Author: staceymeeker

Over the years I have devoted a good number of these Chronicles to the victimary strain of modern Western Leftism, whose increasingly solipsistic turn has suggested to me that it may truly be the ultimate stage of the way of thinking founded on “the epistemology of resentment.” Resentment is not used here in the invidious sense in which today’s Leftists attribute it to their “deplorable” opponents; this epistemology consists in defining moral truth via the quasi-instinctual application of our sense of moral equality to any situation that violates it. This procedure’s explicitness under the Woke regime is close to transparent: the “victim’s” resentment is judged to demonstrate the violation of his moral equality.

The radicalization of this procedure describes the victimary trend whose most recent name is Wokeness, evoking what is indeed its appeal to our most fundamental “moral instincts.” But (assuming I am not in a victim class) Wokeness’ emphasis is not on my own resentment, but on my adoption of what I conceive to be the appropriate resentment of my (white) race’s victims. This conception receives legitimacy from chosen representatives of presumably oppressed minorities glad to be of service to their ascriptive group and indirectly, to the society as a whole, while enriching themselves considerably in the process.

Since over the years the terms of this victimary discourse have changed, I felt that I needed a little historical perspective. The significant historical difference between today and 1991 is that the earlier date coincided with the “Fukuyama moment” of imagining ourselves at the “end of history,” whereas today, what is most striking is not so much the vastly increased economic and military power of China as the decadent state of the American social fabric. American culture is dominated by what can only be called an infantile self-hatred, an identification with “post-colonial” forces hostile to the hegemony of the West and of the USA in particular. These attitudes are comparable to the reactions of a spoiled but discontented child to what he deplores as the culturally hegemonic world of his parents on whose protection he still unthinkingly relies in the moment that he reviles it.

It seemed to me that returning to a book published in 1991 on the effect of victimary thinking in the universities, where it chiefly began and still remains concentrated, would provide some perspective on how things had changed over these 30-odd years, during which the West’s and America’s self-image has gone from one of effortless triumph to an increasing sense of impotence—incapable of defending its borders or keeping order on its streets, or of respecting its historical monuments and achievements, while “daring” to put into question human biological realities that all other cultures had always unthinkingly respected. That book is Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, published by the Free Press division of MacMillan.

Although I was teaching at UCLA throughout the period D’Souza depicts, and was certainly aware of the victimary thrust of the developments he describes, I would not have recalled them as so powerful in that pre-Woke era as D’Souza shows them to have been. The pressures in favor of minority/black affirmative action were more visible then because they had not yet been fully implemented, but otherwise, their ideological rationale was little different from today’s, even to the point of including the radical perspective from which the very notion of excellence, whether in the student’s work or in the works he is asked to study, is questioned or dismissed as a “white” or “white male” means of insuring that group’s dominance.

What is truly different today is that these perspectives are no longer confined to the university but have become commonplaces pervading the educational system and popular attitudes—a further step in Rudi Dutschke’s “Long March…” But already by 1989 the university administrations that had instinctively resisted the New Left in the 1960s were almost without exception ready from the outset to concede to demands for “affirmative action” in minority hiring and admissions.

What is truly curious is why these ideas, already current and put into practice thirty years ago, are still being affirmed so insistently today against little resistance. (The current Supreme Court’s consideration of Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina may soon drastically change this situation!) Why after all this time is it only in the past decade that Deans of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and their staffs have been created and are continuing to multiply—including in the UC system that presumably outlawed racial preferences in 1996? The obvious answer is that the essential flaw in the victimary system—the false assertion that inferior minority performance is due to racism—requires that it continually be radicalized in order to justify it. The insistence on “systemic racism” and on promoting the works of Kendi, Coates, et al. must be seen as a response to the failure of affirmative action to efface or at least reduce the differences in achievement between whites and blacks.

(As a counterexample, having lived and taught through the 1996 passage of Proposition 209, which forbade discrimination in public education, I can attest that at UCLA, which is the hardest UC to gain admission to, the quality of minority students noticeably improved from one year to the next. Interestingly, despite California’s presence on the “left coast,” in 2020 voters rejected by 57-43 Proposition 16 that would have repealed 209.)

The term that has most changed its status since 1991 is “diversity.” Although far from absent from D’Souza’s book, the word does not yet bear the weight that it does today, where aside from its institutional presence, it is the primary rhetorical characterization of the contemporary university. (The UCLA Chancellor includes it whenever possible in his messages to the university community.) Thus the purpose of race-conscious admissions is no longer explained primarily as righting an injustice toward victimary groups, but as making the university more “diverse” and therefore more universal, providing its community a sociological experience that need no longer be justified as compensatory. An expected major change is that thirty years ago, when there were still more male than female students and considerably more professors, feminism was far more militant. In today’s university, women outnumber men in the student body, have parity with men on the faculty, and occupy a comparable number of leadership roles.

In the domain of “critical theory,” D’Souza reacts to what were then the later stages of the “French Theory” invasion begun in 1966, often discussed in these Chronicles. Today even the memory of Foucault and Derrida is fading, and such as Agamben or Zizek are in no way of comparable importance. D’Souza is dismissive of what he calls this au courant criticism; this is fully understandable given that the era’s self-important flamboyance largely hid the true theoretical significance of its questioning of literary norms, a significance to be found in Girard but also in the unremarked anthropological depth of Derrida’s key notion of différance, and more broadly, in the search of all these thinkers to escape the straitjacket of Western metaphysics. The best of what remains of this today are explorations of the esthetic productions of sexual and similar minorities often marginalized in past eras.

Perhaps the most striking attitudinal difference between D’Souza’s book and the current situation is reflected in the final chapter’s three suggestions for improvement, made at a time when the victimary problem was largely confined to the university. These suggestions were:

1. 1. Base affirmative action entirely on socioeconomic, not racial status;
   2. Do not allow student groups based on race, i.e., not The Black Students Society but The Du Bois Society;
   3. Insist on the importance of the classics, including those of other traditions.

It’s easy enough to see that attempts to implement suggestion 2 would bring about vast demonstrations and probably be struck down in the courts. The rationality of 3 is not in doubt, but I think a survey of course offerings today would make clear that outside of a few deliberately traditional institutions such as Hillsdale College or Thomas Aquinas College, majors have tended to emphasize the trendy and “diverse” over a strong foundation in “the great authors,” and a strong background in the Classics, let alone a knowledge of classical languages, is rarely required or found. In 2021, Princeton University dropped the requirement for its Classics majors to know either Greek or Latin!

As for suggestion 1, no doubt crude racial quotas are never put forth as admissions criteria, but recruitment at all levels from freshmen to Deans and Chancellors very much takes race and gender into account, and indeed, the matter of selection itself is less problematic today than its enabling ideology of “systemic racism” and the White Guilt behind it. This ideology is no longer something students discover in college; it pervades public schools at all levels, and with the current wave of transsexualism has led to such perversities as “girls” with penises using girls’ bathrooms and competing in their athletic contests. This has clearly reached its limit and will probably recede, but we should not forget that the clear objective of the shift, in attention if not in reality, from racism to heterosexism, is to discredit not merely our social but our biological norms as “oppressive” to the extent that they appear to infringe on the moral equality of even those least respecting of social normality.

Thus if, on the one hand, “nothing has changed” since 1991, on the other, “everything has changed.” The epistemology of resentment has attained what would seem to be its broadest possible application to the world of social interaction, to the point where its conflict with what was once called “common sense” has attained Orwellian proportions—although not sufficiently to provoke most Republican candidates in the 2022 election into a straightforward denunciation of it.

