Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • GA, Ockham’s razor, and joint shared attention

    Many years ago, before I had even conceived the term “Generative Anthropology,” a reader defined the ideas developed in these Chronicles by their attachment to Ockham’s razor, the principle that the Wikipedia explains as:

    Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates as ‘Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.’

    This would seem to be the most non-controversial principle of knowledge-producing (as opposed to entertaining) intellectual activity. Yet, perversely, GA’s attempt at faithfulness to this principle explains why, after all these years, it has remained largely confined to a loyal cadre of adherents, whose loyalty I continue to hope will one day receive its just reward.

    When I discover articles in scientific journals such as those discussed in Chronicles 858 and 863, I am struck by their lack of awareness of the fundamental nature of human language, for whose historical emergence GA proposes its “minimal hypothesis.” Claiming, as does the second of these, that the phenomenon of different species of birds sharing a warning call for a specific predator is a step toward human language demonstrates a simple lack of understanding of what distinguishes the human sign-system from the signaling systems of animals—and of plants too, for that matter.

    But, you may ask, isn’t the reduction of the concept of language to the use of signs to “represent” things a perfectly good application of the “razor”? The answer is a definite no, since “representing” in the sense of the bird-signals remains in the pre-human realm of reflexive reactions triggering other similar reactions, whereas the principle of human language is precisely the opposite: the conscious deferral of a natural appetitive reaction, the decision to represent an object by a sign as an alternative to seeking to possess it. 

    In his A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014), Michael Tomasello describes the mode of human communication as “joint shared attention,” in which the sign emitted by the speaker induces the listener to lend his attention to the object of interest whose sign is emitted by the speaker. Remembering that animals do not “point” in the human sense of “look at the moon and not my finger,” the sharing of attention via pointing may be considered the simplest illustration of language, in which pointing already functions, as it cannot for animals, as a sign. Yet GA’s originary hypothesis of the historical origin of this exclusively human phenomenon of joint shared attention is, for the scientific world, mere speculation.

    What is uniquely characteristic of human behavior in pointing, as in all uses of signs between humans in live communication, is our presupposition that it will be understood within the uniquely human configuration of a scene. Animals, who lack the ability to share their experience of an imaginary world through the mediation of signs, cannot experience scenes.

    In Chronicle 806, I sought to clarify this point by reference to the origin of Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept, developed in L’Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness), of the néant or “nothingness” that separates, and consequently “liberates,” the human observer from the world that he observes, in Sartre’s terms, in the mode of for-itself or pour soi, translating Hegel’s für sich. This contrasts with the animal that, incapable of using signs, can only relate to objects “in themselves,” en soi, or an sich. For Sartre, in contrast with our freedom to contemplate the world, animals inhabit a totally unfree mental universe, in which he conceived subjects and objects alike as all “stuck together.”

    Sartre was not wrong to emphasize the freedom of the human relation to objects as opposed to the animal. But what he failed to note was that this human freedom was the product of our shared possession of a sign-world—of language. As a result of language, any human group potentially forms a scene in which signers/speakers can make, through the intermediary of language, objects both present and absent potentially “present” to other humans—as well as to themselves, on their mental “scene of representation.”

    Our ever-present capacity of sharing through language our relationship not just to the physically present world but to the world as such is something we normally take for granted; thus it takes a certain effort for us to make scenicity as such the object of our thought. It is to this that Sartre refers when he describes our “free” relationship to the conceivable (and not merely observable) world. It is our ability to experience and to share with others the relationship of signification that divides us from animals, even including those that can communicate to their fellows via signals the presence of dangerous or appetitively attractive objects.

    Sartre never developed a conception of the scene; he understood the pour-soi exclusively as an internal state of the individual human. A similar solipsistic misunderstanding has occasionally inspired philosophers to conceive scenes of language origin in which a lone individual, on suddenly becoming aware of a given object “in a new way,” is thereupon inspired to create a “language” to communicate what we would call his “subjective” experience to others. But such imaginary scenes are a reductio ad absurdum of Sartre’s insight; they describe what is the result of linguistic communication among humans as if it had been discovered by an isolated individual who then desired to communicate it to his fellows by creating language as a system of signs.

    Clearly such an individual, who “freely” contemplates an object and then invents the sign to share his freedom with others, is a product of the philosopher’s narcissism. The sign can only have been created and understood in an interactive collective context, beginning with the abortion of the act of appropriating the object and the subsequent retention of this abortive act, which constitutes pointing—attending to the object—as a sign of the object itself.

    Linguistic signs, if they are to survive as an (established) language, must be shared among a human community that is capable of reproducing itself and its set of signs over time. Hence we naturally conceive the origin of the sign-sharing we call language as taking place in a communal situation, one where each individual’s appropriation of a desirable object, such as the cadaver of a large edible animal, is aborted for fear of provoking a violent reaction from others. But with the repetition of this experience, there dawns within the group the realization that in such situations it is not merely dangerous, but wrong to seek exclusive possession of an object desired by one’s fellows in the absence of an accepted personal “right” to it.

    Only thus can the use of language become not merely an ephemeral means for preventing conflict but the point of departure for community-enhancing modes of social behavior: e.g., clan feasts sharing among their members the result of their hunters’ successful search for game. And only thus can have emerged the presupposition of scenicity that connects humans in virtually all situations—even those in which, when communication becomes desirable among individuals who do not share a common language, they will seek to communicate via an ad hoc pseudo-language of “natural” signs.

    Human society has been deeply affected over the past century and more as the phenomenon of scenicity has been extended by means of acts of what may be called screenic projection or screenicity. This phenomenon, first illustrated in the Lumière brothers’ original demonstration of cinema in Paris in 1895, has now been quasi-universally extended to all humanity via the smartphones whose screens we all carry with us.

    We tend to conceive the dangers of the modern world to our species in terms of weapon systems, but the proliferation of screenic devices has equally transformed our culture in ways that seem to be making the world far less safe. The benefits we reap through joint shared attention to the signs of language are by no means guaranteed to indefinitely preserve us from the dangers of the mimetic desire that language originally emerged to protect us against.

    As a result, rather than conceiving the survival of our species in the perspective of preventing our planet from being struck by an occasional asteroid, while otherwise calmly awaiting the death of our solar system billions of years in the future, we would be well-advised to focus our efforts on warding off humanity’s annihilation in a potential third World War before the end of the present century. Such is the fate of the species that was long ago driven to create language by the revelation that it could survive only by means of the constant deferral of its own mimetic provocation to self-destruction.

  • The Sacred = Religion – Faith

    A very old friend, a former 6th grade schoolmate, having read my latest Chronicle, commented: “I guess I am not convinced that there is a God so I have a problem with the sacred in many ways.” In other words, although my Chronicle avoided asserting that “there is a God,” she found it problematic because it seemed to take God as a valid subject for discussion and therefore implied that the reader must be a “believer.” Such things are no doubt inevitable, although my use of “the sacred” is conceived as a way to avoid the existential question of “the existence of God.” As I have said, I trace this approach to Pascal, who certainly “believed in God,” but wanted to make clear that “believing” without objective evidence, even if one call it “faith,” is really a matter of “taking a chance,” in a word, betting (parier) on God’s reality, which he would show to be implicit in our very existence as thinking beings, obliged to reflect on whether our lives have “meaning,” in the sense of the permanent meaningful status associated with the notion of “going to heaven” or even to “the other place.”

    The question of whether one “believes in God” is like no other. It is certainly not a matter of objective judgment, nor is it a moral judgment, since it does not concern our fellow humans. The degree to which whether or not I believe in God correlates with my own moral qualities is a matter for sociology.

    What is curious is that my friend, being Jewish like myself, shares the historical privilege of bearing a lesser burden in this problematic situation than others, for the same reason that has made the Jews privileged objects of antipathy—scapegoats, if one likes—as a result of their invention/discovery of monotheism. The underlying cause of the universal resentment that surrounds the Jews is that they alone can have the historical certitude that they were the discoverers/propagators of the One God, and whether one considers that conception a “belief” or an anthropological hypothesis, their historical firstness is irrevocable—such that, as with denying the existence of gas chambers during the Holocaust, an attempt to deny it cannot help revealing itself as a desperate effort to make faith contradict fact: like claiming, as Orwell put it in 1984, that 2+2=5.

    The firstness that has aroused such intense and durable hatreds is not merely a chronological privilege. It allows the Jews to conceive HaShem—which is in fact a sort of nickname—in all his transcendentality as nonetheless something like a member of our family. He is to be treated with the greatest respect, but there is no sense in which we cannot address him “man to man,” as occurs, as I understand it, in many passages of the Talmud. And so I feel I can extend this attitude just a bit into a form of “humanistic atheism.”

    I have previously discussed the “Pascalian” theme (see, in particular, Chronicle 840) of how the constituents of (our corner of?) the universe, having made our existence real, and in human terms, durable, have thereby demonstrated their ultimate beneficence, providing us with a reason for us to wager on their, or HaShem’s, providence. That is, our faith concerns the matter of whether and to what extent this providence will protect us in the future. But it is not, like the faith that founds Christianity, “absurd,” but rather, amply proven simply by the fact that we are still here and, at least for the moment, the most successful creatures on our planet. If we can argue with HaShem, it’s because we recognize that, however little we know about his identity, we know that as the Master of the Universe, he has not simply allowed us to exist, but to become aware of our existence, and hence, of the necessary foundation of this existence in the world around us and thus, implicitly, in its “designer,” however the latter’s intentionality be understood.

