Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • 2021: Three Belief Systems

    Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice. For being there to call out to your mom—how heartbreaking was that?—call out for your mom, “I can’t breathe.” But because of you and because of thousands­—millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous with justice.

              Nancy Pelosi, April 21, 2021

    Nancy Pelosi is third in line for the US Presidency. She is also a member, as far as I know, of the Catholic Church.

    When after the 2015 killing of nine in a black church in Charleston SC, Felicia Sanders, the mother of one of the victims, offered her forgiveness to the unrepentant killer, Dylan Roof, she provided an admirable example of authentic Christianity: forgiving, not worshiping one’s enemies, giving love in response to hate.

    Pelosi’s eulogy is not for one who “sacrificed” anything, but whose unfortunate death permitted a vast outpouring of hatred, which for today’s Left is “synonymous with justice.” Those millions who “came out for justice” were expressing outrage at an incident specifically chosen for its outrageousness in order to illustrate a spurious norm of racial persecution that, as our Woke Critical Race Theorists tell us, defines the essence of “white” American, and by extension, Western society.

    Christians supposedly believe that when God let Jesus be crucified, this was the defining sacrifice that freed us from strict reliance on “the Law” and permitted us all to love one another in him. But today Jesus needs an update.

    As George Floyd’s fellow human being, I am embarrassed in his name at this eulogy. Whether or not his death could have been prevented, whether or not Derek Chauvin was guilty of any of the counts of his indictment, it was not a sacrifice. It was an unfortunate event, for which Floyd himself was largely but not wholly responsible, and he should be allowed to rest in peace, having inadvertently brought great fortune to his family. Pelosi’s saying that he died “for justice” is of the same stripe as her tearing up President Trump’s State of the Union speech; it is an expression of a politics of hate far more than of love, the key trope of which is condemning “white” America.

    Today’s world is dominated by three contending ideologies, all examples of the epistemology of resentment, and all of originally Judeo-Christian origin.

    The formerly Christian West may still be called “liberal,” but we can simplify matters, given what remains of American hegemony, by calling it Woke. Pelosi’s eulogy is an example of Wokeness at its least explicitly resentful; the thrice-repeated word “justice” must do business for all the resentment expressed in the chant, “No justice, no peace!”

    The other two ideologies are Communism, a 19th-century conception that seemed dead in 1989, but whose variant “with Chinese characteristics” seems to be flourishing; and Islam, which arose in the seventh century on the outskirts of the Eastern Roman Empire. Islam takes its resentment seriously, and has maintained and/or revived its fundamental principles as a rival to the Christian West. Yet as an “Abrahamic” religion it does not deny its links to the other two, and the recent rapprochement of Arab states with Israel gives hope of a real possibility of brotherhood—a possibility that, despite hostilities, I always felt in Israel on my visits there.

    The origin of religion is in the deferral of conflict—which is at the same time the origin of resentment. Animals exhibit hostility, but resentment is a purely human passion that depends upon our faculty of (scenic) representation. We conceive the originary event as a reaction to the crisis in the Alpha-Beta ape hierarchy, in which the hostilities within the group over possession of a central source of nourishment are deferred in favor of a shared originary resentment toward the sacred force that interdicts this source, a resentment ultimately resolved by the sharing of food in a communal feast.

    The mark of modern religions, in contrast to the “compact” belief-systems of the archaic era, is the separation of the realm of the sacred from the worldly order of things. The Hebrews as slaves in Egypt were presumably not forced to worship the local gods, merely to obey their overseers. But the consideration of how their own god(s) exercised power before and after their liberation from servitude inspired in them a revolutionary notion, perhaps suggested by Akhenaton’s “monotheist” worship of Ra, that the sacred will could be exercised not only locally but trans-historically.

    In contrast to Egyptian as well as Greco-Roman polytheism, whose constituent gods did not reveal themselves as a group but were taken from different peoples and amalgamated in a pantheon, the Hebrews, uniquely in the West and perhaps in all human history, had the chutzpah to presume that their intuition of a universal sacred was the one that humans had always had—but without realizing it because their perspective had been tribal and conflictive: our god against your god.

    If we experience the sacred as a transcendent will acting on us, why must we assume that “other” sacreds exist? Why not assume that the God to whom we remained faithful under bondage, and who finally allowed us to depart from slavery in Egypt, is the One God whose will has always reigned over all things?

    As Adam Katz and I tried to make clear in The First Shall Be the Last (Brill, 2015), this discovery explains, on the one hand, the universal success of monotheism in the West, and on the other, the parallel success of antisemitism, the unending resentment of the discoverers of this principle, “whose” God became willy-nilly that of everyone. I bring this up here because it explains the anomalous centrality of the Jews in Western and indeed in world history, from the birth of Christianity to the Holocaust and on to the endless condemnations of Israel in the United Nations—and on university campuses.

    Yet it is no coincidence that Israel, the restored nation of the founders of Western religion, is the only Western country with a positive demography and a truly vital sense of patriotism. To live in Israel is to defend it against its enemies, and this is true even of the Israeli left.

    Whereas the rest of the West is being absorbed by the Woke movement, which is most simply described as the extension of the hostility to firstness, of which antisemitism is the archetype, to the entire “white” race. Christianity has at its core the idea, expressed by Jesus himself, that the First shall be the Last. In the domain of monotheism, the Hebrews/Jews were “the first,” so that the One God of all is indelibly marked as “their” God. Similarly, the West’s One World of modernity—market exchange, science, technology, and now digital “intelligence”—has been extended to, and in many cases imposed on, the entire rest of humanity.

    In France, and to a lesser extent in the rest of Western Europe, where the Muslim population is both considerably more numerous and less assimilated than in the US, wokeness is associated more clearly than here with a phenomenon called Islamo-gauchisme, Islamo-leftism, visible here in occasional outbursts from Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Europe experiences Woke antisemitism (as well as anti-police Islamic violence) of a more murderous kind, such that many French Jews have moved to Israel or are contemplating doing so. The point of the neologism is that the Woke Left, while well aware that Islamic culture does not share its positive view of feminism, homosexuality, and denial of biological gender, nonetheless shows a respect for Islam that it emphatically denies to Christianity.

    I do not consider this respect a merely cynical ploy in order to maintain an alliance against Europe’s “white” majority. The fact is that in recent generations, Muslims have been much more constant and fervent in their religious beliefs than Christians, such that even the most benighted of their traditions, such as genital mutilation or “honor killings,” are understood not as acts of personal self-indulgence but of obedience to a sacred law of a kind that few Westerners any longer respect.

    Atheistic but ideologically fanatical Western leftists cannot repress a nostalgia for the sacred order they reject in “secular” Western society, where traditional obedience of any kind has been “deconstructed” as submission to oppression. For this is a sacred that has its origin in victimage. Islam, like Wokeness, embodies the resentment of the victims of the West. The oldest religion of these victims, whose God is both the same yet “greater” (Akbar) than the One God of the Jews and Christians, obeys a sacred will invulnerable to Western secularism.

    Communism is a Western idea, but strangely more at home today in East Asia than in its lands of origin. The spirituality of the Chinese empire, from the little I know about it, is devoid of the great drama of transcendence. Although the racial unity of China has suffered from invasions, the Empire’s concern for worldly order outweighs any concern with individual communion with the sacred. Communism, although pretending to be a worldly sacred that will free humanity from the firstness it defines as exploitation, is in effect a top-down authoritarian system whose success is measured solely by worldly accomplishments. Functioning productively in the global economy, unlike the old USSR, the Chinese version of this system has demonstrated its ability to generate political and military power, and a promise of eventual world hegemony.

    Unlike Western Marxism, Chinese Communism carries with it no Hegelian baggage of metaphysical transcendence. Operating within the “capitalist” market is not in contradiction with “Communism with Chinese characteristics,” so long as the ultimate decision-making power remains with the central government. China, at least so far, has shown itself to be a totalitarianism that works—which makes it at least conceivable that the West’s dream of a “bourgeois” China will eventually be realized, at least to the extent that, by continuing to function, it will make radical opposition not only impossible but unnecessary.

    None of this, of course, lessens the medium-term possibility of, for example, a showdown over Taiwan, followed by a likely humiliation of the West far more significant than the 1975 departure from Saigon.

    China is less 1984 than Brave New World, with its Alpha-Epsilon classes being not genetically assigned but attributed by examination (not preventing the widespread cheating on examination scores destined for foreign universities).

    In the US, today’s Chinese and other East Asian immigrant families are often compared with the Jews of my own and my parents’ generation; in both cases, family tradition leads to well-nourished minds and good grades. While meritocracy still rules in places like the Bronx High School of Science, the 80+ Jewish percentage of the 1950s has been replaced by a similar percentage of Asians.

    Can the melding of the world’s two prime examples of cultural firstness, the Judeo-Christian and the Chinese, reunite the human species before their conflict destroys it?

    I have several times quoted (see Chronicle 519) Michael Tomasello’s embarrassing account of the origin of religion, which naively repeats the same basic error as the far more sophisticated Jacques Derrida: that language/religion/culture—that is, the human itself—is ultimately a pretext for the exploitation of the weak by the strong:

    One way that leaders throughout human history have sought to legitimate themselves and their laws from a moral point of view is to claim that they have somehow been anointed by a deity or in some other supernatural way.
    A Natural History of Human Morality (Harvard, 2016): 131

    If anything can save us from the tyranny of wokeness, it is the understanding that, whether or not imposed by the sacred, firstness is not oppression. The sacred intention that stands behind language and religion was not conceived by sinister forces like the “Elders of Zion” as means of control.

    Or perhaps we should judge, with less bitterness, that the woke critique of Western civilization is in fact a gesture of historical modesty: an acknowledgement of the ultimate failure of the glorious dialectic of Jew and Greek, Christian and Muslim, after having provided the basis for the human society of the future, to embody this society in its final form?

  • Bad Mimesis and Western Decadence

    The prehistory of generative anthropology, beginning with René Girard’s Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque in 1961 and its theory of mimetic desire, puts mimesis at the core of our theory of the human. And although natural scientists can discuss the physiological aspects of mimesis: “mirror neurons” and the rest, just as they can study the components of language: sociality, neuronal capacity, vocal tract development, aural sensitivity… the fact remains that, just as natural science cannot explain the origin of language, the same can be said for the specificity of mimetic desire, which is simply human desire tout court.

    Eleven years after Mensonge, in La violence et le sacré (1972), Girard expanded his insight about “bad” desire into a fundamental anthropology. The mimetic triangle became the basis for his model of the originary event, the “emissary murder” of the “scapegoat” by his unanimous fellows. This proto-human murder scene can be understood as a circle constructed from a multitude of triangles with the apex on the central victim, each participant mediating each of the others to desire/hate/sacrifice the latter—who is really the mediator of them all.

    This is not the place to discuss my differences with this scheme, which remains an article of faith among Girardians. All I need say here is that it supplied the original inspiration for the originary scene described in The Origin of Language (1981), hence for the origin of GA.

    What is important to discuss at this juncture, particularly given the focus of this year’s GASC on religion, which has already inspired a number of recent Chronicles, is in what sense the sacred has been from the outset at the heart of (mimetic) desire. This presupposition is already nearly explicit in Mensonge romantique, whose epigraph is L’homme possède ou un Dieu ou une idole (Jeder endliche Geist glaubt entweder an Gott oder an einen Götzen  [Finally, every soul believes either in God or in an idol]; Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen [1954]).

    Although most readers of Girard’s book presumably understood “mimetic desire” as a specific kind of desire, this is a misunderstanding. Taking Scheler’s aphorism as characterizing not merely each human’s transcendental aspirations but his desires in the everyday sense, we realize that already implicit in Girard’s triangle of desire was an anthropology that distinguished human desire from animal appetites, not simply as “more mimetic,” but as mediated by the sacred. Whether we consider the sacred as a being—God (culturally legitimate), or idol (illegitimate)—or simply a “force,” we cannot detach sacred mediation from desire without removing its human specificity.

    Girard’s masterpiece is devoted to a series of novels of idolatry and deathbed conversion, in contrast to those characterized by György Lukács in his Theorie des Romans as embodying die gereiften Männlichkeit (in French, la maturité virile), that is, Bildungsromane in the proper sense, in which the protagonist puts away his childish mediations as he grows to maturity, or in Scheler’s terms, abandons the idol for God.

    But the persistent popular vogue for Jane Austen even in the woke era—as well as my own preference for the tradition of the female Bildungsroman within which she wrote, which can be traced back to Eliza Haywood’s 1751 History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and includes the novels of Fanny Burney as well as my all-time favorite, Charlotte Lennox’s 1752 Arabella, The Female Quixote—demonstrates that still today, the happy couple remains the exemplary source of fulfillment for both sexes—provided that both, but particularly the woman, choose the proper companion. For clearly, Elizabeth Bennett Darcy would have been more capable than her husband of composing Pride and Prejudice.

    The reason that Girardians to this day have trouble with the idea of “good mimesis” is that, following the negative examples from his tragic novels, they identify “mimetic desire” with idolatry. The problematic nature of mediation in these novels is a symptom of the emergence of bourgeois society, which encourages its members to forge their own professional identity rather than inherit that of their parents. This can only be accomplished by learning from models/mediators, who risk being treated as “idols” rather than simply exemplars of worldly wisdom and technique.

    The point in real life, as the Bildungsroman makes clear, is not to avoid the imitation of models, but to maintain a “sense of self,” or more simply, of one’s soul, whose link to the originary sacred affords protection against idolatry. Thus it is the soul (Geist) that is the subject of Scheler’s aphorism.