Let me recall here a point I made about the 2016 election: one can say what one likes about Trump’s erratic pronouncements on Twitter and elsewhere, but in 2016 he won the nomination and the election most simply because he was the only serious candidate to directly denounce what was already an early stage of Wokeness. As I pointed out at the time, he and Ben Carson alone took aim at the victimary tendency that Obama’s administration had fostered and that Romney had done nothing to counter in 2012. Unlike the National Review, I have always considered Trump’s rejection of the victimary, which is to say, of the contemporary Left, as an act of historic political significance. Today, when we witness De Santis’ performance as governor, we are witnessing the acts of a politician who is clearly Trump’s heir, and who has turned an attitude that benefited from Trump’s narcissism but also from his visceral rejection of leftist virtue-signaling into a well-honed political praxis that has splendidly demonstrated its viability in one of our largest and most “diverse” states.

If there is one thing we have learned since the “end of history” in 1991, it is the extreme tenacity of the epistemology of resentment, in both its standard (“Left”) version, and even in its aberrant so-called “extreme Right-wing” version that targets the Jews as the evil distillers of the poison of modernity. Today, even the difference in respectability between the two, as evidenced in the continued unstigmatized adulation of such cruel mass killers as Castro and Mao, is put in doubt by the return of Hitler cults under the influence of Islamism. That regimes founded on these principles have always led to catastrophe, given that unleashing resentment with the dream of a permanent Saturnalia damages the bases of human interaction beyond repair, cannot prevent others from trying.

As Adam Smith said, “There is a lot of ruin in a nation,” and the US is still very far from having become a hollow shell like Venezuela. But in a dangerous world, our democracy will not long survive undamaged the triumph of resentment as embodied in the addled mediocrity of Joe Biden.

1. Fukuyama forever?

The purpose of GA is to provide the minimal set of presuppositions that permit a plausible hypothesis of origin for language and the rest. But the fact of having invented language, which makes possible indefinite layers of recursion, means that this minimality is a source of indefinite complexity.

For example, the “coda” of the previous Chronicle, which referred to Netanyahu’s victory as a positive step toward restoring the West’s self-confidence and the ultimate possibility of reestablishing its world leadership by uniting the three “Abrahamic” religions. Isn’t this just an example of colonialist mentality? Isn’t it just an extension to Western Civilization of my view of the Jews’ “firstness,” of their status as “the chosen people”? How can I criticize antisemitism when the Jews encapsulate the evils of Western hegemony?

Well, as my favorite Churchill quote implies, the West’s success in creating the modern world was the product of its qualitatively greater capacity for self-correction. To hold the West as morally inferior on the basis of its supposedly inequitable superiority to these other systems is the earmark of the seemingly ultimate Woke stage of the epistemology of resentment, the “end of history” of the Left.

The Western system is not linked in some Hitlerian way to our race, Aryan or other (Semitic?). Nations like Japan and South Korea have prospered by adopting both the West’s technology and system of government, and China has certainly profited from the former. To have created modernity makes the West first, not best.

Churchill’s modest pride is the best we can do; it is fitting that in our Woke era he be reviled as an “imperialist” by a generation whose so-far peaceful lives are among the benefits of his vision and spirit during WWII. No doubt imperialism was often exploitative and cruel; one need only mention Leopold’s “Congo Free State.” But the principle of spreading Western modernity to the rest of the world was, and still is, essentially beneficial. It was Western medicine and doctors who helped banish the Ebola epidemic from the West’s former African colonies. When the account is drawn up, the overall result of imperialism was greatly to improve and lengthen the lives of billions in the formerly colonized countries.

2. Return to Israel

I cited in Chronicle 755 the case of the Jews’ return to Israel as a dream of American Protestantism that was at the same time prophetic in the context of the contemporary world. The fact that Israel’s existence has been uncompromisingly resisted by all Palestinian factions is inseparable from the Christian West’s longstanding reluctance to take Israel’s part in this conflict, as though the existence of dozens of Muslim states were normal whereas that of one Jewish state is a scandal.

Thus in the recent UN vote about Israel’s nuclear weapons, only five countries voted against the resolution declaring them illegal, with all the European nations abstaining. In the yet more recent 98-17 vote to “try” Israel in the International Criminal Court for its “occupation,” (see https://worldisraelnews.com/un-votes-98-17-to-take-israel-to-intl-criminal-court-over-occupation/?utm_source=newsletters_worldisraelnews_com&utm_medium=email&utm_content), the countries that voted with Israel in opposing the resolution were Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Guatemala, Hungary, Italy, Liberia, Lithuania, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and the United States. The United Kingdom and France abstained, while at least a few European nations swam against the tide. Yet Ukraine and all the Arab nations approved the resolution.

As with every other humanitarian controversy, Israel is singled out for condemnation by the UN, and most of the world’s so-called democracies abstain from defending it. In the wake of the Abraham Accords, it seems evident that any change in this configuration will come rather from the Muslim nations of the Middle East than the “Christian” ones of Europe and Latin America, even if it is not yet registered in their votes.

There is no need for Israel to boastfully proclaim its world-historical importance; just as the Nazis’ policies revolved around the Jews, so have those of the UN, the world body presumably dedicated to international harmony. Like all other examples of antisemitism, this is a negative form of flattery that the Jews would rather avoid. But in any case, it confirms their role as the exemplary people of the West, and thereby confirms as well the prophetic intuition that only when—or if and when—the Jews, having returned to their ancestral homeland, can at last become a “normal nation,” the West will have finally reconciled itself to the historical reality of its spiritual origin, and the Abrahamic religions will be able to reach a compromise among their visions of humanity.

3. Electoral Reflections

Comparison of the results of the just-concluded elections in Israel and the US makes the exemplarity of Israel all the more apparent. Whereas Israel rebounded from its anti-Bibi moment, in the US the excesses of Wokeness were far from repudiated; two years after electing a near-senile president, Democrat voters put in the Senate a man whose mind is disabled from a stroke. Early voting and freely distributed mail ballots surely contributed to these results, yet it seems clear that the expected “Red wave” failed to materialize.**

The decisive element in the Democrat vote was that of Gen Z. According to one survey, whereas older voters favored the Republicans, and those from 30 to 49 were nearly even (Democrats +3%), those 18-29 gave the Democrats a 64-36 margin. This generational gap was not the simple effect of youthful rebelliousness; it signaled the overall success of the “Long March through the Institutions” proposed by 60s student activist Rudi Dutschke. The most significant long-term result of this “march” has no doubt been the lowering of the American birth rate, putting the US on a par with the dwindling populations of the other Western nations. If I point out that only Israel among these industrial nations has a positive birthrate, it is not to claim that we need to populate the world with Jews, but that even outside its ultra-religious sector Israel still maintains the traditional attitude toward the family that permits the continued flourishing of a nation-state.

I would like to view this development as the fulfillment of the Puritan prophecy of the return of the Jews to their homeland. But given that this positive demographic is due in good measure to the strongly felt need to replace the victims of the Holocaust, one might just as easily interpret it as a holdover from the traditional world that liberated the Jews and produced liberal democracy, a world largely defunct today in Christian Europe, where the birth rate falls ever lower and where having children is increasingly seen by young people as an unnecessary burden, if not a form of environmental pollution. And we may note that, along with China, the Asian nations (Japan, South Korea) that have most closely adhered to the Western formula of liberal democracy have even lower birthrates.

Historical evolution does not follow a predetermined pattern. The very exemplarity of Israel may just as well be a sign that the Western “end of history” is fated to lead to something else, perhaps even to the 1984ish future suggested by recent developments in China. The return to Israel, a fulfillment in one sense, may in another be a sign of the closure of the West’s historical destiny, just as the Republicans’ failure to score a decisive victory despite the obvious deficiencies of Biden and his administration may be seen as one more sign of the West’s Untergang.