    I think the reader will have already understood that the purpose of this little thought experiment is to convince us that our universe’s providential nature is simply demonstrated by humanity’s prolonged existence. Hence in response to my friend’s existential question as to whether “there is a God,” at the most fundamental level, without attributing to this providential figure any particular intention or consciousness, we cannot deny, or as Pascal might have put it, we cannot avoid wagering on, the providential nature of the universe on our behalf. This wager is implicit in the simple fact of living, as we do, with the consciousness of both our individual mortality and the continued existence (so far at least) of our species—along with that of the rest of our life-world.

    The relative banality of these reflections on the sacred is given its real interest by the obvious although essentially unexplored parallel between the sacred and language. A point I have previously made in these Chronicles is that language and the sacred, two phenomena that are virtually never put in parallel, were not even in Roy Rappaport’s fundamental intuition of their coevality understood as both emerging from a new and unique motivation—one that Jacques Derrida combined in the profound if sadly unexplored intuition expressed by the French neologism la différance, based on the dual meaning of différer, which means both to defer and to differ. In effect, the element of deferral, postponement (of desire, of instinct) is the simplest one-word definition of the human, expressed on the one hand by what Sartre called the “freedom” with which we think the world—which could only be realized as shared with our fellows through the medium of language, the exchange of signs in the place of the manipulation of things—and on the other, by the moral sense that Hillel called “the whole Torah,” the simple essence of the sacred: the sense of right and wrong, of the imperative to treat our fellow humans as of equal value to ourselves.

    The problematic human “fraternity” that exhibits itself in the first place as what René Girard baptized “mimetic desire” is at the same time the source of the ultimate failure of “Pavlovian” non-reflective mechanisms for controlling intraspecific behavior, a failure that could only be resolved through passage to the higher level on which humanity finds itself: that of internalization and reflection, which in turn can only take place by means of the deferral of “instinctive” attempts to appropriate appetitive objects in collective situations. Which makes impossible the regulation of human behavior through reflexes alone, and makes deferral a matter of choice, thus consequently uncertain, as the originary scene in the garden makes evident: the conscious decision to defer appetitive action cannot simply be dictated.

    Yet as today’s “postmodern” autocracies demonstrate, it can indeed be compelled by the coercive force which, as in 1984, can force us to “believe” that 2+2=5. Which poses the question of whether “free” market-oriented polities are fated to give way to those in which this force comes to take the place of conscience.

    The above description of the “degree-zero” Jewish context prepares us for my understanding of Tertullian’s semi-apocryphal line Credo quia absurdum est, “I believe because it is absurd,” as the essence of the Christian “completion” of Judaism. The “absurd” idea of HaShem becoming mortal and dying for humanity’s sake is the special distinction of Christianity that guarantees by faith God’s love for humanity and that bridges the gap between the Old Testament’s notion of the “people of HaShem” and humanity in general, making Christianity the West’s first “universal religion.”

    It is really with Christianity that faith becomes a crucial element of religion—faith in the sense of belief against reason, as demonstrated by the uneasy relationship to Tertullian’s point of the Church itself. For although the Old Testament does not lack for miracles, these are not as such foundational elements of Hebrew “belief,” whereas Jesus’ death as a sacrifice to humanity, followed by his miraculous resurrection and return to immortality, is the central dogma of the Catholic Church and most of its derivatives.

    Tertullian’s quip may oversimplify this process, but it points to its core: obliging us to believe that in our time, such a miracle could take place, and the Messiah, normally understood as coming at the “end of history,” be revealed. I need not point out that this belief is not founded on the instrumental/”Darwinian” notion of Providence as “the survival of the fittest,” but one whose salvific power is founded on the “absurd” singularity of the divinity’s appearance in the temporal world.

    The Koran presents Islam as the culmination of the “Abrahamic” series. There are many references to Abraham and his son Ishmael who is the proto-Islamic brother of the proto-Jewish Isaac, to the Exodus and later elements of the Old Testament/Tanach history, as well as the New Testament story of Jesus. But these books are not themselves integrated into the Koran, which presents itself as the definitive version of the whole historical series, sent via Gabriel to Muhammad as a final “correction” to the fragmentary and inconsistent writings of the Jews and Christians. The Hadiths may contain denigrations of these “elder brothers,” but the Koran itself treats them as respected but not as yet fully informed bearers of what will now be the final revelation.

    The language of the Koran prepares and explains but does not contain the shameless historical distortions of a Mahmoud Abbas, who is unafraid to declare as a simple fact that, for example, there was never a Hebrew temple on the Temple Mount, which the Jews dare not defile with their “filthy feet.” But although the Koran itself does not contain such texts, the subsequent history of Islam clearly permits this kind of interpretation.

    Nonetheless, this summary presentation suggests that there is plenty of room within the Abrahamic tradition for compromise and a sentiment of fraternity. The current “post-colonial” spate of jihad should not be taken as a demonstration that the Abraham Accords are incompatible with the three Abrahamic religions taken as a whole. This was the grain of truth in George Bush’s naïve claim that “Islam is a religion of peace”; taken simply as the religion of the Koran, there is plenty of ammunition for such a view. Islam may be the source of jihad, just as Christianity gave birth to antisemitism, but a more optimistic view of the outcome of the current “time of troubles” is certainly possible, beginning with the hoped-for resolution of the current Gaza conflict. For the very horrors of the 10/7 massacre suggest that the current dominance of its antisemitic/anti-Zionist interpretation cannot be indefinitely sustained, being grounded on palpable falsities emanating from biased sources, beginning (let us say) from the fake photo of Gaza’s “bombed hospital” on the front page of the New York Times on October 17, 2023 (see Chronicle 786), a hospital which was soon discovered to have been struck by a misfired Palestinian missile, and only in its parking lot!

    What has empowered the recent spate of jihadism is the revelation of the continuing power of the epistemology of resentment, which has encouraged Muslim immigrant communities in Europe and the US to find allies among disaffected Western youth happy to identify with the enemies of Israel—the conservative wing of which embodies today’s only truly unabashed “Western” nation. It is this shared epistemology that permits the “green-red” alliance between the Western left and the jihadists, not some deep affinity between Marxism’s derivatives and Islam.

    That the Judeo-Christian world’s external enemies have formed an alliance with its internal hommes révoltés is not tantamount to a demonstration that its downfall is preordained. But the defense of Western civilization today has become increasingly dependent on Jewish Israel’s ability to demonstrate, after centuries of passivity, its readiness to repel the aggressions of its enemies, and thereby increasingly to serve as an example to both Christian and Muslim nations of resistance to its persecutors.

    Israel was founded as the reincarnation of the eternal Jewish hope to exemplify the values of the Western civilization whose roots lie in the Old Testament. The current test of this hope may well be crucial for the survival of this civilization in the face of its atavistic enemies.

  • Understanding the origin of language and humanity

    I have great respect for the British popular science weekly New Scientist, which is much sharper than the Scientific American that I’ve been getting since Junior High, and I think it is legitimate to accept its judgments as those of the world scientific community. This Chronicle focuses on this community’s failure to recognize the foundational basis of human language that distinguishes its signs, words, from such phenomena as the warning signals of animals. It follows up on Chronicle 853, where I discussed two earlier New Scientist articles that likewise failed to recognize the specificity of human language.

    On page 9 of the 11 October 2025 issue, Chris Simms’ article “Birds may share universal warning call” begins, and ends, thus:

    More than 20 species of bird around the world use a similar “whining” alarm call to warn that birds like cuckoos are around. The call seems to be understood across species, and its specific use hints at how language may have originated.

    […]

    Calls often have specific meanings, and in some cases, they refer to external objects or events, rather than merely communicating about internal states like fear, or attributes like sex or species,” says Rob Magrath at the Australian National University in Canberra.

    “This referentiality means that such calls are akin to human words, which often refer to external objects or events,” he says. “So, animal communication and human language appear to be on a continuum, rather than ‘language’ being a uniquely human feature.” [emphasis mine]

    The idea that human language originated in (animal) alarm calls is simply false, and we need only refer once more to Terrence Deacon’s Symbolic Species, which locates words and alarm calls of this sort in different locations in the human brain.

    But the point that must be made explicitly is that the words of human language are, in contrast to “instinctive” reactions such as alarm calls, mediated through consciousness, in a sense that only humans possess; consciousness/conscience that is at the root of our moral intuition of right and wrong, and that, rather than reflexively inciting other members of our own or other species to flee a potential source of danger or to move toward a source of benefits, human language originates as the result of the speaker’s decision to defer/renounce the attempt to appropriate a desirable object, and instead to refer to it by a sign in order to communicate this renunciation to his fellows. In other words, the originary sign—which we can conceive as an ostensive gesture, or pointing—is a conscious mark of self-restraint intended to induce the same behavior in its recipients. (Let me refer once more to my example of two party-goers hesitating after simultaneously reaching for the last canapé on a tray; see Chronicle 710.)

    Unfortunately, this thesis, which succinctly defines the “Rubicon” that separates the human from the animal, has remained virtually invisible to the scientific community. That human language and conscience/religion were born simultaneously, coevally in the term of Roy Rappaport (see Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge, 1999), remains “unproven,” the universality of the two phenomena in all known human societies being considered an illegitimate subject for explanation in the absence of concrete archaeological evidence.

    Nonetheless, it is useful to provide a conjectural anthropological basis for these assertions—a basis which, I will repeat once more, is grounded not in the clinical laboratory but in literary research. I refer to René Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire in his epoch-making 1961 Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (in English, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel), which characterizes the “truth” of the modern novel as the overcoming of the “romantic lie” of the self-substantial nature of the romantic ego.

    It is significant that this fundamental anthropological analysis that points the way to a hypothesis of human origin emerged from “French Theory,” a social science-influenced mode of literary analysis that reached its heights in the last decades of the 20th century, and is now all but defunct. These analyses were authored by anthropologists, psychoanalysts and linguists as well as by literary scholars influenced by their writings.