    As humans, each of us is a soul mediated by the sacred. Our imitation of others becomes idolatrous only if we experience them as mediators of sacrality itself rather than recognizing their own subordination to it. Christianity, by including Jesus within the Godhead, provides a divine/human model for the transcendence of idolatry, one that arguably permitted the West to unleash human mimetic creativity stifled in the lands of “oriental despotism” to inaugurate the market system and with it, scientific and industrial modernity. But as we are seeing today, this rapprochement of the sacred and the human has its dangers, not only within Western civilization itself, but in its competition with the despotisms it not long ago appeared to have definitively distanced.

    The inspiration for iconoclasm in all its forms—within which we may include both the Islamic ban on esthetic representations and the Marxist denial of the immaterial, which characterize the two civilizational modes that today rival the Judeo-Christian West—is the suspicion that by producing an image of the sacred mediator, one is attempting to capture the power of the sacred itself. The idolater worships not the sacred as a being/force but this figure of the sacred, by means of which he feels he can capture its powers for himself rather than share in those of the community.

    Westerners mock the fetishism of Lenin’s mausoleum and the ubiquitous images of Mao or Che in communist nations, but these icons, however fetishized, are/were worshiped as embodiments of the national regimes they created “in the name of the people,” not, as were the pharaohs or emperors of old, as supernatural deities. In contrast, Western historic figures no longer serve as such embodiments in the eyes of our progressive youth and their respectable adult followers.

    At the other end of the spectrum, Islamic nations deny any direct communication between Allah and his Prophet, and no images of either are permitted. The apparently anomalous partnership of these two anti-Western forces in what the French call l’islamo-gauchisme reveals their hidden kinship.

    Today, despots in both groups, Erdogan as well as Xi, have a clear sense of gaining on the West. What has gone wrong with the paradoxical/dialectical Christian solution to divine/human mimesis is not that these cruder systems have proved more attractive to their members, but rather that the Western solution itself, having generated the grandeur et misère of modernity, has all but lost the confidence of its own.

    Judeo-Christian civilization is decaying before our eyes, and as theoreticians of originary anthropology, it is for us to explain how, in the space of a generation, “wokeness” with all its absurdities has demonstrated its ability to replace Christianity as the West’s quasi-official religion, in effect discrediting the solution it had put forth to the fundamental human problematic of mimetic rivalry. Otherwise how can we understand that nominal Christians and Jews would kneel to a bunch of political activists whose own declared “religious” affiliation is with Marxism?

    In effect, what is being rejected in Christianity is the ascriptive/”racial” specificity of Jesus as a universal human mediator. It is surely one of the great ironies of history that the Islamic division of humanity into true believers and infidels has become more effective than the Christian West’s insistence that we are all “created equal.” The seemingly trivial focus on racial difference in the USA, a nation that had proudly overcome its heritage of slavery with strict anti-discrimination laws, illustrates the perverse realities of human mimesis that Girard had discovered in literary works and which are now forced on our social conscience.

    The idea that God had incarnated himself just once in human form had permitted the indefinite expansion of the Western socio-economic system. But implicit in it was always the firstness that the Christian West derived from that of Jesus himself, a firstness that the West in its confrontation with the outlying continents not long ago affirmed explicitly in racial terms.

    However generously the colonizers took up the “white man’s burden”—and King Leopold’s Congo Free State was emphatically not the norm of European colonialism—and however successfully Christianity itself has been able to transcend racial barriers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, including China, the West’s vulnerability to racial resentment could only have remained unexploited in a world of saints. Nor is it surprising that the impetus for the current wave of woke decolonization came not from the European powers and their former colonies, but from the United States, where slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath had persisted longer and in more painful racial proximity.

    Today’s woke racialisme would surely have shocked the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, whose triumph had first been announced by images of black children, protected by Federal troops, attending formerly segregated schools. Pace Dr. King, the first day that someone had the idea to compile statistics comparing examination scores by race was the last on which people would be judged by the content of their character.

    It suddenly appeared that the old days of racial segregation and discrimination were less vulnerable to racial resentment than an age in which these procedures were forbidden by law. But none of this should shock students of human mimesis. We need only recall one of Girard’s favorite Shakespeare passages, from Troilus and Cressida I, 3:

    Take but degree away, untune that string,
    And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
    In mere oppugnancy…

    For blacks excluded from it, the “white” school was an object of desire embodying access to a post-racial society. But once included, the cultural effects of their prior exclusion made them collectively unable to compete with whites on an equal basis. For obvious reasons, the politicians of the era, rather than emphasizing the exemplarity of successful minority competitors, reinforced the statistical sense of injustice that led to affirmative action, and today, nearly sixty years later, to massive investments in “equity, diversity, and inclusion”—”inclusion” often being defined as allowing separate non-white/gay/feminist dorms and graduation ceremonies.

    Wokeness, as I have discussed elsewhere (see in particular Chronicle 690), is defined by our awokening to the non-correspondence of the racial and other ascriptive breakdown of various “privileged” groups with that of the general population, as would be the case if these groups obeyed the equalitarian “moral model” of the originary event, preserved prior to the invention of sedentary agriculture and “private” property.

    The political point of wokeness is to convince the population, particularly the white population, that the legal interdiction of explicit racism was only a resurfacing over the implicit “systemic” racism that had previously been hidden beneath it. Why indeed should candidates for X position take a given test? The fact that whites generally do better than non-whites is proof positive that the test, rather than merely measuring competence to perform a specific set of tasks, was, whether unknowingly or deliberately, designed to produce this “disparate impact.” This argument, repeated ad infinitum, has triumphed in the courts, and above all in “public opinion,” that is, that of the professional elite.

    As the disparaging term acting white makes clear, the sticking point of “racial equity” is the fact that Western society was created by Westerners, that is, whites, and making its benefits available to all races on an equal basis means rewarding non-whites for “acting white.” Just as Jesus was white, so are the typical role-models for success in Western society—whereas no Muslim thinks of himself as of a different race from Mohammed.

    Thus we come to the question of firstness, the raison d’être of mimesis. If you want to learn to play the piano, you choose a model who learned to play first. It is here that Judeo-Christian civilization’s souci des victimes, its care for victims, from a morally praiseworthy concern for the less fortunate has been radicalized into a condemnation of their potential mimetic models. To the extent that “white” Western society offers itself as a model to “people of color”—a quality that does not really depend on skin tone—its exemplary position must be condemned, as though the content of any activity to be imitated—the apex of the triangle—were wholly contained in the racial identity of the model. Once the social reward attached to such activity, whatever its demonstrated societal usefulness, is attributed to racial privilege, the “victims” must then be permitted to share “proportionately” in the reward despite having failed to fulfill the requirements “white” society had imposed for them.

    By insisting on the victimary status of the former objects of discrimination, this procedure ensures that whatever progress they might make, any failures can always be explained away by the alien nature of the models they were expected to imitate, that is, by the “systemic racism” of the society these models had created. Indeed, these failures only confirm the racism inherent in the system itself, as though its white founders had not simply exploited their own talents, but booby-trapped their civilization to make it all but impossible for others to succeed within it. And the fact that East Asians have done so well that they too are now discriminated against in university admissions reveals merely that they share in the “privilege” formerly reserved for whites.

    This configuration assures that even if many non-whites perform well enough not to require compensation for white privilege, the supply of non-white “victims” will not diminish. This effect is strongly augmented by a growing tolerance of petty criminality and a diminished effort to move welfare clients, particularly single mothers, off the rolls into paying jobs—not to speak of the considerable financial advantage to such mothers of remaining single, given the dearth of attractive marriage prospects. And how much easier it is for whites to bewail their own “privilege” rather than encourage non-whites to eschew the victimary role and compete on an equal footing—whence the hostility of the entire victimary establishment—although not of non-white parents themselves—toward charter schools.

    The doctrine of systemic racism, which tautologically blames the creators of our civilization for being well suited to its requirements—as in fact they appear less and less to be—is the final effort of what Girard called the “Satanic” force of “bad” mimetic desire to destroy Western civilization. What remains are despotisms, of which the most notable are either Islamist, where every man is a soldier of Allah and every woman a mother of soldiers, or modeled on China, a strictly hierarchical—and tacitly racist—technocracy.

    Since its triumph in the French Revolution, the epistemology of resentment, the denial of the legitimacy of firstness, has been able to create only by first destroying. What is new about the woke version of this epistemology is that it creates nothing—the very essence of decadence—limiting itself to “canceling” the remaining traces of Western firstness. The Western social and political elite has been conquered by a pseudo-religion of spoiled children contemptuous of the parental sacred that they cannot imagine will not forever continue to protect them.

    In a word, as Bill Maher put it in his March 13 broadcast, “Americans are a silly people.” Unlike the “serious” people he contrasted us with.

  • Our Future

    As I whimsically speculated at the end of the previous Chronicle, the current debacle of Western civilization—from which I still hope, without much confidence, that it will recover—strikes me as not merely a matter of transferring power from the West to China et al. It reflects not merely the fatigue of leadership but the beginning of a transition to a wholly new model of social organization. I am not qualified to discuss the technical details of what appears to be our future, and in any case, predictions even by the best-informed are seldom borne out. What is important is to attempt to understand the general direction these changes appear to be taking.

    The “independent variable” in my explanation of wokeness has been the digitalization of human affairs, from manufacturing to entertainment and the rest, and the consequent premium placed on symbol-manipulation. This last has been until now an activity unique to the human brain. But ominously, it is proving to be a mechanizable activity increasingly independent of the human brain.

    Not only have electro-mechanical devices become able to replace humans in an increasing number of activities, they have reached the point of being able to “learn” procedures beyond the capacities of their human programmers to discover for themselves. The contrast between such “labor” and Marx’s idea, conceived not all that long ago, of quasi-uniform human “labor power” is not just striking but disquieting.

    The fact that the intensification of this development coincides with the West’s quasi-suicidal rejection of objective criteria of intellectual ability in the name of “equity” is ironic, but not at all incomprehensible. Just when, not coincidentally in the age of AI, our society is threatened by a formidable rival and should presumably be (as I pollyannishly speculated in the New Year Chronicle 683) making every effort at mobilizing its population’s loyalty and strivings for excellence, the exact opposite is occurring. Now that the wokization of the entire educational system is all but complete, learners from 3 to 30 are taught that our civilization is unworthy of their loyalty, and that inculcating the seriousness hitherto characteristic of civilization in general is one more example of systemic racism.

    Exceeding and “supplementing” resentment, victimary thinking is a malignant outgrowth of Christianity, and more specifically, of the scandalous flaws in Judeo-Christian civilization revealed in the first half of the 20th century. It reflects a failure of nerve, but it is driven by a sense of civilizational failure that goes much deeper.

    In the wake of the horrors of Communism and Nazism, this latest shameful, if less murderous, distortion of Christianity is no longer a Western effort, however misguided, toward creating a better (classless, racially pure) world, but a way of resigning itself to defeat. When a society reaches the point of teaching its children that it is founded on slavery and colonization and remains permeated by “systemic racism,” that society is informing the world that it no longer cares, nor deserves, to defend itself. The fact that most respectable white Americans—no doubt a larger percentage than of those of color—have largely bought into this perspective, makes argument useless.

    How much longer will the Bronx High School of Science maintain its competitive entrance examination against the pressure of “equity”? But why bother? Meritocratic examinations have been part of Chinese culture for millennia. Those raised in the Chinese tradition, including other Asians, are demonstrating their ability to work within the West’s meritocratic systems at the very moment when our institutions are turning to anti-white “racialism,” expanded to include “near-white” Asians who have the bad taste to be academically successful. So far this has not prevented our economy from functioning; but it is a daily increasing handicap, as if we are daring China to defeat us at Go even as we keep allowing them extra turns.

    I doubt if ever in world history has respectability among the elite been so turned against the public order that a self-respecting life depends on. Respectability is now defined by the principled rejection of any criterion that correlates with “privilege,” irrespective of merit.

    What is valued instead, by those who can afford it is “quality,” or rather, luxury—paying several times as much for a name brand or an upscale restaurant meal or a better seat in a plane (for those not yet ready for private jets). In contrast, “the rest,” who buy “ordinary” products, are lumped together; the middle class is included in the elite’s contempt for the tastes of the lower classes, while its traditional marks of respectability are denounced as “white privilege.”

    The victim-worship that is the core of wokeness is a caricature of the Christian respect for the humble, children, the poor—attitudes that tacitly assume on the part of their recipients a genuine absence of agency, whereas the effect of wokeness perversely stimulates the “victims’” agency all the more by its insistent denial. Although the typical member of a victim class is only mildly benefited by his new status through affirmative action of various kinds, vast new opportunities for wealth and power cannot escape the attention of those willing and able to profit from the victimary role.

    At René Girard’s funeral celebration in Palo Alto in 2015, at which a requiem mass was said (in Latin) for his soul, I was surprised to see Jerry Brown, at the time governor of California, who attended the mass as a simple mourner, without any kind of entourage. During the reception following the ceremony, Brown became engaged with a middle-aged woman who seemed to have wandered into the group without any particular reason, perhaps because she normally hung around the church. In any case, seeing that she was having difficulty getting into a boot that she had taken off, Brown knelt down and came to her aid. Jean-Pierre Dupuy (whose prior association with Brown may well have been the source of the latter’s interest in Girard) whispered to me the word “Jesus!”

    To be fair to Brown, his gesture was clearly spontaneous, not intended for public consumption. Whether or not this makes him a candidate for sainthood, his action was a perfect counter-example to the gesture last June of the members of Congress, wearing Ashanti scarves (unaware that the Ashanti had been notorious slave-traders), in kneeling before BLM representatives.