4. More on Wokism

Homo sapiens added an indefinitely self-reflexive/recursive layer to a biological system that had previously evolved by means of the Darwinian process of natural selection. But this biological system itself was not qualitatively changed. The human family was a “natural” institution that, however it came to be modified by cultural developments, did not deviate fundamentally from its normal biological function of preserving the human genome through the generations.

The recent fuss over transgenderism is in many ways a tempest in a teapot, but it is a symptom of a very troublesome tendency, the loss of respect for biological norms that had previously been taken for granted. With the first major disturbance of these norms, the acceptance of homosexual marriage, the difficulty was not posed by having made homosexuals’ lives less onerous, but by the concomitant denial of the biological normality of heterosexuality.

Liberation from norms inevitably brings in its wake the denial of the necessity of these norms, thereby constraining “human nature” in the guise of liberating it. Tolerance never remains merely tolerance; once something becomes permitted, its legality is swiftly transformed into acceptance as full normality. And in the current Woke atmosphere, this in turn leads to the deprecation of the norm itself, which comes to be understood as one more inequitable favoring of one group over others, just as the modern West’s conquest of the world is seen as a violation of reciprocal morality. In however altruistic the terms in which it is expressed, the vicarious adoption of the other’s resentment that we call Wokeness is not a step toward symmetry and reconciliation, but rather a virtue-signaling criticism of the adherents of biologically-based normality.

For this reason, Wokism is often compared to Puritanism, but the self-defined virtues of Puritanism, however severe and even self-destructive, were not hostile to the institutions that preserve the human species. Truly sacrificial behavior, however anti-natural, takes place between the individual and his “soul,” his internal sense of the sacred, before it is directed at others. Even the most extreme forms of Puritanism that lead to such things as self-castration (the Russian Skoptsy), although certainly “unnatural,” do not disturb the normal human universe, within which they are outliers. At worst they may lead numbers of people to destroy or mutilate themselves, but the extremism of such sects isolates them from the general population.

The increasing common claim that all forms of sexuality are morally equivalent is very different. Woke behavior is concerned not with self-chastisement but with the condemnation of others for not agreeing to consecrate the vicarious resentment that defines it. The Woke person’s condemnation of his own ascriptive (“white male”) group becomes concrete only with respect to the recalcitrant members of the group who fail to affirm the Woke criteria of virtue. Needless to say, in the academic world, this way of thinking has opened up vast opportunities for studies purporting to demonstrate that yet one more historical figure or group or tradition must be condemned for having violated these criteria.

A further effect of vicarious resentment is to justify the violation even of norms that no one explicitly denies. Hypocritical puritans may disobey the rules they impose on others, but Puritanism at least claims to restrain everyone’s instincts equally, whereas Wokism overtly permits the “oppressed” to live by less stringent rules than the “oppressors,” as we see in the previously unthinkable yet currently widespread practice of not punishing criminals for “minor” crimes.

The refusal to punish or otherwise discipline is the most dangerous and perverse aspect of Wokism. Even in matters where violence plays no role, discipline itself is increasingly ignored and/or disparaged. Thus students “not allowed to fail” are given passing grades when they neglect to do their assignments, or even attend class.

The Woke refusal to punish what are dismissed as “petty” crimes is anything but a mode of Christian forgiveness, nor is it carried out with the purpose of improving its beneficiaries in any but a material sense. On the contrary, this perverse form of Woke resentment is effectively directed against the victim of the crime, whose right to redress is denied, as if in punishment of his appeal to social authority in its role as oppressor. Nor does this tendency reflect any real sympathy for the criminals themselves. It is rather a mode of complicity, of collaboration with the criminal in his “critique” of the society as ultimately to blame when he, like Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread, is “obliged” to commit the crime.

It is a mistake to call Wokism a “religion,” but here as in other similar cases (communism, Fascism), the difficulty is easily resolved by the realization that, as GA proposes, before socially accepted religion, we are subject to its implicit principle, the “sense of the sacred” lodged in what we can simply call our soul. Wokism retains our elementary moral sense from the originary event and, as what seems to me the ultimate stage of the epistemology of resentment, condemns in its name the “inequitable” society as a whole. It is through this condemnation alone that the Woke do penance for reaping the benefits of this society.

We may disapprove of all this, but can we be sure that similar attitudes are not destined to dominate all modern societies, with the sole exception of those like China, who rather than relying on the market exchange of goods and political ideas, prefer to submit to the incarnation of a national ideal in the person of a supreme ruler?

Yet perhaps, as some of our wiser pundits have suggested, the Right’s relative failure in this current election may be an inaugural step back to a healthier democracy in which, while recognizing Donald Trump’s invaluable contribution to American politics by making us aware of the dangers of the Left’s increasing radicalization—a task only possible for someone effectively immune to it, with all the “insensitivity” that this implies—we can move on to less problematic figures, notably Ron DeSantis, who emerges from this election with a major personal victory as well as the example of moving his large, formerly “swing” state (recall the 2000 election!) well into the Republican column. Rather than a great triumph in 2022, how much more useful and satisfying will be such a triumph in 2024! I know there are counter-arguments, but I prefer to end on this note.

** Adam Katz has brought to our attention a text: (https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/11/13/the-modern-electioneering-process-of-ballot-submission-assistance-is-taking-center-stage/), which raises the real danger that, unless a firm halt is called to the persistence of Covid-era electoral procedures—extended voting period, generalized mail balloting, pre-registration of drivers and others licensed by the state…—conservatives will never again benefit from fair elections.

One might think it unnecessary to return to a subject I have covered repeatedly, but I believe that the constant rethinking of what I conceive as the key moment of hominization is a good thing. Limiting our focus to that moment obliges us to seek in it the root of all that proceeded from it, not as though it “generated” what followed, but in that it inaugurated the mechanism that made it all possible.

Ideally, this is something I wish I could have done from the first. If I could do it all over, rather than beginning (in The Origin of Language [TOOL], 1981) by trying to derive the utterance forms of mature language from the originary ostensive gesture/utterance, then attempting to relate to it the forms of literary culture (in The End of Culture, 1985) I would have found it more useful to examine in depth the phenomenal reality of the aborted gesture of appropriation becoming a sign by focusing more closely -on the interactions among the participants in the originary scene. For it is the introduction of this mediating element among the participants that inaugurates the unique human phenomenon of conversation.

But of course this was impossible; it is in fact my conception of the originary event itself, rather than its linguistic consequences, that has most greatly evolved since TOOL. Such dialectical processes cannot be planned in advance—that is what makes them dialectical.

As to why academic students of language have not dealt with such matters, it is simply that they have not concerned themselves with the necessity of language. Animals have inhibitions that can be learned through practice, as Pavlov famously demonstrated. But they don’t have signs that intentionally communicate these inhibitions, that is, that make them into interdictions shared by the community. This process, as I have tried to show, depends on a sense of the sacred that precedes any recognizable notion of God; this sense attaches to an interdiction that, communicated through the sign, is understood to be shared by all the members of the group. Indeed, in its minimal sense, this interdiction is what the sacred is. Whether it depends on a preexisting sacred being is by definition beyond our ability to determine, since as Jesus put it, “my kingdom is not of this world,” whereas we are. In purely human, Ockhamist terms, God is not a necessary element of the sacred.

All this is very simple; the insight consists in understanding the origin of language and of the rest of human culture in the need for an explicit capacity for deferral of action in the face of increasingly powerful appetitive mimesis, an emergent need that required a new level of consciousness: an ability to represent the appetitive object, not simply within the individual brain, but in terms sharable by the community, that is, by a sign that communicates what cognitive scientists call “joint shared attention.”