    Nor is it an accident that Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire, perhaps French Theory’s most significant contribution to anthropology, was the work of someone whose studies began in the domain of religion and turned from there to literature—someone whom one might imagine to be especially suited to explore Rappaport’s coevality.

    Girard’s insight, gleaned from his reading of a series of modern novels as accounts of spiritual odysseys derived from their authors’ own journeys of self-discovery, was that human desire, in contrast with the appetitive drive of animals, is profoundly influenced by the example of their fellows. To which I would add that implicit in Girard’s analysis is the intuition that it is this characteristic that is the basis for the emergence of the new level of consciousness that humanity represents: one that, precisely, is defined jointly by the coeval emergence of language and religion.

    Girard himself never addresses the question of human origin, but his depiction of the modern novel as a search for personal authenticity based on the self’s escape from the passivity of mimetic desire describes the exemplary lives of literary protagonists as stories of liberation and accession to a level of authenticity that, as in Girard’s final example, Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, is a kind of religious epiphany. This effect is also provided by Le temps retrouvé, the final volume of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, which ends with the protagonist preparing to write the novel of his liberation—which we have just finished reading.

    All well and good, you might say, but what does this have to do with the origin of language and religion?

    What it has to do is that, from the beginning, human language is not exemplified by bird’s or, for that matter, human’s distress calls, which have no need for consciousness to exercise their effect. For this effect is strictly “Pavlovian,” instinctual—like pulling your hand away from a hot stove. What distinguishes human language from animal communication is that it is necessarily the result of a conscious, moral decision.

    How can we explain this? The explanation is supplied by Girard’s idea that humans do not merely have appetites, but desires, which differ from them by the fact that they are influenced by—indeed, imitate—the desires of others. And this influence is too powerful, and too close to consciousness, to be countered by reflexive, Pavlovian inhibitions. We must consciously inhibit our desires—which, as we recall from the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, means that this inhibition may not necessarily take place, resulting in the possibility of conflict with another, or others, who share the same desire—or with God, the source of the moral order itself.

    Generative anthropology’s originary hypothesis is a scenario in which this conscious inhibition provides the gestural material for the first human sign, or word, which would consist simply in an ostensive gesture; in pointing. For, as Michael Tomasello and others have pointed out, the “joint shared attention” involved in pointing at something so that another will direct his attention to it is not practiced by animals. It is an exclusively human phenomenon, immortalized in the Zen koan: Look at the moon, not at my finger.

    And as for the origin of this new use of pointing, the originary hypothesis proposes that the pointing gesture originates as an aborted gesture of appropriation—reaching for an object, but breaking off the attempt to possess it on seeing another or others doing the same thing. For all cannot at once possess the object—but they can all point to it, designate it, refer to it: make it the referent of an ostensive, which is hypothetically the first linguistic sign.

    And as a consequence, the sign, in contrast to the appropriative gesture, can be simultaneously shared by any number of individuals. Hence its first appearance can be hypothesized to take place in a collective situation—for example, one in which the serial distribution practiced by apes, familiar through the Alpha-Beta-Gamma nomenclature its students have applied to it, in which the Alpha takes the cadaver of a hunted or scavenged animal, tears off his piece, then passes the rest to the Beta… has become, as a result of the intensification of mimetic desire with growing proto-human intelligence, no longer effective, its reflexive hierarchy breaking down in conflict. In this context, the discovery of the sign as a conscious replacement of the act of appropriation allows the group to maintain its symmetry, eventually leading to the quasi-simultaneous egalitarian sharing of the meat among the group, the common means of distribution among elementary hunter-gatherer societies—and with superficial changes, the pattern of collective human repasts ever since.

    Furthermore, the emergence of this system must be understood to be dependent on a conscious moral judgment that, at a stage of human culture prior to the institution of social hierarchy, any individual attempt to preempt this egalitarian distribution by “un-aborting” his original appropriative gesture would be not simply dangerous to the individual in question, but wrong. This moral judgment, that no one should disobey the principle of egalitarian distribution, is plausibly the originary source of what later came to be known as the Golden Rule, which, in Hillel’s original formation, was expressed negatively as “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow!”—to which he added, “That is the whole Torah; the rest is Commentary.” Or in other terms, the Golden Rule is the foundational principle of the sacred, the basis of all religion.

    To sum up, the origin of religion, beginning with moral judgment, and language, beginning with an ostensive sign, both exemplify what I have simply called deferral, following Jacques Derrida’s French pun différance, which plays on the dual definition of différer as both to differ and to defer. Or in a word, the conquest of instinct by reflective judgment. Language as a behavior which, rather than either fleeing or grasping its object, is content to refer to it, which is to say, to point it out to others; and the sacred, which inspires in us a moral judgment that appropriating the group’s common object of desire is not just dangerous, but wrong.

    To be human is to hesitate, to defer, to abort our gesture of appropriation—yet to retain this aborted gesture not as a failed act, but transformed into a sign that informs our fellows that we too desire the object, but are aware that it would be wrong to grasp it, since we are all in the same circumstances: in which the sign can be shared, but not (yet) its object, which we must learn to divide in more or less equal portions for each member of the group.

    And the use of such a sign, even from the very first, links its human users in a collective scene of mutual awareness, the origin of what we may broadly call human culture, with its locales such as theaters and assemblies, as well as the now-ubiquitous screens on which, since the Lumières’ first cinema show in 1895, we increasingly display such scenes to each other and ourselves.

  • Charlie Kirk and the Judeo-Christian West

    I usually read Peggy Noonan’s weekly “Declaration” in the WSJ with sympathetic skepticism, but in her September 27-28 column on the memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, entitled “Charlie Kirk and the New Christian GOP,” I felt that she was really on to something. Her references to the new Christian spirit in the GOP and in traditional America as a whole are focused not on filling churches on Sunday (although that may happen as a consequence), but on reaffirming the core values of the Judeo-Christian tradition that has distinguished the USA from the first from its British and European roots, and that is concerned less with church-related activities than with a real sense of the mutual concern and support of the American community in obedience to the fundamental moral principle of “love thy neighbor as thyself.”.

    When Noonan quotes Kirk’s widow Erika’s words for her husband’s assassin, “That young man—I forgive him,” she provides the answer to all the absurd and hateful accusations of “genocide” generated by the Gaza war: this is true human speech—the language of love, not resentment. Noonan’s main point is that Christian faith and its spirit of love for one’s fellows is no longer merely tolerated by the Republican Party—and by extension, by all those who reject the Left’s epistemology of resentment—but understood as the foundation of our civilization and our politics, not merely as an article of faith but an ethical value.

    Hopefully under Erika’s direction the continued growth of Kirk’s Turning Point movement will indeed bring about a genuine spiritual renewal in sizeable percentage of the American public, returning the “Overton window” of our political dialogue to a position where opponents are treated without contempt and foul language, let alone assassins’ bullets. For to honor Kirk’s spirit, we must recognize and denounce, as charitably as his widow but above all as effectively as possible, the epistemology of resentment and its products, in politics as well as in religion.

    Noonan’s and Erika Kirk’s words inspire me to attempt once again to formulate these affirmations of faith in terms that come as close as possible to demonstrating their human truth on the one hand, while justifying their paradoxical “absurdity”—to use Origen’s term—on the other.

    When so-called Christians let themselves be tempted by antisemitism in its “red-green” variant, they should recall that John Paul II called the Jews the elder brothers of Christendom. And just as there could be no Christianity—and no Western civilization—without the Hebrew Old Testament, so there could be no extension of monotheism across half the world without the New. For all the Church’s skepticism about credo quia absurdum est, it is indeed the heart of Christian belief—what merit would there be in a faith that is simply believable? To believe in Jesus’ resurrection is to believe in an event inconceivable in terms of our worldly experience, yet, for a Christian, carried out by God the Father for the explicit purpose of obliging us to accept it as real, which means accepting the ambiguous, meager evidence for it, not as “proof” to show the skeptic that it really took place, but simply as an unproblematic sign of its reality.

    The point of religion, of its coevality with the sign(s) of language, is to remind us that the originary truths expressed by and through language are those that affirm the solidarity of the human community. Humanity’s scenic existence allows us, as Sartre’s “translation” of the Hindu-Buddhist vision of néant/nothingness/emptiness into Western terms as freedom makes explicit, a space of free contemplation that separates us from the objects of our concern and the desires they inspire, a space within which we can not merely contemplate them but freely judge their moral value while communicating about them with our fellow humans.

    As I tried to show in Chronicle 841, the very fact of our existence, that the physical forces that make up the universe came to produce beings like ourselves, capable of evaluating their own fate and of creating moral laws to ensure, as best they could, that they would not become the agents of their own destruction, means that we are entitled to interpret the resultant of these forces as the equivalent of a cosmic Will that seeks the welfare of our species. For our very existence on Earth demonstrates, at the very least, that the universe, which we are free to call the product of will of God, is such that intelligent, soulful creatures like ourselves, with an intuition of good and evil, can come to exist.

    So, to return to Noonan’s optimistic appreciation of the Kirk memorial, we should take this as proof of the essential goodness of human existence, and make use of the spiritual facilities we have attained, whether or not transcendentally inspired, to maintain our faith in this goodness, and as a consequence to combat, by means as peaceful but also as resolute as possible—as in Erika’s quoted remark—the resentfulness that ultimately reflects hatred of our own species and a desire for it to perish.

    For whether or not we “believe in God,” as Pascal put it, we are all willy-nilly “embarked” (embarqués), forced to make Pascal’s bet that our lives can be worthwhile, meaningful in at least the sense that as humans—who as far as we know are the only creatures in the universe to make moral judgments—we can judge them thus. So that, in consequence, it is our duty to encourage our fellows to work toward the success of the human enterprise by encouraging love rather than resentment toward, and in, our fellows.