    Brown wasn’t humiliating himself; he was making himself useful. In other words, he was illustrating on the most fundamental level how one’s firstness can be of benefit to another: helping a weaker person to put on her shoe. When the Pope washes the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday—or when Jesus performed the same act—the same characterization holds true. It is a demonstration of moral equality that depends at the same time on firstness, the greater capacity of some for worldly activity.

    In contrast, kneeling before other human beings to express (not my own but) my race’s White Guilt is an action of abjection, not of nobility, and the only benefit it provides its recipients is a false sense of their own moral superiority.

    Yet much as I find this act morally repulsive, and have little reason to judge such as Nancy Pelosi as any less so, what strikes me as the most horrible thing about it is that those who performed it did so not merely for the sake of publicity and “virtue-signaling,” but because (assuming that even the most cynical politicians have souls) they honestly believed it was a righteous—and not merely self-righteous—act. As virtually all those who follow the woke creed, cynically or otherwise, believe in the “virtue” they are signaling. If their acts were purely cynical, I would find them less perturbing.

    Moral equality, the lesson of humanity’s originary event, is not in itself a problem; it is our default attitude, all other things being equal. But in the real world, outside the sacred scene, they are generally not. Whence the failure of all large-scale attempts to adopt equalitarianism as an ethic.

    Mimetic rivalry concerns all as “equals,” but as the originary event showed, humans were able to solve, or rather, defer this problem through the agency of the sacred, which imposes its will that the fundamental values of life be shared “equally.” The more tenacious difficulty posed to humans, even in an egalitarian setting, is not equality but firstness.

    The two-phase structure of both God’s creation/fall of man in Genesis and Rousseau’s distinction between la société commencée and the moment at which someone first says Ceci est à moi reflect the same tension between the moral and the ethical, between equality before the sacred and inequality in the activities of life.

    The originary society of equals, as we know, was anything but peaceful. Equal sharing has never functioned above an elementary level of culture, and attempts to revive it, such as on the Israeli kibbutz, even with the best will and motives, have never succeeded for long. Whatever the task, some are better at it than others. The great error of woke moralists is to judge firstness as a moral evil in itself, as though the victors in every war deserved to lose.

    The function of religion has been to maintain the presence of the sacred as a providential will in society as it is, in the world beyond the scene. Voegelin’s contrast between the “compact” ancient empires and the “differentiated” societies that emerged in the Axial Age turns on the birth of “new” religions that accept the historical nature of the division between morality and ethics rather than continuing to assimilate the two. The contrast between the two Christian kingdoms of heaven and earth, God and Caesar, allow for the emergence of a truly anthropological ethic, one that respects the originary nature of morality while attempting to adapt it to the ethical needs of social reality.

    Whereas the “moral model” of reciprocal morality can be said with assurance to date from man’s earliest moments, embodied as it is in language itself and in the form of collective rituals, justifying firstness—hierarchical differentiation—with respect to the scene has been the chief task of religion in historical societies, where affirming the sacred’s protection of the social order depends on granting legitimacy to political authority.

    Religion has adapted to the needs of society through the ages, but in today’s West it has become either powerless or dysfunctional. The woke antireligion operates through denial of even the most basic realities that reflect human firstness, claiming that mathematics is white, or that sexual identity is a matter of choice. In contrast with the fundamental religious notion that the sacred makes the world essentially safe for us, the reliance on the epistemology of resentment to “awoken” us to the universal applicability of the moral model has led to a vision of the human species as a dangerous interloper in the natural world, and of the Western “white” as the ruthless bringer of sin into the paradise of the noble POC.

    I have already attempted to explain (see, e.g., Chronicles 684, 690) how the religion of wokeness has given rise to a near-totalitarian alliance of politicians, institutions, and media, financed by the previously inconceivable accumulations of wealth made possible by global commerce and digital near-monopolies. But in answer to the question of how a society can function under a religious dispensation that insists on its sinfulness, it is grossly misleading to view White Guilt simply as a secularized manifestation of the Calvinist roots of American Protestantism, still so vigorous at the turn of the 20th century.

    The contempt of the woke for “white” Christianity is not a minor detail that can be passed over when analyzing our “psychological” dispositions. White Guilt is both untranscendable, unforgivable, and… unchangeable. That there is no God to pray to for grace is what leads to the unseemly self-abasement at the feet of representatives of our victimary betters. This stain is the mark of firstness, one inscribed not just on our souls but on our bodies, and which we can expiate only symbolically, and must continue to live with—while enjoying its benefits.

    The example of Europe suggests the image of our future. Rather than remaining an exemplary national culture able to blend the world’s different ethnicities in a truly diverse yet unified civilization, the American melting pot is divided into “intersectional” victim-groups each affirming its right not merely to existence but exemplarity. The society’s birth deficit, which will only continue to increase, will be replenished by immigration, no longer seen as adding to the melting pot, but to a “non-white” population valued for its victimary status—and presumably voting accordingly. How long will it be before the disastrous proliferation of France’s “no-go zones” (zones sensibles) will be repeated here?

    China and the Sacred

    From the little I know of Chinese culture, the Confucian Analects are the closest thing China has to a Bible. Nothing in the Analects has anything to do with transcendence, not because they are “atheistic,” but rather because the Western tension between morality and ethics is unthinkable within the Middle Kingdom’s timeless maturity. The idea of a morality distinct from an ethic, of an “origin” and a “fall,” is simply inconceivable. China’s chief holy book is a collection of the wisdom of a minor administrator and teacher of ethics of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty in the 6th-5th centuries BC. In Confucius’ China, civilization takes itself for granted as subject to a “way” and “rites” that it is unnecessary to specify.

    Reading these texts, I cannot avoid a sense of unease brought about by their everyday worldliness. Confucius is much closer to us than either the great figures of the Bible, the Buddha, or the heroes of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. His only concern is the smooth running of the social order, which he views as necessarily hierarchical, but ideally “benevolent” to the “common people.”

    The moral wisdom of Confucius is universal. He recognizes the “golden rule,” stated as “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire” (Analects 15: 24), and constantly insists that the “gentleman” must put honor and benevolence above wealth and fame. There are also religious sacrifices and “rites” that must be correctly performed. But there is no one to say, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

    No doubt the roots of the scientific and industrial accomplishments of the current CCP, as well as of its political philosophy, can be found in the Western struggle between morality and ethics, submission and resentment, metaphysics and “primordial” being. But in the coming age of Artificial Intelligence, this can be of no real consequence.

    If anything can be said to define the human, it is the manipulation of signs. And once this activity has become no longer a matter of différance and communion, but of algorithms and recursion, the West’s Judeo-Christian prehistory will have fulfilled its mission. We can henceforth in confidence leave the rest to the representatives of the world’s most venerable hierarchical civilization.

  • Originary and Scientific Anthropology

    In a comment on Chronicle 692, Adam Katz raised an important question: how can the procedure of originary phenomenology be applied to the universal human sense of ancestry? Whether or not individuals worship their ancestors, every culture has a sense of its collective past and initiates the young into the group and its culture, including of course its language. Whether or not parents see their children as their personal heirs, or “honor thy father and mother” leads to “ancestor worship,” they cannot help but be aware of the communal continuity under the aegis of the sacred.

    Adam’s comments raise a more general question, which I think it is of particular importance to face at this juncture. Although kinship structures, marriage customs, and all the other aspects of what we might call “elementary culture,” preliterate and pre- or primitively agricultural—the fast-disappearing terrain of classical anthropological field work—are not simple consequences of the originary hypothesis, the hypothesis supplies a point of departure that by defining in principle the boundary between animal and human activity permits a sharper analysis of the empirical data.

    GA is accused by social scientists of being “unproven.” This accusation falls flat so long as we restrict our analysis to originary phenomenology, where the attitudes discussed can be shown to have clear roots both in the hypothetical scene of origin and in our own experience—communal “ritual” feasts being the most obvious. Attempts to derive human practices from an extrapolation of animal practices are methodologically flawed, because they hide rather than focusing on what separates the human from the animal. And to make this separation appropriately salient requires an independent originary hypothesis.

    But where there is evidence of human institutions beyond the level of the originary event, no attempt to derive such things as kinship structures or ancestor-worship from the hypothesis is sustainable, let alone presentable in a professional context, without thorough consideration of the empirical data.

    This is a domain that has scarcely been explored, given the literary and cultural interests of the few practitioners of GA. But given recent writing in the domain of language origin (see, e.g., Chronicles 567, 632), I think there is good reason to presume that an empirically grounded analysis of these and other aspects of social organization, in both pre-modern and modern societies, can greatly benefit from the point of departure supplied by the originary hypothesis.

    On the other hand…

    There is still a world, albeit shrunken, where philosophy is read for its insights into the human condition. Modern existential philosophy remains relevant to its readers to the extent that they can be made to identify with the writer’s “personal” phenomenology, which does not maintain Husserl’s disciplined focus on perception (itself open to “deconstruction,” as in Derrida’s inaugural La voix et le phénomène [PUF 1967]), but offers an exploration of the human psyche based on intuitions presented as self-evident truths that the reader is invited to share. Needless to say, if the author’s examples are not persuasive, he will not be successful, but even if they are, his analyses are not only unverifiable, but lack an established point of departure such as the originary hypothesis provides.

    Existential phenomenology, even at its best, as in Sartre’s L’Etre et le Néant, is grounded only on itself. By its very nature, it cannot begin from a commonly accepted point of departure, since its purpose is to put our common-sense notions of the human into question. The heuristic supplied by the originary hypothesis provides, in contrast, such a point of departure. To the extent that the reader finds it sufficiently plausible, it allows for discussion on the basis of shared intuition.

    For example…

    A few years ago I was asked to give a talk to a local association devoted to the works of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95), the Jewish existentialist philosopher and Talmudic commentator whose philosophical masterwork, published in 1961, is entitled Totalité et infini.

    In reading through this volume, I was struck by a point that it seemed to me had been raised by no other thinker of his school: that of what he calls “fecundity,” our relationship with our progeny, more specifically, that between father and son.

    It is hard to avoid the inference that this inclusion reflected Levinas’ Jewish sense of existential insecurity, enhanced by the recent memory of the Holocaust. We discover here, as in all existentialist writings, a solicitation of the reader’s own experience, an attempt to persuade us of the inherent truth of reactions that the author conceives of as fundamental for himself and consequently for us as well.

    A more celebrated example, the best-known feature of Levinas’ phenomenology, is his insistence on the “infinite” that one sees in the face of the Other. As is customary in this genre, this intuition is taken for granted as an experience that we all share. Yet this assimilation of the sacred to the human other has always struck me as derivative of Christianity rather than a fundamental human or even Jewish experience.

    One can see this infinity of course, and I have no doubt that Levinas’ text is faithful to his own experience, but I am confident that many readers experience it as I do, as asking us to see what Levinas sees, rather than reminding us of what we have already seen.

    These limitations do not deprive Levinas’ phenomenology of valid insights into the human condition. But what the originary hypothesis can contribute to our reading of his work, and that of any thinker who purports to describe our foundational intuitions, is a criterion for separating the products of the hypothetical originary scene from those of later stages of human history. For in this latter case, the historic background—that of the Christian world in which Jewish thinkers like Levinas have long been immersed—is well known, and should therefore be referred to as an influence on the writer’s intuitions. This is preferable to tacitly maintaining the pretense of “phenomenological reduction” that Husserl sought to apply to experiences reflected on in laboratory-like austerity.

    In the case at issue, the originary hypothesis does not suggest that the “infinite” is what we see in the eyes of the Other, but accepting “infinite” as a metaphor for sacred transcendence, we are able better to appreciate the connection of this experience with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. On the one hand, the sacred remains “infinite,” beyond human grasp, on the other, we can find a vision of it in the eyes of the Other, who shares with us the blessing of the originary sacred. Such analysis can only enrich intuitions such as Levinas’.

    The originary hypothesis is not a magic key to history; it is a theory of the origin of the human scene and its cultural avatars. But the discipline it provides to originary phenomenology comes from its sharing of a well-defined model, one that none of us has experienced in person, but that I have no reason to believe is beyond the intuitive capacity of anyone exposed to it.

    This means that when we are discussing matters that are not directly dependent on our origin, hence hypothetically on our originary model, we should refrain from extrapolating from this model as though, by beginning from it as Hegel from Being, we could reconstruct all of history. The elements of the originary scene are found everywhere in culture, but we cannot simply “derive” culture from them.

    What we can do, in confronting a cultural phenomenon, is to understand it scenically, as I sought to do in Originary Thinking when discussing the “scenes” of literature over the centuries. By focusing our attention on the scene of culture, the “frame” of all artworks as well as religious ceremonies, we can call on our scenic intuition of the works themselves in so to speak “laboratory” conditions that “bracket” the real world in which the artwork was produced and/or performed.

    For example, the key difference I postulated between the Classical and the Neo-Classical scene, most directly visible in the theater, is that the Classical protagonist never sees himself as on stage, whereas this is the primary characteristic of the Neo-Classical protagonist who, inhabiting a Christian society, must consciously assume his scenic, public role.

    This phenomenon is clearly visible in the two arguably greatest modern tragedies: Hamlet and Racine’s Phèdre. In the latter, the heroine is constantly driven by a desire to leave the stage—to the point of dreaming of being lost in the Labyrinth—on which, in Racine’s cruelly scenic world, she must remain until death. Hamlet, in a very different tradition, is motivated by a similar fear of “playing his role,” which he seeks to delay as long as possible. Whereas the pre-Christian, Classical hero is “naturally” on stage, his adventures are culturally significant a priori, and he shares none of the Neo-Classical hero’s “stage fright.”

    These remarks in no way imply that Christianity itself is off limits to originary analysis, rather that its vision of the cultural scene must be understood as reflecting a post-Classical self-understanding, at once more “modern” and closer to the originary truth of the human scene, more revelatory of its ultimate possibilities.

