Author: staceymeeker

Preamble

One of the problems that has slowed the development of GA is that the academic world as currently constituted is ill-suited to provide it with a potential audience, whereas its potential popular appeal (WE DISCOVERED THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE!!) is far from contemporary concerns. Yet it is indeed a “new way of thinking,” one all the more valuable in that it offers a perspective on the human from an angle that is irreducible to the specialties and preoccupations of the current academy.

No doubt it is no coincidence that this idea emerged in the late 1970s, precisely when the traditional genteel world of the American university as it had existed since the advent of graduate education in the mid-19^th century was, to my mind quite brutally, transformed into a mass bureaucracy. Thus the goal of “advancement of knowledge” in the old, relatively unproblematic, self-confident sense gave way within a few decades to blatant careerism, with hundreds of candidates for each position, and increasingly shameless backscratching among those who “made it,” not even to speak of the abject virtue-signaling of the current “diversity”-oriented institution. To what extent this has affected the hard sciences, where real research progress is being made, I am not qualified to say, but it clearly has not merely politicized the humanities and social sciences, but most regrettably, imposed on them a faddish conformism that we more commonly associate with the world of Entertainment Weekly.

Fortunately, the origin of many of GA’s ideas in the ever-popular—and religion-grounded—thought of René Girard has allowed it to maintain a narrow viability in the field of literary studies. Thus despite its moniker’s “anthropology,” nearly all the members of the GASC work in literature departments, mostly English and/or Comparative Literature.

Nonetheless, the greatest intellectual affinities/rivalries of GA as a way of thinking are no doubt with philosophy—and this despite the important lesson, learned from Girard, of philosophy’s failure, in contrast with religion, to go to the root of the human. To René this intuition came naturally from his religious background. I have attempted to root it more concretely in philosophy’s incapacity to theorize the anthropological origin of language, which the Platonic conception of the Ideas denies, and which even the more adventurous pre-Socratics never put in truly anthropological terms.

Given that il n’est jamais trop tard pour bien faire, I intend to pursue the reflections of the last couple of Chronicles by returning once more to the originary hypothesis to flesh it out, this time less in the direction of language as such than in that of what can broadly be called the human understanding.

A GA Cogito

In the previous Chronicle, I postulated, although I did not really demonstrate, that even if mechanical devices (i.e., computers) could simulate the processes of human thought—and given the progress of AI in a few decades, it would be foolhardy to set limits on its eventual accomplishments—the very existence of such devices is dependent on the transcendent nature of the human scene of representation. I even hazarded a comparison between this statement of the “incompleteness” of the mechanical universe and Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic. But even if we accept its truth, how does that allow the central intuition of our new way of thinking to advance the question of the specificity of human self-consciousness, the linguistic and cultural pour-soi, with its eternal dilemmas of freedom and determinism, atheism and belief?

In the first place, and I think most importantly, deriving the human from an act of deferral on a collective scene takes us out of the solipsism that traditionally surrounds this question. Descartes’ Cogito, arguably the originary moment of modern “philosophy of consciousness,” is an introspective attempt to draw a conclusion from introspection itself. If I can think about whether I am, then I must be—something that thinks. This reasoning remains, needless to say, within the metaphysical/philosophical tradition, for which the existence of mature propositional language is never in question. GA’s “first man” could not conceive this syllogism; how could he ask the question “am I?” let alone “who am I?” before using language to communicate with his fellows in order to avert potential violence? Yet we must reflect more deeply on what this “first man” would be capable of, since by our hypothesis, his single ostensive sign is already an unambiguous marker of the difference between humanity and the rest of the universe—including all the “intelligent machines” that later human evolution will lead him to invent.

The subject of language, that is, he who takes the initiative in languaging (see Chronicle 632), can be said to be I, the-one-who-is-speaking. But if the rest of the world understood this, in the profound vocabulary of the late Richard Rorty (see Chronicle 331), merely as someone “making noises,” then he would be no “subject” at all. That is, in order to language in Andresen’s sense, he must always-already belong to—even if it is he who inaugurates—a language community. Else he finds himself in the absurd dilemma of the one who first acquired the “language gene” and who speaks, boldly and eloquently, but with no one but himself to understand him. Whereas the originary community was ex hypothesi constituted by the sharing of the originary sign, and what we presume to have been its reciprocal exchange in the first human ritual—one that, if successful, found its completion in the physically nourishing sparagmos.