    In this context, without taking anything for granted, we should nonetheless avoid assuming that the jihadist mentality that governs Hamas and its allies is the definitive essence of Islam. Islam has less resentful offshoots in which loyalty to Allah is not synonymous with a battle to the finish between the abode of Islam and the “house of war.” In the present situation, I think it is sufficient that we support the positive Christian outlook that Kirk always manifested, rejecting as firmly yet as charitably as possible the resentment embodied in the red-green alliance, and taking every opportunity to denounce the historical lies that are central to the myths of Islamic historical firstness in Jerusalem and elsewhere. These are indeed arguments best made by Christians, whose claim of supersession never required anything like the historical falsifications that provided the supposed justification for the murderous Al Aqsa Flood pogrom. For Christianity conceived itself from the start as a supplement—a younger brother—to the Torah’s original revelation of monotheism, rather than as supplanting what Wikipedia calls, following the Koran, “earlier and corrupted revelations from the same God.”

    Only a living Christianity can defend Western civilization from those who would destroy it, and we can take heart from the fact that, as it mourns the death of its founder, TPUSA appears to Noonan and the other observers whom she quotes as full of life and energy. Thus I find real encouragement in her conclusion that this memorial celebration “wasn’t just a memorial; it was a stepping forward in a new way of Christians and the Republican Party.”

  • The West’s Originary Resentment

    Love and resentment, understood not as emotions but as moral judgments, are the two poles of relations with our fellows that emerge from GA’s scene of human origin. The basis of love in this sense is our intuition of mutuality with others, as in the command to “Love thy neighbor as thyself” that is at the heart of human sociality. This intuition is found as well in Hillel’s negative version, “Do not do to another what you would not have him to do you.” In the nascent human context in which it emerges, it is a remedy for mimetic rivalry; its first manifestation in an individual is deferral, Derrida’s différance, of his attempt to appropriate a good also desired by others.

    In obeying the command of my conscience to renounce seeking to appropriate a common object of desire, I am not merely shying away from possible conflict, I am judging that it would be wrong to take for myself what I realize belongs equally to all. And by the same token, I would judge another who does not abort his attempt at possession as worthy of resentment—my own and that of the group—for having disobeyed this moral imperative.

    It is in the context of this first conscious inhibition dictated by our conscience, our intuition of right and wrong, that the originary hypothesis situates the nascent human scene. On this scene, our relationships with objects are mediated by the signs of language, which themselves originate in aborted/deferred gestures of appropriation, the simplest of which is pointing—which, in the sense of “look at the moon and not my finger,” is done only by humans.

    But given the sacred imperative of reciprocity, in the inverse situation where it is the other who breaks the symmetry of the triangular configuration, we cannot help resenting him. Whether or not its implicit accusation is valid, resentment is a moral reaction.

    The epistemology of resentment

    Hierarchies of wealth and power exist in any but the most elementary societies, and it is impossible to prevent those lower in such hierarchies from resenting those who are higher. But the ethic of hierarchical societies judges such resentment in principle as illegitimate, immoral: legitimate differences of wealth and status must be accepted by all, and religious doctrines distinguish between the equality of souls and the inequalities made necessary by the functioning of the social order.

    No doubt the introduction of conscious morality does not mean the end of mimetic conflict, but it permits the emergence of cooperative behaviors that keep such conflict in the margins of the social order. In contrast, the emergence in the modern world of what I have called the epistemology of resentment—the intuition that, contrary to previously held religious and societal doctrines, it is this sentiment, familiar to all, that is the true guide to personal morality—inspired the first modern challenge to the established order.

    The French Revolution was grounded on what its participants saw as the demystification of the monarchy’s privileged inequalities, for the first time conceived as injustices. Louis XVI’s fatal convocation of the Etats-Généraux in 1789, by bringing together the three “estates,” among which the unprivileged status of the Tiers-Etat stood in clear contrast to the two others, tragically exemplified the ancien régime‘s failure to adapt to the emergent conditions of nascent modernity.

    In this historical context, then, we may speak of the epistemology of resentment as an equilibrating factor, a warning to the community that its system of privilege could no longer claim legitimacy and keep order in the society. But it also provided a precedent that could be revived through the a priori application of the revolutionary model to all privilege, whether deserved or not. And the success of the French Revolution in overthrowing the monarchy provided a guarantee to the less privileged in all circumstances to view their status as the product of a potentially reversible historical injustice, ushering us into the modern world.

    Whence the perennial problem of this world’s “free” or market societies, constantly obliged to convince their members that they are not in fact nests of privilege, in contrast to the “totalitarian” autocracies whose ruling oligarchies tolerate no contestation of their decisions. Such societies, classically idealized in Orwell’s 1984, seek to weed out the least trace of resentment among their populations, including in many cases even within the family. And it is notable that although the ancient world insisted on the instability of tyrannies, those of today have shown themselves to be remarkably stable, even when clearly unpopular with their general populations, as today in Iran or North Korea.

    Resentment and antisemitism

    The most striking lesson of the past few years has been to remind us that the most enduring cultural manifestation of resentment in Western civilization—and, sadly, an increasingly frequent theme of these essays—is antisemitism. Indeed, the simplest definition of antisemitism is resentment of the Jews, the ancestors of Jesus, who may have denounced the Pharisees, but never renounced Judaism.

    Indeed, it is only very recently that those whom John Paul II had the grace to recognize as the Catholic Church’s “elder brothers” have been viewed with such equanimity. Whence the suspicious air of fraternity between Catholic nations like Spain and Ireland and the perpetrators of the October 7 pogrom. Indeed, one is tempted to say that the truly significant revelation inspired by that massacre was the emergence, after centuries of religious wars, of a latent kinship between the two younger Abrahamic religions.

    Ultimately, no doubt, the Islamists don’t really care for the “Sunday people” either, although their hostility to the “Saturday people” is clearly more urgent—especially now that, instead of attempting to conquer Europe by storming the walls of Vienna, they have chosen the more insidious method of mass immigration. Nor have there been any serious epidemics of Islamophobia in these countries, even in the face of the negative effect of this immigration on welfare costs and criminality.

    On the contrary, as Hamas has pridefully pointed out, the pogrom’s principal effect in the West has been to provoke, along with hostility to Israel, a stampede of recognitions of the mythical state of Palestine, among the first being those of France and Great Britain, the two principal West European victors of WWII—as if the honeyed words of peace and brotherhood would magically efface those in the charters of Hamas and its fellow jihadists that vow to annihilate the Jewish state.

    A last word on Jew-hatred

    Daniel Greenfield didn’t mince words in his 9/30/25 Substack article: Western Leaders Recognizing a ‘Palestinian’ State aren’t Antisemitic. They’re Suicidal. (https://substack.com/inbox/post/174984136). For indeed, killing “the elder brother” is an attack on the roots of the self. The bottom line of today’s antisemitism is civilizational self-immolation: the suicide of Western Civilization.

    Greenfield’s point is emphasized in his final paragraph:

    The drive for a ‘Palestinian’ state is a civilizational death wish out to destroy the civilized world. Those who collaborate with it want war, not peace, and they are as willing to destroy their own countries as they are enthusiastic about bringing down Israel. The only supporters of a ‘Palestinian’ state are the enemies of civilization and their useful idiots.

    Greenfield isn’t interested in whether this “civilizational death wish” is something inherent only in Western civilization, or in human civilization per se; but that only makes his point the more powerful. As David Horowitz’s heir at the head of the Freedom Center that bears his name, Greenfield is, like Horowitz himself, a critic of the “New Left” that emerged from the 1960’s with the aim of fomenting Marxist revolution in the West.

    Greenfield is not fundamentally concerned with the long-term history of what I have called the epistemology of resentment, although that is indeed what he is describing. But where the sans-culottes could not only justify their resentment with the evidence of the old regime’s caste hierarchy, but seemed fully justified in envisaging that a casteless society in which everyone would belong to the Tiers-Etat would bring greater prosperity to all, a century later in Nietzsche’s time, le ressentiment—a term that in earlier times had designated rather the aristocrat’s indignation at failure to recognize his privilege—had come to appear as a threat to Western civilization, a threat against which the racially superior Übermensch—and we all know who came to embody this role—would become the sole recourse. But in the ensuing conflict, the Western democracies were victorious, and created the United Nations to ensure that no such disturbance would henceforth threaten the casteless world order.

    And now, indeed, eighty years later, no one talks of a “master race”: the leading “revolutionary” movement is accessible to all… provided they submit. The genius of Islam is that we must experience religion as submission, seeing the divinity not as a liberating force teaching us right from wrong, but as a wise dictator offering us the recourse of blind obedience that deprives us—or more precisely, obliges us to deprive ourselves—of the least chance to do evil.

    And we might imagine that Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and the rest might put up little resistance to this chance at perfection. But this could occur only once the Jews, the originators of the doctrine that guarantees their own exemplarity, had themselves been obliged to choose between death and submission. For the true end of monotheism, in short, is not, as the Biblical religions taught, the golden rule of mutual love, but the free choice of submission to the iron will of the Creator, who knows what is best for his creatures.

    Thirty-odd years ago, Western civilization in its Judeo-Christian mode seemed to have triumphed over its totalitarian variants. But now the West has come to understand that its hubris, freedom of conscience, the poisoned gift of the “chosen people,” cannot be allowed to survive, lest it lead humanity to destroy itself. Our only chance of survival is through the universalization of the Muslim Umma, submitted to the will of Allah. Only then will resentment be no more.

    In the Koran, as in the Torah, humanity chose evil over good and was cast out from the Garden. But it can redeem itself if it but humbly submit to the will of the Creator, as dictated to his Prophet.

