Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • Metaphysics and archi-écriture

    How does generative anthropology free us from the limitations of metaphysics, the domain of classical philosophy from Plato on, characterized by a faith in the independence of linguistic representation from the world it represents and from the worldly needs of its human creators?

    I began by attempting to understand the origin of language in the context of Girard’s anthropology (The Origin of Language, 1981), and, reconceiving its domain as generative anthropology, extended it in the direction of literary culture (The End of Culture, 1985), religious revelation (Science and Faith, 1990), and previous attempts at conceiving human institutions as the products of an originary scene, beginning with Hobbes’ version of the social contract (The Scenic Imagination, 2007).

    La différance, the Derridean component of generative anthropology, was clearly rooted in Derrida’s paradoxical stance in les marges de la philosophie. This, along with the Heideggerian background of this mode of thinking, which unfavorably contrasted the metaphysical basis of Platonic philosophy with the Presocratics’ vaguer but more inclusive intuitions of Being, made me realize that to do justice to GA’s own historical roots required that I situate it within the drive to go beyond metaphysics that led to the splitting off of Continental post-Hegelian philosophy from the Analytic or Anglo-Saxon variety.

    That despite their differences, Girard and Derrida could be understood to have shared this common goal, as noted by Andrew McKenna in Violence and Difference (1992), suggested the usefulness of seeing both in the context of “French Theory” as it played itself out in literature departments and the soft sciences in the United States. Although Girard’s name has rarely been mentioned in this context, it was he, along with Richard Macksey, who created French Theory by bringing Derrida and other major French thinkers to Johns Hopkins for “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man“ in 1966—coincidentally the year in which I obtained my PhD, with no connection to and little awareness of the conference.

    To understand the limits of the metaphysical, Derrida’s works offer a whole catalogue of paradoxical non-concepts, from deconstruction and grammatology to différance and archi-écriture, all of which stand in the margins of metaphysical thought and the concomitant structuralist Western views of language. Although Derrida himself never sought to situate these notions in an anthropological context, they are of great help in the task of teasing out the constitutive elements of originary language.

    I have previously dealt at length with la différance or deferral/difference, since its translation into behavioral terms is clear, and indeed essential to a hypothesis that sees language and the rest of the cultural sphere as founded on the deferral of instinctual behavior—the insertion of a Sartrean néant between the pour-soi and its object that constitutes the human mind as a scene of representation.

    But there is also in French Theory a whole vocabulary of terms referring to the non-originarity of the cultural process, from toujours-déjà to the arché, which expresses in quasi-historical terms the paradoxical impossibility of determining the origin of human language. Claiming that DNA, and why not the periodic table, is always-already a form of language should be understood less as a denial of the specificity of human language than as a challenge to other thinkers to define this specificity—a challenge that I believe GA has met.

    There is no need to maintain the paradoxical titillation of the always-already. 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. But as I have insisted on many occasions, we cannot wait until a fossil-hunter uncovers the remains of “the” originary scene to begin defining originary humanity and its language. That the advent of the sign marks a watershed in what we know of the history of the universe requires that, in the absence of conclusive physical evidence from the era in which it occurred, we formulate a hypothesis of its occurrence to allow us to understand what it means for humans to be users of signs.

    The frustrations of post-classical philosophers do not justify, nor really imply, the denigration of metaphysics itself. Defined as the use of language that brackets the question of its historical human origin, and in particular, the derivation of the declarative sentence or proposition from more elementary forms, metaphysics can be thought of simply as non-fiction—given that fiction, like scripture, points to a transcendent source, be it only that of the author, who even when he says “I” is never simply within the work. Only metaphysical language lets us understand the world, and even ourselves, in verifiable, objective terms.

    Natural science is by this definition entirely metaphysical; it trusts language to specify the realities of the world that scientific hypotheses put in relation to each other. Mathematics, which is constructed from axioms and not from empirical observations, is the most extreme example of a science in this sense.

    It is curious how common it is for those trained in analytic philosophy to consider mathematics, and often language as well, as independent of the human mind, as though these systems were eternally out there in the “cloud” waiting for us to download them. What we discover in mathematics are the less obvious consequences of the axioms that we created to begin with; to claim that these implicit analytic consequences “exist” independently of the human mind is absurd, unless we accept the idea of a transcendental divinity who has always already thought them. (Whether or not God has proved Fermat’s Last Theorem to his own satisfaction is awaiting further revelation.)

    This being true, why then have philosophers since the Romantic era felt constrained by the prison-house of language within which their speculations were confined, as though the metaphysical conception of language as a neutral mechanism for human communication were both unsatisfactory and inescapable?

    Inescapable, surely, by definition, since philosophy consists in stringing together presumably logically connected series of propositions, and propositions exist only in language. The paradoxical language of Derrida and other post-structuralists is as close as one can come to reaching beyond propositional language, an activity that Derrida was careful to locate not outside but in the margins of philosophy as traditionally practiced. (We might mention as well the later Wittgenstein’s discussion in his Philosophische Untersuchungen of “language games” involving imperatives in contrast to the propositions/declaratives of his Tractatus.)

    It was arguably Nietzsche who first made explicit his frustration with philosophical language, and Heidegger who sought to situate it historically by defining Plato’s metaphysics as cutting off language from its roots in Being as intuited by the pre-Socratics—Being, which in Heidegger’s vocabulary escaped the status of a mere word, along with the numerous other redefined words and etymological traces in which he sought revelations of an intuition of Being beneath language. Like Derrida’s non-concepts, Heidegger’s neologisms are most productively understood as groping toward the anthropological basis of language.

    Using la différance as a test case, given the ease with which it can be translated into biological-psychological terms, the question GA poses to its skeptics is: what residue of opacity, of mystery, remains in this term—and by extension, in all the others—once it has been translated into the vocabulary of the originary hypothesis?

    The notion of deferral is in essence psychological: one defers doing something as the result, not of an inhibition, but of a conscious decision. But it is the creation of difference that differentiates la différance from a simple delay.

    Différance is, in Derrida’s text, a feature in the first place of the signifier, whence the coquetry of the letter “a” which is pronounced just like the original “e,” hence detectable only in writing. For Derrida, deferral inhabits language because we must constantly understand each linguistic element, phoneme or letter, as a differential selection from a paradigm that includes many others. (See Derrida’s “La différance,” in Théorie d’ensemble; Seuil, 1968: 41-66.)

    Yet difference within a paradigm, whether of sounds, letters, or meanings, is not the minimal example of semiotic difference. The minimal difference that deferral determines in language is that between significance and non-significance, and in the minimal language of the originary event, between the one thing that is significant, that demands a sign, and all the rest of the world’s things that do not—the minimal “paradigm” that must logically precede any more complex one.

    La différance, the delay that creates/becomes difference, which the originary hypothesis situates in the abortion of the act of appropriation, is inherent in the use of any sign, independently of any possible differences among signs. Deferral occurs in the first place between the world of reality, thought or perceived on the subject’s internal scene of representation, and the world of signs by means of which this internal scene is to be communicated, if only to the subject himself; it is the trace of the originary deferral of the act of appropriation.

    Perhaps yet more revelatory is the case of the deliberately ungraspable concept of archi-écriture as the presumed ontological basis of speech and writing. This notion is less portable than différance because it is bound up with Derrida’s fundamental conception of language. The very point of De la grammatologie (Minuit, 1968) is that speech, which Derrida convincingly demonstrates that metaphysical/philosophical thought beginning with Plato treats as the sole authentic form of language, as opposed to writing that is only its reproduction, is always-already a mode of “writing” in that, like the written word, the spoken word is not grasped in an instantaneous presence but, like the signs of writing, deferred.

    We would . . . suggest that . . . original, natural language, etc., had never existed, that it had never been intact, untouched by writing, that it had always itself been a form of writing. Archi-writing . . . that we only continue to call writing because it communicates in its essence with the common concept of writing. . . .

    This archi-writing . . . cannot, can never be recognized as the object of a science. It is precisely what can never be reduced to the form of presence. (82-83; my translation)

    Thus Derrida claims that language is always-already writing because it is not present but a deferred trace, and thus already a form of writing. I see no reason to contest this point, which is Derrida’s way of denying the ideal atemporality of language that is the basis for metaphysics. Indeed, whether spoken or written, language is a product of deferral; it is not a mode of “instantaneous” communication, or more pointedly, not, like animal signals, instinctual.

    But this does not require that we enmesh ourselves in the paradoxical non-objectivity of archi-writing. In explaining that language is not a mode of immediate presence but its deferral, GA can express this non-immediacy in non-paradoxical terms because, as Derrida does not, it attaches the use of language, beginning with the originary speech-act, to our worldly, temporal existence.

    If the purpose of language is to allow us to defer our instinctual relationship with the central object and to communicate this deferral to each other in order to avert potential violence, using a sign to indicate the trace of the appetitive drive that we have deferred, then to claim that speech is a mode of “presence” must be qualified by indicating that presence in this scenic sense exists as such only in the mode of deferral. We become present to each other on the scene of representation through the mediation of the sign because we cannot unthinkingly appropriate the object either individually or serially.

    This “presence” of speech that Derrida wants to show to be already a form of “writing” expresses in his terms the claim of metaphysics to the transparent neutrality of language, obliterating the material temporality of linguistic communication and, from an originary standpoint, reproducing the transparency of the originary scene mediated by the sacred. In contrast, the use of writing in the absence of such presence lacks this ideal transparency.

    What is missing from Derrida’s account, and from the intuition that presided as well over the metaphysical devaluation of writing, is the notion of the scene. Here presence is mediated by deferral in a way that creates a human community. And this communal element, absent from the written word, is recreated by Platonic dialogue in its scenes of conversation.

    Once we understand human language in the terms of the originary hypothesis, we need not pronounce on Derrida’s extra-linguistic thesis that not just metaphysics but pre-revolutionary politics, with its prolongation in the discourse of structuralism, is dependent on the myth of presence, which for Derrida is exemplified by the figure of authority speaking to a crowd, that is, by a mode of domination in which an individual rather than a divine figure occupies the scenic center.

    In the final analysis, Derrida’s questioning of philosophical language remains incomplete. Yet in contrast not only with the philosophical tradition that followed from Plato’s consecration of the transcendental status of the Ideas, but with all previous attempts to realize Nietzsche’s desire to escape the constraint of propositional language, Derrida’s analyses constitute a giant step toward revealing the anthropological root of language.

    All that was lacking for la différance to give birth to the sign was the intuition that semiotic sapience had become necessary to the physical preservation of at least one community of genus homo.

  • “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”

    Language

    This English proverb is often traced to Plato’s words in the Republic (369c):

    … τῷ λόγῳ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ποιῶμεν πόλιν: ποιήσει δὲ αὐτήν, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἡ ἡμετέρα χρεία.

    …let us create a city from the beginning, in our theory. Its real creator, as it appears, will be our needs.

    It is ironic that Plato should be, even indirectly, the originator of this proverb, given the very essence of Plato’s thinking, which after Parmenides formalized the foundational ideal of philosophy in the opposition between truth and opinion, of which only the former is “philosophical.” This principle of philosophy establishes metaphysics, which can be defined in various ways, but which is at its base a denial of the specifically anthropological nature of language.**

    Philosophical language consists of true propositions, and the worldly or divine process by which humans arrived at the ability to formulate true propositions, that is, the use of language—including, as proposed in The Origin of Language (TOOL), the evolution of the declarative sentence from the elementary forms that language must have taken at its origin—is not taken into consideration. As a result, language is conceived as a neutral means of communication independent of any necessity that might have incited humans to invent it, as Socrates suggests would be the case for the city he is proposing to Adeimantus to build.

    For the last several years I have situated generative anthropology in relation to the intellectual tendency, begun at least nominally with the post-Hegelians and pursued most creatively in the postwar era in “French Theory,” that has sought to go “beyond” metaphysics, defined as above.

    It might surprise those who consider it as some kind of cosmic absolute that “truth” in its fundamental sense is simply a quality of verified propositions, whether empirical or analytic—and in the former case, as Karl Popper made explicit, no amount of “verification” can suffice to guarantee universality. The proposition, or declarative sentence, is a human tool for understanding the world, and in the first place, for understanding ourselves, as its derivation from a “failed imperative” in TOOL suggests. Once this principle is understood, we no longer need to struggle to escape what a Nietzsche translation called “the prison house of language”; we are back in the real world where language was created.