There is no reason to claim that this experience of the original ostensive speaker/signer fully constitutes the human self as we know it, the self of the Cogito. But what is essential is that this experience provide this self’s minimal kernel, and in a way that would not be discoverable by working backward from the finished product. The “first man” cannot think or say, “I am.” He does not even have a sign for “I.” But he has already constituted himself the subject of his discourse, not in order to affirm his individual selfhood, but because he wants the others on the scene to be aware that he has renounced/sacralized the desired object.

That is, before we can even talk about the collective renunciation/deferral of the newly constituted community, the first sign-user is the one who first intends that his “aborted gesture” be not merely canceled but repurposed as a means of communication to the others of his non-appropriative intention. Which is to say that the birth of human self-consciousness comes not solely with the emission of the sign, but with the awareness of this emission as a means of communication, without which it would not be a (symbolic) sign. The signer does not, and at this stage, cannot, think “therefore I am,” but he expresses the substance of this thought by the fact that he intends his “languaging” in order that his fellows recognize this non-appropriative intention, which, because it is not a mere turning-away, but a desiring-in-awe, we can already begin to call “worship.”

Thus the meta-message conveyed by the sign is not simply the redundant “I am signing/designating X,” which would add nothing to the sign itself and would therefore be as effectively unrepresentable as the signals of our animal ancestors, but “by signing/designating X, I am not seeking to appropriate X for myself, yet continue to acknowledge its universal desirability.” The “I am” at this stage is an affirmation of the individual self’s union, both in desire and interdiction, with the nascent language community, without which it could not exist as a human, sign-using being.

To pursue this line of reasoning as in TOOL, once there is a sign for X, it will not be forever restricted to the “meaning” sacred/interdicted, but will in the course of time become attached to the object of this interdiction, and eventually come to function as an imperative to command the object’s presence. This is a consequence of its very existence qua sign, which evokes without physically reproducing it the originary scenic configuration with the object at the center, and is consequently of necessity less sacred, hence potentially less restricted to its original context, than the object itself.

For the “presence” that the sign designates is ambiguous. The presence of the sacred, which we too easily call a god or just God, but which in its simplest form is better represented by the old-fashioned term godhead, unlike the physical presence of a sacrificial animal, is not divided among the participants, but shared by all of them. It is this distinction that founds the sense of essence or Being, what is contained in the word as a signified, and which allows us to grasp its transcendent standing with respect to the objects of nature. Once this power is experienced in the word, its exercise within and outside the ritual context will be open to empirical experience—as, presumably at a later date, will be the possibility of the declarative as an alternative to the performance commanded by the imperative.

For an animal, a sign is a behavior, like taking a step or swallowing. Its status as a token of a “type” is something we as human observers can certainly ascertain, but the type-token association is in no way present to the animal’s self-consciousness, any more than the “type” of an animal is “present” to each individual specimen. Such abstract conceptions are available only to a creature possessing language.

The GA Categorical Imperative

Kant had three formulations of the “categorical imperative” in the 1785 Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, along with several other variants. Of the three, the best known, because the most explicit, is (to quote the Wikipedia):

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

(In this brief exposition, I think we can stipulate without proof the validity of Kant’s claim of the logical equivalence between this and the more abstract:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.)

The sharpness of this formulation from a GA perspective resides in the fact that it explicitly reflects the communal nature of the human, not simply as what the French call a “pious wish,” but as an anthropological truth. For if I take another human as a “means” rather than an “end,” I am implicitly excluding him from the originary dialogue that founds humanity, not attending to his participation in the reciprocal exchange of signs, from which nonetheless all humanity is presumably descended. That slavery and other forms of coercion violate this imperative goes without saying.

Some further examples

Similarly, existentialist formulas like Sartre’s “existence precedes essence” or Heidegger’s “man is the shepherd of Being” can be clarified by situating them in the originary context.

In the first case, the human languager is not what he “is,” but what he does. The sign-using human is defined in action—a point that, as we saw in Chronicle 632, has recently been applied directly to linguistics on the example of J. L. Austin’s speech acts.

In the second, the easily mystified term “Being” expresses the substantiality of the original sacred/significant object. Were we not its “shepherds” but merely, as a superficial reading of Girard might suggest, its sparagmatic destroyers, there would be no human at all.