    Then again…

  • Sacred love and resentment

    To understand the deeper implications of the West’s double heritage, we must defamiliarize ourselves with the facts and judgments we have long accepted as givens and attempt to reconstruct our human ontology from the ground up.

    For many centuries, the sacred, whose core is simply our sense of right and wrong, was humanity’s privileged road to truth. But the double inheritance of the West is dependent on the fact that whereas the culture of the Greek polis combined the stories of numerous local divinities into a Pantheon whose inhabitants’ immortality made them potential objects of human resentment, Hebrew culture was centered on a single transcendent creator. This contrast between the Greeks’ insistence on the mimetic roots of the sacred and the Hebrews’ on the sacred’s transcendence of them generated in the West a clear distinction between sacred and profane that was no doubt the ultimate reason why it was there rather than in the less “dialectical” cultures of India or China that modernity first arose.

    Greek concern with human morality expressed itself most significantly in its public esthetic culture, in contrast to which the “private” schools of Greek philosophy concerned themselves both with the polis and with the rules of thought itself, which its thinkers formalized in geometry and logic and their practical applications in architecture and warfare. Whereas in a society lacking this public-private distinction, the Hebrew intellect remained focused on understanding the interactions of their nomadic people with the established Middle Eastern civilizations, and in particular, with Egypt, into whose orbit they fell.  Jerusalem, their polis, was late to be established and would never have the security or stability of Athens or Sparta. Without the luxury of using their intellects for speculation, the Hebrews sought to draw moral lessons from their historical experiences in attempting to follow the Creator’s implicit will.

    As post-Darwinian biologists have often noted, Genesis attributes to the Creator decisions that can easily be converted into empirical truths about animal and human evolution. But the key event in Genesis, the “fall of man,” is focused on humanity’s moral evolution, and rather than describing it, as the days of creation were described, as bringing satisfaction to the Creator (Genesis I, 29: “and the Lord saw everything he had made, and, behold, it was very good”), the “fall” that is in fact the emergence of humanity is met by Him with anger and punishment.

    This divine dissatisfaction is presented in a very different perspective from the gods’ punishments in the epics and dramas of the Greeks. Achilles and Priam are reconciled at the end of the Iliad through their shared resentment of the gods, whose immortality makes them immune to humanity’s time-bound sufferings. But the resentment in the Hebrew universe is not that of Adam and Eve, but of the Creator himself, who in a unique passage in Genesis III, 22 expresses the fear that his human creations might go on to eat of the Tree of Life and become, like him (and unnamed other gods!) immortal.

    And the Lord God said: ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us [my emphasis], to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.’

    This is the clearest indication in the Torah, far more revelatory than Abraham’s smashing his family idols, of the emergence of Hebrew monotheism from a background of polytheism. The “tree of life” is best understood as a reference to an earlier polytheistic world rather than to a preceding golden age.

    The tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is, precisely, the bearer of the monotheistic truth of the sacred in the place of individually defined gods and rites. Having eaten of it, the humans can no longer cohabit with the Creator, for such cohabitation, as this passage shows, is fundamentally polytheistic, man being distinguished from god by the latter’s transcendent powers alone. The Creator had sought in vain to protect his new creations from the danger of acquiring this “divine” knowledge, without realizing that without it, they could not attain the stage of true humanity. Or in our terms, their prior existence in Eden could not otherwise have fulfilled its purpose as an originary hypothesis of historical human reality. Which is to say that humans are, and can only be, mortal creatures that nonetheless share their Creator’s knowledge of moral truth.

    This inversion of the Greeks’ resentment of their gods’ immortality offers a revelatory point of contrast. In the Greek universe, the gods’ ontological superiority displays them as more powerful, more perfect versions of ourselves—and thus resented as successful rivals. Whereas this unique expression of divine (and collective) resentment appears in the Bible only in the Creator himself, and only as a trace of an earlier, now-transcended polytheistic era of sacred/human competition.

    And whereas in Greek culture, our shared resentment of the gods’ immortality permits the reconciliation of human enemies, as in the Iliad’s terminal scene of Hector’s burial, the Hebrew narrative depicts the Creator as making a couple of false starts even after the expulsion from Eden. The first culminates in the Flood that eliminates the corrupted descendants of Cain who had mixed with the pious children of Seth, and restarts the human race from the seed of the righteous Noah, to whom the Creator promises in Genesis IX, 11 never again to destroy the human world; the second ends with the scattering of the monolingual society that built the Tower of Babel to rival heaven, and the birth of Abram/Abraham, whose people He promises in Genesis XII, 2 to make into “a great nation.”

    Thus only once humanity had ceased to seek in a unique and universally comprehensible human language a final potential source of rivalry with the Creator could its history proper begin its course.

    The reconciliation of human enemies against the gods that we found in the Iliad was effectively the reductio ad absurdum of polytheism. Once we see the gods as our rivals, sacrality is no longer transcendent and we can no longer conceive its distillation into a simple affirmation of human moral symmetry. Rather than telling humans to forget their differences because they suffer the ultimate injustice of mortality, they are to accept these differences on the basis of their equality, their brotherhood as creatures none of whom is a priori superior to any other. Generative anthropology realizes this in the scene of the originary hypothesis: the experience of deferring/renouncing attempts at individual appropriation of the object of common desire in favor of its common designation as a prelude to its symmetrical sharing is the inaugural act of the human community.

    Thus the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” is nothing else than the political embodiment of Hillel’s golden rule. What makes us human, and at the same time, worthy of our fellowship with the Creator, is our need to exercise conscious judgment in carrying out this rule, in contrast to the Pavlovian inhibitions that keep the peace throughout the rest of the animal kingdom.

    This reduction of the sacred to a single precept has no parallel in the natural world; it is experienced as a revelation, not an empirical discovery. And the naturalness with which we attribute the moral law to the Creator has for its primitive model our common intuition that, although each individual must make his own decisions about right and wrong, we can in principle agree on the essential features of “what we would not want to have done to us” that would rupture the communal union.

    The Epistemology of Resentment

    This fundamental principle of human reciprocity has been greatly weakened since the onset of modernity with the French Revolution. It has increasingly given way to the epistemology of resentment: the idea that we should rather understand the Golden Rule as imposed on us from without, as the colonial powers imposed their values on their colonies—that our intuition of the sacred, of the One God who guides us all, is a delusion imposed by the powerful on the powerless to deter them from demanding their rightful share of worldly goods. For indeed, what the symmetry of the golden rule cannot help us with is the asymmetric distribution of the advantages attached to the “surplus value” accumulated in societies beyond the subsistence level. Where indeed is the symmetry between a noble and a peasant, a factory worker and the factory owner?

    If the medieval peasant revolts were visceral reactions to poverty and hunger, that of the sans-culottes was an ideologically motivated rejection of the caste privileges of nobles and clergy—unfortunately foregrounded by Louis XVI’s ill-considered decision to convene the Etats-Généraux in 1789, at which the contrast between the privileges of the Church and the nobility and the status of the Tiers-Etat gave the epistemology of resentment its originary impetus.

    Today the distant heirs of the sans-culottes carry Palestinian flags, identifying with the “oppressed” victims of the Jews, which is to say, rejecting the golden rule’s a priori assertion of fundamental human symmetry as a ruse designed to permit the oppressors to dominate their victims, and accepting in its place a moral epistemology that consecrates the inner twinge of resentment as a guarantee of moral truth.

    Nor can the epochal question this raises be resolved by John Rawls’ ingenious fiction of an “original position” of universal equality (see the discussion of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in Chronicle 322). Clearly the resentment at the base of today’s Islamic Jihadism reveals far more explicitly than that of the sans-culottes the dependency of the sacred in the Abrahamic world on what can only be called the Hebrews’ ontological anteriority. Whence Mahmoud Abbas’ historically absurd insistence on the originary existence of the Al-Aqsa Mosque with respect to the Hebrew temples that in fact preceded it by many centuries.

    Thus, from the Palestinian perspective, in his generous gesture of leaving the Muslim Waqf in charge of the Temple Mount after the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli general Moshe Dayan was merely acting in accordance with sacred truth.

    Might history have followed a different course had he grasped the religious significance of his gesture? For ontological resentment cannot be resolved by means of the Rawlsian calculus. And thus we are now once more (re)discovering, to our regretful surprise, that the resentment at the root of antisemitism lies on a far deeper level than that inspired by differences of worldly success.

  • Humanity’s dubious future

    to the memory of Charlie Kirk

    One more Jew vs Greek, sacred vs worldly question, one that reflects the fact that once the sacred reaches maturity—a matter for l’esprit de finesse rather than l’esprit de géométrie—it ceases to evolve, whereas worldly knowledge evolves unendingly, so that the technique-dependent danger of destruction grows much faster than our ability to defend against it.

    For a few years after WWII we worried a great deal about nuclear war, but after a while its ever-present possibility served only as a deterrent, albeit one that a new advance in weaponry might at any time make ineffective. Not to speak of the emergence of alternate modes of warfare, such as the creation of pandemics, a small sample of which we recently experienced.

    Better not to think too much about such dangers, which by their nature are impossible to anticipate, let alone prevent with any assurance. Like Hitler’s gift of a half-century vacation from antisemitism, that from major wars will surely not be eternal, and just as WWII was far more destructive than WWI, one can predict the same for WWIII et seq.

    So we had perhaps better bend our energies to making life in the present more pleasant for those around us rather than attempting to anticipate the progress of humanity in future millennia. Our flaw, quite possibly fatal, comes from the fact that once we have reached Hillel’s principle, and then, with the aid of credo quia absurdum, the paradoxical apotheosis of Christ, the Western sacred could evolve only as it has in Islam, whose affinity for the Red-Green alliance is anything but accidental, while our command over the object-world constantly increases—so that, on the one hand, we can vastly improve every aspect of our worldly lives, but on the other, our ability and willingness to put an end to human life (to “love death”) cannot be prevented from growing ever greater, to the point where it might seem virtually inevitable that at some point, we will do so.