    GA’s originary hypothesis is not an unproved empirical statement awaiting verification, but a heuristic that, lacking a radical transformation of the conditions of our knowledge, can be replaced only by a better heuristic. In the meantime, the originary hypothesis is the only heuristic construction of the origin of human language and culture founded on the principle that we invent only what we need.

    With the exception of Terrence Deacon’s provocative but not seriously intended suggestion in The Symbolic Species (1997) that the first use of language may have been in a “marriage ceremony” to assure a hunter of the fidelity of his “wife” when away on a hunting expedition, all other accounts view human language as a gratuitous product of our developing mental capacities, in some cases even claiming that proto-humans first had “ideas” and then developed language in order to communicate them. It is curious that a scientific community that is able to land a probe on an asteroid and return geological specimens to earth can harbor at the same time such infantile notions.

    It is well known that in 1866, the Société de linguistique de Paris declared its refusal to consider papers about the origin of language. And indeed, the best-known scenarios of human origin, that of Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Girard’s meurtre émissaire, neither of which deals explicitly with language, are far from providing a solution.

    The upshot of all this is that today’s scientific world neither needs nor wants a heuristic for the origin of language. Social scientists aren’t paid to create heuristics, which is a speculative activity fit only for “French theory,” but to do research. So let’s all apply for research grants to examine the languages of our closest primate relatives, their social structures and cognitive abilities, their capacity for religious feelings, etc. etc. These studies do not risk exhausting the terrain; there will always be new parameters to consider.

    Meanwhile, however, the scientific community can get along very well, not only without such a heuristic, but in denying the very idea that one might be useful.

    Why, might one ask, after all these centuries of philosophical self-exploration, of scientific inquiry and its technological application, has humanity proven itself incapable of applying to language the simple principle that Plato seems to be aiming at in the quoted passage: necessity is the mother of invention?

    I would explain this anomaly, ironically enough, by the fact that when necessity forced humans to defer their “instincts” and mediate them through a communal culture, of which language is the primary ingredient, they acquired both the relative peace and the mental “free space” (the Hegelian-Sartrean pour-soi, or internal scene of representation) in which to conjure up ideas without the direct pressure of necessity. Hence we like to think of human inventions such as language or religion as unforced, happy discoveries, on the model of Archimedes in his bathtub discovering the weight equivalent of the displacement of water. This makes a neat and flattering contrast with the prehuman world, where “invention” had been an arduous procedure, involving generations of “struggle for life” before a new appendage or organ would evolve to resolve the original problem, assuming the species had not become extinct in the meantime.

    Above all, the skepticism concerning the possibility of a heuristic hypothesis of the origin of language reflects a profound cynicism within the scientific community concerning the necessity of positing a realm of transcendence. Without a God to give us language, we can only depend on our knowledge of our primate ancestors, and the claim that some catastrophic difficulty in human interaction made language and religion necessary, however cogently the hypothesis is presented, provokes its dismissal as a “just-so” story.

    Kipling’s “just-so” stories can be explained by simple Darwinian processes. The giraffe’s neck grows longer, not because he stretches it, but because the long-necked ones survive and reproduce better than the others. Hence, because language and culture are not direct results of the processes of biological evolution, the “just-so” story is not the one told by GA, but rather by those who dismiss GA as fantasy, while proposing in Kiplingesque fashion that language emerged when human intelligence produced “ideas” that it “wanted to communicate.” The giraffe species can metaphorically stretch its neck, but homo sapiens can’t think that it wants language without a language to think it in.

    Religion

    Recently Bishop Pierre Whalon, whose book on marriage Made in Heaven? I discussed in Chronicle 678, sent me as a “FYI” an article by James Harrod entitled “The Case for Chimpanzee Religion,” published  in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 8.1 (June 2014: 8-45). I was immediately struck by the introductory passage, in which the author supports his thesis by reference to a line by Jane Goodall, whose familiarity with chimps and their ways was legendary, from her entry on “Primate Spirituality” in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Continuum, 2005), p. 1304:

    Often I am asked if the chimpanzees show any signs of religious behavior. I think perhaps their ‘elemental’ displays are precursors of religious ritual. [She then describes waterfall displays, water watching, and rain dance behaviors she has witnessed.]… Is it not possible that these performances are stimulated by feelings akin to wonder and awe? (Harrod: 2)

    With all due respect, even more than language, whose obvious practical uses explain if they do not excuse the tendency to look upon it as a “happy discovery,” religion is an expensive activity, not a gratuitous exercise of our or the chimps’ faculties of “wonder and awe.” As the quote from Homer in Chronicle 681 demonstrates, the common attitude toward the gods in ancient times was not wonder and awe, but fear and resentment. For Achilles, we can’t escape the Gods’ power, but we don’t have to like it. The Christian attitude of love of God that serves Goodall as her implicit point of reference is, we must recall, dependent on God’s sacrifice in the Crucifixion: love, here and elsewhere, is the transcendence of resentment.

    Harrod’s “trans-species” definition of religion includes, in fact, “experiencing or expressing emotion of wonder . . . with respect to a phenomenon . . . which is surprising, non-ordinary . . . or ‘miraculous’” (p. 14). This effort to create an intuition of transcendence from the everyday worldly phenomenon of curiosity, which before it killed the cat was already operative in the amoeba, is hardly convincing.

    Strangely missing from the “five dimensions” of Harrod’s definition: reverence, careful observance, emotion of dread, emotion of wonder, “binding individuals together . . . in empathic intimacy or communion . . .,” is any consideration of the necessity of this behavior, which perhaps explains the unexpected omission of ritual behavior, explicitly mentioned by Goodall, from his list.

    This is no doubt because animal rituals, at least, are clearly driven by necessity. For example, courtship rites serve to select the best mates and avoid violence that would reduce the overall “reproductive fitness” of the group. But ritual is devoid of the overtly self-conscious behaviors that Harrod sees as defining religion: awe, dread (as opposed to mere fear), reverence, empathic intimacy.

    Yet the central determinant of human religion is not self-conscious emotion. It is, very simply, the sacred, which must be carefully defined in distinction from the worldly objects of emotions such as “reverence” or “dread.”

    Chimps may be closer than snakes or even monkeys to engaging in religious behaviors, or in linguistic behaviors for that matter, but it is the discontinuity that is essential. Human religion is not constituted by “religious behavior” but by a collective sense of the sacred as a source of interdiction mediated through signs. “In the beginning was the Word.”

    No doubt these differences of opinion can be described simply as arguments over terminology. The fact that I insist on the uniqueness of human language or religion is, after all, just a matter of definition. The generic terms “language” and “religion” can if we like be extended to include “animal languages” and “animal religions,” nor is there any reason not to study these phenomena.

    But what gets lost in a world where scientists refuse to make conceptual distinctions between human and animal “cultures” is not the “speciesism” that allows the less woke among us to slaughter animals for food or enslave them as “pets,” but the specific responses to specific necessities that made us specifically human.

    I would not have the bad taste to confuse a serious scientist like Dr. Harrod with the theoreticians of the softer sciences who are happy to condemn speciesism as an extension of “white privilege.” Dr. Harrod’s are not sins of commission, but of omission. In order to appreciate in their own terms the “religious” activities of chimpanzees, one must first have a clear characterization of human religion and of the necessity that was its originary cause. But as we saw in the case of language, one can hardly blame a contemporary social scientist if such clear ideas are not available to him.

    This is the appropriate point in which to emphasize the contribution of René Girard to our understanding on this issue. Despite his use of the Vulgate version of John’s words, In principio erat Verbum, as the epigraph to the section on “L’écriture judéo-chrétienne” of Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Grasset, 1978), Girard, who spent his life studying texts, was, unlike Jacques Derrida, not interested in language per se. But it was Girard’s anthropological insight that was the key to making generative anthropology possible, whereas Derrida, the more subtle thinker, remained enmeshed in the marges de la philosophie (aka métaphysique) that he was always seeking paradoxically to escape.

    In a word, Girard understood that in order to grasp the specificity of the human and its culture, one must in the first place apply the proverb that stands at the head of this Chronicle. What was the necessity that drove these hominins to create religion and language? What was the urgent, life-threatening problem that becoming-human resolved? Girard knew enough about this problem in knowing that human desire is mimetic, that mimetic desire leads to conflict, and that mimetic conflict, la violence, is what makes homo sapiens the only species that is potentially a greater danger to itself than the external world—and consequently, the only species that needs language and religion.

    Once Girard had defined the problem of the origin of human language and culture by the need to establish communal peace via a mechanism that transcended instinct—as this problem had never previously been defined in the entire history of philosophy or anthropology—the task of working out a specific solution, an originary hypothesis, became a realizable project. It is this project that I am proud to call generative anthropology.

    **I would like to thank George Dunn for pointing out that in the context of the Republic, the principle that our needs should determine the creation of the city, the first in a series of hypotheses concerning the construction of the ideal polis, is in fact rejected. This adds an additional layer of irony to the attribution of this proverb to Plato.

  • Toward an Originary Phenomenology

    If we define religion as an ensemble of doctrines and practices that derives its legitimacy from one or more revelations each experienced at a particular time and place, we can understand the difficulty of reconciling religion with a global civilization independently of the question of the supernatural.

    As I pointed out in the previous Chronicle, Islam provides a simple test of this formulation: it defines itself as the product of a single revelation, that of the Coran to Mohammed, and it insists on its vocation of universality: the revelation took place at one point in space-time, but its destiny is to be received by all of humanity. Christianity has in principle the same ambition, but what sets off Islam, or its Islamist purists, is its conviction that jihad to convert the entire world to Islam is a sacred duty.

    Despite the depth of conviction behind this belief, its incompatibility with not simply the Western “Westphalian” nation-state system, but the globalist one-worldism toward which the West’s more advanced countries appear to be moving, only underlines the point that in the context of today’s virtual global “conversation,” for which the Internet offers the exemplary platform, and in which all human relations are increasingly assumed to take place, no historical revelation can recreate the originary human community.

    Whence the rise of wokeness that I described. Wokeness does not refer to a specific historic revelation, but to the residue in each human psyche of the revelatory scene that the originary hypothesis postulates as preliminary to human history, and whose moral power is that it need not and cannot be referred to.

    That religions, in particular, those of the two Testaments, have punctual revelations at their core was the governing principle of Science and Faith (Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), which contrasted (1) God’s revelation of his “name” to Moses in Exodus 3:14 as the founding monotheistic revelation with (2) Saul/Paul’s vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus in Acts 9 as the founding revelation of Christianity as a world religion. Saul’s realization is that his persecution of the Christians demonstrates his own sacralization of their martyred leader, whom he realizes can no longer be understood as a Jewish heretic but as the divine founder of a “new Israel.”

    Given the description in Chronicle 681 of the originary sense of the sacred as the effective power of an external interdicting will that the human community recognizes as effecting a necessary control over its destiny and welfare, historical revelations reveal the further intentions of this will to one or more individuals in a specific time and place. If the originary revelation must be hypothesized as taking place in a collective setting in which it establishes the first human community, in more advanced hierarchical societies, where priests or sacred kings mediate between the divinity and the members of the community, these are understandably the privileged recipients of revelations. In later, less “compact” societies, their role can be taken over by founders of new religious communities.

    The experience of revelation, of hearing the word of God, whether in intuition or in reality, lies at the ultimate crux of anthropology/religion: man creates God / God creates man.

    There is no animal “religion”; animals have no internal scene of representation on which transcendent beings can manifest themselves. The Hegelian/Sartrian pour-soi is not available to beings that have never shared the human experience of the sacred/significant. Thus, as with language and the other elements of human culture, the emergence of religion cannot be explained in the biological terms of gradual emergence and specialization; there is nothing in animal life that can “evolve” into language. The very existence of religion is the clearest sign of this: transcendence is a new dimension, open only to humans, leaving open the question as to whether its ontology demands an extra-worldly domain of its own.

    This is the reason why generative anthropology is both necessary and ignored. The denial of possible “animal religions” is no doubt, like the denial of the existence of “black swans,” an empirical or “falsifiable” statement. But it is not one that natural science in its present state has any hope of demonstrating.

    The point of GA is that only a hypothesis of human origin described in terms of plausible human experience, rather than a set of conclusions from a multitude of data sets, can permit us to deal with the fundamental ontological issues of human culture. Waiting for natural science to tell us how language and culture began means bracketing the most important domain of human knowledge aux calendes grecques, meanwhile leaving the field to the believer-atheist dialogue de sourds.