Very simply, the core of GA is that this is the punctual difference between us and our fellow creatures. Even if we can teach them some elementary usages of language, it is clear that their brains, or perhaps better put, their souls, are not “wired” for even elementary language, and this is so because, as I have often repeated, it is not necessary for them.

The complexities of our intellectual lives, like the mysteries of “Being,” are rooted in these concrete elements of our experience, which the mystifications practiced by “profound” thinkers should not allow to be hidden. What I admire in Derrida is that once we put aside his préciosité (and his leftist politics), his understanding of the human can indeed be translated into simple anthropological terms.

Thus, as Andrew McKenna realized in Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction (Illinois, 1991), Derrida the mystifier is appropriately paired with Girard, who never mystifies, but whose fundamental anthropology misidentifies where Derrida’s did not the specificity of the human, which is not mimesis itself, but the additional layer of meaning that the excess of proto-human mimesis forced nascent humanity to add: language, culture—the world of the sign.

I certainly didn’t invent the idea that “necessity is the mother of invention,” but one wonders why it has been so difficult to persuade others that this common-sense truth applies in exemplary fashion to language, which is as far as we know the most radical invention in the universe after life itself—in a sense, even more radical, in that it leads to the invention of ideal entities that have no worldly reality: words, phonemes… whose referential realms, fetishized as realities, became the subjects of the first systematic—Platonic—philosophy. The constant refrain of those who discuss the subject at all is that language emerged simply as a “natural” outgrowth of increased intelligence; as one well-known theorist put it, we began having ideas and we evolved language in order to express them!

Put in the simplest terms, the origin of language—as Raymond Tallis, author of The Hand (Edinburgh 2003), would no doubt agree—is the discovery of pointing.

For animals, even chimps, don’t point. They may gesture at something, but they are not by this intentionally communicating to their fellows their interest in the pointed-to object, even if they do so mimetically (or “indexically”). The joint shared attention of pointing is available only to humans, and is indeed already linguistic. And it is easy to see, or rather, difficult not to see, the originary pointing gesture as what I called long ago an aborted gesture of appropriation.

This choice of the referent of the original ostensive reflects what we can call its significance, its worldly importance, which evidently derives from an appetitive drive that is in this case frustrated—or in Derridean terms, différé, deferred, and thereby also differentiated within a world of potential signifiés. This makes possible the constitution of language as a system of an indefinite number of such signifiés, and the syntactic structure of language, whose origins I outlined in TOOL, arises as a natural extension of the use of language to model the relations and qualities of the objects referred to.

The time during which language is used—originally, we presume, wholly in the context of a public, sacred, ritual scene—is of a different quality from the everyday time of interactions with others and with objects: it requires, precisely, the deferral of worldly action and the establishment of a state of contemplation, which may eventually exist concurrently with other activities, but which requires a minimum of independent attention if the communication is to be successful. This state of linguistic communication, the sharing of signs, is the kernel of all cultural activity, notably of ritual/religious communion. We conceive of the originary event as a proto-rite, one “discovered” and subsequently repeated according to a predetermined pattern. The exchange of the sign in the originary event must be understood as deferring the appropriation of the central object of desire that is the raison d’être of the event, the serial distribution system employed by prehuman primates having become henceforth impossible. (See, e.g., Chronicle 740 et seq.).

The equivalence of the sacred and the significant, or what is worthy of being signified—attended to through the deferral of appetitive relations—simplifies our notion of the sacred without trivializing it. Time is precious, and to devote time to signifying something beyond simply attempting to make use of it is to defer one’s worldly relationship to it and to everything else.

As language users we of course take this for granted. The purpose of generative anthropology is to explain the necessity of this deferral in terms of the human need to avoid mimetic conflict and its concomitant violence by inaugurating the scenic contemplation of an object of communal appetite, which is by that very deferral transformed into desire, appetite mediated by the mimetic concurrence of the community. This notion of the scenic is homologous to Sartre’s “geometric” description of the human self-conscious mind or pour-soi as an internal scene containing a néant that separates it from its object, or to Heidegger’s less explicit notion of the human as Dasein, being-there, that is, facing, as in a theater, the object that one (tacitly) contemplates rather than (yet) acting upon.

Having heard these ideas for the nth time, one may be tempted to say, like the protagonist of an 18^th-century novel after his or her first sexual experience, “Is that all there is?” But, precisely because of their apparent banality, they must be repeated until the reader realizes that the mark of the appropriate point of departure is not its subtlety but rather its simplicity; it is the simplest starting point that puts the least burden on the realities that must be understood in its terms.

It is in this spirit that Hegel begins his Logik with Sein and Nichts. Except that there is no experiential reality behind Sein and Nichts; they are already intellectual categories that imply a precedent effort to think what is simplest, whereas if we begin instead with the significant/sacred, that is, what in our experience matters, what we are without prior reflection willing to spend our time and energy on, then all the rest falls into place. All living creatures have analogous concerns; but what all but humans do not have, because they do not need it, is a system of representation that defers action with respect to what matters, that allows it simply to matter, to be shared as something we must contemplate, and indicate to our fellows to contemplate, before we begin to make use of it.

Sein or Being is best understood as the worldly manifestation of words, or signifieds. But there is really no way to use the term without confusion. If the green-ness or square-ness of something is reasonably unambiguous, the is-ness of something is entirely contingent on what it is being opposed to, such as that lizards have is-ness but unicorns don’t. But how do we know if God has is-ness? Or the number 5? Much as I love Hegel’s dialectical virtuosity, to get from Being to Nothingness to… the End of History is a tour de force, not an objectively rigorous process.

The point is not to debunk philosophy but to clear away the underbrush that has obscured its essential components. Girard may have overestimated the centrality of scapegoating or “emissary murder,” notably in reference to the earliest human communities that presumably had no human ruler occupying a central position, but his metapsychology was nonetheless rooted in reality: desire is indeed mimetic as distinguished from appetite, and Aristotle had already recognized that humans were “more mimetic” than any other creatures.

From there, it is but one small step to recognize human culture, beginning with sacrality/significance, as an apotropaic reaction to this excess of mimeticity—the conversion of the aborted gesture of appropriation into a sign. From there, we are indeed ready to trace the evolution of the human scene and its components throughout history, if not to the latter’s “end.” I have taken a few stabs at this, but the application of the originary hypothesis to the totality of humanity’s prehistoric and historic activities will require painstaking research and long reflection on the part of many.

It is a telling coincidence that I finished the first draft of this Chronicle on the day of the Israeli elections, where Benjamin Netanyahu has emerged the apparent winner, succeeding to a weak centrist government defined largely by its principals’ personal hostility to him. If I were an Israeli politician, perhaps I wouldn’t like Bibi either. But as I understand world history in the present moment, Israel is a key element, and the Abraham Accords a great achievement. I see Netanyahu’s return to power at a moment when we can expect the US to begin moving away from its current Woke childishness as a demonstration that the liberal-democratic world still remains capable of asserting itself—hopefully not too late—in opposition to the anti-world of resentful despotism.

The Jews are, whether they like it or not, the people whose history is originarily relevant to the West, and thereby to modern humanity in general. Whence the substantive basis of the Evangelical belief that the Jews are destined to return to their homeland in Israel/Palestine, an eschatological ideal which, as Walter Russell Mead demonstrates in his recent The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People (Knopf, 2022), has from the days of the Pilgrims maintained a strong presence in American Protestantism. As Mead realizes, this is not a mere fantasy but a religiously-garbed genuine insight into the future of Western and world civilization.

Just as antisemitism, which was left for dead after the Holocaust, has strongly renewed itself by taking the Palestinians for the victimized “indigenous” population of Israel, so the uncontested establishment of a Jewish state is a prerequisite for a truly Hegelian synthesis to resolve the division among the three Abrahamic religions that dominate the West. In this context, the end of the diasporic existence of the Jews corresponds to a genuine possibility of reconciliation that—and that is the genius of the Abraham Accords—includes in its extension both Christianity and Islam.

