is a reductio ad absurdum of Skinner‘s behaviorist theory of language.  Behaviorism explains the language of the chimp, but it cannot explain the emergence of human language, let alone that of religion and the other phenomena of culture; it cannot thematize human historicity, the event-consciousness that alone explains this emergence.

The theorization of mimesis tells us many things, including why these insights are not yet generally accepted. Resistance to theory is fear of the sacred, fear of mimetic convergence.  Originary thinking forces us to dissolve the barriers between our separate domains of expertise and admit the real power of thought.

The elegance of this way of thinking gives it a potential market value that cannot be indefinitely denied. In some form or other, GA will have its day. This day will come sooner if the readers of this column contribute to spreading, developing, and transforming its ideas within their own spheres of activity. This is our own peaceful version of Marx‘s demand that we participate in the movement of history.

From the beginning, our use of representations has been anthropological. We seek the truth about ourselves in order to defer the violence through which we risk destroying ourselves.  Natural science has advanced by expelling ethical considerations from its intellectual operations. But in anthropology, the ethical is intrinsic to these operations; the hypotheses we create about ourselves are the instruments of our quest for the good.

I have called generative anthropology a new way of thinking. But a way of thinking is nothing more than a hypothesis for solving our crucial problem of living together in peace–in a word, an ethic.

The ethic implicit in an intellectual activity is not always clear from the start. After twenty years or so of originary thinking I am now beginning to understand the ethic of generative anthropology. That this discovery coincides with the access of GA to a wider audience through the WWW is surely not fortuitous.

All ethics promote love over resentment, but we judge them by the sacrifices they entail in order to expel this resentment.  National Socialism sought to promote love among Germans and other so-called Aryans, as Fascism had done for Italians. Not long ago these ethics seduced many, but we remember them rather for the horrors they perpetrated on those they excluded. The Communist rhetoric of inclusion was yet more seductive: “the International Soviet will be the human race.” But this was taken to mean that those even implicitly inimical to the Soviet are no longer part of the human race: whence Stalin’s and Mao’s massacres and purges, and the killing fields of Cambodia.

 These ethics that preach brotherhood but encourage resentment exemplify the phenomenon of sacrificiality that is far from having been exorcised with them. The victimary discourse of today is less virulent than Hitler’s anti-Semitic tirades, but it unreflectively inverts their sacrificial structure. This phenomenon of sacrificial inversion has become so common that it is invisible even to deconstructionists whose very careers are built on the concept of deferral. To reveal the sacrificial in today’s victimary discourse requires originary thinking.

The word sacrifice contains within itself the paradox of culture. Etymologically to make sacred (sacer + facio), it means both to renounce and to kill. Culture is about renouncing and making sacred, but it is also about killing in the service of these ends. In the originary scene, the central object of mimetic desire is renounced-as-sacred through being named-as-sacred by the sign that is the name-of-God; only once this mediating structure has been established can it be torn apart and eaten in the sparagmos.

Sacrificial thinking is designed to justify the necessary evil of this discharge of resentment toward the central being that can never fully incarnate the divinity and put an end to conflict rather than merely defer it. Sacrificial thinking is a necessity of ritual society, all the more so in its often repressive hierarchical forms. But in market society, political structures come to supplant ritual structures in deferring the violent expression of resentment. Sacrificial thinking becomes counterproductive within the framework of democratic politics, as witness the results of fascist and communist contempt for the parliamentary democracy of the bourgeois market system. In today’s victimary thinking, the object of this contempt has been extended from the market system, from which we can conceive no transcendence, to humanity itself.

 The ethical mission of originary thinking is to provide us with a post-sacrificial anthropology.

Victimary rhetoric derives its power from the dynamic of the originary scene. What we resent in the other is his real or fancied proximity to the center. Because we are in principle equal exchangers of signs, we find it unjust that others surpass us in the exchange of things. Where victimary thinking goes wrong is not in denouncing injustice, but in assimilating it to sacrificial victimage. Reducing human relationships to that between sacrificer and victim denies the common humanity of both sides. Where tragedy suggests that life is never as the language of human desire wants it to be, victimary discourse affirms as life’s sole value the struggle against oppression, which mirabile dictu has begun to bear fruit only today. All real social orders are weighed and found wanting against the absolute standard of our originary moral model of reciprocity.

Although the distant ancestor of victimary discourse is the oppositional view of the social order forged in the French Revolution, its specific rhetoric was born in the postwar reaction to the Holocaust. Between Nazis and Jews, there was no reciprocity; one side was innocent, the other guilty of unspeakable crime. The lesson of the Holocaust is to assimilate all collective resentments to this unambiguous model. The resulting faith in resentment generated the powerful social movements that achieved the abolition of colonialism and racial segregation, as well as equal rights for women.

But in the new world these movements have created, victimary discourse is no longer productive. The objectivizing jargon of Foucault can no longer hide the scapegoating rhetoric of sacrifice denounced by Girard. The denunciation of victimage has become a ritual gesture meant to absolve us–and this refers to all of us–of the guilt of our originary inheritance.

Originary thinking allows us to situate our drive toward reciprocal equality in the context of our supreme need to defer mimetic conflict and to trace the historical evolution of the social structures that realize reciprocity while insuring against violence. Humanity has been able to survive and prosper only because, whatever its lapses, its history has been guided more by love than by resentment. The ethical mission of our new mode of self-understanding is to help extend this guidance into the future.

Last week’s column on falsification touched on the subject of minimalism, or Ockham’s razor. In the realm of hard science, there is a trade-off between minimalism and falsification, simplicity and closeness of fit. Although it is pragmatically useful to assume that nature does things simply, we have no intrinsic reason to believe so. In contrast, in the domain of human self-reflection, where the object of thinking is thought itself, minimalism is tempered only by plausibility. If I can show a relationship between ideas, the simplicity of my explanation is central to its truth. The more minimal my explanation, the more truthful it is.