    It is therefore my conviction that the central task of generative anthropology is to elaborate and extend its phenomenology of the originary scene, my own and other accounts of which are necessarily subject to continual refinement. If we would understand the human as such, we must understand in the first place the originary humans who were our ancestors, and to do this, we must attempt to put ourselves in their place in the formative configurations that began with the originary event.

    Such speculations are “unfalsifiable” and lacking in the rigor of empirical science, but their reliance on a intuitable hypothetical event is no less reliable than that of classical phenomenology on introspection. For whatever authority I may have to describe the “contents of my consciousness,” my descriptions are unverifiable by others save via a shared intuition of this human consciousness. And without an originary hypothesis, we must simply take for granted the mechanism that allows others to share my intuitions, including those that are constitutive of languages and cultural structures of all kinds.

    In the case of the “Awokening,” for example, the acephalous nature of the movement depends on the contagion effect of condemning what are described as symptoms of “systemic racism.” The all-important “gotcha” effect is indeed a form of revelation, one well-suited to a society that is no longer held together by the great historical religious revelations, while having absorbed their originary moral framework as an ethical template.

    The Judeo-Christian roots of wokeness are essential, because although all human cultures share the moral model inherited from the originary event, Christianity foregrounds the victimary nature of the scenic center more explicitly than any other religion. This foregrounding has been the source of the greatness of Western culture, as well as of the anthropologies of Girard and GA; yet the woke phenomenon demonstrates its limitations. The flaw it reveals in Christianity is the example it sets, not for society’s “victims” so much as for their purported victimizers, in whom the most innocent manifestations of social hegemony can be described as examples of “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” that is, ultimately, forms of participation in the murder of Jesus.

    The originary event is the source of our openness to revelation, and the more insightfully we can phenomenologize it, the better we can understand the effectiveness of historical revelations and the differences they reflect in the societies in which they have occurred.

    To carry out such a task will require much further research into the specifics of religious traditions. At this point, I can say only that, if the fundamental intuition behind the originary hypothesis is correct, its application to the study of and comparison among the separate religions promises to raise the study of religion to a qualitatively new level.

    The sole example I can offer of my own research in this area is my very limited study of Mahayana Buddhism, presented in my talk at Nagoya in 2016 (the text is given in its entirety in Chronicles 515 and 516). In this paper, I pointed out that, in contrast to Zeno’s paradoxes, Nagarjuna’s paradoxical evacuation of propositional truth is an intellectual emptying of the scene of representation, analogous to the psychological practices of Buddhism and other “Eastern” religions (yoga, meditation, etc.), the common purpose of which is to emphasize the scene of representation itself at the expense of the central object around which it was originally constituted.

    Emptying the scene of its central object, or emphasizing its arbitrariness by focusing, as in meditation, on some arbitrary item, enables us to contemplate, or at least to conceive, the scene itself. This intuition of the peace of the empty scene is inversely symmetrical to the suffering unto death in the scene of the Crucifixion.

    Since the object in the center is in the first place a sacralization/sacrifice to the community, both alimentary and spiritual, earthly and transcendental, emptying the scene brings us closer to an intuition of bare transcendence “as  such.” We could not have the sacrifice, even Jesus’, without the scene—nor, on the other hand, the scene without its sacred/significant center.

    The two religious traditions each emphasize one of these two elements: in the West, our personal bond with the transcendental as “sons of God”; in the East, our ability to transcend worldly desire to grasp the divine emptiness—the space-time of deferral—within which alone a sacred being could appear. Whence the contrast we see today between the West’s self-destructive “humanism” that makes discipline of any kind, including punishment of criminals (“victims” of society), increasingly difficult, and China’s often brutal assertion of the priority of the common scene as the basis of the community over the “illusory” desires of its individual members.

    Needless to say, a far more inclusive analysis would be required to confirm and extend these suggestive conclusions. I offer this example as a preliminary model for other, more extensive research projects. Generative anthropology exists as an affirmation of the principle that only by hypothesizing an originary scenic configuration of language and religion, that is, of the specifically human as such, do we become able to substitute a plausible and intuitable configuration for the abstractions in which religion is habitually discussed.

    For it is one thing to talk of “love of God,” and another to situate this love as the transcendence of resentment in a specific originary context. Classical phenomenology attempts to find such configurations within the researcher’s own mind through introspection, but there is no substitute for positing them in the first place as objective external realities, which they must have been at some point in order for the human universe to get started. All the revelations and insights that have made humankind what it is today can be understood as dependent on this originary step beyond the social world of our prehuman ancestors.

  • The Great Awokening

    NB: I began this Chronicle before the recent rioting in the Capital and the CCP-like reactions it has provoked in the woke community. I will leave this subject for a later Chronicle, remarking only in passing the ominous signs of convergence of the two “world-systems.”

    As someone who lived through and even participated in the activities of the New Left during the 60s, when I was a member of SDS and its “senior” affiliate, the New University Conference (NUC), I am struck by the vast difference between that movement and “wokeness,” which, although it can hardly be called a movement in the traditional sense, has penetrated the society far more deeply than anything the New Left in its heyday would have dreamed possible.

    Wokeness is the apotheosis of the victimary thinking that has been gradually gaining strength over the past thirty years or so, beginning before the end of the Cold War. It has now reached the point where the House of Representatives has voted to eliminate “father” and “mother” from its vocabulary.

    Wokeness cannot easily be compared to any previous movement, either political or religious. Its mentality is as totalitarian as that of the Chinese Communist Party, and its ideas are disseminated ad nauseam on both social and mainstream media. People commonly speak of it as a “revolution” or the aggressive side of a “civil war.” Yet no one can identify its leadership. How many can even name the leaders of BLM? Let alone Antifa, which Democrats such as Biden get away with calling “an idea.” No one confronted by the Nazis or the Bolsheviks or the Chinese or Vietnamese communists would have had any trouble identifying not just a but the leader of these movements.

    Those who are in fact identified as spokespersons for the movement are quite different from Lenin, Mao, or Fidel. AOC’s prominence reflects not only her youth but her unimposing physical presence and, dare I say, her cuteness; similarly, Bernie Sanders’ now-fading popularity was that of an eccentric old man. It is no small matter that not one person in the prime of life with an impressive physical and/or oratorical presence can be found among those in any way associated with woke leadership. Nor did the recent Democratic primaries bring forth a single powerful personality—on the contrary, Biden was seemingly deliberately chosen for his senescent mediocrity.

    This is not meant to imply that the movement is unorganized. The activist groups do not lack management nor, what is surely of greater importance, “angels” who supply them with funds. The MSM never discuss such things, but all these people “demonstrating” day and night cannot live on nothing, nor supply themselves with hoods and black clothing and various kinds of weapons. The name of George Soros is often mentioned in this context, but he is not holding rallies, nor are the managers of the billion-dollar foundations and corporations that happily finance the activities of woke groups and enforce their moral precepts.

    The woke movement’s lack of strong leaders or theoreticians—or to put it another way, the pathetic level of its “critical” theorizing and the undistinguished nature of its leadership—is less a weakness than a strength.

    The movement’s acephalous state corresponds to the status of the human community that emerged from the hypothetical originary event, the very same originary egalitarianism to which previous revolutionary movements claimed to be seeking to return. Moral egalitarianism is identified with the “moral model” we all share intuitively, even if, in the Dark Ages before GA, we did not think to view it as a trace of the founding event of humanity.

    No doubt the possibility of such a movement is logistically enabled by the existence of the Internet and social media. For the activism associated with the woke movement is not oriented toward spectacular events so much as toward creating a cultural atmosphere in which its values are enforced.

    And it is particularly striking how little resistance it meets with. Although the movement is not just radically critical of many traditional values and customs, but demands major changes to them, in most cases its efforts have met with virtually no organized resistance. To mobs tearing down statues have responded scholarly commissions removing them. The Woodrow Wilson fellowship I received in 1960 will soon have another name. Although those who identify as woke are generally young, their elders offer little or no opposition to their efforts.

    There remain, even on university campuses, conservatives who disagree with woke ideas. But all understand tacitly that, however new and shocking, not to say ill-founded, they may appear, it is a settled matter that it is disagreement with them that will be stigmatized rather than the reverse. If a new taboo appears, it is obeyed almost without question by the personnel of most “socially responsible” institutions; resistance is often met with reprisals, and almost never with reversal.

    Woke behavior may appear coerced, yet there is no well-defined body exercising coercion. Its source is the principle, accepted without question, that “white” Western society is saturated with racism, the “privilege” of the white population over “people of color,” and the model for many other forms of ascriptive discrimination such as sexism, ableism, transphobia…

    The Awokening has no need for charismatic leaders, for its failure to encounter organized resistance reflects a quasi-consensus predisposed in its favor. And the events that spark new accesses of fervor are not meetings and speeches but random incidents selected to demonstrate the saturation of the American soul by racism.

    The George Floyd video, seen by millions, was near-unanimously accepted as proof of what most of its spectators were all too ready to believe: the persistence of murderous racism under the superficially race-neutral surface of American society and its forces of order.

    Instead, had anyone dared publicize a video featuring a black assaulting a white, under any conceivable circumstances, the mainstream reaction would have been that this too was an egregious example of racism: the deliberate choice of an image designed to reinforce white supremacy and hatred of blacks.

    The fact that the 2014 incident that gave BLM its start, that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, involved a black criminal rushing to attack the policeman who shot him in self-defense, as revealed at the trial by black witnesses in the neighborhood, had little or no effect either on the BLM organization or on the effectiveness of similar incidents. Conservatives such as Heather MacDonald who have pointed out not only that statistically such white-on-black police behavior was very rare, but that white criminals were more likely to be shot by police than blacks, have been ignored by all but their own limited audience. Even many conservatives have felt obliged not just to sympathize with George Floyd, but to condemn the officers in advance, describing their behavior as atrocious, horrific, murder…

    This reaction, which can be triggered by any exemplary incident, is dependent on the implicit acceptance of an a priori ethical norm denouncing the US, and Western civilization in general, as inherently a system of racial oppression. If “white” nations are better off than others, it is not a mark of moral superiority but the reverse. Western hegemony is not just guilty of “excesses”; it is to be condemned en bloc—without, however, ceasing to enjoy its benefits.

    What must be emphasized, as a prerequisite to the cynical exploitation of wokeness, is its undeniable moral power. The Awokening as a strategy for dealing with “white” firstness is experienced by most as a genuine revelation, a previously neglected self-evidence. It is as though the USA, and by extension the entire West, by the very fact of its evident historical superiority, not necessarily in native intelligence or talent, but in accomplishment, were wholly vulnerable to the accusation of “privilege.”

    What is most striking of all about this anomalous ethical situation is that its anomalousness is virtually invisible. In the small, if I get the highest grade in the class, people will congratulate me, and I will have modest boasting rights. Yet because “my” civilization has contributed a disproportionate share to world welfare, it is stigmatized and its historical conduct condemned in principle as granting those like myself an unfair privilege. Merely stating the fact that Western culture has provided virtually all the components of the modern world is sure to be taken as an assertion of “white supremacy.” The West’s moral imperfections are weighed neither against its positive contributions nor against the crimes of other peoples; the mere fact of dominance suffices to condemn the entire enterprise.

    Yet the key to wokeness’ triumph is that the Awokening is as if designed to allow us to enjoy the fruits of Western civilization, all the while vigorously denying its legitimacy. The important thing is to accept any opportunity to denounce our own and other “white privilege,” and above all never to defend it. In cases for which this opportunity is not given, we can afford to ignore it. Purchasing goods manufactured by, e.g., Chinese slave labor is no problem, for its connection with American merchandising is not publicized by the media.

    Wokeness appeals to what might be called our moral subconscious, a set of values we “awaken” to as though they were always there but had been repressed. Which GA explains very simply as corresponding to the moral model that first emerged in the originary scene of human language.

    The question, then, is not where the woke came from, but how had it been suppressed throughout history, save in isolated revolutionary outbreaks, and why it is only now capable of maintaining itself over a substantial period within a (still-) functioning social order.

    If morality regulates the relations between humans independently of any context other than the fundamental one of originary reciprocity, it is ethics that apply as soon as the other aspects of the context cannot be bracketed as inessential. It is here that we encounter the problems of social privilege, or firstness, and the necessity of mediating between them and originary moral equality.

    The ethical mediation between firstness and reciprocal morality had traditionally been the domain of religion. From an anthropological standpoint, bracketing claims of supernatural sources, the contents of the Bible and other reports of divine revelation can be understood as anthropological models. These models have traditionally served as foundational sources of ethical conduct, on the assumption that the human culture that has received a given revelation is worthy of perpetuation until such time as the divine will may decide to end it.