Admittedly this is still a visionary work in progress, but its realization is perhaps less distant than might appear, and the return of Netanyahu to power in Israel is a major step in the right direction.

The Jews are not “the chosen people” in some invidious sense; they are simply the first people to have conceived a genuine monotheism and, consequently, a fulfillable vision of world unity: One God, one humanity. Just as, as Adam Katz suggested, in the originary event there must have been a single proto-human who first realized that the aborted gesture of appropriation could and should be understood as a sign. But just as the very success of his insight, dependent on its spread to the totality of the participants, made it inevitable that this “first man’s” inaugural understanding would forever remain unrecognized, the Jews would no doubt happily give up their chosenness could they put off the curse of their firstness.

Yet since, in the historical world, they cannot, they will have to wait to happily live with it until their neighbors will have become willing to accept, as did (Saint) John Paul II, their status as elder brothers. And I imagine that by that time, whether or not my name has remained associated with it, the originary hypothesis, or something quite similar, will have become a simple matter of common sense.

Despite the naive literalness of his notion of the end of history, I have remained loyal to Francis Fukuyama’s central point, which is a dogmatic version of Winston Churchill’s more appropriately paradoxical assertion that Western liberal democracy, as practiced most characteristically by Great Britain and the US, is “the worst of all systems, except for all the others.” **

I must admit that watching this system operate recently in the US has given me moments of doubt when thinking of China’s 7% growth rate and, as Bill Maher put it, its “seriousness” in contrast to the US. But in fact the 7% was a while ago; now Jack Ma has disappeared and Chinese citizens are despotically locked down, North Korea is as impoverished as ever, Iran is in revolt, and Russia n’en parlons pas. So I see no reason to doubt my affirmation that human life in Western democracies, with all its flaws, is on a whole different level of flourishing from that in these autocracies. Left to their own devices, the Western countries, whose culture supplied all the basic discoveries currently being exploited by Chinese industry, will almost certainly remain far more innovative in every area in the medium and long term.

And yet the real problem, the one at the core of the originary hypothesis, is not which system makes its participants happier or more productive by any criterion: health, longevity, industrial output, artistic and scientific creativity… but which system can maintain itself the longest given our propensity to mimetic conflict. The Fall of the Roman Empire should suffice to remind us that cultural superiority and survival are not synonymous.

Nor is the fact that Chinese prosperity is not what Xi would like us to think it is necessarily a factor in our favor in the short term. China’s demographic deficit, potential food shortages, and (no doubt) increasing discontent among its highly surveilled population are on the contrary reasons to fear that before it is too late China risks making an aggressive gesture that might lead to WWIII or even to Apocalypse ∞. We need only look at Russia, which can’t compete with us on any level save perhaps in some advanced military technologies, but which has not only the potential to destroy the human species but something like an incentive to play the game of chicken that might lead to it.

On this topic, in the October 17 Le Figaro, Senator Philippe Bas, Secretary General of Jacques Chirac’s cabinet in 2002-05, expresses fear that we are letting the Ukraine war get out of control with possibly uncontrollable results, and urges French President Macron, who has retained reasonably good relations with both sides and heads the only European country with a credible military, to begin overtures toward a truce and negotiated settlement.

Whether this would be acceptable to either side at the moment is dubious, but the point that Bas makes, or rather, implies, is nonetheless difficult to refute: Russia is the world’s one country that was designed for the game of chicken. Its vast spaces make conquering it almost unthinkable, and whether or not that is really the case is less important than the fact that its leaders believe it. Readers of War and Peace will recall Napoleon’s shock on reaching Moscow to find it burning; could he have imagined winning a war by burning down Paris?

Bill Maher’s point is well taken; even if the Chinese are rigid or, as one columnist put it, “autistic,” they are serious, whereas the let’s-go-Brandon Afghanistan-be-damned team with its get-out-of-jail-free-but-don’t-drill-for-oil policies is not. I didn’t have to read the Heritage Foundation Annual Index of U. S. Military Strength released October 18 to learn that our military is unprepared for a major conflict. The enemy’s most brilliant spy-master could not have thought up anything more effective than the current Wokeness policy to undermine what was a few decades ago the world’s undisputed finest fighting force.

Although Wokeness is a movement of youth, in many ways a revival of the 1960s New Left, the enormous difference between the two movements is that today’s “youth” is encouraged to act as the spiritual mentors of the older generation who are purportedly making “mature” decisions. As we have seen, even when management has balked at certain more extreme Woke developments, it has usually caved in to systematic resistance from younger employees, no longer finding a moral platform from which to resist them. On the contrary, our supposedly responsible elite is inhabited by the conviction that the moral truth found in this youthful Wokeness is one that older “white males” dare not ignore.

Although this was far from Fukuyama’s intention, the simplest way to understand this development in the Hegelian context in which liberal democracy’s victory in the Cold War can be called the “end of history” is to see the Woke movement as likewise representing the final stage of the epistemology of resentment, but one that no longer proposes a model of the “good society” that would fulfill Hegel’s expectations for “the end of history.” Instead, Wokeness functions as an internal critique of Western society that seeks to rid it of all signs of “inequity” and “systemic racism,” without suggesting or implying that this end can ever be accomplished. The Woke vision of the “good society” is a negative and tacitly unreachable utopia of Western civilization from which all inequities have been removed.

Indeed, Woke criticism never addresses structural issues directly; it is as though indifferent to the possibility that, if we followed its imperatives to the end, always choosing “equity” over objective qualifications, we might find that the social order would collapse—intimations of which are clearly present today, from the White House to the armed services to the elementary schools.

Which is to say that, although Wokeness may not be a “religion,” in contrast with Marxism and its derivatives, it sets what is in fact humanity’s originary moral intuition above any objective considerations, and in that sense may be said to depend on a revelation—one that, however, is manifested not as a positive vision of the future, but as an unwavering faith in resentment, actual and vicarious, as the detection mechanism for “inequity”—that is, evil.

It is in this sense that we can understand the Woke movement as the “end of history” of the epistemology of resentment, aka “the Left,” which has now abandoned any pretense of “building communism” or anything similar, relying instead entirely on an abstract moral intuition of perfect equality. In GA’s “new way of thinking,” this intuition can be defined quite simply as that of the originary event, which founds the human community through its successful resolution in the egalitarian distribution of nourishment as a demonstration of each individual’s equal share in the communal participation in the sacred.

The historical coincidence of Wokism with the originary hypothesis is in no way fortuitous. Each in their own way, Wokism and GA embody the originary revelation of human moral equality in the originary “equal feast.” The difference is that, dismissing the complications that have arisen in the course of humanity’s centimillenial existence, Wokism insists on this fundamental human reciprocity as the only genuine criterion of communal existence.

To understand it as an essentially immature attitude is not simply a condemnation; it is also an explanation of Wokism’s strange power, so different from that of the New Left which it superficially resembles. For in the 1960s, the administrations may have caved in to the activists, but with all the sympathy they could muster, and all their shared misgivings about the Vietnam war and its many casualties, they never really felt in political agreement with the protesters. Whereas today, there are no such protesters: on the contrary, the administration is conscience-driven to defend the activists against any conservative students or faculty who might have the audacity to complain about an antisemitic speaker or a segregated dormitory or a departmental vote in favor of BDS. What they recognize is that, whether naively or manipulatively, the Woke speak the language of originary morality, however unsuited it may be to modern society.