To translate the logical coherence of a system of ideas into a vision of history is a Hegelian mode of thought. The anti-Hegelian empiricism that has dominated our century has little to its credit on the anthropological front. Great progress has been made in understanding natural processes, but little in understanding our most deeply characteristic activities. There is even a widespread feeling that this goal itself is inappropriate; that each culture is a separate entity with its own values and that any attempt to impose a global theory smacks of Western imperialism.

Hegel‘s system lacks scientific credibility for the same reason that religious anthropologies do: for its lack of care in distinguishing between the anthropological and the natural. It is one thing to describe human history, including that of art, religion, and politics as a dialectic of ideas; it is another to describe the physical universe in terms of Being and Becoming. Hegel’s Idealism has not yet thrown off the originary anthropomorphism that metaphysics inherited from religious thought. But where religion insists on the divine revelation that alone can ground its anthropology, metaphysics thinks it can avoid the overt paradox of revelation by eliminating the historic specificity of human origin in favor of Plato’s Ideas or Kant’s Reason. Philosophy is an anthropology that has sacrificed this specificity in exchange for the ability to reason from abstract postulates rather than revealed truths. Modern analytic philosophy in rejecting anthropomorphism sacrifices the human altogether, although it has recovered some of it through “ordinary language.” And the poster/whipping boy for what it has sacrificed is Hegel; history’s most powerful ratiocinator is reduced to a figure of fun.

But as the old master knew, intellectual history is dialectical; theses are replaced by antitheses and then by antitheses of the former antitheses, moving ever nearer the truth. If the nineteenth century erred by excess of systematic confidence, the twentieth has been characterized by an inordinate fear of the human universal. It is indeed possible to construct a minimal anthropology that can thematize the open-ended productivity of our manipulation of representations without pretending to anticipate its course. As my article in the second issue of Anthropoetics attempted to show, mimesis is the basis for minimal thinking about the human because it is the source of the paradox that makes us human.

Our century’s empiricist particularism has allowed us to brush aside until now the mimetic themes that nineteenth-century writers like Baudelaire and Dostoevsky developed so acutely in favor of an anthropology concentrated on the individual that confines interaction to the margin. We speak of our intelligence, even of our language, as though they were primarily directed to the natural world and only incidentally involved in human relations. But whatever else is included in intelligence, it centrally includes the capacity to learn from another’s example. A student learns by reproducing in his mind structures of understanding learned from other human beings, whether present teachers or absent authors.

But our mimetic capacity cannot be limited to the behaviors our model wants us to imitate. You are happy when I learn by your example, but if I learn so well that I can replace you, I become a threat. In learning to perform a task, I learn its goal; but by sharing your goal, I become your rival. The fact that the vast majority of our intelligentsia resist these obvious truths is testimony to their radical power. People would far rather believe that they want to sleep with their mother and kill their father than admit that their desire imitates the desire of others and that their resentment of these others is the real source of their aggression. By keeping these passions in the family, the Freudian system softens their impact. I hate X because he reminds me of my father, not because I have secretly tried and failed to imitate his mastery.

It is to Girard that we owe these insights; yet he neglects the quality of human mimesis that separates us from the higher animals: mimesis is not merely imitation, it is representation. I don’t just imitate you, I represent the object we both desire. Human beings imitate each other so well that they have devised in language a means for multiplying through imitation the objects on which their desires converge. Animals use signals, and can even be taught to use human signs, but they cannot understand the originary purpose of the sign as a replacement for an object made sacred by desire. (Or perhaps experimenters can teach religion to chimpanzees.)

Mimesis is a minimal function because it has no content in itself; unlike Freud’s Oedipus complex, mimetic desire is defined not by its objects, but by the increasing undefinition of these objects. The circulation of desire, enhanced by the mechanisms of material exchange, is the true motor of history, the generating force of all the complexity of human culture. Through this mechanism, the material world is turned into an ensemble of signs. Generative anthropology has nothing to say about the material world in itself, but the signs we make of it embody meanings that can be traced to their source in the originary scene.

Yet deconstruction tells us that it is naive to imagine that human language emerged at some specific moment. Events never happen; they are only traces of something that has always already occurred.

There are good heuristic reasons for rejecting this view. The difference between deconstruction and GA in practice is that the former reduces all texts to the same phallogocentric paradigm, whereas GA constructs the historical specificity of both institutions and texts. But heuristics aside, I have no quarrel with the idea that presence is always a myth, that there is no Event of origin. Let us call it rather a scene. The scene is always conceptual rather than real, even at the moment in which it occurs. GA does not postulate that there once occurred a sacred moment henceforth ever remembered in a profane world. Every moment is profane in itself, yet sacred and revelatory in the universe of meaning–every use of language repeats the paradox of the originary scene. The originary event is supplementary to itself; everything we imagine through language is always already a construction rather than reality itself, for reality itself, as soon as we think it, is itself a construction of language.

It is not GA but deconstruction that is naive in thinking that it is meaningful to deny the reality of events because they are never truly the events we think them to be. It is the child, or the Romantic, who denies reality because it fails to correspond to the Ideal. The adult is the one who understands that reality is the source of the Ideal that we pose as its horizon, of the language that transcends reality. This is a paradox that religious thinkers prefer to leave in the hands of God, but that mature human beings should be able to face with the help of a truly mature form of thought.

 

A recent post by Jim Collins to the GAlist asks a question fundamental to the intellectual status of generative anthropology: in what sense, if at all, is the originary hypothesis falsifiable?

Karl Popper‘s concept of falsifiability is a basic test of scientific hypotheses. A meaningful hypothesis about empirical reality must be falsifiable by empirical reality; otherwise, it makes no meaningful claim and can be shaved off by Ockham’s razor. Popper points out that no hypothesis can ever be confirmed by reality. His favorite example is that if the hypothesis is swans are white, then finding a single black swan falsifies the hypothesis, whereas finding any number of white swans can only corroborate, but not confirm it, since there may still be a black one yet undiscovered.