    Back to the family

    Returning to Adam’s suggestion, because tracing the origin of our awareness of ancestral links exceeds the bounds of originary phenomenology, to make the originary hypothesis relevant to the study of this subject would require that it be supplemented by empirical data on archaic family structures.

    The family itself is not well-defined as a human institution, for it cannot be seen as a product of the public scene. In its prehuman form, it is a locus of cooperation in which mimetic rivalry can be assumed to be at a minimum, in order that the intellectual/mimetic capacities characteristic of the human might develop to the point at which the “mimetic crisis” that led to the originary event became inevitable. This development in turn would have intensified the cohesion of the family unit, given the increased burden of childbearing and the prolonged infancy associated with the newborn’s ever-larger brain and consequent greater neoteny.

    The increased investment by adults in the welfare of their offspring would presumably have been an indispensable prelude to the originary event, just as the hunting males’ distribution of food to their families may well have provided a precedent for the deferral of appetitive action. And after this event, the invention of language and the sacred would presumably have affected the “private” lives of the participants much less directly than those of the group of hunters. It seems plausible, for example, that human “symbolic” language would at first be restricted to communal occasions.

    The self-consciousness that emerged along with the sacred would allow parents to assimilate their renunciation of nourishment for the benefit of their young to that imposed by the sacred in the originary scene. On the analogy of the public scene in which the sacred “provides for” the community, the family—regardless of its precise constitution—would come to be conceived as a virtual scene, composed of adults under the aegis of the sacred supplying nourishment and protection, and children, who would be expected to learn language and culture from their parents before being initiated into the adult culture. As the linguistic “threshold of significance” became lower, familiar objects would become referents of language.

    Of particular relevance to the matter of intergenerational continuity is the individual’s awareness of his own death, which the sacred protection from death would paradoxically inspire. Thematic consciousness of one’s own mortality within the context of a transgenerational human community would provide a model for individual families as units within this community—however the “family unit” was understood—with a continuity of their own.

    Yet the sense of individual continuity through one’s biological children is not clearly a result of the original constitution of the community. Only with the institution of private property after the Neolithic Revolution would my genetic descendants necessarily become objects of concern as inheritors of my goods as well as my name and “memory.” Similarly, the emergence of “big-men” as tribal leaders would give rise to questions of succession that would make it necessary to choose and groom heirs/successors in advance. Once more, our originary intuition must be brought to bear on available data.

    Incest

    The prohibition of incest, which is found in some form in every human society and has traditionally served anthropologists as a “definition” of the human, is certainly derivative qua sacred prohibition from the sacred interdiction of the originary scene, although our phenomenology does not offer a clear path from one to the other.

    For Freud, the “father’s” interdiction of the “mothers” to the “sons” is the lead-in to his own “originary scene” in Totem and Taboo, productive of the Oedipus complex. Whatever the flaws in this scenario, it is nonetheless the first serious attempt to construe the human as emerging not gradually but punctually, in a communal event, and as such, the direct ancestor of Girard’s and my own more minimalist scenic conceptions.

    Sexual appetite being a powerful drive with a potential for disturbing family relations, both its attempted control by the mechanism of deferral and the frequent violation of this control under the generally non-public conditions of sexual activity can be assumed. The sacred will must be extended by analogy to this second domain of potential mimetic rivalry, as later illustrated in law-codes such as the Ten Commandments.

    One thing thereby made clear is that the prohibition of incest is not a direct prolongation of the sacred interdiction of the scenic center. According to Le Monde, something like 10% of all French people (victims are 77% female, thus about 15% of Frenchwomen), claim to have been victims of incest. This figure demonstrates that the “incest-taboo” is not experienced “viscerally” by a good many Frenchmen. (Males constitute 95% of the offenders.) The salience of incest prohibition is a sign not of the inscription of this prohibition in “human nature,” but rather of the opposite: that it is “natural” for males to desire their daughters (and sisters), so that a social disincentive, explicit rather than implicit, is necessary.

    Because the various anthropological theories of incest-avoidance are agnostic with respect to which foundational qualities separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom, these theories explain this behavior either as a product of natural selection (incest having a negative effect on the gene pool, a genetic predisposition to incest-avoidance would provide an advantage), or as determined by social conditions (exogamy solving the need for allies beyond one’s close relatives), but without giving fundamental priority to the worst-enemy principle that puts a premium on avoiding conflict within the community. This is an area in which empirical research would greatly benefit from being guided by our hypothesis of human origin.

    Summing up

    The above examples are not meant to be taken as “results.” On the contrary, they are suggestions for research in the anthropological literature and/or in the field. The difference between such proposed research projects and those carried out under current criteria is that they would test the practical usefulness of generative anthropology as a “way of thinking,” without denying in any way the validity of the scientific method. This is a task that cannot easily be accomplished by the literary scholars like myself who have worked with the premises of GA.

    The current situation strikes me as offering an opportunity for adventurous researchers, whose chances of obtaining groundbreaking results should make the tentative adoption of GA worth their while. A few pieces of scientifically respectable anthropological research guided by the originary hypothesis might well have a revolutionary effect on the field.

    Unless…

    our intellectual culture is already so indentured to woke religiosity as to make such research unthinkable. As things are going, the great Western tradition of human self-understanding within which generative anthropology has evolved may not be around much longer.

    The final victory of metaphysical over originary thinking is likely to take place through the reduction of all intelligence to Artificial Intelligence and of all thought to algorithms. We should not assume that machines will stop at defeating humans in chess and Go. Our ultimate future may well be science-faction.

  • Topics in Originary Thinking

    As I recounted in Chronicle 504, the name I first chose for this “new way of thinking” was genetic anthropology, translating the French word génétique, whose use is not confined to the biological. But as my publisher pointed out to me, in English, it is, so I was obliged to borrow Chomsky’s term generative.

    Political differences with Chomsky aside, the unfortunate character of the word generative is that in Chomsky’s usage, and implicitly in the word itself, the product of a generative system is wholly determined by the preexisting paradigms of the system. Its history is not a series of new revelations, but the discovery of new possibilities latent within it.

    Mathematics is the most salient model of such a system. There is indeed a history of mathematics, and of new and revolutionary developments, such as calculus, group theory, topology… that were inconceivable to Pythagoras or Euclid. But none of these discoveries implied any change in mathematical foundations; they were new extensions and restatements of the original elements and laws of the system.

    The metaphysical domain, to the extent that philosophers considered themselves able to derive its categories from the originary one of Being, reached its most ambitious heights with Hegel, who indeed proceeded to “deduce” all of human and world history from Being via the “dialectic,” on the basis that we had now reached “the end of history” from which all the stages of this dialectic could be observed. But needless to say, even Hegel’s Logic is not a truly deductive system, let alone his Philosophy of History. Being does not “imply” non-being as its antithesis, nor is Being itself an “originary” idea, as is the sacred in the founding experience of generative anthropology. Logic is not about “ideas,” but about propositional truth-values.

    The originary hypothesis seeks to understand human origin “in its own terms,” by positing a plausible point of departure for the human scene of representation, language, and the sacred. No such hypothesis, however faithful its depiction of the originary event, could permit us to deduce from it the course of human history. But a variant of Hegel’s procedure remains valid. The present is the “end of history,” history until now. To the extent that we can show that the anthropology founded on the originary hypothesis “transcends,” “lifts up” (aufhebt), situates within its own framework, previous anthropologies, we can claim that it offers a superior perspective on the course of human history.

    Unlike Aristotle or Hegel, I have neither the pretension nor the time to put together an Organon. After The Origin of Language (TOOL; 1981), the University of California published in 1985 The End of Culture, in which I attempted to describe the emergence of literary culture from the domain of sacred myth. Then in Originary Thinking (Stanford, 1993), I proposed a set of literary-historical categories (classical, neo-classical, romantic, post-romantic…) based on the relationship of the protagonist to the scene within which he appears. But in neither case did I attempt to formulate a generally applicable methodology based on the experience of the originary event.

    To make up for this, I have attempted, here and in a number of other recent Chronicles (notably 681, 682, 685, 686, 687, 688, 691), to exemplify more systematically than in the past the procedure of originary phenomenology described in the previous Chronicle 692, providing examples of its application to religious and philosophical/metaphysical texts.

    Hopefully these examples can furnish subjects of discussion at our forthcoming GA Summer Conference (website) to be held online June 14-16, along with topics suggested by conference participants. A more specific list of questions to be addressed will be made available in advance of the conference.

    Humanistic vs Empirical Anthropology

    The methodology of the social sciences rejects as merely speculative hypotheses not “falsifiably” grounded on empirical data. Hence these sciences reject out of hand the argument for GA: that the human cannot be understood without a model of its scenic origin, and that such a model cannot be based on empirical data, because the human is defined by its culture, whose earliest manifestations could only have been a set of scenic behaviors that cannot for the foreseeable future be reconstructed in sufficient detail by means of such data.

    The principle of what I have called humanistic anthropology is that the organization of the human scene is not a sum of separate traits but a unified whole that, while not necessarily more complex than certain highly organized animal behaviors, is not actuated by hereditary mechanisms and conditioned reflexes, but by consciously willed acts. Thus the conclusions of GA, beginning with the insights into the prehistory of mature language developed in TOOL on the basis of the originary hypothesis, are methodologically off bounds to empirical social science.

    The human is defined by its origin but not determined by it; the human capacity for conceiving the world on our scene of representation and manipulating it ever more freely distinguishes us from all other creatures. Hence in contrast to the Darwinian story, there is not only a (sociological-political) history of human organizational structures, but a metahistory of our understanding of these structures. To the extent that generative anthropology is a “new way of thinking” with respect to both these narratives, it is because its own genesis depended both on earlier understandings and on their encounter with new realities. In all significant human behavior, dialectical interaction between theory and practice is inevitable, mediated as they both are by human scenic consciousness.

    Varieties of Providence

    Providence is, so to speak, another “name” for God. It is not simply an aspect but the essence of the sacred will, to defer the mimetic conflict that always threatens the human community. And although today, natural disasters, “acts of God” in the insurance sense, even if we pray God to avert them, are no longer seriously considered as punishments for our sins nor as the focus of a sacred will, the sense of “tempting providence” remains alive in the eagerness many feel to explain such disasters by human actions that are “sins against nature.”

    Our tendency to exaggerate our own contribution to conditions such as what used to be called “global warming” reaffirms human agency, not out of pride, but on the contrary as a reaffirmation that providence would continue to protect us had we not strayed from the right path. The same phenomenon is at the core of wokeness’ denial of agency to “victims” while focusing on “our” sins as oppressors—the negative version of “the white man’s burden.”

    If the essence of the sacred is an intention protecting the human from itself, the specific details of different creeds are all the more important in their understanding of the nature of this protection. The obvious distinction between the Christian combat against sin, which differs from Jewish obedience to the law not so much in its content as in its insistence on mediation by Christ, and the Buddhist emptying of the scene of desire, reflect their different cultural origins, but go beyond them as “ways of life,” aspects of which can be transferred to alien cultures, as various Buddhist modes of meditation have been adopted in the West. This comparison can be extended to other religions by examining the model of the originary scene implicit in their scriptures.

    It is important to understand the sacred as the effect of a providential will rather than simply of collective human self-interest, because it is experienced in the first place as such an effect. The good of the community is felt as prior to the individual wills of its members, and in fact serves as their model. That is, our sense of God’s prior existence is not merely the result of our “lateness” with respect to previously existing human society; it is present in humans from the outset.

    Existentialism and the “Death of God”

    Given this intuition of the sacred’s temporal and ontological priority, Existentialism’s affirmation of the subject’s freedom is less a liberation from theistic dependence than an expression of modernist hubris, the individual discovering as a personal truth the deferral of appetitive behavior that humanity had in fact learned collectively.

    This fact is not a refutation of this individual “discovery,” but an obligation to understand it as the product, not of a triumph over “superstition,” but of a reflection on the originary source of our internal scene of representation, and in particular, of our moral conscience.

    Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy has fallen on hard times, in part because his individualist Marxism is no longer that of the woke age. But I continue to admire his conception of the pour-soi as the closest metaphysical/philosophical approximation to the human scene of representation, gifted by différance with an internal néant. No doubt Sartre has no notion of an originary event as the source of the human scene, but his philosophy, and even his novels, reflect a fine understanding of the scenic character of human interactions, richer than Heidegger’s sound and fury—imagine Heidegger writing a novel!

    The hubristic notion of the soul’s absolute freedom that is the core of Sartre’s anthropology is so to speak the last stand of metaphysics—for if the individual human were indeed able to use language to know the truth about himself independently of the human community, even if this truth be a repudiation of the spurious Geplapper of the community repeated by Heidegger’s das Man, this could be possible only if language itself were in its essence independent of the needs of the human community that in fact created it.

    Existentialism, in a word, can escape from metaphysics only by allying itself with generative anthropology. But we can respect its insights without taking them for the last word in human self-understanding. The “death of God” so often taken as the watchword of post-metaphysical modernism is not only anticipated by Christianity itself—could Nietzsche have failed to notice this?—but ultimately irrelevant to the ontological question of the constitution of the human self. Whether or not God exists as an independent being, we know from the very fact of our existence that the sacred “exists” as the providential agency that has permitted our species to survive.

    Once again, “French Theory”

    “French Theory” was not a mere footnote to Existentialism. It was liberated from metaphysics by its focus on textuality, a category which, however mystified, is irreducible to metaphysics because it is based on “fiction,” an act of scenic recreation that has no pretension to objective truth. (In Parmenides’ terms, fiction is neither truth nor opinion, although Plato sought to deny this third possibility.)