    But although religious revelations may be compared, often favorably, with the speculations of anthropologists, they must be either witnessed or received; they cannot be imposed through rational argument.

    The decline of religion in the West can be explained from many perspectives, but what appears to be the final blow is that given to it by digitization, and which is most simply explained as the impossibility, in a truly global world, of a single shared revelation. (The alternative in the global world to Western de-religioning is that chosen by Islam, which cannot rest until all humanity accepts its revelation. But although Islam might possibly blow up the world, it is most unlikely to convert it.)

    The Internet has created willy-nilly a world culture and a world-wide conversation. The old term “PC” is rarely heard anymore, but it is a trace of the origin of the woke in what can be seen as an extension of the exigency of politeness. In a private conversation, one is averse to saying anything that might offend any member of the party.

    But if the “party” is one attended by the entire population of the world…? At that point, it is no longer even necessary to say anything explicitly offensive to make some participants, as they say nowadays, “feel unsafe.” The mere unapologetic attendance of representatives of “white” Western civilization is a tacit offense to those peoples it formerly colonized or enslaved, and that, even today, it may dominate economically and politically.

    What wokeness attacks is the implicit privileging, detected beneath the surface of ostensibly neutral criteria of behavior, of the demographic at the origin of Western civilization, in a word, of Whiteness. This is experienced as a violation of fundamental moral equality that trumps any ethical distinctions. Whence the urgent need to address this moral deficiency before considering other matters—such as the scandalous differences in income and wealth the digital revolution has generated.

    Thus it becomes clear why virtually all of the wokeness revolution’s beneficiaries are glad to turn our attention from the material inequities formerly denounced by the Old Left to concentrate on that of “white privilege.” For this privilege can be presumed to be most egregiously flaunted, not by society’s enlightened elite, but by the benighted white middle class, clients of Olive Gardens and Holiday Inns (see https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/01/08/anderson-cooper–olive-garden-n2582808 ), oblivious to, or even secretly proud of their participation in the shameful heritage of racism that our millionaires and billionaires have at least the grace to regretfully acknowledge.

    The result of the Great Awokening is that, without any real self-consciousness as an organized movement, wokeness has gone forth from the campuses to become the effective social religion of the establishment.

  • Hope for the New Decade

    Just as the third millennium began in 2001, so the twenties of our century begin in 2021. However arbitrary these divisions, we should always welcome any opportunity to wipe the slate clean, to remind ourselves of the tautological emptiness of determinism.

    Looked at from what Voltaire called the point de vue de Sirius, there is surely no more problematic operation of the human psyche than the resentment that makes us deny the value of firstness to the human community. As a Jew, I am privileged to belong to the social group that has most painfully experienced this resentment, which confirms, for better or worse, its status as “the chosen people.” This is not a matter of vanity, but of anthropological realism.

    The great irony of our day is that the Christian world, which spread the chosenness of the Jews far beyond the boundaries of the twelve tribes, is today confronted with the same resentment from within. The word “white,” designating those of European origin, that is, the population of the Christian nations that survived the original onslaught of Islam (disregarding that Arabs, as well as Indians, are Caucasians and not racially distinct “people of color”), has acquired in “woke” circles the same connotations as “Jew” once had—which has not prevented a resurgence of antisemitism itself. The critique of colonialism and generally of the Western domination of the world over the past two centuries is a perfect example of how resentment of superiority effaces the moral value of firstness. Some even go so far as to deny the value of Western technology, advocating for “ecological” reasons a return to a pre-industrial “indigenous” lifestyle— presumably with no effect on our health and longevity or on the medical technology that sustains them.

    Arguments are made in opposition to such ecological fantasies, but the fundamental question of defending firstness as such is simply verboten. Clearly all humans enjoy demonstrations of firstness in such things as athletic contests or award ceremonies, but its most significant, cultural manifestations are dogmatically denied.

    The obvious fact that the entire world is dominated by institutions and technology created by Western civilization is treated as a badge of shame rather than the clearest possible proof of the superior “fitness” of this culture—including its concern for preserving the artifacts of earlier cultures, a concern largely unknown to these cultures themselves. Meanwhile, the everyday functioning of firstness as meritocracy is both taken for granted and denounced as the effect of “racial privilege.”

    Seeing history, particularly our own, as a morality play in which the winners are guilty by default has become the Western norm. The appeal of “wokeness” is a demonstration of the bankruptcy of ethical thought in our largely post-religious era, incapable of distinguishing any longer between God and Caesar.

    Once the originary human community defined itself by the deferral of instinct and the reciprocal exchange of signs of the sacred/significant, the resulting liberation of individual initiative was from the outset a potential source of conflict.  Nor is such conflict lacking in today’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies. The transcendence of resentment by communal love is temporary, not permanent; it must be constantly renewed, whence the universality of ritual, where firstness is identified with the sacred to which we must all submit.

    But when the Neolithic revolution gave birth to private property, surplus production, and inevitably to hierarchy, the survival of the human community required that social difference be affirmed rather than denied, and the sacred understood as consecrating it. We can only shake our heads at thinkers who interpret this consecration as a deception meant to persuade credulous individuals to subordinate themselves to a ruler governing for his own profit (see Chronicle 519). Whatever the motives of the members of ruling classes, their activities have been ultimately conducive to historical progress, and their violations of moral equality, however gratuitous, were from the standpoint of the community not ends but means.

    Although “might makes right” is usually enunciated as a condemnation, it is might, not right, that makes history. Competition among different societies has insured that victory would belong to the most efficient social institutions, which did not necessarily mean the most humane. But in the long run, one cannot disagree with Steven Pinker’s argument in The Better Angels of our Nature (Viking, 2011) that the human condition has steadily improved. History gives clear evidence of M. L. King’s famous assertion that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, not to speak of well-being. The very success of Christianity in liberating the intellectual and creative energies of the West has been due to its understanding—one that Islam, to its detriment, has never fully accepted—that the worldly kingdom cannot be identified with the heavenly, or in human terms, that ethics cannot be reduced to morality.

    The “death” of civilizations that Oswald Spengler and others (including “Spengler” aka David P. Goldman) speak of should not be understood as analogous to biological senescence. Most civilizations end when they are destroyed from without. But when we speak of those that crumble from within as “decadent,” what we are describing is the deadly effect of complacency due to lack of credible competition.

    As always, it is necessity, not free-spiritedness, that is the mother of invention. When there is no pressing need to improve the efficiency of the social order, it tends to diminish. Classical culture was not enough to defend the Roman Empire against illiterate Huns and Goths once it had lost the fighting edge it had had in Caesar’s or Trajan’s day.

    The analogy with our own times is clear.

    During the Cold War, Western society continued to measure itself against the USSR and its allies, and whatever internal problems it faced were put in perspective by the necessity of winning this competition. The classic example is the American space program, initiated in reaction to the first Sputnik flight in 1957, which produced the moon landing twelve years later.

    Yet the Cold War competition included significant “hot” conflicts, and the breakdown of our competitive spirit began in the 1960s with the Vietnam War, where, unlike WWII and even Korea, many young men, particularly on the campuses, could not be made to view this war as worthy of putting their lives on the line—as in retrospect it was not. Whence the New Left and the first stage of the radicalization of the Democratic Party.

    Yet the Democrats remained patriotic; their liberal 1972 presidential candidate, George McGovern, had been—like George H. W. Bush—a decorated pilot in WWII. The more radical elements of the New Left retreated into the background, many taking up academic careers.

    The West’s Cold War victory in 1989-91 appeared to consecrate the liberal-democratic-market system as the only one viable in advanced societies. The disappearance of serious threats to American and Western hegemony spurred a globalist vision of the entire world as a single market, in which all conflicts could be translated into the language of economic competition. In this perspective, admitting China to the WTO in 2001 (three months after 9/11) was a reasonable decision.

    But as we are becoming uncomfortably aware, the West, and particularly the US, faces today in China a geopolitical rival far more formidable than the asymmetric terrorism of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

    In this context, 2020’s Wuhan COVID virus has been a game-changer. It has focused universal attention on China’s quasi-deliberate use of the virus as a weapon and on its ambition to ascend to the hegemonic position occupied by the USA, as well as on its ruthless totalitarianism, including implementing industrial and academic espionage, strictly controlling the inflow and outflow of information, blackmailing Western enterprises into censuring criticism of its policies, cruelly repressing Uighurs and Hong Kong independentists, as well, increasingly, as Christianity and other religions. In 2020, China’s world “favorability rating” suffered a sharp decline (see the October 9 article https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/chinas-reputation-takes-a-well-deserved-global-hit).

    No one familiar with Dialectical Materialism should be surprised at my claim that this development encourages us to take a more optimistic perspective for the coming year and beyond.

    The Soviet Union under Stalin was economically cruder but just as cruel, if not as sinister, as the current Chinese regime. Yet during the Cold War era, the USSR provided the Western world with a competitor against which to measure ourselves. Indeed, had the Soviet economy come closer to living up to its “we will bury you” pretensions, the condition of quasi-permanent détente favored by many in the later years of the regime might have permitted a more productive result than the current gangster state that Russia has become.

    Today, China poses similar challenges. The illusion of friendly, or even dare I say frenemic marketplace competition with China is for the present no longer tenable. China must be seen at the very least as a potential enemy. It is a serious rival for world hegemony, with geopolitical ambitions that pose a real risk of military conflict, over Taiwan, for example.

    But once we recognize China as a serious rival that must be deterred from territorial aggression as well as from outstripping us in sensitive domains such as space militarization and artificial intelligence, we will be forced to recognize, as our younger generations (even including my own) have never been seriously forced to recognize, that moral equality is not ethics, that we must understand the American nation in the first place not as land stolen from autochthonous peoples and worked by black slaves to whom we should feel eternally guilty, but as our own living enterprise, one that we must in the first place protect lest it be destroyed by our enemies.

    College campuses have been for a very good reason the nerve center of American “wokeism.” It is a philosophy of adolescents—including adolescent casseurs financed by corporations whose administrators are, like those of the universities, happy to sponsor the fight for “social justice” if it is consonant with their bottom line.

    We can therefore be cautiously optimistic that once the American public comes to see the present era as a second Cold War to be reckoned with in every sphere: economic, scientific, military, and diplomatic, this infantile mentality, which can operate only under the aegis of an unchallenged hegemony, will dissipate. In a world in which we collectively fear the loss of our influence and freedom of action on the international stage, where we must be prepared to respond to challenges involving military force, childishness cannot be tolerated. If America is to survive, we must have faith that when push comes to shove, it is still much the same country as it was in 1941—one in fact quite a bit closer to “social justice.”

    In 1941 we didn’t really get serious until Pearl Harbor. Let us hope that the “Chinese Virus” will suffice to shock us out of our current narcissism. And we should thank China and its CCP for providing, after a generation of unwise geopolitical euphoria, a serious competitor that cannot but incite the American population, hopefully along with that of the other Western powers, to come together once again as the united community of the “free world.”

    The New Year is a time for hope. In 2021, let us put aside the victimary nonsense and strive for a reaffirmation of the ethical values that are the Judeo-Christian West’s greatest gift to humankind.

     

     

     

     

  • A Last Word

    As its name makes clear, Generative Anthropology is a science of beginnings, of January rather than December. Given its somewhat cynical watchword, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” it emphasizes not the wonder of language as a liberation of the mind but the necessity of its discovery in order that our increasingly mimetic species be able to survive.

    And as the previous Chronicle suggests, the same is true of religion. Müller saw it as a celebration of God’s handiwork; we understand it as an outlet for the resentments that would otherwise have destroyed us.

    This understanding of our beginnings allows us to understand as well the sense of impending doom that has always accompanied human progress. The apocalyptic element of religion is a direct reflection of its origin in deferral. God’s role in human lives is most fundamentally that of forestalling the tendency of mimetic desire to self-destruction. Our gratitude malgré tout for this gift of life encourages the believer to anticipate a Last Judgment where, after our temporary sojourn on Earth, the moral balance sheet of each individual is evaluated for eternity.

    But now that the prophecies of apocalypse have been given practical force by the invention of weapons powerful enough to eradicate the human species, they can no longer be dismissed as figments of the religious imagination. That we have so far been spared from self-destruction by the différance that has enabled our fuite en avant  is no guarantee that we can stay indefinitely ahead of our shadow. This new condition has initiated a qualitatively new stage of the historical process.