Popper, whose central examples were drawn from physics, attacked psychoanalysis as unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless because there is no empirical test of the unconscious motivations it alleges. What would constitute evidence that X does not have an Oedipus complex? Popper’s critique raises a methodological question that goes beyond the particulars of the Freudian system. Freudians are not interested in falsifying the Oedipus complex, but in using it as an explanatory mechanism. In the domain of meaning, which exists only in human language, falsifiability becomes a matter of internal coherence. A powerful explanation imposes its interpretative mechanism, obliging us to think in its terms. Freudian metapsychology is implausible and unwieldy, yet it is widely used because it provides some understanding of the mimetic structure of human desire, and in its Lacanian version, some insight into the relationship between desire and language.

 

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We can turn Popper’s hard-nosed critique against him. His fundamental idea is that no scientific hypothesis can ever be shown to be true, that we use the best hypotheses available in full knowledge that they will some day be falsified and replaced by better ones. But this makes falsification a relative matter. Even if Newton‘s equations fail to match the empirical data, we cannot discard them until we find a set (say, Einstein‘s) that improve the match. Finding one black swan may falsify the white-swan theory, but in practice one would seek an ad hoc explanation (a fall in a tar-pit?) before tossing it out altogether. By the same token, if the Oedipus complex offers a coherent explanation for certain aspects of human behavior, before worrying about falsifying it, we should first seek a better one.

We should not confuse falsifiability with rigor. In Popper’s world, the strongest hypothesis is the most easily falsifiable one, the one that makes the most vulnerable claim on reality. In the anthropological world of meaning, the strength of a hypothesis is measured rather by its minimality. The more it explains with a minimum of presuppositions, the more powerful a claim it makes on our intuition. But we can make a still greater claim for minimality in the anthropological domain. The explanation of meanings and the meanings themselves are all part of the same anthropological universe. The minimal explanation is not simply the most efficient; in referring all meaningful events of human culture to a minimal basis, it approaches the historical understanding of the origin of human meaning in a unique event.

By positing such an event, the originary hypothesis transcends the pre-generative techniques of humanistic interpretation. But no direct physical evidence for this hypothesis is conceivable under present conditions. The evidence for the scene of origin is not an unambiguous physical trace; it is the whole of human culture. And even if we had a film of an event that took place exactly as I have hypothesized, how could we tell it was the first such event? The claim that the originary hypothesis is the minimal hypothesis consonant with the existence of its object, humanity, appeals not to empirical corroboration but to a fundamental intuition: that the sign cannot arise unconsciously, since its use implies consciousness. The rest of GA, in principle if not in detail, follows from this premise.

Hypotheses of biological human origin that concentrate that origin in a single place, like African genesis or the “Eve” hypothesis, tend to corroborate the originary hypothesis. Those that do not, for example, by postulating the independent origin of humanity on several different continents, seem to me to confuse nature with culture. Biological species-formation always takes place in a single population; to claim that various prehuman populations became human in different places is to recognize the specificity of human cultural origin and to deny it with the same breath. If a theory of this sort nonetheless became established, it would be incompatible with the uniqueness of the originary event, although not with the overall thrust of the originary hypothesis.

The difference between anthropology as I understand it and natural science is that at its core the former depends on a mentalistic intuition of the human as understanding and creating meaning. Its faithfulness to this intuition makes GA not a new doctrine of positive anthropology, but a new way of thinking, neither social science nor humanistic interpretation, grounded on the minimal defining condition of humanity, the use of representations. GA‘s originary hypothesis is the first both to respect and to challenge on their own terrain religious doctrines of human origin, which remain the most powerful and universally influential. Religious thought insists on the specificity of the human, even if its postulation of transcendent figures and concepts makes it hard to find the minimal core of this specificity in our use of signs. Positive anthropology, in contrast, has been beating a retreat from foundational questions ever since the generation of Durkheim.

Even if human language began in ten places at once, even if its originary function was not the deferral of violence, the core of the hypothesis would remain: we could not have begun to use language unawares. Some, for example, would situate the origin of language in the interaction between mother and child. But can they constitute a plausible link from this intimate origin to the cultural activity of the community as a whole? Freud himself saw (in Totem and Taboo) the necessity of reconstructing the originary event. I invite Freudians to reflect for a moment whether one can explain the origin of human language and culture by observing the development of a child whose parents are already part of that culture.

When the intellectual community understands what is at stake in GA, it will not ask whether the originary hypothesis is falsifiable, but how human science has been able until now to resist formulating such an hypothesis. GA is a new way of thinking, but the challenge to which it responds is not of its own invention. Seen from its minimalist perspective, all previous modes of anthropological thought are founded on implicit hypotheses of origin. By making its own hypothesis explicit, GA acquires a rigor that adapts to the human world of meaning the real spirit of Popper’s criterion: the formulation of the most intellectually efficient hypothesis consonant with reality.

An explicit hypothesis of origin appears to many as a return to the naive absolutism of religious myths of origin that would prevent the circulation of cultural ideas essential to the generation of new degrees of freedom. But real diversity is not promoted by the refusal to see fundamental identities beneath superficial differences. Just as freedom is the consciousness of necessity, so diversity is the consciousness of identity. These paradoxical formulations pay tribute to the human power of thematization by means of signs. GA offers the first rigorous explanation of this paradoxicality that is the glory and the frustration of our never-ending enterprise of self-understanding.

A few years ago, a political scientist named Francis Fukuyama achieved instant fame with an article proposing that the demise of the Soviet Union signaled the end of history, or in Hegelian terms, the achievement of absolute self-consciousness. Having seen that the Socialist utopia is untenable, we realize that industrial capitalism, the marriage of a market economy and a democratic political system, is the ultimate social order. Recent history had been dominated by history’s final dialectical conflict; now only mopping-up operations remain. For the inhabitants of the ensuing posthistorical age, absent an extra-galactic threat or an errant asteroid, life will be pleasant but boring.