    Among the present signs of this gradient in the West are the falling birth-rate and the decline of humanistic thinking, as reflected in the academic world in the decline of humanities programs, including the humanistic anthropology represented by GA. The other day I spoke to an educated woman in her thirties who had never heard the name of Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous philosopher of his generation not all that long ago.

    Will there be any more “great thinkers”? I have tried to do my bit, but hardly with much success. There is little profit in such speculations. Meanwhile, physical science continues to progress in every direction, creating ever more powerful tools and concepts for exploring ever farther Pascal’s two infinities of great and small, yet showing no signs of arrival at a new synthesis.

    Can it just be a fluke that throughout my lifetime my impression has steadily grown that the more we learn about the natural world, the less we know it, in the sense of understanding the whole? Can we really imagine someone someday updating Pope’s lines:

    Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night:
    God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light!

    Einstein was the last physicist to whom that couplet might have been applied, although he himself would have rejected it. And since his day, the more the sciences advance, the less easily can they be explained even to the educated layman, and if certain elements of progress are clear enough, it is certainly not obvious what the mastery of quantum mechanics (and its pending integration of gravitation) would hold out to us, and anything but obvious what an updated “theory of everything” would look like.

    But physics aside, the essential point is simply this: if indeed the irreversible growth of entropy implies that of increasingly complex negentropic beings, the increasing complexity of such beings that has led them to become increasingly subject to mimetic desire and hence to resentment makes the attainment of a harmonious society in the face of the constantly increasing potential of physical annihilation increasingly inconceivable.

    As we seem to be seeing today, the relative stability of autocracies is no longer associated with a more primitive level of technology; on the contrary, the choice seems increasingly between a totalitarian system like that of China and democracies collectively evolving in the direction of anarcho-tyranny: the breakdown of local order and the spread of petty crime contrasted with wealth and monopoly of power as the only clear protections against disorder. And although the US still maintains, at least outside its major cities, a reasonable level of what we may call bourgeois order, in producing the materiel of war it has clearly fallen behind China, whose armies, however untested, are being increasingly supplied with the capacity to overwhelm those of the West.

    What force is there to counteract the steady improvement in the instruments of violence, to which artificial intelligence has only begun to make its contribution? Although each army will prefer to avoid sacrificing vulnerable humans on the battlefield as opposed to increasingly intelligent drones and other automata, the principal aim of the latter will not be to destroy their enemy counterparts, but the humans that they are protecting.

    What authority can we cite that might persuade us that such developments are not inevitable in the next couple of generations? Putin’s ability to invade Ukraine with impunity is just one minor consequence of the existence of “ultimate” nuclear weaponry, from which the immense area of his country allows him to credibly assume a greater immunity than any other, despite Russia’s renunciation of the USSR’s former aim to “bury” the Western economies. For who needs an economy when he has enough nuclear bombs? And while the Earth remains the same size, there is no reason to doubt the future evolution of increasingly deadly weaponry—and pace sci-fi, little chance indeed of finding safe havens elsewhere in the cosmos.

    How might the countervailing force of the sacred conceivably counteract this evolution? Today the only real use for the sacred in human competition is creating the kind of monsters that invaded Israel on 10/7/23, whose “love of death”—as they proudly boast—gives them strength where their enemies’ love of life brings weakness. It is in this sense alone that the atavistic sacred of Jihadi Islam is “more advanced” than the Judeo-Christian religions.

    No doubt Israel will likely emerge victorious from the present conflict, but the Jews’ very exemplarity makes them inimitable even by those few who have the generosity to admire them… And as we have seen from the world’s reaction to 10/7, and even in the race for the mayoralty of New York City, not long ago the world capital of Judaism, the psychological rewards of the transcendence of love by hate seem ever-increasing.

    Conclusion

    I have no doubt that in objective terms, Generative Anthropology has made considerable progress with respect to the state of anthropology at its inception. But whatever my personal limitations, I cannot imagine that ideas such as our originary hypothesis remain virtually unknown merely through a failure of marketing.

    The fact is that in the (post)modern world that we inhabit, the “taboo” subjects—antisemitism, language origin—that I have repeatedly referred to in these Chronicles are really dangerous, accessible to only very few of those who seek to understand the human unshielded by divine protection. The heyday of “French theory” was one more legacy of WWII, a transitional period during which esthetic culture, particularly literature, could become a privileged source of anthropological understanding. But it’s all over now, and I don’t think that even Taylor Swift could popularize my theory of the origin of language—or of antisemitism either.

    There is a reason why these thoughts, which in my perhaps overly self-centered judgment are the most significant anthropological advances of our new century, remain all but unknown, and will likely remain so when I have passed from this earth. As we saw in the previous Chronicle, the market for explaining the origin of language still remains blithely open to such Woke considerations as privileging women and children over men, making it useless to insist that, given that the focal point of culture is the deferral of intra-human violence, men have played the greater role simply because, as non-child-bearers, they remain necessarily even now the more violent sex.

    But I think it is clear enough from these Chronicles that addressing the origin of language or its “spread” as the effect of one or another worldly activity simply refuses to take into account the contribution of French Theory to our fundamental anthropology. Which is to say, the real point of Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire and its potential for inciting conflict—the burden, we might say, of the human soul, of our independent intelligence.

    We acquired language because we needed it as a means of deferring our desire before it could lead us to violate the Golden Rule. But having attained through language the deferral of our potential violence, we ironically became able, with accelerating facility, to vastly increase our capacity for violence, to the point where at some point in the near future, an act within the power of a single human being might conceivably put an end to human life, or indeed, to earthly life altogether.

    And yet, to this ominous truth, our only reply can be, “While there is life, there is hope!”

  • Judaism and Originary Ontology

    There is a sense in which my defense of the Jews as the innocent victims of undeserved hatred might be taxed as unfairly tendentious: that, as my own writings demonstrate, the Jews have an unfair advantage in the domain of what I call “originary thinking.” Not that their ancestors became human before other peoples, but because they discovered the essence of the sacred, and thus of the human, before the others. That this has not been laid out before in modern terms should not surprise us, any more than that the millennia of Jew-hatred have never been explained as anything but an irrational prejudice by those who have not succumbed to the temptation to share it.

    Let me take an example from Greek reflection on the sacred, one that embodies an empirical attitude we tend to find more congenial than the rigorous iconoclasm of the Jews. In a famous fragment, the 6th century BC Eleatic Xenophanes, noting his compatriots’ propensity for depicting the gods and goddesses in human-like form, speculates that different animal species would do likewise, so that horses and cattle would have horse-gods and cattle-gods.

    Yet in another fragment, he declares that God is one, that he abides in one place and does not move, yet “without effort he sets in motion all things by mind and thought.” Which is to say, Xenophanes’ notion of god is superficially quite close to the Hebrews’, including his namelessness. Yet the difference is that this philosophical god is merely a mental construct in a world where the “real” gods worshiped by the Greeks, which Xenophanes clearly considers childish fictions, remained the objects of official cults.

    In such circumstances, “God” is a mere abstraction, something like the “Pascalian” figure I developed in Chronicle 840, whose principle of entropy results in matter organizing itself to preserve its negentropy, hence favoring the evolution of increasingly complex creatures. But Pascal’s own God was not an abstraction: he had revealed himself in the historical person of Christ, accepted by Christians as the human embodiment or “person” of the nameless Hebrew divinity who “is that he is,” and whom religious Jews just call “the Name” (Hashem), who created the world as a residence for a humanity for whom he has to learn to provide the appropriate moral training to permit it to form collectivities that will survive and prosper. Thus the story of Genesis is centered on the origin of human morality, on our learning to assimilate the divine command of right and wrong, which, as God himself “learns” in Eden, cannot be done simply as blind causality—or as Pavlov would have said, by conditioned reflex.

    It is a consequence of the greater seriousness of the Hebraic sacred that the Torah has been transmitted more or less intact through the generations in a society constantly condemned to migration, whereas most of the Greek philosophers, whose society remained far more stable, are known today largely by fragments cited in other works, themselves rarely complete. The sacred implies, in the first place, reverence for the vehicles that transmit it, and for Judaism, this means not idols or statues but texts. We still possess many treasures of Greek philosophy and literature, but a large portion of even the major texts of Greek antiquity have been lost, absent the reverent care that sacredness imposes.

    No doubt the major works of the greatest thinkers and poets have largely been preserved, and in any case, there is no point in preferring the productions of one or the other of the two sources of our civilization. But what the current turmoil teaches us is that, when push comes to shove, the majority of the Western societies, whose sacred books begin with the Torah, are more inclined to share the resentment of Islam’s fanatical murderers rather than the Jews’ desire to live in peace beside them. Christianity and Islam have much in common, and may perhaps evolve toward a modus vivendi that would enrich both, but the Islam that fights with the end of eliminating the Jews from the Middle East and the rest of the world is no friend of Christianity either, the Sunday people being, like the Saturday people, worthy only of the choice between conversion and, at best, dhimmization.

    Thus the question we must ask is: why do these disciples of Christ feel more kinship with his enemies than with the Jews, who may have rejected his prophecies but had no part in his crucifixion? Or to put it differently, why do Christians feel less kinship with those who wrote texts that they consider holy than with those who have rejected these texts, as well as their Christian supplements, as imperfect drafts of their own holy book which almost no Christian ever opens? Is it not because their antisemitism is at the bottom a recognition that—however much Jesus enriched the Hebrew heritage, in ways that most modern Jews are ready to recognize, and however Christian wisdom may tell them that the Jews are their “elder brothers”—when given the choice, they sympathize with the savage murderers of October 7 more than with their victims, as though when Jesus told them to “love their enemies,” he had neglected to add “so long as they hate your brothers more than you”?