    Taking literature as the key to anthropology—an intuition that had begun with such as Paul Valéry, the Russian formalists, and the English New Critics before evolving from the literary-critical to the more broadly anthropological category of the textual in the postwar nouvelle critique—was the point of departure for Girard’s anthropology, as well as for my own.

    In terms of the dichotomous history of the movement (see Chronicle 638), Derrida was in many ways closer to the originary hypothesis than Girard—save in its key aspect. Derrida never envisaged the possibility of a humanist anthropology that could incorporate his insights; he saw deconstruction and in general the liberation from metaphysics as embodying the tired old Marxist program. In short, he shared the Left’s definition of man’s “original sin” as oppression—more accurately, firstness—in contrast with the egalitarian utopia in which “some are (merely) more equal than others.” But in the post-structuralist world, language itself (always-already écriture) took the place of Rousseau’s Ceci est à moi as the sign of the fall of man.

    Summing up…

    The core of generative anthropology, prior even to the originary hypothesis, is the understanding of the human as the species that is more dangerous to itself than the outside world, or more succinctly, its own worst enemy. Girard was not interested in language, but he saw that violence, the ever-present danger of self-destructive “mimetic crisis,” was the primary problem that the human had to solve.

    That Girard saw this so well that even today his disciples still marvel at the possibility of “positive mimesis” is proof that they have learned at least that lesson. But violence is the sacred only from the point of view of Sirius. For us mortals, violence is what the sacred exists to defer, hoping against hope that it will never catch up with us. It is in the context of this hope that I offer these reflections on originary anthropology.

  • Elements of the Sacred

    A Note on Originary Phenomenology

    Years ago when I first conceived the originary hypothesis as a theory of language origin, my chief concern was to understand how language might have begun and evolved from its elementary forms (ostensive, imperative) to the declarative sentence that is the basic utterance form in all languages. The originary scene as originally conceived was different in detail from its later incarnations, but the important thing was that it was formulated as a scenic event that would serve as the basis of a heuristic for conceiving the evolution I needed to describe.

    Over the years, I have realized that this same heuristic could also be applied to the origin of other elements of human culture, and particularly to religion. If linguists, who are concerned with the data of language and only peripherally with its origin, can afford to ignore “unproven” originary hypotheses, this is less the case with those who study religion, given the impossibility of bracketing its anthropological origin and functions to focus on its semiotic structures.

    I originally called the procedure of using the details of the originary event as a source of insight into aspects of human culture originary analysis. But it is perhaps more accurate to call it originary phenomenology, since its procedure of introspection is essentially the same, save that instead of examining our own life experience, we “put ourselves in the place” of the participants in the originary event.

    Needless to say, humans have evolved a great deal since our origin, physically and even more, culturally. Nevertheless, the premise of generative anthropology is that the human is a distinct category of being, far more distinctive than an animal species, and that all humans from the beginning share the same fundamental traits.

    We may therefore be reasonably confident that our efforts to imagine ourselves at the origin are productive of genuine insights. The “scientific” alternative, waiting for empirical data to supply the details of human cultural origin, has been able to do no more than understand the human as an extrapolation from our animal ancestors. The failure to respect the qualitative difference between human language, religion, etc., and its animal “equivalents” limits the usefulness of these results to gradualist evolutionary details: the growth in size and complexity of: social groups, neuronal processes and the brain, tool-making and similar behaviors.

    While none of this research is useless, attempting to understand the emergence of language and religion as evolved from animal behaviors effectively denies their uniqueness. As I pointed out in the preceding Chronicle, what makes humans unique is that the crisis that resulted from our growing mimetic intelligence was too abrupt to be resolved through the processes of Darwinian evolution. Whence the necessary recourse to a heuristic phenomenology that allows us to conceive the emergence of those uniquely human traits that are responsible for humans’ qualitatively superior level of evolutionary development.

    The following applications of originary phenomenology are work in progress. The point of this essay is less to persuade readers of their authoritative character than to challenge them, once familiar with the originary hypothesis, to take on the phenomenologist’s role and see if they come up with similar results.

    The Originary Sign

    What is the meaning of the originary sign? Is it the central desire-object, the source of nourishment, the scenic center itself as focal point of attention, or the concentration in that center of sacred “being” as a kind of black hole?

    We soon realize that there is no way of describing the meaning of the first sign in terms of other meanings, since this one is the first. Nor is there any reason to assume that the sign would have a “meaning.” Previous “signs” had been signals to act in a certain way, typically, to avoid specific dangers; they were not part of a universe of meaning. But if the scene is such a universe, the only meaning we can attribute to the first sign is meaningfulness itself, significance, sacrality.

    The simplest interpretation of the aborted gesture as sign is that the sign conveys not, like a signal, the signer’s discovery of something in the external world, but his own conscious intention, dictated by a sacred will contrary to his “instinct,” to renounce his appetitive urge to appropriate the desirable central object.

    As Adam Katz long ago pointed out, realizing the communicative utility of the aborted gesture rather than experiencing it merely as a failed intention is a product of insight. But we cannot understand the sign simply as signaling this renunciation to one’s fellows. It is in the first place addressed to the sacred “will” at the center of the scene. It is a sign of awe—and of resentment.

    This analysis is on the one hand frustrating, because originary phenomenology does not allow us to speak of the sacred as a “being,” merely of its effects (deferring appropriation, presiding over distribution…), but on the other hand, liberating, because it makes us realize that what is at the core of language, and culture in general, is not communicating information but sharing the acknowledgement of the scenic state of deferral—in which alone “information” can be communicated.

    God is the sacred as a willing being, external to the human participants, who organizes the scene and brings it to a successful conclusion—the source of Achilles’ resentment of “the gods,” but also of his conviction that they determine his fate. We must leave for later Parmenides’ capital distinction between truth and opinion that is the foundation of philosophy/metaphysics, and ultimately of empirical science.

    Religion and Death: The Afterlife

    Distinguishing between the “existence of God” and a human “sense of the sacred” remains in the realm of abstraction, in that the bare assertions God exists/God does not exist imply nothing about the world as we know it, either in the past or in the future. And even affirming God created/did not create the universe leaves unclear how this could possibly affect human experience.

    Whereas the claim that we have, as evidence of the reality of the sacred, a soul that survives corporal death, whether it subsists eternally in diminished form, as in the Greek Hades, or awaits a “Last Judgment” to separate the saved from the damned, or “migrates” at death into another living creature, only the most blessed reaching the state of Nirvana, best understood not as annihilation but as an eternal experience of nothingness… such affirmations may not be provable in this world, but they do posit, as articles of faith, distinct outcomes.

    Pascal’s famous pari on God’s existence is not a metaphysical affirmation but an existential one. It is founded on the premise that if God exists, then each human soul, including his own, will have eternal life and will be “resurrected in the flesh” at the Last Judgment—and that the infinite value of this eternal life, as opposed to the finitude of earthly existence, obliges us to bet on even the smallest positive probability of God’s existence.

    As recently as a three or four generations ago in the most prosperous nations, and still today in many, the valence of life-as-such was more negative than positive (see, e.g., Chronicle 674). The shortness and painfulness of life does not in itself explain, however, where humans acquired the idea that their souls lived on after their death. Animals show signs of interest in their dead, but the traits specific to human culture cannot be explained as biological extrapolations from animal sociality.

    This does not discredit Richard Wrangham’s idea of the “goodness paradox” (see Chronicle 614). No doubt humans, like bonobos, have been selected to be cooperative rather than aggressive. But our felix culpa proves that selection alone did not suffice. Had proto-humans remained self-sustaining long enough for natural selection to make us as pacific as bonobos, we would have remained like bonobos, enjoying life with neither nuclear weapons nor Bach cantatas.

    The hypothetical originary event is focused on food distribution, under circumstances where large food animals were of critical importance to survival. But in more fundamental terms of human organization, the role of the sacred is to defer death. When we defer our drive to appropriate the central desire-object, we remove the threat of immediate death at the hands of our fellows, while putting off the threat of eventual death from hunger.

    Once the sense of the sacred exists, its first function is understood as having protected the group of humans from its own deadly violence, which by our definition of the human is more threatening to the group than the “forces of nature.” It stands to reason, then, that if the sacred can protect against the greatest danger to life, it can protect against the lesser ones. As anthropologists tell us, peoples in the early stages of socio-economic development, and even much later, have no conception of “natural death.”

    The peace of the originary scene, including that of the meal that follows, is a revelation not simply of the best way to divide up large animals, but of a new kind of sacred-governed communal harmony. The sacred will prevents me from reaching for the object, and I see at the same time its parallel effect on the others. The result of the scene is the creation of a community in a sense that does not exist elsewhere in the animal world, one mediated by a sacred will and mutually communicated through a sign.

    The sign is not simply a new kind of signal shared by the group, but a common acknowledgement of submission to the sacred, a submission that remains after the scene has been concluded, and in principle prolongs the peace of the scene. Whence the sense in tribal societies that when one suffers illness, or violence, or dies, one has somehow lost the protection of the sacred, either because one has violated the terms of one’s submission, or because an enemy has persuaded the sacred will to turn against oneself.

    Even today, with all our sophistication, when we suffer some unexpected mishap we tend to blame, seriously or frivolously, either ourselves or some other human agent, that is, the original participants of the human scene.

    Immortality

    The model of immortality is that of the sacred and its timeless presence in the sign. The sign as a reminder of the originary scene exists in a noetic space that requires no physical manifestation, so that the soul that acknowledges the sacred by bearing it cannot be understood as perishable. My memories, my thoughts, are by virtue of language communicable to the universe and remain so after my death. They may be unknown to my fellows, but not to the sacred will that has provided the space of deferral in which they are, and remain eternally, knowable.

    My soul is the core of my self-consciousness first realized in the scene, in which I know myself to be acting under the control of the sacred will, aware of my desire to contravene it yet at the same time to demonstrate my submission to it by means of the sign. This sense of acting under the eye of the sacred “superego” remains with us as our conscience. The vast market for alcohol and mind-altering drugs bears witness to the value given by so many to relief from its presence.

    Heidegger’s terming authenticity the constant awareness of mortality is ipso facto an affirmation that self-consciousness does not in itself imply this awareness, even as we plan careers and lives on its basis, leaving wills and buying life insurance, knowing we have only a limited time to accomplish our goals.

    Because our sense of self was born in the context of this scene that defers our mortality, our knowledge of this mortality is external to our cultural life. The spectator of tragedy is exempt from the mortality of its characters; the audience of a symphony finds peace, not loss, at its end.

    The New Immortality

    One needs no survey data to affirm that the importance of an “afterlife” has greatly declined in the modern world. This decline reflects what can only be understood as a diminished fear of death that diminishes in turn our reliance on the sacred.

    The death the sacred originally protected us from was violent and unpredictable. Not so long ago, humans suffered far more than today from violence and disease, including plagues, of which the Black Death was only the worst of many. Death in infancy, or of women as an effect of childbirth, was common. The idea of the dead being “at peace” and “in a better world than this” had a real meaning.

    The alternative, old age, was misery, and began, not as today, at 75, but at 40. Lost teeth, eyesight, hearing could not be remedied. Whereas today in the US and other advanced nations, one can expect to live past 80, replace lost teeth, sight, and hearing, and receive painless medical treatment. If, as is commonly said, death has been “expelled” from modern life, this is not simply a matter of sweeping it under the rug. A woman two centuries ago who had ten pregnancies and four or five children to show for them had experienced many more deaths than the average modern person sees in his or her lifetime.

    However unpleasant the last years of many of our elderly, we must, as they say, consider the alternative. The sadness of walkers, wheelchairs, dementia, and the rest for people in their eighties and above has made aging, not death, the focus of our greatest fears. There are indeed no atheists in the foxholes, but in the modern world, we envision death not in the foxhole but in the hospice, drugged if not demented, unaware of our own dying or of the fate of our immortal soul.

    The immortality of the soul has lost its allure, but not immortality itself. Today we put our hopes not in God but in artificial intelligence and related technologies to preserve us from annihilation. Whether our whole body (cryogenically maintained), or merely the contents of our brain (uploaded to the “cloud”), will be saved from the ravages of time, the current generation views immortality as just around the corner, and the young feel they have a real chance of benefiting from it.

    And they may be correct; in the digital world, things move fast. But if the sacred could not preserve the body from decay, it protected us from death in a way that no product of human technology, however cleverly programmed, can guarantee. God may have given us a community, a soul, and a conscience, but he left a tree in the center of the garden to remind us that he, not we, has our ultimate welfare at heart.

  • The Political Sacred

    In Chronicle 681, I proposed that the originary experience of the sacred was as a will countering our individual desires but permitting the peaceful distribution of food among the original human group. The notion of sacred will is crucial, since it must be distinguished from the prehuman intentionality that we attribute to animals or even to natural phenomena, the sense that what we see of them now tells us what they “intend” to do in the immediate future. The sacred exists only in the context of a scene-preserving intention; sacrality is never independent of the scenic nature of the human.

    The sacred will is experienced as the interdiction of the central object of the scene. We can understand that the members of the group would “naturally” defer their intention to appropriate the object in the face of the danger represented by their fellows’ parallel intentions. But what is not explicable in terms of fear, inhibition, etc., is the exchange of signs around the central object—an expense of time and energy—that realizes and memorializes the “significance,” that is, the sacrality of the object.

    If in the Alpha-Beta configuration, the higher-ranked members of the group acted serially as obstacles until each individual’s turn was reached, and could be challenged if so desired to single or perhaps factional combat, in the originary scene, the sacred force of dissuasion has no source within the peripheral proto-human group, but is concentrated in the scenic center itself.