What is of value in Fukuyama’s argument can be better understood from the perspective of generative anthropology. The end of history as an anthropological category means the end of the human problematic, which is that of man as the animal whose primary danger comes from itself. What has indeed come to an end in our era is war as a maximal operation. The human world could not support a full-scale war with the weapons currently available without either disappearing altogether or regressing to an unthinkable level. This means, in originary terms, that we are once again a single community whose violence can destroy it, a global village. Hence there is real weight behind the idea that the end of war is the end of history, that once maximal violence can no longer be exercised, humanity has solved its fundamental problem.

But this is a solution of a very peculiar sort. The weapons of mass destruction still exist, and even if eliminated, could be recreated–to destroy the knowledge that allows us to construct them, one would have to destroy the civilization that creates this knowledge, a destruction that only the weapons themselves could carry out. Hence there can never be any absolute guarantee that World War III will not take place, or–a more likely prospect–that despots and terrorists will not acquire the means to destroy human civilization. Humanity must live on “forever” in the shadow of possible self-destruction, in the face of the unresolved but indefinitely deferred originary crisis. We may well call our awareness of this situation absolute anthropological self-consciousness, but it is quite unlike the Hegelian end of history in which Being succeeds in wholly realizing itself. Only GA can really understand the inherent paradoxicality of the Hegelian ideal.

The great conflicts of the twentieth century, including the Cold War, may now be seen as impatient attempts to bypass the frustrations of the market system. The horrible and destructive attempt to create ethnic community and the less horrible but still more destructive attempt to create distributional community have both been revealed as misguided. Market society cannot avoid disequilibria with the moral model of human interaction that was bequeathed to all of us by our origin, but it will have to work these out for itself–no conceivable centralization of authority can transcend its limitations.

This having been said, the idea that we are at the end of history is more helpful in understanding our past than our future. The shadow of nuclear destruction puts a limit on our exercise of violence, but not on the number of degrees of freedom that human society continues to generate. To say that society has reached its final state in the democratic market system is like saying that humans reach a final state when they pass from childhood to adulthood. If this system is a permanent acquisition of human society, that only means that future social evolution will take it for granted, just as we take agriculture and monogamy for granted. The market is a minimal institution, in contrast with strong institutions founded on ritual centrality. And so is political democracy. The resiliency of these systems, whose survival seemed so precarious less than 60 years ago, comes from the fact that both are means of reaching social decisions with minimal coercion from central authority. Nor do the principles of either market exchange or democracy find definitive expression in any particular set of institutions. Just as the end of the Cold War has seen the weakening of coalitions set up to defend market democracy against communism, the next decades may well see vast changes in the structure of democracy itself.

Imagine if a Renaissance visionary like Leonardo were told that in the late 20th century humans would fly, transmit sound and images instantly around the globe, design machines on computers… How could such blessed beings (with life expectancies of over 70 years) not be happy? how could the history of human conflict not come to an end? But even the achievement of world-wide prosperity on an American or Japanese scale would not put an end to our propensity to mimetic conflict and resentment.

What has indeed ended in human history is the innocence that allowed us to take our separate communities as absolutes and to use all means in our power to destroy our adversaries. As I pointed out in The End of Culture, the battlefield is really the first marketplace, the first situation where value / valor (the French word valeur means both) is established by results independently of ritual constraints. With the demise of this means of testing their relative strength, competition among societies must henceforth be limited to non-violent venues. This limitation has so far provoked both a global movement of religious and cultural ecumenism and local movements of religious and cultural terrorism. The outcome of this tension will remain no doubt forever undecidable.

But one thing that generative anthropology teaches us is that war is not an originary institution. The origin of the human is not the concentration or the externalization of violence, but its deferral. Now, at the end of history, we are able to understand that the human has from the start deferred its potentially self-destructive violence through the exchange of signs and the consequent exchangeability of things.

 

The recent comments on the GAlist concerning the ethical problems engendered by the market are a good illustration of the peculiar difficulty that attends any attempt to theorize this institution. The market system produces so many trees that it is hard to see the forest in the proper–originary–perspective.

The free market is one of humanity’s great achievements. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the course of human history may be described as the never-completable transition from the ritual system of distribution inaugurated in the originary scene to the market system, where no central authority is necessary to mediate between human beings beyond the universal human order of representation through signs.

Nearly all those who deny the ethical validity of the market system agree that they are unable to conceive a better one. This suggests a return of the pendulum from the immanence of the Socialist utopia to a transcendental perspective for which Satan is the ruler of this world and the good society is only found in the Kingdom of Heaven. But the deritualization brought about by the market has always gone hand in hand with the “Protestant Ethic”: the internalization of ritual constraints in harmony with the market. The Mormon church offers probably the best recent example.

Let us try to defetishize the notion of the market. The free market is not a thing; it has no existence independent of the decisions of its participants. Prices for goods and services are set by the interaction of buyers and sellers, as expressed (not prescribed) by the law of supply and demand. The market system, as Marx observed, is essentially dynamic, in contrast with ritual systems that change only accidentally.

Because it removes ritual restrictions on mimetic rivalry, the market system generates vast quantities of resentment, some but not all of which can be recycled into the system. Even the successful A is bitter that B is yet more successful, that C does as well without working as hard, that D is surviving without working at all. In a modern exchange system, there is no way to achieve the relative material equality of the originary human community without empowering the state to expropriate all private property–a solution that has been tried with disastrous results. Less drastic mechanisms for leveling the playing field–from inheritance taxes to affirmative action–are always both partial and controversial. Consumer society offers means to make significant statements of style and posture that add dimensionality to the linear hierarchy of wealth. But this only defers the resentment generated by material inequality; it does not abolish it. The more openly information about the market’s evaluations is made available, the more resentment is intensified, and the more the market itself is blamed for it. In contrast, the human love that exists within the market system–family and amorous intimacy as we know it are creations of this system–is commonly understood to be in non-dialectical, Rousseauean opposition to it, an expression of good human nature struggling against the evil of culture.