    In Chronicle 638 and a number of other recent Chronicles, I have tried to show that, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima capped the 20th century’s series of pre-apocalyptic events, “French Theory,” including not just post-structuralism but the writings of Girard (whose work deserves a more appropriate label than “mimetic theory”), constituted the most significant body of pre-post-metaphysical anthropological thinking, and that Generative Anthropology, as the synthesis and heir to these twin tendencies, is potentially the most significant thought of our times.

    But if significance is ultimately equivalent to sacrality, both are grounded, not in some abstract criterion of knowledge, but in the capacity to save humanity from itself. To claim supreme significance for an idea is to claim that it is the most able to defer our species’ potential for self-destruction.

    The religious attitude, however we evaluate the specific revelations brought forth by the different religions, attributes to divine will the deferral of self-destruction that GA finds in the discovery of the sign and its consequences. In either case, the course of human history must be explained as a series of adaptations that, whatever their material benefits—longer life, freedom from pain, richer set of experiences…—have as their underlying purpose to defer the danger of mutual self-destruction.

    In the last analysis, it is the possibility of “salvation,” for the human community if not for the individuals that compose it, that permits the faithful to understand the sacred as worthy of love rather than of the resentful respect offered it by Achilles (see Chronicle 681). Achilles’ attitude is that of worldly common sense, whereas the Judeo-Christian love of God depends on our willingness to respond to the gift of life with our own gift of faith.

    The Christian West has thrived on the basis of this faith. The hope that we can defer our retribution until the Last Judgment enriches the circulation of credit that began with Mauss’s don with additional degrees of freedom, and was instrumental in the West’s primacy in the development of a bourgeois economy. Similarly, its liberal-democratic political system is an expression of faith in the power of community’s best interest to bring together the diverse interests of its members in a single will: e pluribus unum.

    Both branches of French Theory were focused on victims.

    The post-structuralist critique of metaphysics saw language not as a neutral tool, but as in the first place an instrument of oppression, granting to a human occupant of the scenic center the power to impose his “presence” and thereby his power. Derrida’s powerful notion of deferral/différance was not intended as an analysis of the Sartrean pour-soi, but rather as a deconstruction of this “presence,” denounced for its illusory absence of deferral.

    Girard’s own originary hypothesis is based on the identification of the scapegoat/sacrificial victim with Christ. But his postwar pessimism was grounded in his judgment that Nazism had “demoralized” the Christian West’s concern for victims, making it “caricatural” (See Chronicle 427). The course of Western history since he wrote those lines in 1999 has only confirmed his insight.

    The souci des victimes stems from Christianity’s deepest intuition, that the human self and its culture is the product of the shared resentment of the sacred that culminated in the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. This resentment had previously been the only means of generating the necessary love for one’s fellow man, to be superseded by faith in the Father who was willing to sacrifice his own Son.

    If this faith has now been corrupted, what hope remains for the continued reign of Christianity in the West, even in “secularized” form? How is our culture to be cleansed of the victimary excesses that have reached the point of not only grading examinations on the basis of race, but of justifying looting and burglary? Or does even these remain venial sins in comparison to the monolithic cruelty of Chinese communism?

    This is the fundamental political question of our times.

    Communism, Marxism, socialism, or whatever else it may be called, is a Western, that is, fundamentally a Judeo-Christian ideology. Its very critique of religion is merely a modification of it. Marx’s utopian vision of communism, where everyone follows his own inclinations and the energies of all, in the absence of any kind of coercion, blend harmoniously in a thriving economy, depends on a quasi-cybernetic, “materialist” version of the One God who, finally fully satisfied with his creation, has retreated to the 18th century role of the craftsman who needs only set the world in motion, his anticipatory wisdom sufficing to maintain the harmony of the whole. However cynically deferred, the “withering away of the state” remains defined as the blissful fulfillment of communism.

    China’s adoption of Western communism is of course not independent of its status as the world’s longest-enduring empire. But the two dominant political forces of the day (with Islam as a “third force” that continues to threaten the West while being straightforwardly oppressed in China) are most simply understood as two offshoots of Judeo-Christianity, the victimary liberalism of the West and the totalitarian communism of the East.

    From a nationalist perspective, the backwardness of China, exacerbated by Mao’s economically illiterate schemes, provided a great opportunity for the reasonably effective market policies introduced by Deng, which Xi has built on to great effect. In contrast, the West, after winning the Cold War, has been distracted by the horror of 9/11 into focusing, mostly ineffectively, on the Middle East. As a result, the “end of history” in 1989-91 has now been followed by its resurrection, with “Xi Jinping Thought” defining a second round of the contest between capitalism and socialism.

    The tension between God and Caesar, the transcendental and the worldly, which permitted the West to evolve a market economy, science, and technology, has in the digital era morphed into a tension between the global market, which transcends national and cultural boundaries, and the nation-state, loyalty to which in Western countries is increasingly contested by “critical” race and gender theories that condemn the West’s “imperialism” and deny any virtue to national patriotism.

    The upshot of this development is that, curiously enough, the Western elites have come to implement the same resentment against “white” Western culture that motivates Chinese nationalism. Throughout the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, China’s experience of Western domination provided a historical basis for this resentment. Whereas today’s globalist Western elite, no longer loyal to their specific nations but seeking worldwide markets for their (increasingly digital) products, view anti-“white” ideology both as a marketing tool and as an opportunity for virtue-signaling that by denouncing their racial privilege, guarantees their economic advantage. In particular, given the size of the Chinese market, many international corporations, notably in the entertainment industry, censure any hint of dissatisfaction with Chinese human-rights violations in Hong Kong or elsewhere.

    In an era when the West’s world domination was not yet contested, John Rawls’ 1971 Theory of Justice was the most lucid exposition of its postwar ethic before the victimary distortions of woke politics. Rejecting Caiaphas’ “it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people” (John 11:50), this theory takes its fundamental criterion from the secularized Christian idea that the freedom of a society can be measured only by the status of the “least advantaged” within it.

    This goal remained abstract in the days of Rawls, but it nourished a victimary mindset that has come to fruition in the digital era. By a curious irony, the West’s victimary narrative, reinforced by images from cell-phone cameras, has engendered a “surveillance society” parallel to that of China, but inversely related to the central power. While Chinese surveillance functions to enforce the police power of the central government, our own version, directed at delegitimizing the police and social authority in general as oppressors of society’s victims, condemns the systemic injustice of Western civilization on the basis of selected videos.

    There is no doubt in which of the two societies most of us would rather live, and the very existence of a “counter-culture” is a sign of freedom sorely lacking in a totalitarian state. But no civilization can survive in which concern for its purported victims comes to outweigh concern for the civilization itself. The passion for moral equality cannot overcome the respect for firstness.

  • The Anthropological Idea of God, Revisited

    In 1988, I gave a talk at the University of Washington entitled “The Anthropological Idea of God,” in which I defined this “idea” as the subsistent center of the scene of representation, the point being that after the animal that had been at the center of the scene was divided among the participants, all that would be left as a “subsistent” signified of the originary sign would be this center, not as a physical locus, but the remembered center of the scene that is both a locus of public interaction and the field of attention of the individual pour-soi, separated by the néant from its objects.

    This was a decent first step. But an empty locus is nonetheless a geometrical rather than a spiritual conception. Thirty-odd years later, I think the following comes closer to my original goal.

    The previous Chronicle ended with: “Every religion affirms, each in its way, that the sacred and the significant are one. With GA, this affirmation becomes as well the basis of secular anthropology.”

    When religions make this affirmation, they can take for granted that the sacred is knowable through their practices of worship. To equate it to the significant is but to reiterate the universal religious message that the sacred being or essence that they worship is the source of all things significant to us, whether in an everyday or a linguistic sense.

    GA can define the sacred only in terms of human behavior. The originary hypothesis conceives both the sacred and the significant in the context of the originary scene of language.

    The central object of the scene, which we assume to be the cadaver of a large animal that must be divided among the members of a hunting group and their families, is a crucial element of nourishment, hence the object of all appetites, yet given the prior failure of Alpha-Beta serial distribution, all the members of the group fear to access the animal, and their appropriative gestures toward it are aborted.

    But one or more of the members come to interpret the aborted gesture as a sign pointing to both the interdiction of the object for them as individuals and its continued importance for the group. The other participants, realizing the value of this interpretation, come to repeat the sign in order to give assurance of their deferral of such gestures and their mutual recognition as equal participants in the scene.

    Once the entire group has achieved this state of peaceful symmetry, they can approach the animal in unison, and the scene concludes with its roughly equal peaceful division among the participants. The success of this operation leads to the repetition and elaboration of its scenic configuration, and ultimately, to human culture as we know it.

    The source of the universal human conception of a sacred being is understandable only if we include in our hypothesis that the human group does not repeat the scene merely as a result of its success, on the understanding that this egalitarian distribution system is ultimately less dangerous than the former serial hierarchy. The internalization of the scene in the individual members of the group, in conjunction with the recalled originary sign, leads the group with seeming necessity to conceive the sign and the deferral of instinctive action that it embodies not simply as a useful human invention, but as imposed by a sacred being whose existence precedes and dominates that of the newly emerged human sign-users.

    Our progress toward the confluence of religion and anthropology, of God-creates-Man and Man-creates-God, requires that we explain this necessity as a feature of the originary event.

    In the mid-19th century, Max Müller speculated that the referent of the first word was the sun. He claimed that a name for the sun was “wanted” because of its prominence in the imagination of a “first” human “awakened” by sunlight—without thinking that a newly-emerged human would experience the sun no differently than the proto-human ape he had been before his humanizing experience (see Chronicle 192). Similarly, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey, the presumed “first men” worship a monolith, which embodies like Müller’s sun, albeit on a smaller scale, the ideas of permanence and power. Whatever its naivete, this reasoning provides at the very least a justification for our conception of (a) god as both essentially permanent/immortal and possessing great power.

    In our hypothesis the object of the originary sign is rather a dead animal, one not contemplated in awe by a solitary proto-human, but in the center of a scene surrounded by a group, by whom it will at the conclusion of a sequence of events be divided up. After the scene ends and the cadaver has been parceled out, the sign will remain in the memory of the scene’s participants, not simply as an external object like the cadaver, but as a behavior that they remain free to perform.

    The originary sign is an ostensive; it designates, points to, the animal, as its referent. But whereas the sun or the monolith are presumably unaffected by signs of worship and conceived as timeless, our hypothetical scene must lead to the consumption, that is, the disappearance, of the original referent.

    What then, in the absence of the dead animal, does the sign, as signifier, signify? What, in a word, is its signified?

    To answer this question, we must put ourselves in the place of creatures who had never previously to deal with a “signified.” As animals, their signals, even if quasi-voluntary, did not mean, but simply signaled, as tears signal distress, or blushing, embarrassment—or “ouch,” which is hardly a primal cry, nonetheless signals a sudden pain. How does the first sign, a product of deferral, continue to mean?

    The sign is a conscious means of indicating the emitter’s deferral of his appropriative intention toward the object. In our hypothesis, the very notion of intention is born in this act, since previously, aborted acts were not acts of conscious deferral, but the results of what Pavlov called “conditioned reflexes,” one variety of which would inhibit actions whose performance had previously had negative consequences.

    The key to the originary idea of the sacred being is the experience of a contrary will. That the gesture of appropriation had come to be intentionally aborted by the entire group, and subsequently intended as a sign of the renouncement of appropriation, demonstrates the oppositional nature of the originary sacred that the participants experience as interdicting their original intention to satisfy their appetites. That is, the sacred interdiction that protects the object at the outset of the scene is experienced as a hostile intention, one that arouses what I have called originary resentment (see Chronicle 333).

    Yet it is this original hostility that permits the sharing of the animal in the concluding feast, resolving the problem posed by the breakdown of the Alpha-Beta system of distribution. The imposition of this apparently hostile will results in general satisfaction. Whether a given member of the group feels cheated or benefited by the scene is indeterminable—the former Alpha may not appreciate finding himself on a par with the others—but the overall success of the operation, biological as well as psychological, is not in doubt.

    Thus the sacred is first experienced as an apparently hostile will that cannot be opposed, one that emanates from no worldly source, such as the Alpha animal in opposition to his fellows. The only “embodiment” of this will is as the signified of the originary sign, which in turn is the originary source of our conception of a sacred being or divinity. The participants may not “love” the being that has thus operated upon them, but they must recognize, and preserve by their future actions, the collective value of its benefits.

    Hence, at the origin, the sacred is not an object of gratuitous adoration, just as the significant is not the basis of a utilitarian means of communication (“the food is over the hill”). Nor is the sign in its origin an expression of joy, even if it may acquire this affect in the aftermath of the feast. Its original performance is imposed on us by the sacred force of the scene, independently of its immanent or transcendental origin.