    Let me give an example from what is superficially an entirely different domain: that, once more, of the origin of human language. In the August 23 New Scientist, Michael Marshall reviews on p. 26 a book by Madeleine Beekman entitled The Origin of Language (Simon & Schuster, 2025), with the accompanying blurb: “Beekman suggests the complexity of childcare drove language’s spread.”

    Thus Beekman puts forward one more possible activity that may have “driven” the spread of language, as well it may, but gets no nearer than any other officially approved attempt to the origin of language. As Marshall puts it:

    In proposing this idea, Beekman is wading into a very crowded marketplace. Many scenarios have been put forward for the evolution of language. Some say it developed in concert with technologies like stone tools; as we created more advanced tools, we needed more descriptive language to teach others how to make and use them. Or maybe language was a means of showing off [!], including through witty wordplay and insults. Then again, it might have allowed individuals to organise their own thoughts and was only secondarily used to communicate with others. [communication as a secondary effect of language!]

    One appealing aspect of Beekman’s proposal is that it places women and children at the centre….

    Need I say more? Certainly not to the readers of these Chronicles.

    The idea that the care of children in the home “drove” the origin of language is incompatible with everything culture tells us about human society: how can words be spread throughout the community if they are first created in the relative solitude of maternal child-care?

    No doubt this activity, like tool-making and various other techniques, may be said to have stimulated the evolution of language, that is, providing new signs for things of shared interest among humans. But it is nonetheless obvious, not merely in the abstract, but from our present practices, that the origin of language must have been in a collective activity, one in which the participants were not engaging in an unproblematically cooperative function like childcare or toolmaking, but one in which a danger of mimetic conflict had to be faced and conquered. Indeed, is it not disappointing that now that René Girard’s name is becoming well-known in association with “scapegoating,” none of his new fans has noted that really to take Girard’s key insight seriously is to realize that the key problem for humanity is the conquest of mimetic rivalry and its potential for violence—a phenomenon we are certainly witnessing in spades today!

    And this failure, I would affirm, is a product of the Greek dominance over the Hebrew as an influence on our intellectual life, which has given us the glories of modern science, but which on the level of human relations has allowed resentment to flourish in the place of Hillel’s simple principle.

    This is not the place to discuss in detail the text of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but it suffices to point out that although Aristotle’s ultimate aim is to perfect the politeia, the community (of responsible adults), he begins with what he considers the individual’s aim of “happiness” or “pleasure,” rather than with Hillel’s simple “golden rule,” which seems unknown to Greek thought. In a word, the polity is a collection of individuals about whom the question of how they became human or “discovered” language or ethics is never asked. No doubt Aristotle and his fellows inhabited a pre-Darwinian universe. And yet the equally pre-Darwinian Hillel, while equally unaware of human evolution from the apes, focuses unlike Aristotle on the collective foundation of human ethics, the avoidance of mimetic conflict.

    Certainly the Greeks were well aware of mimetic conflict in their dramas and epics—and it is of telling significance that when Aristotle himself touches on humanity’s mimetic tendencies, it is not in the Ethics but in a famous passage from Book IV of his Poetics:

    Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation.

    And this “division of labor” indeed reflects the greatness of Greek literary culture in a society whose philosophical reflection nonetheless seeks the roots of ethics in individual “happiness” and “pleasure” without conceiving the need to grasp the origin of human social organization in our sacred intuition of right and wrong.

  • Western Civ: The Jews and the Greeks

    The Jews and the Greeks are universally understood to be the two peoples most directly responsible for the foundations of Western Civilization, the first for its religious and the second for its secular culture. Thus at first glance, the “firstness” I have alluded to as the source of the unique phenomenon of antisemitism or Jew-hatred should be shared between the two groups; no one would deny the foundational nature of the contributions of either.

    Yet over the millennia, the fortunes of the two peoples have been very different. The Greeks, whose medieval culture nourished the Byzantine empire in parallel with its Roman variant in the West, later spent several centuries under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. As we recall from the example of Byron, the colonial status of Greece was a rallying point for admirers of Classical culture, while Britain, France, and Russia fought alongside the Greeks at Navarino in 1827 to restore Greece as an independent nation. I need not insist on the different reception of Israel by the international community.

    Indeed, the idea of hating the Greeks—or any people other than the Hebrews/Jews—not merely in a kind of brotherly rivalry, but as unworthy of belonging to humanity itself, is inconceivable.

    Thus it is unsurprising that no term for historical Jew-hatred can capture its uniqueness. Antisemitism, whose pretense of focusing on the Jews’ “racial”/linguistic heritage is obviously irrelevant—as people used to say, “but the Arabs too are Semites!”—is as good or bad as any.

    To liberate the Greeks it sufficed to free the land of Greece, which, although its borders changed a good deal over the centuries, never lost its general location on the map, nor its sense of ethnic continuity. Whereas the Jews were for the most part driven from their original lands, first by the Persians, then the Romans, and more definitively by the Muslims in the 6th and 7th centuries. They were subsequently expelled, sometimes more than once, from most of the Western European countries where they had been allowed to settle, their population often thinned by pogroms, until Hitler’s “final solution” murdered something like 2/3 of the Jews of Europe. Meanwhile the Jews remaining in the former territories of Judea were never permitted to form a polity of their own until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

    The West stood up for Greek independence in the days of Byron and has accepted it as a matter of fact ever since. In contrast, the Jews, even those who had remained in Judea over the centuries, were never accepted as its rulers, and the establishment of Israel nearly 80 years ago, never fully accepted by its neighbors, is contested by a large—and increasing—percentage of the membership of the UN. In contrast, the local Arab population that Yasser Arafat began to refer to in the 1960s as “Palestinians” deserving of statehood have not only been uniquely granted, along with their descendants in perpetuity, the status of “refugees” with an eternal claim to return to the land supposedly granted to Israel, but their chimerical “State of Palestine” had been “recognized” by over 75% (147 of 193) of the UN’s member states even before the recent rash of recognitions by France, Great Britain, Australia et al.

    The final irony: today the Greek population is among the most antisemitic in Europe, as witness the recent repeated attacks on Israeli tourists in the Aegean attempting to land in Greek territory. In the Statista table “The antisemitism index score in Europe in 2024, by country” (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1616141/antisemitism-index-score-by-country-in-europe/), the two Greek nations, Greece and Cyprus, were among the four highest scorers, at 50% and above.

    And if much of the recent rise in antisemitism in Europe can be attributed to the political influence of the influx of Muslim immigrants, most notably in France, but also in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark…, Greece has only a small Muslim population. Clearly, today’s Greeks feel far more kinship with the Palestinians in their statelessness than with the Jews finally restored to their original homeland.

    The anthropological conclusion we must draw from this contrast is the primacy of the sacred over the semiotic element of human culture—in the first place, its language.

    For to return once more to GA’s minimal hypothesis of the origin of the human, the key precondition that has allowed us to create a self-conscious semiotics in which we have what Sartre called our freedom to reflect on words/Ideas, is that which Derrida summed up in his brilliant portmanteau term la différance, which we may translate as (semantic) difference emerging from deferral (of appetite). In the hypothetical originary event, whose simplest model we may find in the hesitation of two party-goers both reaching for and finally renouncing the last canapé on the tray, only once the participants had converted their fear of conflict into a moral intuition of the sacred wrongness of putting the realization of their own desire above that of their fellows could they come to designate, by a sign derived from an abortive version of our “instinctive” gesture of appropriation, the object of their—and by extension, all humanity’s—common desire.

    This intuition of a sacred interdiction that prevents us from denying our fellows’ equal claim on an object of common desire is the source both of all religious feeling and of our ability to designate, with a pointing gesture I call an ostensive—and eventually by verbal and written and encoded signs—the objects of our interest. Whence our ability to use the signs of language to express, in Platonic terms, Ideas that allow us to reflect on them and their interactions independently of our desires. But it is the priority of sacred deferral that permits the differentiation of the realm of thought into distinct Ideas.

    Whence the anthropological priority of the cultural contribution of the Jews to that of the Greeks, whose immortal works would have been inconceivable without the sacred intuition that the Jews were first to define in minimal terms (“monotheism”) and to construct around it the history of their and the world’s peoples.

    And whence Hillel’s famous “golden rule,” which reads: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” God need not be mentioned, even in the allusive sense in which he is “named” in Hebrew religious texts; the Jewish divinity is paradoxically both familiar and unknown. It is this simple moral intuition that is the basis of all religion, and that affirms the intrinsic equality of all human beings prior to any hierarchies they may later construct, as defined by the wrongness of individual attempts at asymmetrically seeking advantage over another.

    And thus it is the very fact that it was the Jews, whose religion, minimalistic in conception, but maximal in its insistence on reminding its believers, through the obligation to perform the 613 mitzvot, of the presence of the sacred in every detail of daily life, would allow them to understand that this truth is indeed the foundation of the Hebrew Bible, that has made the Jewish people eternally susceptible to the hatred of the “nations”—who, as we see so clearly in the so-called “United Nations,” are constantly tempted to exclude this “chosen people” from the benefits of human fraternity.

    That the Jews have contributed far more than their share to the cultural and civilizational progress of humanity is not the essence of their “election,” any more than is their eternal danger of being reduced to pariah status. The lesson of the difference between their fate and that of the Greeks is rather something we learn from reflecting on our originary hypothesis.