The originary point of departure of the market is the potential exchangeability of the parts of the central object divided among the participants in the sparagmos. Because each element of the central being participates in sacred significance, it bears an equivalent value. This means that the market contains no absolute values, that its values are ultimately quantifiable. The exchange of goods and related values in the marketplace is complemented by the exchange of representations in the cultural sphere. The exchange of signs defers crisis; the exchange of goods operates within the space of this deferral. In ritual societies, equalitarian or hierarchical, the latter exchange is modeled more or less directly on the first: the exchange of things is dictated by the exchange of words. Socialist economies anachronistically attempted to operate in the same manner.

All political institutions may be traced to the linguistic reciprocity of the originary scene; this is the germ of truth in social contract theory. The human is originarily equalitarian because the originary exchange of signs is reciprocal. Democracy has a powerful intuitive appeal because the principle of one person, one vote makes direct reference to this originary moral configuration. But political democracy does not arise as the result of a “natural impulse”; it has existed historically only as a compensatory institution within market society. The limited market society of Athens produced the first notions of a self-governing polity, and mature market society has for the first time enfranchised all adults, including women.

Those who point out the injustices of the market from within market society itself merely confirm the fact that the market system indefinitely defers the end of history (a subject for another column). The market’s central contribution to human self-consciousness, to what I call anthropology, is in leading us to reject apocalyptic schemes of thought, whether the demonic one of Hitler, the deluded one of Lenin, or those of millenarist thinkers who exhort us to choose once and for all between peace and self-destruction, love and resentment.

No, we each make this choice many times a day, but there is no way for us to make the choice. We may break a few eggs, but we’ll never taste that great omelet in the sky. Faith in the market-system is merely another term for faith in human history, the faith that the future we construct with our daily interactions will continue to teach us something of value about ourselves.

One thing modern feminism has sensitized us to is the anomaly of male generation. The twin roots of our culture, the Hebrew and the Greek, both imperialistically attribute generation to the male, where their ancestral cultures had more plausibly left it to the female or to some combination of the two.

We are all familiar with the creation scene in Genesis 1; yet in the original version of this scene the world is generated not by the word of the one God but by the sexual union of Earth and Sky. In the Oresteia, which could be called with some justification an Athenian creation-myth, the Areopagus declares Orestes free of the Erinnyes‘ curse on mother-killing, not because Clytemnestra had killed Agamemnon and therefore deserved to die, but because only the father is really the child’s parent, the mother being only a vessel for his seed.

But to reveal the anomaly of these scenes is not to denounce them. Denying history may be fun for a while, but it isn’t conducive to anthropological understanding. These developments, which lie at the foundation of Western civilization, that most successful of human enterprises, lend support to the originary hypothesis of generative anthropology, which alone can offer a useful explanation of them.

The originary hypothesis explains language and culture in general as primarily motivated by the need to defer the violent consequences of mimetic desire, and therefore as an essentially masculine creation. We should appreciate the historical irony of this discovery. A mere generation ago, when humanity was generally called “man,” there was little question that culture was an essentially male domain that women contributed to only marginally. But the originary hypothesis could not have been formulated so long as (male) violence remained sacralized. It is only in the context of postwar feminism, when women for the first time in history are considered to merit equal opportunities with men in all cultural domains, that this hypothesis of the “masculine” origin of culture can be formulated.

Men have always been stronger than women, so their usurpation of women’s generative capacity need not have awaited the beginnings of Western civilization. The idea that we all lived harmoniously under the civilization of the Goddess until the male Gods took over is an extension of the Eden myth as renewed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The latter’s utopia is a reference to primitive equalitarian society before the invention of sedentary agriculture, where there was no property to accumulate and therefore no powerful social hierarchy. The Goddess-world was presumably more advanced, but still peaceful and happy.

These utopian theories make light of the sacrificial nature of earlier societies, as though it were not the anti-sacrificial nature of the Judeo-Christian tradition that inspired their utopian ideals in the first place. As Girard has long pointed out, the idyllic descriptions of the ritual order of these societies are not written by their sacrificial victims.

The myth of paternal generation, however false to human biology, is a great conceptual advance. Monotheism and metaphysics, the Hebrew and Greek components of Western thought, are so central to our way of thinking that no anthropology can ignore their importance. The Bible and the Oresteia present the concept of male generation differently, but for the purposes of this discussion we may consider them in agreement.

To begin with the more profound of the two documents: God is presented as a unique figure referred to in the masculine who creates the world through words. This point has never been given the explanation it deserves. God creates the world, and man, through language because in the originary scene, man and (the idea of) God created themselves through language. It is through pronouncing the first linguistic sign, the name-of-God, that the protohuman becomes human. Naming God gives meaning to God, but only if they who name God conceive of him as existing prior to their naming. Believers and nonbelievers still live within this paradoxical structure, the first group being defined not by its different vision of the present so much as by its hope for a future when we will see God face to face.

No doubt to understand the origin of the world linguistically commits what I would call the cosmological fallacy: that the natural world can be understood through the categories of anthropology. The suppression of biological generation, and of woman’s role in it, is indeed bad biology, but it is excellent anthropology, and it is the latter, not the former, that is conducive to ethical progress, including the eventual recognition of the essential equality of men and women.

Thus although God is traditionally presented as masculine, gender is not really essential to “his” constitution, as has been demonstrated by various de-gendering operations on the Bible and related texts. Language may have been originated by men, but women are equally able to accede to it. The biblical creation scene offers a theory of the human qualitatively more rigorous than naturalistic myths, whatever gender-relationship they may involve. Once I understand that “man” creates “himself” through language, this understanding can be applied to women as well, and to the humanity they jointly create–just as the Biblical text applies it, by affirming the priority of Adam over Eve in one version of the creation story but not in the other.