    To the extent that we experience the sacred interdiction as enspirited in an alien will, we may agree that the godly essence revealed here is, in Girard’s sense, the scapegoat for our own mimetic rivalry, which prevented us from equably distributing the meat from the animal in its absence. The hostility behind the violence that proto-humans had in the past visited on each other with the breakdown of the serial system does not simply disappear. It is converted into originary resentment against God, in the knowledge, however frustrating, that God is invulnerable to our resentment, and that his will must be obeyed. It is in this sense, rather than in literally immolating a human victim, that the originary sacrifice anticipates the Crucifixion.

    The Abrahamic religions, and most particularly, Christianity, emphasize God’s love for his people and insist on our duty to love him in return. But the reciprocal love of God and man was not typical of the religions of the past.

    The last book of the Iliad contains a classic expression of the ancient understanding of the gods. In the poem’s climactic scene, Achilles, touched with sympathy, addresses Priam, whose son Hector he has killed, and whose body he is releasing to him for burial:

    ὡς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσι
    ζώειν ἀχνυμένοις: αὐτοὶ δέ τ’ ἀκηδέες εἰσί. (24:525-26)

    Thus the gods have spun the thread of fate for wretched mortals: we live in sorrow, while they are free from care.

    This is, as far as our anthropological reasoning can take us, the origin of our notion of the divinity. It allows us to incorporate Girard’s understanding of Christianity as anthropologically revelatory. His affirmation that the “gods of violence” are false because it is man that is the source of violence and resentment is a giant step toward the unification of religion and anthropology.

    Whether the originary conception of God reflected the inchoate awareness of a divine being or was an imaginary extrapolation from the original humans’ experience of a contrary will embodied in the human collective itself, the origin of the sign and of human culture cannot be understood in the absence of the phenomenon of the sacred.

  • The GA Future

    Faintly detectable signs suggest to me that perhaps the time is coming in which GA can play a significant role in the world’s intellectual life.

    As I have pointed out in a few recent Chronicles, GA, which emerged as French Theory was reaching its end, brings together the key ideas of Girard and Derrida, the principal representatives of the movement’s dichotomous currents. GA develops Girard’s anthropological insights while rectifying his limited concern with language; it puts aside the facile left-wing politics that helped make Derrida a “rock star” while deforming the real importance of his thought.

    Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, having put together a synthesis that effectively resolves the contradictions between its two components and emerges with a hypothesis relevant to every aspect of human culture, GA found itself without a base of support in an intellectual world that could find no use for it in the fundamental sense of enhancing the careers of those who might adopt it. Empirical scientists view GA as speculation without proof. And in today’s academy, aside from purely fact-based activities such as manuscript editing or bibliography, the humanities are dominated by defenders of victimary identities whose sole scholarly interest is in demonstrating the historical depths of their victimhood.

    Throughout these years, my faith in the significance of GA has never waned, but my hope that it might be adopted as a new source of human self-understanding, narrowing the gap between the religious and the metaphysical, God-creates-man and man-creates-God, has not had much earthly nourishment.

    No doubt the mere fact that Anthropoetics has kept going for over 25 years, and our annual meetings for 13+—we had to take this year off, but if we can’t have a live conference in 2021 we’ll do it on Zoom rather than not at all—is a sign that GA is more than a flash in the pan. That our group has largely held together all this time despite its academic near-invisibility is a clear sign that GA’s central idea is one that, once understood, is difficult to turn one’s back on.

    Necessity being the mother of invention, our current political turmoil may well prove as productive of real progress as similar “mimetic crises” have been in the past. If GA’s “new way of thinking” was unpalatable in the aftermath of victory in the Cold War, today the West should welcome its synthesis of the rational and the transcendental as an affirmation of its own ultimate strength.

    The originary hypothesis is not anti-scientific. Yet neither is it comparable to the kind of hypotheses that are taken seriously in the sciences, including the human sciences. A hypothesis, whether in physics or sociology, is only of value if it can be tested empirically. A purely heuristic schema that purports to model the early development of language is not testable/falsifiable in any conceivable manner. Paleontology cannot detect the traces of the acts it postulates, let alone the historical developments that might have led from ostensive to imperative and declarative utterances. Nor is it plausible that a simulation might be devised using either humans or AI “bots” to test the validity of its assertions. Yet these limitations do not mean that the theory is “meaningless,” nor that its application cannot lead to practical results.

    As I pointed out from the very beginning in The Origin of Language (1981), the fact that we have no way of empirically testing these hypotheses should not oblige us to wait until the Last Judgment to, very simply, have a hypothesis of how language and culture began. Similarly, GA’s theory of originary morality may not be “testable,” but it is both grounded in its founding hypothesis and altogether compatible with our thinking about moral questions throughout the ages.

    I have shown in recent Chronicles that the originary hypothesis provides an anthropological basis for the recent phenomenon of “wokeness,” and even explains why this metaphoric term is used. Such thinking is vastly inferior to Marxism, yet the Marxist idea of “raising the consciousness of the proletariat” does not have the revelatory ring of “woke.”

    Nor it is useful merely to claim that such language is closer to religion than to rational thought. GA explains it all very simply: we “wake up” to this primitive egalitarian morality because it is our originary morality, as close to an “instinct” as any cultural phenomenon. Hence there is a genuine “awokening” here, even if its implementation be translated in modern terms into racial/gender preferences.

    This explanation is not a simple debunking, but a derivation that allows one to point out to the “woke” that the truth of their originary intuition does not cancel the fact that society has advanced since its origin, nor that quota systems emphasize human difference rather than transcending it—transcendence being the one domain that the “woke,” along with a large portion of the rest of our society, given the poverty of civilized religion in our era, have little chance to encounter.

    We can begin to see from this small example the virtues of a non-religious understanding of transcendence, one that does not declare that “God is not good,” but puts the “supernatural” in brackets while seeking to explain the transcendental elements of human culture from within. GA distinguishes the human/semiotic/cultural realm from all else in the universe by its transcendental relationship to its objects.

    I have often referred to Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of the pour-soi as a preliminary version of the individual scene of representation. Sartre, as befits the great philosophical tradition, made no attempt to derive the human pour-soi from a pre-human state. Whereas the core idea of GA, even before discussing language, is to show that the human pour-soi is characterized by what Derrida in a context only superficially different would call la différance, the deferring-of… What is deferred is something that Derrida himself refused to understand in anthropological or biological terms. It is simply the instinctive/reflexive action of an animal which, even when it involves “thinking,” is connected to no communal scene of representation. To think with signs is altogether different from “thinking” by consulting memory-traces; signs belong to the community as well as to the individual subject.

    At the birth of metaphysics, Plato conceived the Ideas of language simply as emanations of Being, which Hegel would derive at the “end of history” from “Being” itself. Since the Enlightenment, thinkers have sought the sources of human ideas in the depths of the psyche as well as in collective scenes such as Freud’s father-murder in Totem and Taboo. But the fact is that neither before nor since the elaboration of the theory of biological evolution has either philosophy or social science offered a cogent theory of the origin of either the human pour-soi or human language. The originary hypothesis is the first such theory to be both minimal and plausible.

    I have called GA a “humanistic anthropology,” a formulation that has the disadvantage of suggesting that these two terms can only remain standing by leaning against each other. But the more pertinent point is that the absence of a single term combining both elements reflects the failure of scientific hypotheses about the human to explain the emergence and persistence of the characteristic quality of the “humanities,” the simplest name for which is transcendence.

    Transcendence is an ambiguous term; it fails to distinguish between religious revelation and human innovation, between God-creates-man and man-creates-God. Metaphysics’ faith in the transcendentality of language long allowed philosophers to bracket this distinction. Since Hegel, Western thought has grappled with the need to liberate the human from what Nietzsche called the “constraint of language (sprachichen Zwange),” that is, to go beyond metaphysics to explain the transcendental in anthropological terms. Yet this has been attempted without seeking the key to this liberation in the worldly emergence of language itself. And this can be explained by the fact that metaphysics’ faith in the independent substantiality of propositional language has always remained implicit. It is only by defining metaphysics itself in anthropological terms, by its denial of originary, pre-propositional language as emergent from a prelinguistic state, that we make its overcoming possible.

    The most recent attempt to name the “humanistic,” anti-metaphysical constituent that liberates the human pour-soi from the Laplacian rigor of a future wholly determined by the past was that of Derrida. Derrida had various “non-conceptual” names for this element, the best-known being deconstruction, and the most useful, différance, where the “a” in place of the usual “e” indicates that this is no longer an Idea in the metaphysical sense, while introducing the “deconstructive” element of change by inventing a gerundive form of différer, which means to defer as well as to differ.

    The term deconstruction was deliberately nihilistic. It corresponded to Derrida’s cliché-Left politics, such as supporting Philadelphia cop-killer Abu Mumia-Jamal. But what is really being deconstructed is declarative, propositional language, the language of philosophy—that is, metaphysics.

    The originary hypothesis allows us, for the first time, to define, or better put, delimit metaphysics by its failure to connect language with its pre-linguistic past. Propositional language is not originary language. Unconcerned with reconstructing the origin of language, post-metaphysical philosophers accuse propositional language, so to speak, of pretending to be originary. But the poor declarative sentence is not to blame. Its historical existence doesn’t prevent anyone from realizing that it cannot possibly have been the originary form of language.

    The origin of metaphysics as a way of thinking goes back to Parmenides’ “way of truth,” which equates “truth” as a quality of propositions, declarative sentences, with a “metaphysical” quality of goodness, value, or moral worth. Philosophers to this day refer to “truth” in this way, and it tends to be assimilated to all other kinds of positive value, such as loyalty, honesty, etc.

    But “truth” is simply a quality of declarative sentences. The reason we make such a fuss about it is that, in the normal course of events, we like to be able to assume that when someone enunciates a proposition, he is doing so to convey “true” information, rather than either lying or, to use Harry Frankfurt’s term, BSing. This has nothing to do with the nature of declarative sentences, but only with the way they are normally used; the ethical element is in the speech act and not inherent in “truth” itself.

    In any case, the only useful way to get beyond this fetishism of “truth” is by tracing the declarative sentence back to its roots. But if we want to get back to the root of why making true statements is generally considered ethically valid—although not, pace Kant, when an SS man asks you whether there is a Jew in your basement—we have to understand the original purpose of language.

    The purpose of the first utterance cannot have been to make true statements, that is, to convey information, but to avert violence. And to this purpose, this originary utterance, which we envisage essentially as a pointing, implicitly tells the greatest lie of all, which is nonetheless a transcendental truth: that there is only one significant thing in the universe, and it is this.

    These are not merely academic questions. The thinkers who sought to transcend metaphysics, from Feuerbach and Marx to Girard and Derrida, were in different ways attempting to promote human freedom. As the example of Marx and his followers shows, the political implementation of these attempts was often massively counter-productive. This should impress on us the seriousness of getting the transcendence right.

    Given that liberal democracy is still, sauf preuve du contraire, the most advanced, and surely the most freedom-promoting form of government, it makes sense to look to the current crisis of liberal democracy for an answer. Why, at this moment of crisis, have the two branches of French Theory, each in its own way, become irrelevant?

    Deconstruction is superficially compatible with the Left; its nihilistic language suggests a preference for anarchy. If indeed language itself, assimilated to metaphysics and the world of Ideas as originally formulated in fifth and fourth century Athens, is essentially a deceptive construction intended to make the arbitrary power of a political leader appear as a “natural” emanation of revealed truth, then there is no way to “reform” it. One can only deconstruct it, which is to say, use it to “criticize itself,” but in a way more radical than Kant’s “critical” philosophy, which ultimately retains confidence in language as a vehicle of truth.

    Nihilism can function only in a destructive context, in rejecting the idées reçues of the self-styled rational society it would tear down. Contemporary victimary politics implements deconstruction, albeit without using the term, not by critiquing the internal inconsistencies of traditional discourse, but by denouncing its whiteness, its failure to take into account its substrate of victimary oppression, presumably demonstrated by its race/gender non-representivity. Whence the unconsciously ironic use of the term critical (race, gender…) theory in the woke sense of subjecting all affirmations to “criticism” if their sources lack identitary equality.