    The obvious reason why the “will” of the central object is experienced differently from that of an animal obeying its instincts, or a rock, the force of gravity, is that the object itself is immobile; it does not threaten us or resist our accession. On the contrary, the scenic configuration gives each participant a clear path to the center. That they are at the same time prevented from following this path is experienced as the effect of a repellent force, a sacred will centered in the object.

    The sense of the sacred is thus defined experientially by the contrast between the absence of apparent sources of dissuasive force and the force itself. It is similar to the mimetic “aura” that emanates from a celebrity who becomes the unprompted center of a public scene.

    The participants in the originary event discover their desire for the object at the same time as they experience the will that interdicts it—for the sense of interdiction is inherent in the notion of desire. The sacred nature of this interdiction, that is, its dependence on an alien will, implies that the act/sign of renunciation is directed to the other members of the group only through the mediation of the central object and of the force of interdiction that inhabits it. My exchange of the sign with the other members of the group is incidental to my communication to the sacred will interdicting the central object/being. Thus the reciprocal exchange of signs is always-already a rite in which the community recognizes its unity in its resentful acknowledgement of the sacred’s self-manifestation.

    As the prolonged peaceful nature of the scene diminishes the center’s interdictive effect, the intuition that the sacred would permit its collective appropriation gains momentum. Provided that they do so symmetrically, the members of the group are able to approach the center without incident, and the collective dismembering of the animal can then take place without conflict so long as no one reaches into another’s “territory.” Given the evidence of such feasts in observed hunter-gatherer societies, and their prolongation in our own, it is clear that the whole process, from identifying, renouncing, and signing to and “about” the sacred central figure, to dividing it up, is understood as carrying out this sacred will, which provides the solution to the peaceful distribution of nourishment essential to the group’s survival.

    The element of truth in my old formulation that the originary idea of God is as the “subsisting center of the scene” is that this center as focus of attention survives its impermanent occupant—but not simply as a “place,” rather as the apparent source of the interdictive sacred will. The division of the central animal continues to be presided over by the sacred, which interdicts any attempt at “inequality.” This scenic configuration will persist in communal memory as the model for future such distributions. The scene once created, like the sign that designates its center, will remain with humans as long as humanity exists.

    The human community is, as the first humans discover, not held together sufficiently by “instinct”; its members are “too mimetic” to let the process of biological evolution deal with their potential conflicts. Thus to the group’s practical needs, requiring the development of skills of active cooperation, say in a hunting party or in a battle with a rival group, is added the new factor of coherence independent of the specific task at hand. The discovery of the originary scene is not a new skill or “technique” of dealing with nature, but a new sense of community under the aegis of the sacred will. Thus added to the organizational problems of obtaining food, shelter, etc. is the problem of insuring the endurance of this will that protects the community from internal conflict.

    Defining the human as the one species that is a greater danger to itself than the dangers of the outside world is a tribute to its higher intelligence, and at the same time an avowal of its lack of self-sufficiency. If humans are alone in conceiving the sacred, it is because they alone need to appeal to a will beyond their own to assure the dominance of centripetal communal values over the centrifugal ones of the community’s individual members.

    This division is expressed institutionally in that between religion and “politics.” The maintenance of communal unity through repetitions of the originary scene can clearly not be a daily activity. The practical affairs of the human group must be decided on a day-to-day basis, and to be effective, decisions must be made in function of specific needs, not of ritual patterns. Thus from the beginning the human group must have a “politics” as well as a “religion.”

    Taking the originary scene as its point of departure, the human community, like the remaining hunter-gatherer societies, would presumably have maintained a rough egalitarian symmetry in its “political” decision-making model, limiting to marked occasions the ritual repetition of the originary scene itself, whether centered on an animal or other object of value to distribute, or in anticipation of finding such an object—for example, using the hunting scenes of Paleolithic cave-paintings as their backdrop.

    The hierarchization of society following the Neolithic Revolution would have followed a similar pattern; the hierarchy of religious and political authority, having the same origin, would remain linked. As I observed in The End of Culture (1985) following Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics, the “big-man” as the minimal model of a political leader began by dominating the clan system of ritual distribution, taking over the central role in the ceremonial feasts previously shared on a circulating basis as a result of his greater productivity. We can assume that with the growing complexity and hierarchical ordering of ancient agricultural societies over the millennia, the sacred and secular elements evolved in tandem.

    In the final stage of this process, the rigid hierarchies of the ancient empires are antipodal to the symmetry of power in hunter-gatherer societies. But in neither case was there any space between the political and the religious order. The celebration of the sacred embodied in the Pharaoh or similar figure, including his role as intercessor with higher gods, mirrored the political structure.

    Yet throughout this evolution, whatever the taboo against resenting the Pharaoh, we can be sure that the “sense of justice” among social equals was much the equivalent of our own. The moral model of the originary scene, overlaid with hierarchical structures, was never lost; it is inherent in language, and in the human condition.

    In contrast to these “compact” (Voegelin) empires, the separation between morality and ethics, heaven and earth, God and Caesar, implicit in Judeo-Christian ethics from the beginning, was made explicit in Christianity as the worship of the Crucified. It permitted the secularization of civil society, the liberation of everyday political and economic decision-making from the constraints of ritual, leading to the emergence of the “Westphalian” European nation-states in which was born the modern world of science, industry, and market exchange.

    But with the increasing emphasis on the conquest of nature by the scientific method, the hitherto acceptable religious accounts of creation and natural history lost credibility as sources of legitimacy for human social institutions. An inchoate new mode of politico-religious order emerges in the French Revolution as the inverse of sacred kingship. Rather than regarding the societal ethic as the embodiment of sacred morality, the new political religion finds its moral criterion in an epistemology of resentment that affirms as its sole ethical criterion our sense of injustice at the violation of moral equality, according to which it condemns and seeks to overthrow the established social order, including the religious practices complicit with it.

    The hubris implicit in thus rejecting all existing social differences and beginning again from scratch—the French even attempted to restart the world calendar in 1792—was noted in the very first year of the Revolution, in Edmond Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke had earlier supported the American Revolution, which had largely retained the British political structures of the colonial governments, eliminating only the caste-system of king and nobility—and leaving Southern slavery for future generations.

    The resentment of the sans-culottes and bourgeoisie of the Third Estate against the privileges of the nobility, privileges no longer justified by their ancestral role as military leaders, are easy enough to understand, as is that of the Russian people in 1917. But today’s political religion of wokeness, arising not among society’s least fortunate but in its dominant classes, and motivated not by their own resentment, but by the anticipated resentment of their “victims,” is unique in history. The genius of wokeness is that, as in the days of the Comité de salut public, the “privileged” are asked to do penance—but without losing either their heads or their privileges.

    Whereas the French revolutionaries worshiped the Goddess of Reason and replaced the chaos of traditional weights and measures by the metric system, the woke decry mathematics as “white” and reject the idea that there is a “correct” answer to a math problem. Where the French inaugurated a system of strict examinations for entrance into its elite academies, the woke protest merit-based admissions as a mark of racism—and today’s French have been gradually dismantling their “elitist” system over the decades.

    The digitization of the modern economy and its emphasis on symbol-manipulation over not only the manipulation of nature (agriculture, mining) but of machines, makes strangely apparent the paradox that I enunciated in “Originary Democracy and the Critique of Pure Fairness” (The Democratic Experience and Political Violence, London: Frank Cass, 2001, 308-24): It’s much easier to accept losing if you can claim the system is biased against you.

    Over the centuries, civilizations evolved caste systems, generally less rigid than that of traditional India, but real nonetheless. The French examinations are open to all, but one cannot deny that the son or daughter of someone who has previously passed one of them is far more likely to do the same than the child of a worker or storekeeper.

    The postwar prosperity made opportunities for all, but the digital era has made clear the advantages of higher education. It teaches those successful in the digital economy that they are indeed privileged, not by “race,” but by their parents’ status and educational level: professional Belmont vs working-class Fishtown, in Charles Murray’s 2012 Coming Apart, which avoids the race question by confining itself to whites alone. Yet there are no longer differences of legal status to eliminate, as in the days when the “Third Estate” railed against the nobility and the Catholic clergy, or American blacks protested racial discrimination.

    Claiming that 2+2=5 is not a “wrong” answer is an expression of frustration, not so much by ordinary folks who would never have thought of such an idea, but by the well-meaning professionals who, in a strange but recognizable form of “the white man’s burden,” think that condemning “their own” racism, which really means that of Trump supporters and other “deplorables,” they are taking a step toward resolving the caste-like divide between MIT graduates and those stuck in inner-city schools, whose teachers want to be paid during the COVID epidemic for not teaching children whose mothers are prevented from forming normal families by the welfare system.

    Wokeness appears on the way to conquering all the Western nations still called “liberal democracies.” I am struck both by the success of the supposedly “American” ideas of race and gender in Europe and by the paralysis they inspire in the traditional leaders of these countries, a bit less ready than ours to be awokened. On February 26, the lead headline of Le Figaro, a conservative but mainstream French newspaper, denounced the precepts of wokeness as Ces nouveaux dogmes qui veulent s’imposer en France [These new dogmas that want to impose themselves in France].

    Not coincidentally, America’s main rival for world leadership is no longer to be found in the liberal camp (a role that Japan seemed destined to play a couple of decades ago), but in an increasingly monolithic Chinese dictatorship where, as in previous “socialist” paradises, the sacred, although called by other names, is fully identified with the political hierarchy. Nonetheless, unlike previous attempts at socialist governance, China appears to have found a way to combine sacralized state power with growing success in, and potential dominance of, global market society. Certainly China’s vigorous nationalism—in a nation that has lived under authoritarian hierarchies for millennia—is a powerful antidote to the real and vicarious resentments that fuel wokeism.

    In this context of this unpalatable dichotomy, woke America or totalitarian China, it is not altogether a coincidence to find that Chinese-Americans point the way to a third alternative. The most forthright condemnation I have seen of the woke intelligentsia’s “Critical Race Theory” is this document, promulgated by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY), and headed “Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a hateful, divisive, manipulative fraud.” Unlike guilt-ridden whites, Asians as “people of color” have no compunction in denouncing the policies that penalize them as “white-adjacent” for their academic and career success.

    I can remember when UCLA was called the University of Caucasians Lost among Asians, a grudgingly admirative pleasantry that would likely get one “canceled” today. But whereas UC is not about to limit its Asian admissions, this is not the case in the Ivy League, where the recent lawsuit brought by Asian students against Harvard was turned down, or in most college admissions offices.

    Just as the greatness of Western civilization is most simply explained by Christianity’s success in maintaining an overall spiritual unity among a creative diversity of peoples and social systems, so the United States has been for the past century the flagship nation of the West because it has been able to blend together the world’s diversity of populations in a single nation.

    As my old UCLA colleague Ivan Light, a sociologist who had studied the success of Asian immigrants, would remind us, in the 19th century Chinese “coolie” railroad workers were treated no better than black slaves, and Chinese neighborhoods were feared as scary places run by criminal gangs. And this is not to speak of the many Japanese-Americans who lost their homes and livelihoods during WWII, while German and Italian-Americans suffered no similar penalties.

    Asian-Americans are the successors of the Irish, German, Scandinavian, Jewish and other hyphenated Americans who, having first been subject to prejudice, have over the years been assimilated into the mainstream of the American population. A similar phenomenon is observed today among Mexican-Americans, and among recent immigrants from Africa. There are no “racial” barriers to excellence.

    No doubt African-Americans descended from slaves have a long and deep history of grievances. But their path to success, and that of other minorities, is the same as that of their Asian-American fellow citizens: not that of Critical Race Theory, but of E pluribus unum.

  • The Woke Overcoming of Metaphysics

    It is impossible to truly stand back from politics and take an “objective” view, since unlike Voltaire’s Micromégas, we are not from Sirius. But it is worth the effort to step back far enough to observe the contrast between the political power of certain ideas and their intellectual content.

    Politics, like art, speaks to us in ways we had not yet thought of. This is as true of today’s absurdities as of the originary event, where the “politics” of the human community reflected the increased strength of mimetic appetite that could no longer maintain itself as such, but had to be deferred and converted into “worship” cum mimetic desire through the mediation of language.

    The first humans had no intellectual culture to modify; it was all to be created. Today, political revolutions/revelations** take place in a context of political ideas. Yet their content and that of the ideas that accompany them are by no means guaranteed to be of similar importance. On the contrary, the more intellectually absurd a politically powerful idea, the more it is likely to reveal to us a truth about our society that we have not previously assimilated.

    I need not waste time in deconstructing the idea of socialism, which continues to appeal in various guises. Based on the idea of making material existence coincide with the moral equality of our origin, its implementation has inevitably resulted in extreme inequalities in power and wealth, and frequently in mass murder.

    Wokeism, although it attaches itself rhetorically to “cultural Marxism,” has the advantage over socialism of being largely compatible with liberal democracy, particularly in the USA. Its very lack of a positive political doctrine, of a blueprint for the “good society,” is the source of its strength in this context, which it transforms without the need for political revolution. Wokeism reflects conditions in the most advanced world cultures that have yet to become foci of analysis, if only because, unlike Marxism, it is based on the most primitive possible social analysis, the resentment of firstness in the context of originary moral equality.

    Marxism, grounded in Hegelian dialectics, is a philosophy of history; wokeism is a vision of anti-history. For the woke, history tells the story of a series of evils that it is our task to undo. All the organizational structures that reflect the introduction of differential firstness into human relations are subject to criticism, and must be denounced until they eventually disappear; only originary reciprocity is without sin. The tactics of the movement find their primary inspiration in the intuitions of the young, the least original but the most originary sources of insight.

    There is much to be learned from the woke phenomenon. “Don’t argue with it; learn from it” is a useful slogan to keep in mind. Wokeism and GA share the same originary intuition—the human community in symmetrical, reciprocal, “politically correct” conversation. But for the woke, all history beyond the originary event is a fall into sin that we must work to negate.