In the same vein, Saint Anselm’s “ontological proof,” which depends on considering existence as a necessary “perfection” of the “most perfect being,” is, from the standpoint of standard philosophy, absurd, as Kant among others demonstrated: thinking something doesn’t make it so. But if we understand the “perfection” of this “being” in originary terms as its sacrality, that is, as the necessary guarantee that the permanence of the object’s transcendent being, in contrast with its material substance, will not be violated on the scene of representation, then we can understand Anselm’s reasoning as an etiology of the signs of language: the originary sacred referent of language must first “exist” in its “perfection” in order to become the signified of a sign. Whether or not we accept this reasoning can then be shown to be contingent on our position in the God-creates-man/man-creates-God controversy; is the sacred a reality beyond the human world, or its internal (hence subjective) foundation?

This same procedure could be extended to elucidate the characteristics normally attributed to God. Immortality, omnipotence, ubiquity, omniscience—all are extrapolations from the “perfection” of the sacred object and its power, mediated by the sign, to interdict the implementation of human desire. But because religious belief, from which the element of faith cannot be absent, belongs to a different category than philosophical thought, it must therefore be treated in a different place.

I – Necessity is the mother of invention

Derrida conceived la différance as the opening-up of a paradigm. As opposed to the reflexive association of stimulus and response, as in our example of an animal’s avoidance reaction that follows the association of a behavior with an electric shock, the user of language is obliged to choose the proper word—in Derrida’s conception, from a set of similar words: colors, animals, numbers, etc. That is, the association of a signifier with a signified involves deferral of choice among the different possibilities.

But the significance of this arch-Derridean quasi-concept, which I have found so precious for GA, can be described in much more anthropologically fundamental terms. What needs to be deferred/differentiated, in a word, is violence.

The idea of a precipitating crisis, which Freud had found intuitively obvious as the source of the new behavior that would define humanity—in his case, the rivalry/inhibition connected with the Oedipus complex—has altogether disappeared from the increasingly voluminous literature on the origin of language, as though, whether or not language itself be considered a gradual development of animal communication, it cannot conceivably have been provoked into being by a newly critical situation. The passage between the Alpha-Beta hierarchy typical of the great apes and the enforced egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers cannot have escaped everyone’s attention but my own, yet the only writer I know of who evokes it, Richard Wrangham in The Goodness Paradox (see Chronicle 614, Coda) does so obliquely, portraying it as rather an effect of the birth of language than its cause.

The key point is that what is new about human language is not its function as a device but its operation in a scenic configuration. No species can survive without the means to maintain whatever collective order it requires, and the originary hypothesis proposes that the new mode of communication we call “language” reflects the need to respond to a new form of challenge to this order, one that requires the institution of a transcendental mode of interaction among ourselves and with our environment, and which manifests itself as the transmission of signs on a scene of representation.

In the terms of the originary hypothesis, the signs of language, unlike the indexical signals we share with the animals, are not only actuated by different parts of the brain, but above all originate as deviations from practical actions, directed instead at sacred/interdicted objects. The idea of an imperceptible glissement from signals to language is incompatible with the radical difference between human and animal communication. And from a heuristic standpoint, the more we focus on the specificity of language in its originary segregation from the activities of “profane” life, the more we discover in this activity that will help us to understand the specificity of the human/cultural in general.

The originary hypothesis liberates us from the gradualist paradigms of evolutionists and neo-evolutionists. Not that they are wrong; but they are seeking their solution in the wrong category of phenomena. No doubt the most interesting features of human language are the complexities of the mature languages that we know. But it is a fallacy, one so transparent to the Darwinians that they never even notice it, that human language must have emerged via some intuitively “simple” form of linguistic communication as we know it that would have evolved, after many thousands of generations, into the complex systems we now possess. Instead of thinking that what was new was a new cognitive ability, let alone a “big bang” language gene, they should have sought to model rather the critical situation which provoked a new behavior.

In a word, as are most innovations, language must have been pulled, not pushed. Necessity is the mother of invention. Not pooh-pooh or yo-heave-ho or bow-wow or ma-ma, but… fear of death.

René Girard’s most original contribution to originary anthropology is not his focus on the phenomenon of mimesis, but on that of the potential violence threatened, and often occasioned, by mimetic rivalry. Traditional Darwinians have no problem with mimesis as a concept; what is missing from their etiologies of the human is the need to control the enhanced threat of internecine violence that mimesis poses as its positive features lead to higher levels of (mimetic) intelligence.