    In contrast to the anti-metaphysicians, René Girard looked for human truth in the cultural texts of literature and ultimately, religion. His original insight was that the bourgeois world, where the inertia of predominantly agricultural economies was giving way to the dynamism of the “capitalist” market, made problematic the individual’s search for models of behavior. It was no longer possible simply to do as one’s father and grandfather had done. What we call adolescence and its problems were created by the early modern age.

    In Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961), Girard saw the Bildungsroman as the locus of the young person’s mediation by models, at first “external,” like Amadis for Quixote or Napoleon for Julian Sorel, but with the intensification of the market-model, increasingly internal to the protagonist’s own society, leading to the mimetic extremes Girard finds in Proust and Dostoevsky. The solution offered is that indicated in the book’s epigraph by Max Scheler: Man has either a God or an idol, meaning that the only salvation comes from rejecting our worldly idols and, like Alyosha Karamazov, making Christ our mediator.

    But this implicit Christian message, later made explicit in a series of major works beginning with Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978), is not what has fueled most of the popular interest in Girard. It is rather the polemic value of his apparent “above the fray” stance toward mimetic desire, which he never renounces in his expository texts, even as he specifically denounces it, for example in his discussion of Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme (“Perilous Balance: A Comic Hypothesis”, MLN 87:7, Dec., 1972), where the maître de philosophie mocks the other maîtres as narrow specialists without recognizing them as his mirror images. In particular, the notion of the scapegoat, too rapidly generalized from the example of Jesus on the Cross, can be applied all too easily to the “victims” designated by the “woke” contingent. Girard’s own warning in Je vois Satan tomber comme un éclair (1999) about Hitler finding his revenge in the postwar degradation of the souci des victimes (see, e.g., Chronicle 637) is generally ignored.

    But this does not mean the final defeat of French Theory. It merely suggests that its two components, both productive in their time—although Girard never attained the fame of Derrida in his heyday, I would venture to say that he remains the more widely read and appreciated today—can no longer survive as separate modes of thought.

    GA brings together in our post-Enlightenment era the insights of religion and those of metaphysics, not as either theology or the sociology of religion has done, let alone in producing their ultimate Hegelian “synthesis,” but in offering to both a common originary terrain on which they can share their insights.

    Today, religion needs such a theory to be able to maintain the validity of its revelations in the face of widespread skepticism and indifference. Clearly the biblical creation story, with its insights into the human condition, cannot be taken literally. But if it is indeed an allegory of Man’s emergence from the animal condition, where is the anthropological theory that can translate these insights into earthly terms without trivializing them?

    In its attempt at a minimal reconstruction of a scene of hominization, GA is not without roots in the Western intellectual tradition. I observed some years ago (“The Sacred and the Social: Defining Durkheim’s Anthropological Legacy,” Anthropoetics 6:1, Spring/Summer 2000) that Girard was Durkheim’s most important heir, for attempting to show not just how religion helps maintain the “solidarity” that holds societies together, but how this arrangement may have begun in the first place. Setting aside Freud’s sexual emphasis in Totem and Taboo, Girard finds a minimal originary hypothesis in the mimetic crisis and the control of violence through sacrifice.

    But what remains lacking in this scenario is what specifically makes us human—in the first place, language. The Crucifixion is not a model of human origin, but, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the revelation of its ultimate explanation. It is GA’s originary hypothesis that explains what kind of “sacrifice” might have given rise to language, as well as to the “woke” morality of universal reciprocal exchange.

    Every religion affirms, each in its way, that the sacred and the significant are one. With GA, this affirmation becomes as well the basis of secular anthropology.

  • Bear Theory III — Bear Theology

    In my previous discussion in Chronicle 654, I tried to show that our relationship to bears (understood as stuffed animals of any species) allows us to understand, and in a way to participate in, the relationship—which even the believer cannot claim to be empirically present outside his scene of representation—of God to Man.

    That is, the ontological otherness that allows God to create Man as a being “in his image,” whose transcendental persona (his “immortal soul”) is the product of God’s action and persists only through his loving will, is paralleled by my personation of a stuffed animal that I may find, for example, in a pile of similar creatures in a department store. I pick one to be “my” bear, and he acquires a name and above all, a claim as a “person” on my love.

    I do not hesitate to speak of love, although needless to say one loves a bear somewhat less profoundly than another human. Stacey and I will never forget a couple of bears that were lost over the years for one reason or another, and our regret is surely less painful but of a similar nature to regret for a lost child—someone who depended on you but whom you were unable to protect.

    The key difference is that our emotions concerning a bear are wholly internal to our family. A child, even if our own, is a member of the human community with enforceable rights to care and protection. Even a dog has such rights. Whereas our moral failings toward bears remain entirely our own responsibility. Which is to say that our love for bears is truly gratuitous and unforced, as we can imagine is God’s love for us.

    After the previous Chronicle, in which, following Pierre Whalon’s theology of marriage, I noted the capacity of the Trinity, as the Christian configuration of God in his relation to/within himself, which also governs his relation to his creatures, to help us to understand and value human love, I thought about the Trinity’s possible application to human love for a bear.

    The Trinity’s paradoxical inclusion of the human within the divine, not as a mere creation, but as an internally related person, is arguably the ultimate degree of articulation of the anthropological within a religious framework. This use of the Trinitarian model seeks to understand the relationships among humans singly and as a community, including language and the semiotic apparatus of cultural phenomena, as not merely phenomena taking place under God’s benevolent supervision, but as derived from aspects of God’s “image” in which we are created.

    Which is also to say, independently of any religious belief, that the internal relations of the Trinity are mirrored in human relationships, or in other terms, that they can so to speak be tested for their adequacy, not simply in modeling these relationships, but in pointing the way to their optimal configuration. For whether this configuration is the result of God’s will or, conversely, our conception of God’s will is a reflection of our efforts to attain the clearest possible ethical intuition, the intuitive effort at articulation is the same.

    And to add one more point: the Trinity, unlike the Creation or the Crucifixion, is not found in the Biblical text; it is an extrapolation from it, one that not all Christians accept. Its formulation allows us to understand that, if not empirical social scientists, then certainly humanist (generative) anthropologists are seeking the same thing as religious thinkers: defining the place of the human community and its members in the universe.

    Although I have all my life had a certain liking for bears, their active participation in my life began with my marriage to Stacey, who had with her a small family of bears with which she “communed,” and into which family I was admitted. Over the twenty-plus years of our marriage, we have accumulated dozens of additional bears, almost all of whom have names and “personalities.” And even those who do not, merit a smile or a pet when we pass by, as “persons” of potentially equal value, but with whom we are simply less well acquainted.

    The presence of another, particularly a spouse, provides what might otherwise be lacking in one’s relationship to a bear, the possibility of dialogue. One can no doubt talk to a bear, and even reply in its name, but to do this by oneself is not a satisfying experience. An invented dialogue with a bear is almost invariably a performance that needs an audience to be effective.

    As it happens, Stacey is much more at ease playing the role of a bear than I am, perhaps because her involvement with them began at an earlier age. But in any case, most of our conversations with/about bears do not involve such performances, but rather discussions of what they would say or do in particular circumstances on the basis of their past “history,” to which a new explanatory incident might be added; we imagine how they might individually and collectively judge our past or prospective actions. Such conversations may help us to make our own decisions, but in any case they are pleasurable in themselves, embodying as they do the circulation of love within our “family.”

    Once one has decided to bestow on a bear a name and a personality, one no longer thematizes this “gift,” but takes the bear’s independent persona as an object of affection. I cannot help but understand this as a valuable parallel to what a believer in God understands as their relationship, and to use it as a model for what I might not otherwise intuit so clearly. I discussed this to some extent in Chronicles 470 and 654, but in the present context it deserves further analysis.

    It is in fact paradoxical to say that God’s creation of Man provides a parallel to our personation of a bear. We have no direct evidence of God’s activity other than reports of religious revelation, whereas we do have direct experience dealing with bears. Hence we should rather say that our notion of God creating Man is something we can try to understand by grasping what goes on in personating a bear. This is a casual rather than a dramatic process, and certainly involves no “ceremony,” although naming the bear differentiates it from a bear-in-general that one might give a pat en passant.

    As human subjects, gifted with language and human (self-)consciousness, we find it natural to treat objects in our world, even many that unlike bears were not especially designed to be personated, as persons having a will—which is not the same as “instinct.” We begin to personify a machine, not when it simply does something, but when it seems to want to do something (usually the opposite of what we want). But the machine’s actions, actual or potential, exist prior to the personation—although we can give our car a name before driving it, we know in advance what the car will be “doing.”

    A bear, in contrast, need not “do” anything. As I wrote in one of my better lines of poetry:

    Bears are the stares of pairs of eyes

    Although one can have a bear without visible eyes, one cannot deny that it is primarily in looking into its eyes that one relates to it as a person. Obviously God would not have to be “triggered” in this way, although in the Genesis account, he would have had plenty of examples of “pairs of eyes” before getting to Man.

    The personating effect of looking into an Other pair of eyes, real or fabricated, has been discussed by phenomenological thinkers such as Buber and Levinas, but in the sense of recognition rather than creation. I recognize you in your regard. But the bear’s regard is something I recognize as well, while fully aware that I have freely determined to honor its figuration of a look with the stamp of reality.

    This effect is particularly obvious when choosing a bear among others, in a store, for example. The experience of choosing a bear is, in a lighter vein, like adopting a child from an orphanage. To adopt a bear is at the very least to accept it as having a regard. Stacey and I were at Marks and Spencer in Paris in 2000 or so when we came upon a display of several dozen hedgehogs. After looking at a few, we chose our own—the most beautiful, of course—our mascot Henri, who has accompanied me to every GASC conference.

    No doubt we really are persons, and bears are not in the normal sense; but there is no need to choose between claiming that God’s creation is a reality that we imitate with our human limitations in personating a bear and claiming, conversely, that our ability to attribute personhood, e.g., to bears, as opposed to merely recognizing it, is the anthropological basis for our understanding of God’s transcendental status. Such attribution is not experienced by us as a gift, but as a recognition; we recognize the bear as a person, rather than create it as such, while at the same time affirming the potential personhood of the other bears one leaves behind.

    Similarly, belief in God’s creation implies that each human being does not genetically inherit his personhood, but is individually recognized as a person by God, independently of any ceremony such as baptism in which he is made part of a specific church. More than the act of “molding” Adam, divine recognition is the essence of God’s transmission of personhood. We are very much the bears of God.

    Which obliges us to examine this phenomenon more closely. If God’s personation of us is real, we know that our personation of bears is not, in the sense that, left to themselves, they are merely physical objects. The frequency of personified animals and objects in folklore or animated films makes clear our ease in conceiving and interacting with them.

    Yet personating a bear is not passive, nor purely imaginary. It is not like watching an animated film or reading Winnie the Pooh. It is not even like writing Winnie the Pooh—although the bears from which the story was derived were apparently Christopher Robin’s real playmates. Because the bear is a physical object, his body becomes, independently from ourselves, the foundation of his persona, just as ours is. We are responsible for his well-being, and any damage to a bear, let alone its loss, is not just painful to us like watching a character suffer or die on screen, but like an injury to a member of our family, although we do not have to answer for our responsibility to any public authority.

    The possibility of personating a bear, or a familiar object, derives from the fact that the source of personhood is not worldly, like our bodies or those of our bears, but transcendental; it belongs to the realm of the sacred, of the sign. Whether God exists as the source of the transcendental, or the transcendental realm created by the sign is a human discovery/invention, this realm is not essentially material.

    Fiction, the invention of imaginary personae, is in principle coeval with language itself. For even the ostensive sign must be understandable in the absence of its referent, although in principle it points to this referent and to be correctly used must be confirmed by its presence. The boy who cried “Wolf!” should have been aware of this. (The derivation of the imperative from the ostensive in The Origin of Language supposes that an ostensive sign pronounced in the absence of its referent will come to be interpreted as a request for this referent, thus as an imperative.)

    The bottom line is that in personating a bear, we are performing a make-believe version of the essential operation of divine creation. This is not the creation of matter, of which neither theologians nor physicists have the slightest understanding—or even, I would say, understanding of understanding, for what does it mean to speak of there “being nothing,” followed by “something”?—but the creation of personhood. God may have created many things before creating Man, but only Man, as a person created in God’s image, could tell the story of God’s creation.

    A note on the Trinity

    As I have tried to show in Chronicles 419 and 675, beginning with Eve, female resentment against the “patriarchy” can be understood as the source of the felix culpa that defines earthly humanity. But to admit this is also to admit the reality of the masculine firstness resented by Eve and her daughters down to the present.