Aeschylus‘ doctrine of male generation is more specifically “sexist.” It affirms an unscientific doctrine of male dominance in the act of procreation of which feminist biologists have found traces well into our own (soon to be ended) century. But rather than basking in our moral superiority to the benighted Athenians who built the Parthenon and invented philosophy, we should give some thought to the anthropological value of this sexist biology.

Aeschylus was a contemporary of the pre-Socratic philosophers in whom Karl Popper sees the origin of scientific hypothesis. This has led some to remind us that, as opposed to maternity, paternity is itself a hypothesis, for reasons it is wise not to specify over the Internet. But this emphasis perversely privileges the biological domain that the whole point of the new doctrine is to subordinate to the anthropological. Certainly the reign of the paternal hypothesis is associated with patriarchal order and restrictions on women’s sexuality, but that is not the fundamental point of the Oresteia. No one questions who Orestes’ father was. It is rather that the Athenian system of justice, by annulling the Mutterrecht represented by the Erinnyes, declares itself heir to the originary scene of language. The Greek courts were, as far as we know, the first place where logical reasoning was cultivated. Philosophy originates as a dialectical antithesis of these courts, with the Socratic elenchos that opposes and denounces the Sophists‘ unprincipled use of language “to make the worse cause appear the better.”

Why is this adjustment necessary? What does it tell us about the paternalist doctrine of the Oresteia? The Athenian court made its decisions through voting; it was an intellectual marketplace. But in Aeschylus‘ world, the court is presided over by the Gods; its decisions are considered divinely inspired. The speaker before the tribunal is free to reason on behalf of his cause, yet constrained by the sacred aura that surrounds the court from uttering “sophisms,” or expecting to win his case if he does. This double aspect of language, free and sacred, is preserved in the style and content of the fragments of pre-Socratic philosophizing that remain to us: they express hypotheses about the world, but in gnomic and mystical form, as if inspired by the Gods; Parmenides‘ hexameters make this explicit.

With the secularization of Athenian society, this contradiction became overt. Language and its sacred origin were split apart. It was then that Socrates and his pupil Plato created a doctrine in which the words themselves, in the form of the Ideas, incarnate the originary power to prevent conflict. “The good,” Plato tells us to seek is not merely an empirically optimal social arrangement, it is an ideal whose “reality,” if not its actualizability, is guaranteed by the fact that we have a word for it. And as in the Genesis story, Plato’s Republic gives women a surprisingly equal role; once the “masculine” anthropology of the word is made explicit, there is no reason to exclude women from its province.

The unequaled power of these explanations inspires my certitude that some day the originary hypothesis will be generally accepted by both sexes–and all the genders.

 

What exactly does a literary work do for us? Is there a difference between art and entertainment in this regard?

Let us begin with Aristotle‘s classic definition of this function as catharsis or purgation, which reminds us of the sacrificial nature of culture. The negative emotions of pity and terror are purged by witnessing the simulation of the protagonist’s suffering and death. Instead of participating in a real sacrifice, one watches it on stage; but the literary text of the tragedy (or comedy) does not merely reproduce the implicit or explicit text of the rite. Athenian drama made the tragic action explicable by obliging us to identify with all the characters in turn. Identification is no mystery; it is a mode of mimesis. As we see and hear human beings dealing with a crisis, we imagine ourselves in their place. Ritual sacrifice, because it uses a real victim, does not permit of dramatic identification. Its horror–all the more so if the victim is human–precludes the spectator’s identifying with the circumstances of the myth that is being enacted. (Imagine how we would react to the verbal ironies of Oedipus rex in a performance where the actor would actually put his eyes out.)

Aristotle’s definition is a good starting point, but it suggests a purely cyclical operation. Purgation of negative emotion is followed by a new buildup of this emotion, which is followed in turn by another purgation. This ritual pattern is preserved in the sequence of weekly church services and annual feast days. Such a periodic activity contributes to our entertainment in the etymological sense of the term: it keeps us going, il nous entretient, but it leaves no permanent residue to build on.

 Yet the term culture, which derives from agriculture, cultivation, suggests that the higher forms of art add to our experience something irreversible. Pedagogy is the art of cultivating the young so that they blossom into cultured adults. The uncultured person is like a field overrun with weeds; he will produce poor fruit. These botanical metaphors point to an irreversible process of creating social value.

This suggests the following model: A piece of entertainment leaves the spectator as sacrificially inclined as before, it purges or defers only temporarily his appetite for sacrifice. The work of high art, on the other hand, cultivates us in turning us away from the brutality of sacrifice. Having identified ourselves with the position of the tragic protagonist as well as with the social forces that require his downfall, we are less eager to rejoice in such downfalls in the future.

 There is another class of literary works specifically designed to teach us a moral often given explicitly in the text: the fable or moral tale. Fables are a part of oral culture that survives in our own. In an earlier column, I dealt with the “sour grapes” fable (The Fox and the Grapes); another favorite, particularly for connoisseurs of the French fabulist La Fontaine, is that of The Fox and the Crow, where by flattering the crow into singing, the fox makes him drop the cheese he was carrying in his beak. We are invited to apply these lessons to our own lives. Because we like to be flattered, and tend to denigrate honors we cannot attain, fables are useful reminders of the likely unhappy consequences of giving in to these tendencies. Do we actually become less likely to succumb to them? A new element has been added to our self-reflection. But now that we have thematized it, we can resist it. Now that I know about sour grapes, I can deny its applicability. Or perhaps the fox’s praise was sincere appreciation rather than flattery. No proposition about human interaction can specify the effect of its enunciation on the interaction it describes.