I recently noticed in rereading La violence et le sacré that Girard uses the expression la première fois (the first time) some half-dozen times, each time to refer to the real collective murder that he believed was the basis for each killing/metamorphosis in myth. The first time there was a real scapegoat lynching, an emissary murder. Whatever you think of this hypothesis, what it shows is that, intuitively, Girard felt the need for what he calls in the conclusion an événement fondateur (founding event), even if he could not bring himself to conceive this, as GA does, in terms of the deferral of worldly into symbolic action.

Girard had no theory of language as such, but his intuition told him that the sign was born in a moment of crisis and was originarily reserved for the sacred. That he defined this crisis differently from GA is secondary to the fact that he understood that signification was something entirely new that could only be born in crisis. When was the last time this simple idea was expressed by one of the hundreds of researchers who study the evolution of language? Not that it is counter-intuitive. Even the idiotic notion that language began with the appearance of a “language gene” at least recognizes what Max Müller called the Rubicon-crossing nature of its appearance.

II – Humanism and interiority

In my recent reflections on deferral/différance, I have emphasized the continuity of this notion with the phenomenological conception of intentionality, and more particularly with Sartre’s néant, which although unconnected to language can easily be assimilated to the difference/separation between the thinking/speaking subject and the referent that he addresses, not through “instinct” or conditioned reflex, but beginning with the abortion/deferral of action, opening the point in space-time in which the “natural” reaction to an object is transformed into a sign. The recent trend in the linguistics community has gone precisely in the opposite direction. But contrary to what my readers might think, I see this as a positive development that brings a new level of clarification to the specificity of the “new” or “fourth” way of thinking that is GA.

This has not always been the case. In Chomsky’s famous 1959 review of Skinner’s 1957 Verbal Behavior, the entire linguistics community stood behind Chomsky’s rejection of a behaviorist stimulus-response model of dialogue. Intuitively, in the everyday “humanistic” world, it is obvious that, to use one of Skinner’s examples, the command (or mand) “Tell me what this is” said when pointing to a violin, as a means of provoking the response “violin,” suggests a stimulus-response relation implicitly short-circuiting the conscious decision behind the reply. If I think that someone considers “violin” the response to a “stimulus,” I may say something else just to show that I can, whereas an animal having learned a conditioned reflex cannot make such a decision. Such arguments seemed at the time to settle the question. Which is to say that, abstracting from the idiosyncratic manner in which Chomsky considered the mind to operate in the case of language, in his response to Skinner he was defending in his fashion the classical humanist conception of interiority, or what we call the internal scene of representation.

But contemporary constructivist linguistics considers Chomsky’s cure worse than the disease. For one thing, Chomsky’s notion of the linguistic pour-soi is far from the néant within Derrida’s différance. For Chomsky, language is the affair of a computer-like “module” independent from the rest of the nervous system, and only lightly touched by ontogeny. The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) with which the child is presumed to be born is a genetically determined machine that awaits only the setting of a few parameters (“switches”) to become fully operational. The “poverty of the stimulus” to which the language-learning child has presumably been exposed is offered as proof of the language module’s nearly complete independence of epigenesis. In other words, in Chomsky’s hands, the interiority whose history goes from Descartes to Husserl to Sartre to Derrida is reduced to something almost as mechanical as the stimulus-response link he rejects in Skinner.

I first encountered a thorough exposition of the revised attitude toward Skinner in Chapter 8 (entitled “Revisit: Skinner, Chomsky, and construction grammar”) of Julie Tetel Andresen’s Language and Evolution (Cambridge, 2014: 229-259), one of the more interesting and original books on language origin/evolution I have encountered. This work has the considerable ambition of being, in the words of its introductory blurb, “the first rethinking of an introductory approach to linguistics since Leonard Bloomfield’s 1933 Language.” Although, unlike Bloomfield’s classic, it is more the exposition of a program than a possible textbook for Linguistics 101, it develops at length a constructivist perspective based on “developmental systems theory” that defines its subject, the essence of human communication, not as the Saussurian langue or even as language, but as the activity of languaging. Thus its fundamental components are not words or even sentences but speech-acts, in the tradition of Austin and Searle, to the study of which Andresen sees Skinner’s explorations of “verbal behavior” as, surprisingly, closely related.