    For the foundational nature of the sacred, as opposed to that of language, is not an arbitrary matter. Generative anthropology can declare, without any of the paradoxical air of Hillel, that the human begins, before language, with the replacement of reflexive inhibition by the sacred sense of interdiction, or more simply, with the primitive sense, the conscience of right and wrong as the same rejection of asymmetric behavior as Hillel’s Golden Rule. What, in philosophical language, Jacques Derrida called différance: to defer acting on appetite in order to appreciate the (sacred) difference of an object of potential desire, starting from the premise that all other things being equal, all humans will judge the object as worthy of interest, significant.

    That the simple yes-no quality of the decision that invests worldly acts with moral value necessarily precedes language tells us that, before we can conceptualize the external world even in the minimal sense of designating an object by a sign that separates the thinking subject from the thought object, we must consciously choose to defer treating the latter as an object of appetite; we must affirm the moral rightness of its communal sharing. All the rest, as Hillel said, is commentary.

  • Israel, land of paradox

    For a logician, a paradox is just a disguised contradiction, like the town where the barber shaves everyone who doesn’t shave himself, in which case the barber himself… Which simply means that to say he shaves only everyone who doesn’t shave himself is undefined in his own case, because if he doesn’t/didn’t shave himself, then he subsequently does, which doesn’t really contradict the condition since… But there is something more to paradoxes than playing with words.

    The reason is that human life is lived as a series of scenes, some simultaneous with others, embodying different principles of causality, in which the significant ones are those that have a purpose, and we are particularly aroused by situations in which a purpose, such as “shaving everyone…” meets with a restriction (“except…”) that appears to prevent the fulfillment of that purpose. And yet we know that there are occasions where the efficient performance of purposeful acts may be less effective than “performing” them in such a way that they remain always virtual, never producing the final result that would inaugurate a new situation putting a new set of acts on the agenda…

    In the broader scheme of things, we are mortal creatures who cannot limit our overall sense of purpose within our life span, for human purposes and their possible fulfillments exist within a context that we increasingly view as that of humanity as a whole. In one way or another we all contribute to “the human condition” and since the dawn of the modern era with the American and French Revolutions, we have become increasingly aware of the entire world as a single human community.

    The awareness of this condition of one-worldness only accelerating with the generations, it is thus no accident that we are faced today with a revitalized version of the Islamic dream of world conquest. Just as the Bolsheviks inaugurated a new era with the ideal of a Communist world, the Mullahs of Iran and the various Sunni jihadist groups such as Al-Qaeda have done likewise, and however we may find their ultimate dream absurd, it reflects the shrinking of the world from the standpoint of access to weaponry as well as economic relations. The contrast between the fanatical confidence of the Mullahs and jihadis their backwardness in almost all other respects is not surprising; the degree to which terrorism and insurgency permit their fanaticism to spread around the globe in the era of Tik-Tok and X allows even the wildest dreams to flood the market, and in its very atavistic nature, Islamism, whose potency was so clearly demonstrated by the enthusiasm October 7 has aroused in the “first world” Left, has served as an inspiration to many who would never sacrifice their lives for a cause, while inciting a good number of the mentally fragile to commit mayhem on its behalf.

    The ideal of the world-wide Umma may be atavistic, but its superficial compatibility with globalism has given it new life, notably in conjunction with antisemitism, transformed from a “prejudice” into a political movement by the existence of a Jewish State. For Judaism, as the one major religion that makes no effort to convert outsiders, viewing its role of “light unto the nations” as setting an example for others rather than including them within it, appears in the light of resentment as an agent of ontological negation.

    Indeed, the Jews’ desire to have their own nation but not convert the world had always been interpreted as a mark of overweening pride, but since 1948 its realization in a powerful nation-state, as Arafat would have predicted, has moved many of the Western nations, aware of their need to pacify their own increasing Muslim populations, while vicariously sharing their resentment, to perpetuate the quasi-mythical existence of an autochthonous Palestinian nation whose parallel existence Israel is conceived as denying, even “genociding”—whence the recognition of a purely conceptual Palestine as an imaginary double of Israel whose chimerical presumed fraternity would alone permit the Middle East to return to normal.

    Whence the UNWRA’s unique perpetuation of the Palestinians’ refugee status through the generations—along with its sympathy, as exemplified on 10/7, with Hamas and similar organizations that need not hide their intentions to found their state on the elimination of Israel—and why not the Jews of the diaspora as well? For although the elimination of the Jews should be seen as a necessary precondition to the Islamization of all humanity, for Israel’s Western frenemies, it is the latter alone whose security needs are viewed as pretexts for “imprisonment” and even “genocide.”

    The geographical proximity of the Islamic Middle East to Israel is no small factor in the Western eagerness to take the side of the Palestinians in the current conflict. Despite abortive attempts like the Soviet state of Birobidzhian, an independent Jewish nation-state could only be situated where it was originally located. And just as modern Islamic antisemitism borrowed much from the Nazis, contemporary European (and American) antisemitism has been greatly reinforced by the initiatives of Iran and its Arab proxies. “Globalize the Intifada” has revived latent Jew-hatred by “demonstrating” the “imperialist” nature of the Jews in a way that no Western slogan could match.

    The irrational resentment of the Jew deep in the historical memory of Christian Europe has now been embodied in a real military power, and the eagerness of the media and the public to devour stories of Jewish/Israeli atrocities has at last found a credible worldly basis, beside which the details of whether the Gazans are really starving or their women and children truly being massacred are mere details. If pogroms could be initiated in Europe on the basis of vague rumors of Jewish bloodletting, how could these present-day (pseudo-)documented atrocities inflicted on a “third-world” people not appear as a millennial justification of Western Jew-hatred? Today’s antisemitism need no longer restrict itself to the allusive snobbery of Eliot’s “Rachel née Rabinovitch / Tears at the grapes with murderous paws.”

    Is it then somehow coincidental that the most reasonable “solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I have seen, contained in an eBook recently released by Mosaic magazine entitled To Save Itself from International Isolation, Israel Must Hold On To The West Bank (available to subscribers at
    https://lp.tikvah.org/west-bank-diplomacy-ebook-confirmation), makes the case for an explicitly paradoxical status quo on the left bank: a continuation of the current division of these territories between Israeli settlements and the areas ruled by the Palestinian authority without either Israeli annexation or splitting off a “Palestinian state,” that is, maintaining the present “impermanent” status quo indefinitely.

    To discuss this 41-page pamphlet in detail is not possible here, even omitting those parts that do not deal with the West Bank. But the principal author, an Israeli writing under the pseudonym of Rafi DeMogge, insists above all on the necessity of maintaining this apparently unstable status quo, noting as well that there is little or no pressure from those nations who have been so eager to recognize “Palestine” to realize this purported nation-state in concrete terms. Thus DeMogge is very clear that seeking to profit from 89-year-old Mohammed Abbas’ eventual death or resignation to abolish the Palestinian Authority would be a grave mistake.

    Just as the St. Petersburg paradox** plays on the simple fact that the player’s “infinite” expectation can only be approximated by extending his playing time to infinity, so the success of the Jewish state, in DeMogge’s terms, is dependent on Israel’s indefinitely forbearing to annex these territories that it nevertheless controls. Indeed, a point on which he does not insist but that follows from his proposal, the only conceivable model for Israeli-Palestinian peace is the stable instability during which a one-state or two-state resolution remains indefinitely an open question.

    The Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s earlier, increasingly generous offers of a state reflected the untempered irredentism of its potential inhabitants: for in even the most favorable partition of the territory, a Jewish state would remain on what the Arabs considered an indivisible part of the Islamic Waqf. Yet the relative stability of the divided West Bank, in contrast to the continual violence emanating from Gaza even before 10/7/23, suggests that (shall we say, “paradoxically”?) the principal cause of instability since the days of Oslo was Ariel Sharon’s generous concession of Gaza to the Palestinian Arabs in 2005—Gaza, which soon broke away from the Palestinian Authority to elect terrorist Hamas and become a constant source of rocket fire and finally of invasion—such as the Palestinian settlements on the West Bank have never been to anything like the same degree since its Israeli conquest in 1967.

    Indeed, the immense hostility generated in the West by Israel’s war with Hamas even more clearly demonstrates the error of Sharon’s gesture, an error that at least serves to demonstrate that “two-state” solutions are effective only as ultimate indefinitely unimplemented goals. That after twenty years without a single Israeli presence, it has remained common to speak of Gaza as an “open-air prison” or even a “concentration camp” demonstrates the profundity of the bad faith with which the Palestinians bewail their sufferings—to the accompaniment of a chorus of European sympathizers. DeMogge’s “paradoxalization” strategy may well be the only viable solution to a situation where Israel’s victories are equated with genocide, while any defeat would only redouble its enemies’ support.

    The ultimate lesson of DeMogge’s piece as well as the accompanying discussions is simply to avoid drastic modifications of the status quo and “let history decide.” Once Gaza is no longer a base for terrorist incursions and rocket launches, Israel, now rid of the local Iranian proxies of Assad’s Syria and Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, can continue to flourish in relative peace. In time no doubt Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia will join the Abraham Accords, the Houthi terrorists will be decimated, and Israel, its population swelled by natural growth—as well as Aliyah from a Europe (and a US?) increasingly beset by Islamism—should need from the US at a minimum only the grudging support of a Biden-like administration to survive and prosper.

    Nor would even the dystopian prospect of future Chinese hegemony threaten it. Unlike the Europeans, the Chinese have no part in the “oldest hatred.” Indeed, Israel and China have strangely similar, yet not incompatible views of themselves as foundational world cultures.

    **The basis of this paradox is that a game where a coin is flipped until it comes up tails, and the payoff is equal to 2 to the power of the number of flips: thus one head gives 2, 3 heads gives 8, etc. It is easy to see that the “expectation” from this game is “infinite,” since the probability of the given number of heads, 1/2n times the payoff of 2n always equals 1, and since there are an infinite number of terms in the series, the total expectation is infinite; the problem is that you must play an infinite number of games to achieve this result.