    There is no point in arguing with wokeness. If the woke declare that “mathematics is white,” such a statement must be judged by its effects, not its “truth.” This assertion will not modify the role of mathematics in science and industry, or in daily life. But it is effective in encouraging minority resentment of the higher math scores of other races and the accompanying, or anticipating, compensatory reaction. As a result, it has led to the widespread elimination of math tests, and indeed, of numerically scored examinations, as criteria of admission to professions and universities. For the woke understand, as GA does, but as so many “Platonist” philosophers do not, that mathematics is in the first place a human institution. Whence the ability of woke teachers to claim that no student’s answer to a math problem should be considered wrong.

    The strength of such ideas is that, by appearing to benefit their victimary clientele, they offer opportunities for virtue-signaling by establishment institutions, redefining “justice” by replacing equal opportunity with equal results. So far, at least, the idea that “no answer is wrong” does not function outside the classroom.

    One of the points made in Chronicle 684 was that in the current state of Western social relations, the only available alternatives appearing to be tyranny or chaos, the woke version of liberal democracy might well appear the most attractive choice for nations that wish to retain some of their relative freedom of social interaction. We cannot ignore that China, with its multi-millennial imperial history, its vast population, its emphasis on competitively cultivating the intellect—and the resentment stored up from a century of Western domination—has a tradition and an incentive that allow its people to submit to a level of discipline that would be unimaginable in the West. This is particularly true in the digital age, when our most powerful institutional and business leaders see the world in terms far more “global” than national.

    No doubt liberal democracy still has some real advantages in the generation of original ideas, and perhaps in the pragmatic areas of their application as well, although it is not clear that this must remain the case. One area in which we are definitely more proficient is in the kind of intellectual reflection that GA represents. It is unimaginable that a contemporary Chinese thinker could conceive the originary hypothesis, any more than it could come up with wokeness. This is indeed a tribute to the West’s vastly greater freedom of thought.

    The much misunderstood significance of “French theory” was that it was both a significant anthropological breakthrough and at the same time a recycling of Marxist clichés about “late capitalism” that revealed, not the weakness of “capitalism,” but on the contrary, its compatibility with the “progressive” ideology that denies in theory the very values it embodies in practice.

    This is more than just profiting from selling Che T-shirts. Our tech billionaires were not chosen by affirmative action, nor will those who in the course of history succeed them. Their corporate successes are not due to “diversity and inclusion.” Emphasizing the latter is not really to deny the significance of firstness, but merely to change the subject, the better to avoid criticism of the extraordinary inequalities that digital capitalism generates.

    Wokeism should be thought of less as a “way of thinking” than as a means of social organization. Instead of taking its ideas seriously, we should think of them simply as slogans, and judge them not against the history of Western thought but, as in 1984, as organizing principles—only slightly less absurd than “ignorance is strength” or “war is peace”—while bearing in mind that these slogans are not so much imposed on us by force as replicated, as it were effortlessly, by our institutions.

    The woke phenomenon has become the political religion of the digital age. It functions to provide cover for the efficiency of market processes that have made possible, indeed, inevitable, extraordinary prodigies of firstness, concentrations of wealth and power of a sort that were inconceivable in the machine age.

    As proof of its authority, one need only examine the ever-awokening state of the English language (and the French and no doubt others are following suit), particularly in the domain of sexual identity. Nor does today’s political marketplace contain a counterweight to the moral force possessed by the process of “diversity and inclusion” that currently dominates the institutional scene.

    The fact that California voters recently rejected a measure to remove the bar on racial preferences created in 1996 by Proposition 209 will surely have little effect on the reality of such preferences at the University of California and elsewhere. Nor do arguments against them by such as Thomas Sowell or Ward Connerly have any real effect. It is and will probably remain unquestionably safer to take “the side of the victim,” whether this really serves the “victim” or not. And it goes without saying that spokesmen for victimary privilege can always be found within the chosen communities and, lacking a genuine revolution in outlook, given at least passive support by a majority of their members.

    None of this is critically detrimental to the overall success of “capitalism,” but in competition with a determined Chinese adversary, it is hard to imagine that a nation that can only maintain its viability by doing penance, not just for past and persisting evils, but for its “racial” identity, can once again mobilize its forces for total victory as it did in winning WWII.

    There are certainly advantages to American pragmatism over strict hierarchy. Wokeness does not impose such hierarchy, only an endless series of taboos that not so much oppose the system as render it less efficient. But given that the competition with China, outside of broader geopolitical considerations, turns on maintaining the highest efficiency, we must measure the advantages we gain from a freer flow of information and lack of authoritarian obstacles to free thought against the downside of this accumulation of taboos—such as the recent fires and blackouts directly attributable to woke environmentalism.

    From the standpoint of maximum productivity, wokeness must be seen as a self-imposed handicap, as though spotting one’s opponent a couple of pawns were a fitting compensation for the evil of Western “racial” firstness. We could not have won WWII with this mind-set, and we cannot expect to outdo the Chinese with it now.

    As an example of how wokeism works in the small, I refer you to David P. Goldman/”Spengler”‘s recent article https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/02/16/mediocritys-envy-of-genius-the-dirty-secret-of-cancel-culture-n1426112 ). Spengler’s reference to “cancel culture” is in effect a euphemistic way of speaking about something more insidious. The focus of the article is an African-American music professor, who “has won his fifteen minutes of fame by denouncing whiteness in classical music.” In Spengler’s words, this person “dismisses Beethoven as merely ‘an above average composer’ whose prominence erases the contribution of composers of color.”

    Black Americans have made great contributions to American and world music, and denigrating Beethoven contributes nothing to their glory. Nor will this denigration prevent talented musicians of whatever skin color from pursuing their ambitions for greatness. But what it will do is operate to deflect the goals of blacks in music and other fields from focusing on objective excellence—firstness of their own—to finding excuses for mediocrity in the unfairness of a “white” civilization’s judgment of the greatness of Beethoven. Such are the wages of “diversity and inclusion” in our culture.

    This all goes back to the infantile presumptuousness of wokeness, the originarity that is the source of its power. Wokeness is a distant legacy of the American Century confirmed by our victories in WWII and the Cold War. The woke mindset is that of children living under the care of all-powerful parents, whose fun and games can be “outrageous” because the conditions of their lives are guaranteed by daddy and mommy through processes they need not concern themselves with.

    The parents tolerate the brattiness of their woke-children, who were not allowed to lose at T-Ball. Faced with the difficulties of competition in the digital age—difficulties that I can only thank my lucky stars for having avoided—the children throw tantrum after tantrum in the confidence that mommy and daddy will get the message.

    So far, this strategy has paid off handsomely, at least in symbolic terms. What is new in our “cancel culture” is that this tolerance of youthful foibles is increasingly exercised with a 1984-like eye to “canceling” any deviation. Those we once thought of as responsible adults now comfort the “progressive” in their delusion that woke inefficiency is a “virtuous” compensation for “white privilege,” rather than above all a way of guaranteeing the role of our giant corporations in the global market system.

    But when “freedom of speech” comes to mean in practice that one is free to denigrate great white contributors to culture for the benefit of other races, but that defenders of the former must be very careful to avoid offending the sensibilities of the denigrators, the very function of “speech” has been stripped of its civilized function of seeking objective truth and returned to its primitive role of creating communal harmony coûte que coûte.

    In short, the originary intuition of the woke has achieved the long-sought “overcoming of metaphysics” that refutes Parmenides’ separation of truth from opinion. It provides a powerful lesson in originary anthropology—one that demonstrates the terminal incoherence of the dream of a “post-metaphysical” Western civilization.

    **A Derridean (je parlerai, donc, d’une lettre…) might propose revelution, reflecting the inextricability of political revolution and revelation (this works in French as well as English). Admittedly not as neat as différance.

  • Reflections on 1984

    I’m sure many of you share my experience of never having read some books that have been so widely talked about that one feels no urgency about reading them. This was long my case with George Orwell’s 1984, which has penetrated our cultural vocabulary unlike any other literary work since Shakespeare.

    That the current political situation might inspire a reading of 1984 is hardly surprising, given the disquieting similarities between Orwell’s Soviet-inspired dystopia and the woke “socialism” currently installing itself over here. While the ubiquitous two-way screens are certainly prophetic of the kind of surveillance exercised in China, although not yet in the US, the Newspeak of today is if anything more sinister than a language that seeks to make forbidden thoughts “unthinkable” by drastically reducing the vocabulary. Instead of the novel’s wasteful procedure of changing all documents to reflect the Party’s latest version of the “truth,” it is much simpler to reread all past documents, from literary masterpieces to law codes, as embodying implicit inequities whose evil has only now been recognized. Whence the House’s decision to eliminate words like “father” and “mother” from its vocabulary, while others replace breastfeeding by chestfeeding and allow those filling out forms to choose their own “pronouns.”

    The most striking difference between our own version of 1984 and the world of Big Brother (and of China) is the absence of any charismatic central figure, and consequently of any but the most hollow gestures of national cohesion. It is inconceivable that any previous society has ever so insistently tolerated and more than tacitly encouraged defining virtue as disloyalty to its national—and civilizational—traditions.

    Washington, even Lincoln, no one is sacred, and although blackness is at a premium, no Martin Luther King is being promoted to replace them. Instead, wokeness allows only powerless “victims” to become objects of admiration, while viewing powerful central figures, as exemplified by Donald Trump, exclusively as targets of hostility.

    1984 has the figure of Goldstein, obviously modeled on Trotsky, who provides the society with a daily Two Minutes Hate, as well as a yearly Hate Week. But Goldstein/Trotsky is a focus of hate only in contrast to Big Brother/Stalin, whose demand for universal love is satisfied in the book’s final lines, referring to its protagonist, Winston Smith: “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” Today there is no Big Brother to love, and except for Hating the Haters, “hate,” along with “resentment,” are terms never attributed to the woke. Countless headlines use these words in connection with Trump and his allies, never the Democrats, just as the weaponless Capitol incursion was an “insurrection” and the riots all summer long, “essentially” peaceful demonstrations demanding “justice.”

    In reality, Trump’s sometimes crude put-downs have often been in bad taste, but never hateful; Trump is a mocker, not a hater. One can only hate something that gets under one’s skin, and Trump’s political invective is a means of getting under the other fellow’s skin. The first presidential debate is a good example; Trump mocked Biden, while Biden muttered several expressions of unalloyed hostility, of which I remember in particular racist and clown.

    The total domination of 1984 society by the Party obviously has much in common with that of the CCP. But China’s resemblance to Oceania in matters of governance adds an important element that the Soviets claimed but never achieved: economic dynamism. China may fudge its statistics, but “Spengler” (David P. Goldman), who is highly knowledgeable about the Chinese economy as well as its military and technological development, sees China as already a viable competitor with the US in all the areas in which breakthroughs can be expected: AI, quantum computing, space war technology… Tom Friedman has recently expressed his impatience with America’s lack of seriousness in handling this competition (see https://www.mediaite.com/news/ny-times-tom-friedman-tells-chris-cuomo-china-is-doing-better-than-america-despite-bad-stuff-with-the-uighurs/ ).

    Thus whereas the overall picture of Oceania, and presumably of the other two empires into which the world is divided, is one of political oppression but also of economic stagnation, with luxuries reserved for the Party elite and, as in the old USSR and in Putin’s Russia as well, no signs of general prosperity or advanced consumer goods, such a picture cannot be drawn of post-Mao China.

    As we discover midway through the novel, Goldstein’s “clandestine” Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism explains this stagnation as resulting from a deliberate plan to carry on low-level permanent war among the three states in order to use up the extra productive capacity that would have risked undermining the hierarchical relation between the three “classes” of Inner and Outer Party and the Proles.

    This aspect of the novel’s futurism is clearly obsolete. Orwell could not have imagined today’s progressive digitalization, which allows the elites in advanced societies to control vast fortunes while granting a high standard of living to all but the poorest. Although Xi may resemble Big Brother in more ways than one, China has certainly shown itself capable of generating general prosperity, and I have no more faith in the dire predictions of its economy’s collapse than in the rosy hopes, still presumably entertained by a fraction of the Democrats, of its smooth integration within the world of “late capitalism.”

    The one advantageous feature of the negative focus of wokeism, as opposed to the insistently affirmative thrust of the cult of Big Brother, is that it allows for a certain distance between intimate and socially marked relations. No doubt the latter have expanded greatly in the cancel culture at the expense of informal person to person contacts, but these still have a good deal of wiggle room in comparison to 1984—and no doubt to today’s China. If the outrageously disrespectful treatment of Trump by our so-called elite has its silver lining, it is that being able to curse the President reflects a far freer society than one where such a thing is unthinkable.

    Hence the whole last part of 1984, where the “Ministry of Love” punitively reeducates Smith to not simply accept but believe the Party’s ever-changing version of the Truth, is largely irrelevant to the woke world. We don’t need to terrify people via “Room 101” into accepting that 2+2=5. We merely have to persuade them that 2+2=4 is “white”—or for that matter that mathematics itself, along with correct spelling and grammar, are instruments of “white privilege” (see Chronicle 562). Nor do we have to threaten having your face eaten by a rat—the climax of the novel—to make you betray the love of your life. There is no Big Brother to be jealous of other loves; it is perfectly fine to share your wokeness with as many others as possible. Wokeness is not coercive but persuasive; as I have shown (see Chronicle 684), its “anti-racism” is an extension of the moral equality we all share, the “PC” that prevents us from making disobliging statements about other participants in an ongoing conversation.