In short, both GA and Wokism as the final stage of the epistemology of resentment are founded on the same originary intuition of the egalitarian symmetry of originary human exchange, first of signs and then of worldly goods. Except that GA is not a political doctrine that asks us to put an end to history in order to return to a lost utopia of equity. We should nonetheless not make light of this parallel, nor of the explanation it offers of the apparent success of one implementation of this intuition and the tabooed status of the other.

Defining “injustice” as deviation from universal equality may have been the model of the originary human community, but human equality is not that of insects: from the first, the transcendence shared by the community is present in the pour-soi of every individual. To liberate these creatures from the dangers of their proto-human state is also to ensure that their intelligence will remain a constant source of différance: of reflection, of differentiation.

Only resentment can motivate the desire to reject all forms of superiority as modes of irrational ascriptive prejudice, with the result that the more such resentment becomes the basis of morality, the more new injustices will be discovered, to the point where the normal functioning of society becomes impossible. But in a democratic society, well before this point there will be a reaction, which forthcoming elections will reflect. The “end of history” of the Left is indeed the exhaustion of its dialectic, its reductio ad absurdum: having marched through the institutions, it has succeeded, or will in the near future, in alienating all persons of common sense.

But as we are theoreticians and not politicians, we should understand this development as the rectification of a misunderstanding, a return as it were to Burkean, historical wisdom: resentment as a motivation cannot be ignored, but it must be controlled. If its traditional religious controls have by now become insufficient, they are far from having disappeared. What lets life remain bearable is that one is constantly made aware that, even in today’s political climate, everyday casual relations are only superficially affected—although admittedly being retired makes it much easier for me to limit myself to such relations.

Whatever the fate of Wokeness, we cannot help witnessing its effect on the society, nor can we avoid reflecting on the persistence of the Left ideal even in the absence of any conception of “the good society.” This should motivate us to examine, on the one hand, the historical persistence of the notion of moral equality and the attempts to extend it beyond the point at which it subtends the social order, and on the other, the—largely religious—institutions that have throughout history kept the resentful extensions of this morality in check, institutions that, once more, I think we can say that the liberal-democratic system embodies in the worst way possible except for all the others.

Returning to Fukuyama, to the extent that the West has indeed won the battle to define the good society, so that its victory in the Cold War truly demonstrated that neither Western society itself nor any other can “lift up” (Aufheben) liberal democracy into some form of socialism, the current moment must be seen as one of reflux. In China, Xi’s recent totalitarian triumph suggests that, whatever its successes, Deng’s attempt to modify the socialist model by “Chinese characteristics” that combine that land’s tolerance for despotism learned over centuries of empire with an opening of its economy to market values appears to have proven itself incapable of the kind of supremacy that Westerners once feared and envied. Similarly, Wokeness is a dead end; it is fated to remain ever dissatisfied, arousing resentments that are more and more reflections of generalized frustration rather than, as the Woke pretend, deep moral indignation.

Assuming that we survive the current crisis, it is at the point when all this becomes a commonly accepted reality that the West will have to roll up its sleeves and start cleaning up its act, restoring norms and discouraging the promotion of deviant lifestyles, whose potential for excitement will fade in any case: how much of this stuff do we need?

I would imagine that traditional religions, even if their communal foundations have been weakened, will regain much of their prestige, although I also envisage that the unquestioned faith of past centuries will be replaced by a more pragmatic sense of faith’s human benefits. It is in this context that the originary hypothesis, and perhaps other similarly insightful “new ways of thinking,” would come into its own, allowing for a new sharpness in our definition of the human that can increasingly mesh with the hard-science discoveries of neurology/psychology as well as with the experimental world of artificial intelligence.

We should gear up and plan ahead toward these vistas rather than either basking in the eternal afternoon of Fukuyama’s “end of history” or bewailing it as the Spenglerian Untergang des Abendlandes. We might begin by starting to keep score at the kids’ T-Ball games. Hopefully this process will kick off in the US with the November elections and continue through 2024 and beyond.

**As I was working on this Chronicle, Matthew Taylor sent me a link to an article by Fukuyama himself, in The Atlantic: “More Proof That This Really Is the End of History” (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/francis-fukuyama-still-end-history/671761/ ). Fukuyama’s original idea of the “end of history” retains its power in contrast to the dystopian/utopian schemes for what amounts to non-dialectical despotism, but it still isn’t “the end of history.” We cannot help but admire Fukuyama’s Western self-confidence, which covers Christianity and its Hegelian Aufhebung, but as a true “dialectic of humanity,” that is, as a generative anthropology by means of which human history may be understood, it nonetheless falls short in ways that it would be a distraction to trace here.

I was very pleased to note Adam Katz’s reaction to Chronicle 752 suggesting that GA’s relationship to religion would be a good subject for a future Summer Conference. Adam subsequently proposed a topic along these lines for our 2023 conference, which should be announced shortly. The sentence he was responding to was the following:

I remain hopeful that, given the faith and energy of its adherents, our “unproven” hypothesis will increasingly be able to serve thinkers and believers as both a supplement to and a substitute for organized religion, providing in either case a source of originary anthropological understanding as the basis upon which our public sacrality may begin to be restored.

Although Adam’s post suggested that I had rejected the “substitution” point in the past, I had really never raised that possibility in quite these terms. What I had said was, in agreement with a point Richard van Oort had made some years ago, that GA was not itself a religion and could not be expected to serve as one. The difference is subtle but important: I was thinking of GA not as seeking to “convert” religious believers or atheists to a fideistic belief system, but rather, as I conceive my own case, as providing, in a minimal hypothesis on which to base an anthropology, a hypothetical originary event that generates the first communal human scene, whose coherence depends on language and the sacred. There is a faith involved in any hypothesis, but ours remains hypothetical without ever being experienced as revealed.

The large number of “nones” that appear in current surveys of religion are not as a rule looking to convert to a new faith; yet if they think at all about the fundamental problems of humanity, they should be open to a plausible hypothesis of how our species emerged and survived—and they should be persuadable that regardless of one’s view of the existence of God, one cannot explain the human and its culture without a conception of the sacred.

The dismissive attitude toward religion that has become the norm in today’s social sciences reflects a fundamental anthropological misunderstanding. As an illustration, Chronicle 519 contrasts cognitive scientist Michael Tomasello’s cavalier remarks about religion with his serious research on the acquisition of language. In fact, at the root of language and religion, significance and sacrality differ only by degree: what is sacred is uniquely significant; what is significant is at least a little sacred, worthy of the serious concern of the human community. It is notable that we have no word for the shared meaning of both terms, for which the closest approximation is perhaps transcendence.

In the absence of an originary hypothesis such as GA provides, one is reduced to expressing the presence of the sacred in all human cultures in fuzzy, subjective terms like “we all need something to believe in.” But this need is not in the first place individual but communal. Each member of human society translates in subjective terms the lesson of the originary communal event, whose primordial act is the substitution of a common sacralizing sign for interdicted and aborted individual attempts at physical possession.

Regrettably, the social sciences’ lack of response to our “new way of thinking” has made it difficult to conceive a strategy for drawing academic attention to the originary hypothesis. No doubt the entire academy, outside the more procedure-driven branches of the hard sciences, has under the influence of the epistemology of resentment strayed far from the old academic ideals. But the real problem is deeper. The reluctance to reflect on originary anthropology is not mere Wokism; it reflects the contradiction at the heart of Western culture between sacrality and rationality, science and faith, of which victimary thinking is only a symptom. Western science and technology invented modernity and now dominates the world, but its current cultural malaise reflects a serious deterioration of its communal “sense of the sacred,” in Europe as well as the US.