In this perspective, rather than attempting to improve on Chomsky’s idea of what our internal language machine must look like, we put the whole “mental” world in brackets and study “languaging” as an activity with no need to posit “hidden parameters” at all. Andresen does not claim—and she assures us in her own terms that this is true of Skinner as well—that the space-time we refer to as différance does not exist, merely that it is unnecessary to the explanation of an interactive system. If to the question “What is the capital of France?” instead of “Paris” someone answers “I don’t know,” or “London?” or “I’m not going to tell you,” these are all speech-acts that can each be understood as producing its own specific illocutionary and perlocutionary effects, without requiring us to concern ourselves with what went through the speaker’s (and hearer’s) brains before (and after) it was selected.

Not being myself a professional scholar of either language or languaging, I cannot vouch for the superiority of this or of any other elements of constructivist methodology. But by all indications, Andresen’s work is an eloquent defense of the path that linguistics is taking today. Politics aside, I would say that anything that can liberate linguistics from decades of Chomskian dominance is a good thing. And I might add that orthodox Chomskians’ dogmatic reduction in practice of all “language” to more-or-less-English is certainly an ironic commentary on Chomsky’s radically “anti-imperialist” political stance. Just ask Anna Wierzbicka (see in particular Chronicle 597).

By making far clearer than before the separation between humanistic and empirical science, this return to behaviorist-like positivism is of great benefit to GA. The element of différance is precisely the point at which they diverge, which is to say, the point at which the uniquely human begins. The emergence of this separation in the case of language coincides, by no means coincidentally, with the historical moment in which the evolution of computers has begun to show us that anything humans can do with language can be simulated by machine, and in simple cases at least, improved upon. This in no way dissolves the difference/différance between the two; on the contrary. But it demonstrates the incommensurability of these two “ways of thinking”—and as a corollary, the paradoxical impossibility that the mechanical universe of stimulus-response could have produced by itself machines that simulate the human without having first produced the transcendence embodied in the human itself. We may if we like consider this as a demonstration of the “incompleteness” of the mechanical universe, analogous to Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic.

In short, the existence of machines that can truly simulate thinking makes it all the more urgent for us to preserve the intuition of transcendence outside the sphere of empirical science, which would seem to have increasingly less use for it. Just as philosophy has allowed for reflection on the human condition by “bracketing” the anthropological source of the transcendental intuition that permits this reflection in the first place, so empirical science, in studying our specifically human mode of communication, now finds itself obliged to function in the same manner, the henceforth unsatisfactory alternative being the interposition of a black box of “universal grammar” between an abstract “meaning” and a physical output. I am happy to see the end of this procedure, which results in a much more parsimonious model of how “languaging” operates in the brain—one that can hopefully be filled out by future research into the neuronal processes involved.

Neuroscience is not our domain. Our task is rather to flesh out the newly reinforced humanism/empiricism split with the products of our reflection. For although this new way of thinking is one made possible by the originary hypothesis, it is by no means exhausted by the mere fact of its enunciation.

We should conceive of the originary différance or space-time of deferral that enables the conversion of a practical movement of appropriation into a new mode of communication, the symbolic sign, as the focal point of all that distinguishes the human from what preceded it. Historians of philosophy can no doubt trace this conception back to its roots in Kant and beyond, but it reaches a point of thematization only with the notion of intentionality, conceived first psychologically and then “existentially.” But given its centrality to our understanding of the human, tracing the history of the concept is less important than situating it as precisely as possible within the originary hypothesis.

To call this différance a néant as Sartre does is as much as to say that it has no independent being of its own. No wonder, then, that a thinker as suspicious of abstractions as René Girard could never accept to conceive the locus of what he called “the first non-instinctual attention” other than as the physical space in which a cadaver had replaced the living being of the scapegoat. Yet this abstraction is necessary in order for us to conceive the unity of the human. Derrida’s perverse genius conceived la différance as a sort of dehiscence or gap in what, as a political equivalent of original sin, had been spuriously presented as the presence of truth in the sign—a form of what Sartre had called bad faith, where such spurious evidence was precisely faith’s object, a sacralization of the en-soi.

But this image of solidity as a figure of propaganda is a secondary construction that does not do justice to the profundity of Derrida’s intuition of the spatio-temporal separation that makes “difference” not possible—the world contains it from the start—but—as différance—conceivable. For the token of a sign is not a revelation, but a thing like any other. The type-token distinction that characterizes the sign is, in conceptual terms, the minimal expression of différance itself.