    As a consequence, the civility untainted by wokeness of most human interactions in the US and other Western-style nations makes everyday life, even in the COVID world of masks and distancing, a welcome oasis in an ever more desertlike public scene. This remains for the moment the West’s most reassuring contrast with the world of 1984.

    Acephalous wokeism is unique among political movements in not dictating any positive conduct, even as it winks at acts of anarchy and petty criminality. The metaphoric basis of wokeness is a state of enhanced awareness, not of action: it is a critical rather than a programmatic vision. Hostile to traditional American patriotism, it has no “Pledge of Allegiance” of its own, nothing but a few slogans. Its best known organized element, Black Lives Matter, is nothing but a slogan—one we must take as a credo, rejecting “All Lives Matter” as an impiety. “We Shall Overcome” was far more purposeful than anything one hears today.

    The woke program is directed not at building a new society but at enforcing an ever more “critical” attitude toward racism and other forms of alleged victimage, including in particular those that “victimize” the planet and its climate. Whereas the virulent chauvinism of 1984, catalyzed by the pseudo-wars with twin rivals Eurasia and EastAsia, demands that Oceania be seen as a utopia, the woke define utopia only by the negation of traditional (“white”) values. Aside from “greenness,” the new “socialism” has no substance other than the provision of free services. Its sidelining of Bernie Sanders—although he now chairs the Senate Budget Committee—is part and parcel of its focus on identity politics rather than economics.

    The different natures of the two social orders are perhaps most clearly seen in the similarities and divergences of their vision of what the novel calls “thoughtcrime.” In 1984, this category is an exaggerated form of the thought control practiced in the USSR, with its newspaper “Truth” (Pravda).

    In contrast, in today’s West, the “white” population is increasingly obliged, and often “reeducated,” to understand itself as implicitly guilty of “white privilege,” even as it denounces racism most emphatically. There is in woke society no stable set of values that the majority can profess that would allow it to be in harmony with the social ideal. Its only proper role is lifelong penance for its indelible original sin of whiteness.

    But in recompense, the unfailing expression of woke attitudes will allow whites, with certain set-asides for “disparate impact,” to maintain their privileges, particularly if they are active in denouncing those who fail to manifest these attitudes. One of the effects of this social pressure on conservatives is that, even if they refuse to feel guilt for their “privilege,” they tend to be highly vulnerable to any suggestion that they share Trump’s insensitivity to political correctness. Indeed, the never-Trump Republicans condemn him with a disdainful contempt that often exceeds that of the Democrats.

    It is easy to mock the absurdities of wokeism, particularly when it ventures into the spheres of political theory or literary criticism. Yet we should not let the abjectness of its intellectual content prevent us from realizing that wokeism could not have taken over the vast majority of the nation’s major institutions, from universities and elementary schools to corporate offices, unless it were indeed the ideology most hospitable to the power elite and its allies in the digital age. And this being true, it may well maintain itself indefinitely.

    In fact, by tacitly accepting the West’s and particularly America’s retreat from world leadership, wokeism may even arguably be said to inspire more rational policies than Trump’s America-Firstism. For the latter demands, from not just “flyover country” but the near-totality of the American population, a solidarity and love of country that no longer exists today, and that it is not easy to see reemerging even in a major crisis. The patriotism that emerged victorious from WWII has been in retreat since the Reagan administration, all the more so since George W. Bush’s optimism about our attractiveness as a model for the world proved to have been unwarranted.

    Perhaps, in other words, we will be obliged to accept that the relative freedom of social relations in our society as compared to that of China must be paid for by a loss of world leadership, and consequently, by the spread of an ideology that explains this decline as punishment for our victimary sins against our human “others” as well as nature itself. No doubt the Chinese themselves are far more egregious sinners in these areas, but their sins and souls are not our concern. Their resentful experience of a century of Western hegemony, of which Hong Kong was until recently a persistent reminder, makes them willing and able to assert themselves in ways we no longer find possible. Thus it is not altogether unreasonable to claim that, unable to battle them for supremacy, we will do better to modestly hasten our decline by fetishizing “diversity and inclusion” at the expense of the promotion of excellence.

    The time may not be far distant when the 1984 dystopia begins to take on for us a nostalgic appeal. Oceania was assured of its position as one of the three mega-states that would continue to rule the world, and Big Brother deserved Smith’s love for this, at any rate.

    Whereas it becomes less clear every day whether liberal democracy has the capacity to emerge from its present state of crisis. The banner of White Guilt has been carried from triumph to triumph, in Europe as well as the US. A society that, as we saw quite recently in San Francisco, is proud to remove the names of its founding fathers from its schools can hardly long expect to maintain world leadership.

    It is no doubt too soon to resign ourselves to despair. But the reign of the epistemology of resentment, aka “cultural Marxism,” while arousing a great deal of dismay and indignation, has yet to encounter an intellectual opposition that does more than refer to theories that the woke have already rejected.

    In contrast, it is clear to me and, no doubt, to a few of my readers that the anthropology based on the originary hypothesis is capable of offering such an opposition. But just as quality and influence have largely parted in the traditional arts, the world of the intellect can no longer be trusted to pay attention to a new way of thinking that seeks to understand the human past in terms of our origin rather than to awoken us to its inequities.

    Those of us who are persuaded by this way of thinking can do no more than make every effort to bring it to the world’s attention. At the very least, loving Big Brother is not an option.

  • Science, Religion, and GA

    Last week’s Chronicle 687 elicited reactions from two distinguished colleagues that revealed the need for a clarification of GA’s epistemological status.

    In contrast with the two opposing perspectives of theism (God creates Man) and atheism (Man creates God), which define respectively the anthropological discourses of religion/revelation and of natural science, GA presents itself as a “humanist” anthropology that avoids deciding between the two. Unlike scientific discourse, GA recognizes that the category of the sacred is both essential to and uniquely experienced by humans, but unlike theistic discourse, it does not posit the existence of a sacred entity independent of the world of human experience.

    This seems to me the proper way to situate the originary hypothesis, but it fails to make clear exactly how this “meta-feature” should be implemented within GA’s own discourse. In what way should our description of the originary scene, which avoids reference to divine revelation, differ from that of anthropology as a social science?

    Social-science anthropologists, as well as linguists, unanimously consider that the originary hypothesis is not “scientific” because it is unfalsifiable. The idea of a hypothesis that can be made plausible only by reference to its consequences, that is, of a heuristic hypothesis, is unacceptable in domains where conclusions must be based on the analysis and prediction of data. However useful it may be to speak about the scenic nature of known cultural phenomena, the necessity of an originary scenic event evidently cannot be derived from the existence of these phenomena.

    I had therefore considered that GA’s dependence on a heuristic as opposed to an empirically falsifiable hypothesis sufficed to distinguish it from “scientific” anthropology. But my colleagues’ surprise at the sentence:

    No doubt the originary hypothesis should not be interpreted to suggest that the event it describes occurred at a single point in space-time that divides the prehuman world from the human.

    made it clear to me that what I had taken to be a nuanced statement of the hypothesis could be viewed as contradicting its longstanding claim to “minimality,” or conformity to Ockham’s razor, the rule that imaginary entities should “not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

    This is indeed a point that I had overstated in the past by affirming, not that it sufficed for our purposes that the event took place just once, but that it necessarily could only have taken place once. For example:

    In biological evolution each fundamental transformation takes place only once. The branches of the genealogical tree of species do not converge. . . . Man’s qualitative as well as quantitative distance from other species implies that the biological rule of unique genesis must apply to him even more rigorously. If our hypothesis truly describes the birth of man, the founding event it postulates must have occurred only once: its concentration in a unique event.
    (Science and Faith, 2nd ed., Aurora, CO: Noesis Press, 2015: 7-8)

    This claim of the originary event to uniqueness is itself a violation of Ockham’s razor. It treats the origin of Man as an “ontological” event in a sense that is in effect theistic. For after “the” event, God would know that “now Man exists,” but if no transcendent consciousness pervades the universe, a second group of hominins not in contact with the first could arguably have a similar experience. That is an entirely different issue that could be settled, if at all, only by the “hard” sciences of paleontology and genetics.

    If the breakdown of the Alpha-Beta system led to a “mimetic crisis” that eventuated in the invention of the sign in more than one place, that would hardly be surprising, given the spread of hominids and hominins of different species throughout Africa and the rest of the world. Perhaps this is unlikely, perhaps not, but we need not concern ourselves with this question, because it is not, minimally, an element of the hypothesis. Whether we are all cultural if not biological descendants of the chronologically first group to experience the originary scene is irrelevant to GA’s central thesis that our description of the scene, always of course subject to revision, contains the minimum of elements necessary for language to appear.

    A similar discussion could take place around the determination of the exact moment of the first sign. The core of the hypothesis is the collective experience of the aborted gesture of appropriation as a sign. In historical terms, this is indeed a punctual event, but it seems useless to debate whether the sign-experience would be definitive if only one member of the group understood it in this manner, or if we can only speak of a sign when all the members repeat it.

    Just as Adam Katz pointed out years ago, correcting my original formulation that the idea of interpreting the aborted gesture as a sign occurred “spontaneously” to the group as a whole, that this idea must first have been grasped by one or more individuals, and only subsequently spread to the others, so it is useless to argue about the uniqueness of the first moment of humanity. What matters is the minimality of this experience. It is true that all known human languages are sufficiently similar to suggest that they had a common origin, but this should be viewed as an empirical question that our ever-increasing knowledge of hominid paleontology may quite possibly be able to resolve. The originary hypothesis refers to the causality of the event, not to its uniqueness.

    This being said, my colleagues’ reaction points to a component of human self-reflection that I had previously overlooked, and that is relevant to the whole question of the sacred.

    I can only apologize for the naivete of my earlier insistence on the absolute singularity of the originary event. But that insistence, along with these reactions, makes me realize that the underlying attitude they manifested was not simply naïve. It was the expression of what can be called a residual theism, not oriented toward a divine being, but nevertheless focused on a “uniqueness” that, to be fully guaranteed, would indeed require a consciousness whose universal purview could only be that of such a being.

    This provides us with an important insight into the basis of religion.

    One of the essential functions of the sacred, notably in the Judeo-Christian culture of the One God, is the creation of the world, and more specifically of Man. Conversely, one way of judging the current crisis of Western civilization is to note the increasing reluctance of scientists and laypersons alike to see Man as anything other than just one more—particularly destructive—species.

    I have noted (see Chronicle 513) what I consider the curious insistence with which astronomers refer to what is tantamount to the logical necessity of the existence of extra-terrestrial life—not merely on exo-planets in distant galaxies, but even on other bodies in our solar system—although no particle of evidence of such life has ever been discovered. It is as though the scandalous possibility that “intelligent life,” or even life itself, might be uniquely confined to our planet comes uncomfortably close to a “proof of the existence of God,” although logically speaking it would of course be nothing of the sort.

    Thus my former unnecessary insistence on the uniqueness of our scene of origin should no doubt be seen as the converse of the atheistic credo of natural science: if our existence falls below a certain minimum of probability, is this not a proof of the existence of God? Logically, of course not, but it is surely not without significance to generative anthropology that the very scenic nature of our culture appears to require the uniqueness of its origin. Just as religious texts describe human history as a sequence of unique events guided by a central will, so is our culture full of fictions in which individual lives and historical phenomena are described by a central will in terms of unique events. That is how scenes function; their epistemological basis is that of a unique revelation, however well or badly it explains the elements of highly complex processes.

    The sacred cannot be understood, as many social scientists appear to think, as a useful expedient to maintain social order. As soon as we suspect that it is but an expedient, its expediency disappears. And this is because, whatever we think about God in the privacy of our soul, the very notion of God—and the “soul” as well—is inseparable from the human community in which alone it could have been formulated. Whence the usefulness of religious belief and ritual as a means of insuring group loyalty, a point that has been developed by Rodney Stark (A Theory of Religion [1987], The Rise of Christianity [1996], How the West Won [2014]), in particular relation to Western Christianity. Insects can be “programmed” to sacrifice themselves instinctively for the sake of the group; but the first couple’s felix culpa assures that participation in the human community is mediated through the will of its individual members.

    In order for human origin from the perspective of GA to be seen as compatible with its description in the Bible, the point that GA preserves from the biblical story, that of human uniqueness, allows our humanist anthropology to “fraternize” with theism. Like the biblical account of the creation of Man, the hypothetical originary event is not a description of an empirically verifiable happening, but a means of explaining the originary function of the différance that defines the human.

    But as my colleagues’ reactions, and my own earlier insistence on “uniqueness,” make clear, however we may qualify our judgment as to the situation of the originary hypothesis in the real world, we must be very clear that the need to affirm the uniqueness of the “first” event of human language is not material to GA’s “way of thinking.”

    Nothing in the real world happens “instantly”; nothing creates a dimensionless cut in the time-sequence. If at some future time we have material evidence of one or more “originary” events, we can then concern ourselves with the question of which was earlier and of whether the earlier influenced the later. But none of this is relevant to the minimal hypothesis itself.

    What GA shares with religious story of the Creation is the essential ontological separation between the world of the human, which is the world of the sign, of the logos, and the rest of the universe. Whether the originary event we hypothesize took place more than once, or what degree of unanimity in sign-usage should be required to classify a given occurrence as such an event, is peripheral to our anthropology. It suffices to point out that, unlike the emergence of animal species, that of the human—whether our own homo sapiens, or some ancestral species—is defined by an act that is not merely “cultural” in the general sense in which mammals and even insects have a “culture,” but involves a new layer of self-consciousness that can be minimally described as an exchange of signs, a logos.

    To put it most simply, we may say that the human emerges as the consequence, not of a gene, but of a scene. It is the uniquely human scene that gives us our sense of the unique moments of history, our own and that of the universe.