But if fables once produced an irreversible progress in our self-understanding, it is an ancient one. There are many collections of fables, but they all repeat the same lessons; Æsop‘s is the oldest available in the West, but surely not the first. Fables remain always à propos, they are not a part of sacrificial history, because they express a non-sacrificial vision of society, or to put it another way, they are blind to their own sacrificial nature. If the protagonist suffers, it is not because the social order–or the reader–requires his suffering, but because he has failed to understand the mimetic symmetry of human relations. The crow’s enjoyment of the fox’s flattery prevents him from reflecting on the fox’s own self-interest. In a fable, the problems of human desire are foibles, weaknesses that can be pinpointed and resolved. The crow swears after losing the cheese that on ne l’y reprendra plus. But in tragedy, we are made to understand that the hubris that brings about the hero’s suffering is not a foible but the essence of the human. Tragedy has no moral other than the paradoxical necessity of its sacrificial structure.

What then does literature do for us?

 Entertainment teaches us about the deferral of satisfaction. We want the villain to get his comeuppance and the hero and heroine live happily forever after, but the work teaches us that it’s more fun if we have to wait a bit.

High literature adds an additional lesson; that the roles of villain and hero are not so easily distinguished, that each has its ambiguities, so that the work’s deferral of the final decision teaches us that such decisions were best avoided. To say that tragedy or art in general makes us less sacrificial is to claim that there is a progressive revelation of ethical truth in history. In modern novels and plays, we identify with the sufferings of ordinary people who would have been fit only for comedy in the classical age. The decline of high art in the postmodern era is associated with the deconstruction of the sacrificial by victimary discourse: now that everyone knows it’s good to be the victim, everyone claims to be the victim. We no longer accept sacrifice because we each want to occupy the sacrificial center for fifteen minutes ourselves.

The great lesson of high culture was that however great its ambiguities, however intense our mourning for the tragic protagonist, sacrifice is an absolute necessity, the implicit foundation of the human order. Today we are no longer willing to accept this proposition. No doubt tragedy was more dignified than our incessant squabbling over who is the victim of whom, but such is the price of moral progress. High art has served its purpose; now we must find less dignified but less violent (dare I say less masculine?) means of deferring our resentment.

The discussion started by Column No. 29 on the abortion issue gave me the idea of developing my ideas on sexual difference a little further.

I have resisted the temptation to call this column Engendering GA, not merely because the play on words is about as trite as Yogi Berra‘s quote about déjà vu, but because the term gender is used today to imply that there is no fundamental difference between the sexes, that feminine and masculine roles are socially determined. The traditional French reply to this utopian denial of the facts is vive la différence!

 But in order to speak about this difference, we must first attempt to understand it in originary terms. GA has said little about sexuality. Its theory of desire, founded on the primary relation of mimesis, is suspicious of any attempt to specify the objects of desire.

In my Abortion column, I suggested the following definition of sexual difference:  Men relate to others externally; women have the additional potential of an internal relation to a human other. To be biologically equipped to bear children is what a woman is (and what a man is not)– which does not mean that it need be the essential determinant of her (or his) behavior. The germ of the feminist argument that men resent female superiority is that women have a way of relating to others that is inaccessible to men. But this definition is not biological; it is anthropological. Otherness is an exclusively human category.

The abortion issue touches directly on the nature of this internal relation; when does the fetus become a human other and cease to be a mere part of the woman? But of far greater interest is the way in which this conception of sexual difference can enlighten us about the chief subject of these columns, which is love.

 

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My original idea was to call this series Chronicles of Resentment. But as I especially emphasized in Column No. 6, if there is one thing that saves us from resentment, it is love–sexual, romantic love. Clearly we can understand love up to a certain point without referring to sexual difference. Although the religious and literary tradition gives a quite different picture, in the Athens of Plato‘s time, the only culturally interesting form of love was homosexual. The expulsion of sexual difference from Greek eros is one of the founding gestures of mature Athenian culture, and certainly of philosophy. But the culture of sexual love in the West since the Middle Ages has returned to its heterosexual roots; modern homosexuality is best understood as a deviation from this norm.

The notion of love that I have attempted to develop in these columns, as well as in my recent seminar, is that love is essentially tenderness, the caring awareness by each of the other’s vulnerability, and therefore of his or her need for love. The obvious source of this sentiment in the originary scene is mourning for the central being torn to pieces in the sparagmos. But the specific quality of the love-relationship as it develops in Western culture reflects the integration within external human relations of the internal otherness of the mother-child relationship. This relationship is fundamentally non-rivalrous. Lovers can indeed become rivals; they are as subject to the mechanism of mimesis as anyone else. But what makes the love relationship tender is the non-mimetic appreciation of the other’s difference. The infant in the womb–and for a long time afterward–is incapable of mimetic rivalry; this only begins with the assumption of full humanity in the possession of language. To engage in conflictive mimesis, as any two-year-old knows, it is essential to be able to say no.

 The mother’s tenderness for the child in the womb cannot be reciprocated; it is she who recognizes its need for her care. In contrast, the tenderness of lovers is reciprocal. (A relationship in which one party depends unilaterally on the other is unworthy to be called love.) Love is an external relationship between adults, yet it strives toward mutual internality, as if each were the nurturing mother of the other. Each treats the beloved not as a potential rival but as an object of asymmetrical caring. The love-relationship lacks the biological element of internality; it achieves cultural grandeur by attempting to reproduce in an external relationship the visceral necessity of an internal one. As the deaths of Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, and countless others exemplify, the true lover cannot live without the beloved.

These reflections on romantic love lead us to examine the role of love in Christianity, the central cultural system of what Hegel called the Romantic era. The love of each for each, which I have qualified as omnicentric–each becomes a center for every other–is proposed in the Gospels as an alternative to the symmetrical opposition of rivals.  Turn the other cheek rather than retaliate in kind; go the extra mile rather than draw a line in the sand. The moral duty of asymmetry is associated with maternity in the figure of the other as a child that recurs so frequently in the Gospels. A recent lecture by my UCLA colleague, historian Scott Bartchy, emphasized early Christianity’s subversion of the symmetrical male relationships of the Roman empire. This suggests that we should understand Christian love (agapé) as modeled on the asymmetrical caring relationship of internal otherness. What Jesus proposes is the feminization of external relations as a non-sacrificial means of deferring violence.