Our first experience of différance is that between the world of the sign and the “real” world of its actual and potential referents. As Girard recognized, language was at first, and in a sense still is, the mark of the sacred. Sacrality cannot be defined solely as a property of sacred “objects.” The sacred can be designated only by a communal sign, which itself, as with the Hebrew “name of God,” may be referred to only by a sign. (In the context of a conceptual understanding of différance, one might claim that the strict prohibition of iconic representation—”graven images”—that Islam shares with Judaism is vitiated by its non-prohibition of pronouncing the name-of-God, which not merely figures but addresses/commands the divinity. The  reply would be to affirm the absolute nature of the type-token distinction.)

The richness of human culture, and first of all, of the sacred, stems from the transcendence realized in the non-act of deferral. What interdicts the appropriation of the sacred object is a quality irreducible to empirical attributes, yet empirically observable as productive of deferral itself. At the same time, once the sign exists, its tokens are worldly objects like any others that can be manipulated in the absence of the deferral within which they were first conceived—for example, by machines such as computers.

Because types are only visible through their tokens, the necessity of deferral to the constitution of the sign can only be (re)constructed, not demonstrated. The Enlightenment quarrel between believers and non-believers, God-creates-man and man-creates-God, turns on the necessity of such a construction. GA proposes that both sides agree that man constructs God, whether on the basis of reason or revelation.

The person of faith cannot well deny that the very notion of faith implies the impossibility of a straightforward logical-empirical demonstration. The more difficult task is to persuade the nonbeliever of the pertinence of the question itself. Clearly from a Hegelian point of view it is inconceivable that religious belief of whatever kind is simply a mistake, like thinking the earth is flat. Yet from the perspective of empirical science, its cutting off by Ockham’s razor is unavoidable. From that of Western philosophy/metaphysics, where Hegel by no means reigns supreme, the question is indeterminate. The only fundamental proposition that all philosophers tacitly agree on is that, whatever its origin, language cannot be put into question; what credence we give to any other non-empirical statements depends on one’s premises, not on philosophy as such. Generative anthropology, which puts the question of language at its center, fills the gap left by these other modes of thought.

The naïve understanding of belief in God is that it stems from an urge to “anthropomorphize” whatever in nature exhibits behavior not subject to our will: whence worship/deification of the sun, wind, storms, ocean, etc. “Animism” is seen as a primordial form of rational thought, as though, given our possession of “reason,” it goes without saying that we “need to explain” things, and that the simplest explanation is by analogy with ourselves.

The “common sense” behind this oddly uncontroversial explanation is ungrounded in a conception of what language is and how it arose. The existence of independent centers of agency is something experienced from the beginning of time by living creatures. Do we want to say that they too “believe in god”? To put it another way, what benefit is it to humans to postulate “supernatural” forces to explain what we experience as natural phenomena?

That we take such explanations for granted is the result of several centuries of religious skepticism—which is in turn the result of the failure to offer a convincing explanation for the existence of language and religion, that is, to conceptualize what can be called transcendental phenomena. In other words, if we can cogently explain the existence of language, which empirical scientists take for granted as a simple extension of animal signaling systems, if not of DNA “coding,” then we can begin to understand not merely caricatures of religion, but its real significance.

Max Müller’s idea that the first word designated the sun, because we all recognize the sun’s power both to warm us—and to prevent us from looking directly at it—contained a genuine element of transcendence, one that indeed has parallels in pre-modern religion. But what would the first men see in the sun that was different from the view of their immediate pre-human predecessors? These speculations in the spirit of Auguste Comte, whose ideas about the first or “theological” stage of human society had the excuse of predating later generations’ direct investigation of tribal societies, must be abandoned once one attempts to think more rigorously about how the originary event would generate a need for transcendental concepts. Which is to say that we must, as in a mental laboratory, apply the Cartesian procedure of concentrated reflection on a minimal set of phenomena—the procedure pursued by Brentano and Husserl, albeit from a narrowly psychological perspective.

What then is there about the originary sacred object that is “supernatural,” that cannot be encompassed by the “natural realism” of the creatures that preceded us? Thus we come back to the question of what did we need language for in the first place?