    As the originary hypothesis presupposes, the most likely scenario for the origin of language was masculine. Whence the Trinity, which uses an all-male model of generation, although the most traditional form of Christianity honors the human Mary with a devotion often more fervent than that accorded to either Father or Son. We conceive of God as creating Adam; to conceive God as gestating him would contradict the very purpose of the creation of Man, which transcends the biological through the sign.

    If we take Michelangelo’s image of the creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as its iconic artistic representation in Western culture, the “creation” is entirely spiritual. God’s finger as the source of enspiritment or personation is also the means of designation, the minimal form of language, as in the originary hypothesis, where pointing is the root form of the aborted gesture of appropriation. And the fact that the original purpose of this gesture/sign is to avoid mimetic violence (presumably as a result of many experiences to the contrary) makes clear that language is in the first place a transcendent mode of communication rather than a signal derived from “animal language.” As a means of deferring violence, the sign repurposes a gesture susceptible of provoking it.

    This enspiritment defines the paternal nature of the originary Father-Son relationship. That the male is the primary cultural gender because it is the secondary biological gender is the bottom line of human sexuality and its conflicts. What defines Adam as spirit is not speech itself but the capacity for language, the human nature that is instilled into him in an instant, and that permits him and God the Father to share access to the Spirit in which they communicate.

    Like that of Adam on the Sistine ceiling, bears’ accession to personhood is entirely spiritual. In the case of bears, I think the quarrel between West and East over the filioque—the Western church considers the Spirit to be “spirated” by both Father and Son, the Eastern, only by the Father—would best be settled in the more conservative Eastern fashion; language/spirit remains the creation of the Father, although it cannot be realized without the Son’s participation in second place.

    The difference between bears and humans appears to argue for the Western interpretation in the human case. Yet there is certainly something to be said for the comfort of seeing oneself as a bear of God.

  • Pierre Whalon’s Made in Heaven? — A Trinitarian Theology of Marriage

    I have recently had the pleasure of exchanging a few emails with Episcopal Bishop Pierre Whalon, whose book on marriage (Made in Heaven? How God acts in marriage, Theology for Everyone Books, 2016) makes use of GA’s originary hypothesis in demonstrating the anthropological basis of the marriage institution.

    The point of departure for Dr. Whalon’s study is the fact that marriage has been from the first a somewhat embarrassing topic in Christian theology. Understandably, the interpersonal nature of sexual desire makes the tension between its “natural” and “cultural” elements far more problematic than in the case of our other appetites, and these tensions are reflected in what Dr. Whalon notes as the conflicted nature of the Christian conception of marriage.

    For one thing, the institution predated Christianity, and the marriage bond was particularly loose under the Roman Empire, where divorce was frequent. For another, the first Christians, anticipating Jesus’ return, were not focused on the need to preserve the species, and saw marriage, in contrast to celibacy, as at best a compromise with worldly desires.

    The most important mention of marriage in the Gospels is negative: Jesus’ rejection of divorce in Matthew 19, where he also praises chastity “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (19:12). To this we may add Paul’s well-known judgment in 1 Corinthians 7:9 that “it is better to marry than to burn.” Whence the question mark after Made in Heaven?

    Dr. Whalon’s book discusses the Church’s difficulties throughout the Middle Ages in dealing with the tension between the liberal “consent” notion of marriage, inherited from the Empire, and the “contractual” marriage-relationship introduced by the “barbarian” invaders, for whom the woman was essentially a piece of property. A detailed summary of the Roman Catholic and subsequent Protestant views of marriage over the centuries clears the way for a positive theology of marriage that can deal realistically and optimistically with today’s sexual and psychological realities.

    This book is meant to serve Christians and others as a guide to realizing Holy Matrimony, as prefigured by the unity in difference of the persons of the Trinitarian God. The Trinity complicates the simplicity of Hebrew monotheism in order to offer an articulated model of the transcendence that is synonymous with the human, in which God/Father creates Man/Son, but as “always already” implicit within Him, along with the Holy Spirit through which they communicate. As Dr. Whalon demonstrates, the advantage of such a transcendental “model” is that, like all significant doctrines derived from religious revelation, its capacity as a source of understanding of worldly phenomena is not limited by prior historical experience.

    Unlike the semiotic elements of culture, conjugal relationships in some form may well have preceded the origin of humanity. Monogamous “families” exist among birds and mammals; in contrast to language, there is no obvious necessity of a prior collective event to inaugurate the human family.

    Given that the neoteny and large brain of humans are more a consequence than a cause of the emergence of cultural sign-systems, we may assume that prehuman and early human family structure, whether monogamous or polygamous, would have been less rigid than any historically known form of human marriage. Women not protected by a specific male during pregnancy and lactation might have been part of a female collective, for example.

    But we must also assume that once humans emerged, along with language, the sacred, and deferred desire, human development, beyond making the time of reproduction from pregnancy through early infancy longer and more difficult, would have increased the mimetic dangers associated with sexuality, and consequently, that the necessity for formal marriage rules and ceremonies would have emerged as the symbolic elements of early human culture developed. All known societies have marriage as well as “coming of (pubertal) age” ceremonies, as well as communally respected interdictions of incest and adultery, however exactly defined.

    Dr. Whalon’s innovative use of the Trinity—long narrowly confined to purely theological discussions, rather than applied to God’s relationship to humanity “made in his image”—as a model for the marital love-relationship allows him to claim that:

    God the Holy Trinity is a dynamic Lover—a perfect Communion of Love—reaching beyond “Self” to create and re-create, to free us by binding us to love—”in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom.” [quoting the Anglican Book of Common Prayer] [Chapter 6: “Sketching a theology of marriage”; page numbers not available in Kindle edition]

    The central thesis of Dr. Whalon’s theology of marriage is found in the following passage:

    . . . the image of God as male and female is not just about a marriage of a man and a woman taken individually. The image of God is the myriad communities of women and men that all humans at all times and all places must live and die in. . . . An individual marriage is therefore a special empirical example of a general reality. . .

    This community begins theoretically with the covenant of a man and a woman to live together in order to ensure the other’s well-being and thus create a common good. Therefore the image of God is among other things a woman and man in covenant with each other, though it is derivative from the whole community as the primary imago Dei. Furthermore, each person, married or not, participates in the imago as covenant-maker and -keeper.

    This assertion rests upon the fundamental Christian understanding of the nature of God: God is Love because God is Trinity. God is the originator of covenanting because this creative activity is itself derivative from the relations that constitute the Godhead. [Ibid]

    As I understand it, the mutual spiration of Father and Son within the Trinity is an internal relation (not “relationship,” as the author points out) that should serve as a model for the mutual love of the two partners in marriage—including arguably same-sex partners.

    The revolutionary aspect of Dr. Whalon’s theology of marriage is the freedom with which he lets his religious intuition expand the conception of the Trinity rather than attempting to restrict it from what we may dare to call an “originalist” perspective. Unlike the US Constitution, what is essential in the Trinitary conception of God is not what was in the minds of the originators of the term, for they must be understood to have conveyed a divine revelation in language available to them, but that does not exhaust the Trinity’s potential applications to historical reality.

    Were it limited to its literal terminology, or to the conception of it in the minds of the clerics of earlier generations, the Trinitary exchange between the transcendent Father and divine-human Son could not include within it the sexual-reproductive nature of marriage. The absence of Mary from the Trinity is a clear sign that her specifically human holiness, which the Catholic Church has increasingly emphasized, with the Immaculate Conception accepted as dogma in 1854, cannot be assimilated to that of God.

    But Dr. Whalon’s world is not that of ancient or medieval theologians. It reflects the cultural evolution that he is not afraid to assimilate directly into our understanding of the Trinitarian God. The ideal of love in Holy Matrimony begins with the circulation of love within the Trinity, but its specific historical manifestations have developed within secular culture.

    The “courtly love” ideal that began with the troubadours and the dolce stil nuovo is the historical source of the Western notion of “romantic love,” an attempt to understand sexual love in transcendental terms that took our culture a giant step closer to Dr. Whalon’s aim of bringing marriage into the sphere of the Trinity.

    The courtly love tradition began in opposition to socially imposed marriage. The object of the troubadour’s poetry was typically the wife of a noble, presumably away at the Crusades. As a more spiritually oriented extension of this, befitting the dolce stil nuovo, Dante’s Vita Nuova expresses love for Beatrice, a young girl, as a desexualized version of non-marital love. It provides no path from virgin to wife, as there would be in later versions of this paradigm.

    Courtly love and Mariolatry were parallel institutions. In the worship of Mary, the sexual element of courtly love, already highly sublimated, disappears. Indeed, Mary has always been an object of devotion to women more than men, and never an object of desire.

    In the later development of romantic love (which may be said to have been anticipated by the marriage of Abélard and Héloïse; see Chronicle 13), the problematic/mimetic nature of the relationship is entirely mastered by each lover’s devotion to his/her partner, who is presumed to satisfy both sexual desire and the need for mutual recognition.

    Social acceptance of the romance-marriage synthesis had to await the “early modern” era. This normalization of the synthesis of the erotic and the transcendental provides the chief story-line of the modern novel. In contrast with the picaresque “adventure-novel,” which is essentially a series of separate incidents, the novel as such is almost inevitably structured around the love-life of one or more characters. (Don Quixote is in this context very much a transitional work.) Its premise is that the protagonist’s life goal is the achievement of a unique love-relationship, normally in marriage, with which the work typically concludes, leaving the couple to live “happily ever after.” (The French equivalent emphasizes the element of progeny: Ils vécurent heureux et ils eurent beaucoup d’enfants.) But the relationship itself is more important than its social form—and the production of children is rarely more than suggested, save to provide the material for one or more sequels.

    English woman novelists developed a genre that might well be called the female Bildungsroman, beginning with Eliza Heywood’s 1751 History of Betsy Thoughtless, where the plot, as in the whole family of similar novels including those of Fanny Burney and of course Jane Austen, centers on the woman’s quest to reject false appearances and find true love with the right man. Readers of Girard have pointed out that the resolution of a novel like Pride and Prejudice is not at all opposed to the “conversion” Girard finds in the tragic novels he discusses; the “happy ending” results from Elizabeth’s rejection of an unhealthily mimetic attraction to Wickham and conversion to “true love” in marriage with Darcy.

    The process of cultural evolution, as of any form of evolution, increases the number of degrees of freedom in the system. The physical world evolves in its way, but has no mechanism other than life for conserving anything other than physical quantities such as momentum, mass, energy, and the “low-tech” structures that occupy the studies of astronomers.

    The advent of living creatures allowed a selection process, greatly accelerated by sexual reproduction, to continually improve their durability and capabilities, and human cultural evolution raises this to a higher plane. This is not to minimize the dangers of mimetic conflict. But as Steven Pinker and others insist, in the long run, humans keep getting less violent and more creative, or as Martin Luther King put it, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

    In today’s world, major readjustments of the relation between the sexes in as short a time as one or two generations—my grandmother was a mature woman before she could vote—are necessarily fraught with difficulties. It is in this perspective that we can appreciate Dr. Whalon’s choice to link marriage to the Trinitarian structure of the Christian God.

    Man and wife are not “like” Father and Son, but what the two relation(ship)s have in common is that from the seemingly absolute difference between the divine and the human, they create mutuality. In the past, the Trinity was understood essentially as a relationship of male filiation. But God has no gender, and the progress of social mores illustrates the unanticipated wealth of human possibilities that can be figured by this transcendental relation.

    The social function of religion, from revelation to theology, is to reveal, in the ever-changing human world, each generation’s possibilities for creating a loving community, if only out of the faith that God’s will for humankind is that it prosper. This truth is brought closest to home in Holy Matrimony, because the marriage bond in its various forms is necessarily the fundamental level of human social organization.

    Hence we should see marriage as always capable of allowing a broader set of options, including homosexual marriage, the subject of Dr. Whalon’s final chapter. I find it hard to see a serious future for “polyamory,” but not long ago “gay marriage” didn’t seem to me such a good idea either.

    The movement toward expanding degrees of freedom remains the fundamental principle of life and of the human in particular. Dr. Whalon’s choice of the Trinity as model, far from narrowing the definition of marriage, universalizes it to whatever limits are consonant with the spiration of the Trinitarian Father and Son. In the Trinity, the One God offers himself as an interactional model of human love, of which Holy Matrimony is the highest expression.

    In his faithful application of the Trinitarian model to what he as a Christian understands as our fallen but redeemed world, Dr. Whalon’s book succeeds in its ambitious aim of reconceiving Holy Matrimony as an authentic sacrament.