 

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I will conclude with a reference to Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary, probably the most significant novel of the nineteenth century. The excesses that bring about Emma‘s downfall are more financial than sexual. She is the first literary character of consumer society. As the author might have said, Madame Bovary, c’est nous.

Emma ends badly, but her passion for consumer goods is prophetic of a society in which we can all differentiate ourselves without directly competing by using consumption to make a statement of our social being. Emma is unconcerned with rivalry in the real world; the mimetic models she finds in books and magazines provide her with consumption patterns–including adultery. If mature market society has resisted the final conflict predicted by Marx and so many others, this is the result of the rise of consumption as a mitigating factor in social confrontation.

Can we find a more specific linkage between the modern phenomenon of consumption that mediates between symmetrical rivalry and linear hierarchy and the relationship of internal otherness?  Emma is disinterested in motherhood; she cares more for her possessions than her child. Can we say then that the meaningful consumer goods of consumer society are (like pets) cultural substitutes for children that allow us solace within ourselves from the rivalrous externality of the social world? These ideas require further reflection.

The first group one thinks of on hearing the term self-righteousness is what is known today as the Christian Right. One imagines Jesse Helms fulminating against obscene artworks, or Pat Robertson condemning homosexuality. But my thirty years in the academic world have taught me that the most self-righteous people of all are on the Left. No one is so certain of standing at the right hand of God as the–probably unbelieving–university-based liberal. The religious person, even the true believer, always harbors some doubt about his salvation; his very vituperativeness is a reflection of his incertitude. In contrast, the liberal is untroubled by doubts. His unrelieved contempt for his political opponents is grounded on his serene conviction that they are not merely stupid but above all criminally selfish. Liberal self-righteousness is grounded on faith in altruism.

 In the old days, the philosophies of the Left were universalist, which means they included oneself. But we have all learned Marx‘s lesson about the hypocrisy of the revolutionary bourgeoisie who equated their own interests with those of mankind. Now that this lesson has been translated into the victimary language of the PC era, the academic liberal has learned to have no self-interest at all. He is on the side of the oppressed, whether this be a social class, an ethnic group, a species of animals, or the planet as a whole. His own unavoidable complicity with the oppressors provokes in him white guilt, whose whiteness, whether or not it correspond to his skin color, is that of the non-particular, the non-minority. But white guilt, unlike his Christian counterpart’s sense of original sin, is activated only in the presence of victims. In relation to ordinary people it produces a powerful rush of superiority. For one so aware of his own complicity with oppression, a Ronald Reagan voter is beyond the pale.  Pat Robertson will tell someone whose conduct he disapproves of that he hates the sin and not the sinner; liberals do not make this distinction toward the sinners on the right.

Our two self-righteous camps have few kind words for each other. Yet both are heirs to the Christian moral ideal that René Girard has characterized succinctly and powerfully as the defense of the victim. The academic liberal imagines his ideals to be secular, but they derive from the Christian revelation, and the Judeo-Christian tradition, as much as those of his political enemies.

Today the market system has caught up with the Christian ideal. Two thousand years of humble love for the victim have led to two kinds of Phariseeism: that of the religious conservative who rejects modernity, and that of the liberal who embraces white guilt, the one condemning the ungodly in the name of the original victim, the other ever seeking new victims to protect from their persecutors. (The breakdown of this protection, in the form of the welfare system, reflects that of the cult of the victim in general.)

 To reveal the persecution of the sacrificial victim is a great moral revelation, historically perhaps the greatest of all. But it cannot be the final revelation. If generative anthropology has a role to play in allowing us to transcend self-righteousness toward the ultimate horizon of mutual understanding, it is in showing us that society is not founded on victimization but on language and the deferral of violence, and that there is no absolute dichotomy, as Christian thought suggests, between sacrificial and non-sacrificial social orders. Putting oneself on the side of the victim cannot constitute a permanent moral discovery-principle for right action.

What will improve the moral atmosphere is not compromise or tolerance in the vapid ecumenical sense of seeing the other side’s point of view, but a new understanding of the common root of all our moral positions. As human beings, we all share the same origin; what we fight over are hypotheses, not foundations.

Those of the Christian right should remind themselves that the world cannot return to the human immediacy of Christ’s day, or of their grandparents’. Phenomena like the homosexual lifestyle, abortion, pornography, need not enter everyone’s life, but they are part of the modern world and must be accommodated to. Human desire is everywhere the same; we should encourage the reciprocity of love and resist the violence of resentment in all our interactions. As I tried to show in my last column, if access to abortion leads to the destruction of potential lives, it also permits the mother to freely choose the life of her child. 

From my academic vantage-point, liberal self-righteousness is a more troublesome phenomenon. The flaw of liberalism is that it is based on an anthropology of difference; liberalism is a kind of inverted colonialism. Every culture is different; every ethnic subculture is different; every individual is different. It is imperialistic to expect members of other cultures to function in our culture as well as we do. Hence any attempt to submit everyone to the same standards leads to outcries of discrimination.

But this anthropology is wrong.  We are all fundamentally the same. Cultural differences supply enrichment upon a common foundation; that is how we are able to study foreign languages and cultures in the first place. To respect other people’s differences is to treat them as choices we too could have made, not as signs of victimage.

What formula does GA propose to replace take the side of the victim in a world where everyone is claiming victim status? Let me suggest take the side that is less self-righteous. Self-righteousness is a sign of resentment, and resentment is the source of human violence.

Jesus preferred to hang around with (re)publicans and sinners, not because they were “victims”–publicans were tax-collectors–but because they were less likely than the Pharisees to feel and act morally superior to others. Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bête, to quote our old friend Pascal.