What is not “natural” about the referent of the sign is that it is not “my” referent but that of the community. It suffices to prolong Durkheim’s notion of the sacred as the embodiment of the values of the community to understand its “supernaturalism.” Whereas Durkheim himself, who considered the concepts of language, like those of religion, as représentations collectives, refused to speculate about the origin of these cultural foundations, the originary hypothesis views significance/sacrality as a quality embodied in the sign as a relationship among speaker, object, and community in a mode for which no previous object relation can serve as example.

As a counter-example, we can cite the Pavlovian phenomenon of “inhibition.” If an animal after performing some act is several times subjected to an electric shock, it will avoid this behavior in the future. Superficially, this is identical to the behavior of the performer of the “aborted gesture of appropriation”: the original movement toward the object is “inhibited,” and in animal behaviors, there are a great variety of ways in which the original energy can be deviated from its original aim.

But the sacred object is not interdicted because it somehow provokes a shock, but because it is the point of convergence of the group’s desires. The sign’s function as an alternative discharge of energy is secondary to its communicative function, which addresses the entire community, not serially but as a unit. Indeed, it is this address that constitutes the community as a unit. Physically, the community is a loose collection of individuals, but as the interlocutor of the sign, it is an “ideal” being—an entity of an entirely new type—defined as the “agent” of the interdiction associated with the sacred central object.

It is this new conception of “agency” that leads to the ultimate paradoxical understanding of God as possessor of a will and inseparable from human existence, whether in the dialectical structure of the trinity or more simply as the mortal-immortal Buddha. Following in the footsteps of Eric Voegelin, a GA-inspired “history of ideas” should attempt to determine just what new element in the “axial” era in which Buddhism and Christianity emerged made it necessary and possible to reconceive the sacred as at the same time both eternal and humanly incarnate.

On the societal level, the question of whether the nation, the creation of the Hebrews, or “global” humanity, as diversely projected by Christianity and Islam, provides the ultimate model for the human community is far from settled. We may speculate that the final result will involve some new synthesis of locality and universality that will transcend the curse of Babel—as English seems to be in the process of doing in the linguistic domain, despite Anna Wierzbicka’s warnings.

For the moment, it is intellectually and existentially urgent to restore to religious concepts like “God” and “transcendence” their anthropological dignity. I think it is clear that this cannot be the task of either philosophy or empirical science—that it requires an anthropology independent from, though never in conflict with, empirical science. It is in this “fourth way” that we can progress toward elucidating the unity of the sacred and the significant.

The immediate inspiration for this Chronicle was an essay by “Spengler” (David P. Goldman) from a June PJ Media article entitled “Why the British Monarchy Still Matters”  [https://pjmedia.com/spengler/why-the-british-monarchy-still-matters/], where the author insists on the indissoluble connection between the nation and the sacred.

Spengler is one of the very few pundits who can really be considered a thinker, and one with an excellent knowledge and sense of world history. As an intellectual in the real sense of the term, he is a—not uncritical—supporter of Donald Trump, whose manner offends many of those who in my youth we used to call “pseudo-intellectuals.”

The key element in the inspiration I take from Spengler’s article is that he is very much aware of the unique role played by the Hebrews/Jews in world history, in particular, in creating the ancient and modern idea of the nation. For I am convinced that this factor, unfortunately both foregrounded and distorted by the trauma of the Holocaust, must be given the emphasis it deserves if GA is to have a chance to play the historical role merited by its theoretical originality.

In writing this I am the first to recognize the uncomfortable impression produced by one identifying as a Jew who insists on the importance of his people’s contribution to history. But that is precisely the crux that must be worked through, even if it leaves an unpleasant residue. Indeed, if WWII “proved” anything, it was the centrality of this crux to Western and world history.

A few years ago, Adam Katz and I published a book of essays entitled The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism (Brill, 2015). Ironically enough, the book was sponsored by an antisemitism-fighting organization, The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). Yet not only has this book had zero impact on the field, it has received virtually no attention or publicity from the very organization that sponsored its publication. And because the publishers set the book price at an exorbitant level, presumably to extort funds from university libraries, they foreclosed any possibility of its finding buyers on the open market.