As those of my generation will recall, the USA formerly maintained a broadly accepted public sacred that remained largely uncontested until the 1960s, a tradition that made reference to God in the Protestant religious framework that had formed the core of American culture. It included the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance and holiday pageants in schools, Fourth of July parades, and patriotic statues and monuments, any number of which have been denounced and even torn down for Woke reasons. Renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, events such as the kneeling ceremony to George Floyd/Black Lives Matter referred to in Chronicles 695 and 697, exemplify a new, antinomian mode of sacrality—as does what should be called Speaker Pelosi’s desecration of her copy of President Trump’s State of the Union message on February 4, 2020.

Well before the current crisis, the contrast between the modern world and the preceding “Age of Faith” had led important conservative thinkers such as Eric Voegelin to view the entire modern project from the Enlightenment on as marked by the inauthenticity that Daniel Boorstin (see Chronicle 652) pointed out in its proliferation of “pseudo-events”—that is, as ultimately a historical error. Yet, however much respect we owe such thinkers, I find the idea of repealing modernity unworthy of serious consideration. The survival of Judeo-Christianity, and of humanity, for whatever duration either will be achieved, cannot be won by turning our back on the modern world.

We must assume that the founding characteristics of the human as defined in the originary event are permanent, so that it should be our priority to understand them in as fundamental terms as possible. This implies that, despite all we have learned about historical and prehistorical humanity from research in biology, psychology, etc., in the absence of an originary hypothesis, neither the intentional deferral/différance of reflexive acts that founds the sacred and human language nor the religious and representational culture that derives from it can be understood on its most fundamental level.

Linguists have a right to avoid speculating about the pre-declarative origins of human language, but they cannot then claim to have sought to understand what is specific to human language in contrast to whatever preceded it. Language is not found in nature; it is an entirely artificial, cultural, inter-human reality.

Analogies with animal “languages” or attempts to teach human language to chimps provide us only with an understanding of the limits of minds that, although they can achieve a certain level of interaction with humans, cannot assimilate language into their own social world. Animals have priorities that we may if we like consider “sacred” or “significant,” but these analogies fail insofar as these fellow creatures lack the ability to think them or talk about them.

Yet the notion is nonetheless quite widespread among analytic philosophers that language, on the model of mathematics, is a phenomenon that we discover rather than invent, such that its historical emergence is of secondary interest. These thinkers view language as so to speak a programming system with “switches” for grammatical and lexical variants that our ancestors downloaded one day from a great server in the sky.

For unless we make the effort to trace it to an originary event, the philosophers’ world of propositions seems to have just as little to do with humans as the mathematicians’ world of numbers. The laws of logic are as rigorous as those of mathematics: if Socrates is a man and all men are mortal, then… The difference is that, although like language, mathematics too is a human invention, where its example leads philosophers astray is that once we invent mathematics as a formal system, learning its deeper implications is indeed a work of discovery rather than invention. So too with logic; but language is not derived from the axioms of logic.

Nor does the analysis of language in terms of the Saussurean architecture of signifier/signified/referent, however useful, speak to the origin of the linguistic function. The originary hypothesis postulates that language and religion, the two fundamental forms of human transcendence, had a common origin in the originary scene. And simple common sense tells us that, like other cultural phenomena, they could only have emerged in real-world events that we must hypothesize in order to understand them, even if our hypotheses cannot be verified by historical data under present circumstances.

Physicists like to see the universe as the exemplification of mathematical formulas, matrices, etc.; even if the operation of the quantum universe amidst 95+% of “dark” matter and energy has so far remained beyond their understanding, it is susceptible to mathematical expression. Yet dealing with the material universe does not provide a model for dealing with the one known fragment of this universe that has a means for thinking about it. The ontology of particles and even biological beings does not include the phenomena of language and the culture that derives from it. Analyzing its operations does not provide an explanation of how, or why, our species came to invent it; and the same is also true of mathematics. Pace Descartes’/Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, Deus may have invented language and mathematics, but Natura surely did not—which is why Deus, or perhaps just humanity, invented religion.

As Chomsky demonstrated against Skinner in his famous “Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior” (Language 1959;35:26–58), the human sign is not a mere signal, not a conditioned reflex: it is a deliberate act. But Chomsky was not interested in its anthropological origins; it sufficed for his purposes to demonstrate that human language was incompatible with Skinner’s behaviorist psychology, which applies without difficulties to animals.

As we describe it, language begins with but does not remain limited to an “aborted gesture of appropriation.” Insofar as this originary gesture becomes the basis of language, it will have taken on the new, emergent character of an intentional mode of communication within the community: an ostensive sign, a pointing. The mutual exchange of the sign within the group by common accord confers on its worldly referent the quality of sacrality, demonstrating a shared appetitive interest in the object (presumably an animal to be shared for food among the group and its dependents), so that, in order to forestall the danger of mimetic conflict, the group’s nascent “sense of the sacred” interdicts it to appropriation and makes it accessible, at first, to contemplation, and subsequently to equal sharing, ending with a communal feast on the scene defined by the presence of the originary humans.

Which is to say that the appetitive drive that might have led to violently contested acts of individual appropriation has been deferred (Derrida would say, différé) and, in Hegel’s terminology, lifted up (aufgehoben) into an act of signification. Is the interdicted object of appropriation itself sacralized? Yes, but as the participants must soon have realized, our collective notion of the sacred cannot be permanently embodied in a mortal animal; even animal-gods are more like words than like real animals.

Why is it only now, forty years after having formulated the first version of the originary hypothesis, that I have come to explore the relationship between GA and the sacred, both within and independently of religion? It is because religion as a cultural phenomenon cannot reveal its worldly, anthropological truth without disguising it. Religion, in its urgency to preserve us from mimetic violence, asks us to accept the sacred as revelation before situating it at the origin of the human. To the extent that a genuine anthropology is possible, its creators must resist this urgency.

Although I regret repeating in somewhat different words ideas I have expressed many times, it is only through thus reimagining the originary scene and rethinking its description that I have come to understand some of its deeper implications. The lesson I have learned from this repetition, and that I hope to convey to my readers so that they may begin from where I leave off, is that whether or not my hypothesis is “true,” it has shown itself to be true enough, revelatory enough, to merit the faith that I have maintained in it. Indeed, is this not really the core of what we mean by revelation?

Some may have had transcendental experiences such as that of Moses at the burning bush on Mount Horeb, or Paul on the road to Damascus, but if indeed, as John 1 suggests, language is of the same sacred origin as incarnate sacred beings, then my imaginary experiences of the scene of origin are, in their modest way, revelatory as well. And in sharing them with you, dear reader, I invite you to further deepen our common attempt at self-understanding.

A recent article celebrating its relevance after sixty years (“Why Nothing Seems Real,” by Nicholas Clairmont, in the September 27 issue of the conservative newsweekly Washington Examiner) led me to Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Harper, 1962), which I found too familiar not to have read it long ago. I was struck by the near-coincidence of its publication date with Girard’s 1961 Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (in English, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel) and by the contrast between their critiques of what Girard called “internal mediation”—taking one’s mimetic model from within one’s own society. (This had been from the beginning the essential terrain of the novel as the representative literary form of modernity. Its first protagonist, Don Quixote, introduces the theme by choosing an “external” mediator, the fictional knight Amadis de Gaula—but Girard notes that Quixote’s own “mediated” persona becomes itself a model for Sancho and a number of the other characters.)

Both works have become classics in their field: Girard’s in the humanist world of literary studies, and The Image throughout the social sciences. Although Boorstin never uses the term mimesis, his theme of inauthenticity differs from Girard’s critique of mimetic desire less in substance than in what I would call its anthropological context. But it is in that context that Girard supplies what is lacking in Boorstin’s work: reference to the sacred.

Chronicle 507 described what I think is the secret of Mensonge‘s unique success. Girard sees the protagonists of his five novelists (Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Dostoevsky) as bearers of their creators’ personal liberation from mimetic desire, which their stories seek to make sensible to the reader by demonstrating the error of worldly mediation and the necessity of its (intrinsically Christian) transcendence. Girard’s reader is learning to read great (“true”) literature as conveying a spiritual lesson. As the epigraph from Max Scheler informs us: Man possesses a God or an idol, that is, we all need a transcendental mediator, and although for Girard only the divine/human mediation of Jesus can guard us against idolatry, the novelist is not obliged to use Christian symbolism—uniquely exemplified by The Brothers Karamazov—to convey this truth.

In a typically detached American social-science perspective, Boorstin presents the modern world as dominated by “pseudo-events” from whose power no one is presumed to escape. His aim is not to propose any particular reaction to this condition, merely to make us aware of it as an unsatisfactory but unavoidable feature of modernity. His denunciation of the modern world’s saturation by pseudo-events and -values can be understood as a highly elaborated version of Heidegger’s denunciation of everyday life’s inauthentic Geplapper, but with no opening to possible redemption.

Even in acknowledging, for example, the efforts of such as Joyce to retain the novel wholly in the world of “internal” language and consequently make it unsuitable to bring to the screen—although Ulysses was filmed in 1967—Boorstin is not led to posit a distinction between authentic and inauthentic artworks. He reserves his most significant praise instead for P. T. Barnum, who rather than insisting that his audience take his own pseudo-events at face value, was happy to proclaim with ironic frankness their inherent spuriousness. Nor does the world of public action offer an avenue of escape; even a genuine hero such as Charles Lindbergh winds up as a mere “celebrity.”

As Boorstin presents it in the still ivory-towered American university of the early 1960s, the public world of the pseudo-event is inescapable save in private reflection devoid of effect on its practices. In contrast with Girard’s integration of the reader’s moral reality into the praxis implied by his analysis, Boorstin’s conception of authenticity is confined to the realm of academic/theoretical discourse.

The Image is an undeniably admirable work; its lack of recommendations for action is irrelevant to the historical thoroughness and sharpness of its analyses of the phenomena described and of the attitudes of their producers. Indeed, its continued relevance after sixty years reflects its success in presenting a unified view of a whole set of representational activities—one that could easily be integrated into an overall examination of modernity as “consumer society,” a term I did not find in the book.

In contrast, Girard’s work tells us only about a few novels… and about desire. But human desire itself, as the Scheler epigraph suggests, and as Girard would demonstrate a decade later in his next major work, La violence et le sacré, is really a function of the sacred. The Image is a masterpiece of social psychology, yet as such it must fail to grasp this point; and in so doing, it anticipates the forgetting of the sacred that defines the West’s current civilizational turmoil.

In deploring the absence of authentic heroes, events, and above all, of representations, what Boorstin regrets without defining it is the active presence of a public sacred, of worldly realities infused by a transcendental status. Virtually all the examples of the cultural figures he misses (military heroes and sovereigns; palaces and cathedrals; artworks found within them rather than in museums…) belong to a pre-modern world of hierarchical castes. Yet Boorstin never pauses to consider that the “deceitful” images and pseudo-events he denounces are modernity’s inevitable responses to the need to replace caste distinctions by more or less meritocratic ones, sacred ones by profane—such that the world-wide mourning of Queen Elizabeth’s passing reflects her role’s ever more unique consecration rather than her status at the top of the social pyramid.

On the other side of the ledger, as his title makes clear, Boorstin takes for granted and avoids any reference to the material distinctions that modern society’s inhabitants have created for themselves and others, not by photo-ops and staged conferences, but by genuine discoveries and inventions—not as representations but realities. Aside from new techniques of reproduction—printing, photography, sound recording…—he refers to the near-total transformation of just about every human activity from sanitation to industrial processes only insofar as it detracts from what we are asked to consider the “heroic” authenticity of what it replaced.

Thus travel, which as Boorstin notes derives from travail, denoting inconvenience and suffering, now having been replaced by tourism, and months-long treks and sea voyages by air travel, has by that very fact lost its authenticity. One might just as well regret all the inconveniences that modernity has freed us from, starting with toilet facilities, running water, electricity… not to forget modern medicine, which has far more than doubled our life expectancy during the time he describes. As Boorstin would surely not deny, the inhabitants of our hall of mirrors live far longer and richer lives than did the denizens of the world of the sacred image.

In a word, Boorstin’s critique takes what Voltaire’s Micromégas led the French to call “the viewpoint of Sirius,” the perspective of a fictional character from another world—a popular trope in the early Enlightenment, as witness Gulliver’s Travels and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. Although Boorstin’s tone is far more serious, readers will nonetheless recognize in many of his descriptions of our pseudo-world the ironic but not altogether antagonistic curiosity of an alien observing an alien reality.

If today’s more somber irony reflects America’s waning influence and prestige, as not insignificantly embodied in near-daily illustrations of the incompetence of its political leaders, sixty years ago, when our dominance and above all our self-confidence was challenged far less seriously, Boorstin’s critique of the sociological side of public authenticity was strangely similar to that of his Marxist contemporary Herbert Marcuse in his 1964 One-Dimensional Man—a book regretting what Marcuse analyzes as the convergent decadence of the USA and the USSR (!) that would make most amusing reading today. But unlike either Boorstin or Girard, Marcuse’s politics belong, like French Theory, to the leftist mainstream, whose denunciation of modernity is always at least implicitly a critique of capitalism—whose pseudo-world of consumerism Marcuse feared had begun to affect the Soviet Union.

The Image provides a wholesale critique of modern culture on every level, from art to business practices, yet only implicitly presents it as a problem for the culture to solve. But in retrospect we must read this book as akin to Marcuse’s in foreshadowing the sixties’ New Left condemnation of Western society—given sociological impetus by the Vietnam War—a phase that we can now understand as preparatory to this society’s current major crisis. For if Boorstin offers no solutions, the excesses he denounces certainly imply, in Hegelian terms, the necessity of an antithesis, all the more given the “dialectical” nature of politics in liberal democracy.

In a word, the lesson of The Image is that transcendental uniqueness—the sacred—is constantly imitated but cannot be reproduced. But the crucial point that generative anthropology adds to this lesson is that human existence as such depends precisely upon the uniquely human form of such imitation: linguistic and cultural representation as a substitute for mimetic conflict.

The reciprocal exchange of the sign in the originary event was the first moment of human representational culture that allowed, through the mediation of the sign’s “miraculous” multiplication, a protein-rich animal’s egalitarian distribution via the deferral of (mimetic) violence through representation. Modernity takes this process a great step farther in carrying out by technological means the multiplication of loaves and fishes that Jesus could perform only as a miracle—or better, given the Christian basis of the Western society in which modernity appeared, as a model for the scientists and engineers who eventually made possible its embodiment in reality.

This poses the question of the anthropology of the processes, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, that have enabled, along with the broad-scale reproduction of goods, the commodification of representations, with their concomitant loss of artifactual uniqueness. How should we interpret—and how might we replace—in the course of a development whose overall benefits to the human species can hardly be denied, the waning of public sacrality that Boorstin implicitly deplores in every area from news reporting to art, from consumer products to historical monuments: the disappearance from public view of the embodiments of transcendence that had throughout history allowed each unit of human society to recall the originary lesson that made humanity possible?

The new way of thinking that is generative anthropology provides us with the means to understand—without which we cannot stem—the rising tide of resentments brought about by the deterioration of the West’s public sacred, a decadence that has breathed new life into both the atavistic sacred of jihadism and the dystopian utopia of communism. I remain hopeful that, given the faith and energy of its adherents, our “unproven” hypothesis will increasingly be able to serve thinkers and believers as both a supplement to and a substitute for organized religion, providing in either case a source of originary anthropological understanding as the basis upon which our public sacrality may begin to be restored.