Perhaps our book could have been more clearly focused, and it certainly could have been better publicized and marketed. But I rather think the problem was simply that we dared to point out that there was a reason why the Jews have the unique distinction—for a people who have never numbered over a few million—of attracting an enduring, world-wide hostility, one that despite its “racial” pretensions is nothing like what is usually called “racism,” the contempt for people of a “different color.” For the Jews are hated for their superiority, however nastily described: as secretly controlling world finance, as infecting the racial purity of Aryan women, as polluting communion wafers or killing little Christian/Muslim children to use their blood in matzoth. Whether or not Jews are really more intelligent than others, their replacement by Asians in many venues, such as my alma mater, the Bronx HS of Science, which in my day was something like 85% Jewish, has not led to my knowledge to a rise in “antiorientalism”—except perhaps in Ivy League admissions departments, where the old Jewish quotas have been replaced by various techniques for depriving Asian students of the benefits supposedly owing to “students of color.” The Jews’ “superiority” is best understood simply as firstness, priority in the rigorous monotheism they transmitted to the (Christian and Muslim) world.

To the extent that history clarifies what would otherwise remain fruitless exchanges of verbiage, the revived existence of Israel after two millennia has provoked, at the very least, an increase in clarity. In a famous, if perhaps apocryphal, anecdote (recounted in the Introduction to Michael Brenner’s In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea; Princeton, 2019), Chaim Weizmann, one of Israel’s founders, is said to have responded to a woman comparing the disappearance of the landless identity of the Jewish people to their “becoming Albania” with “Yes! Albania! Albania!” No, the Jews have not become “a people like any other,” but they have certainly become a bit more like any other. The movement of a plurality of the world’s Jewish population to Israel as a result of Hitler’s slaughter of Europe’s shtetl-bound Jews followed by their expulsion from most Arab countries has made it increasingly resemble a normal nation with its diaspora of expatriates, in sharp contrast to the “international conspiracy” of a people without a country. That this has not in fact lessened the suspicion of the Jews as a sinister force is all the more significant, as is the transfer of the center of antisemitic activity from Europe to the Middle East—which was traditionally and not altogether falsely cited as more accepting of the Jews than Christian Europe.

The various biblical prophecies of the return of the Jews to the Holy Land—the foundation of “Christian Zionism”—are from an empirical-scientific perspective nonsensical. But like all religious ideas, they are founded on the principle, far from absurd in itself, although hardly a guarantee of empirical truth, that certain worldly realities, which superficially are merely quantitatively different from others, possess for historical reasons an inordinate significance. The origin of this irrationality is in the “irrational” nature of the originary event itself, which, wherever it may have taken place, and even however many times it took place in different venues, consisted in the promotion of a specific worldly object to sacred status, not because of its uniqueness “in itself,” but because it was of unique significance to a particular group of humans at a particular moment. But the same is true on a broader scale—in particular, on the scale of nations.

We should hope, of course, that the apocalyptic nature of the predictions associated with this return does not foretoken the end of human civilization, which, given our propensity to violence and our possession of world-ending weaponry, is a far from supernatural possibility. The alternative, of course, is not “perpetual peace,” nor the “end of history,” as prophesied by prophets and philosophers, but an indefinite future on the edge of the apocalypse.

In any case, this provides a clarification of possibilities that for GA, at least, is not beyond the capacity of its theoretical model. One effect of this conjuncture is a newfound respect for nationalism, and a sharper contrast than in the past between it and universalism or “globalism” unlinked to a specific social order. The Left has always been universalist, from its birth in the French Revolution (to which we owe the metric system, and might have owed a calendar with ten-day weeks), as though the rational were incompatible with the particular. But given the dominantly cross-cultural nature of their business ventures, today’s globalists are emphatically “multicultural.” This is quite a change from the authoritarian internationalism of “scientific socialism.” Yet not surprisingly, multiculturalism is equally the province of the Left. Virtually all tech billionaires espouse the victimary egalitarianism of the Left, even (in principle) its denunciations of the rich and the demand that they pay higher taxes—which, in any case, billionaires usually command the legal firepower to avoid.

Superficially, the populist-internationalist dichotomy has upended the traditional positions of Left and Right. The Left’s ascriptive identity politics, quite a change from its earlier class-based typology, seeks to reduce all social difference, that is, firstness, to “racial” privilege, thereby permitting virtue-signaling White Guilt to remove the stigma of “privilege”—a symbolic activity that would have had no effect on the Bolsheviks’ expropriation of the bourgeoisie or their slaughter of the Kulaks. An added benefit of this posture is its dismissive assimilation of “populist” nationalism to fascism, which, as Yoram Hazony has pointed out, was not a nationalist but an imperialist movement.

The world is a particular, not a general place, as reflected in its institutions, notably those of religion and its cultural derivatives. But the common intelligence which lets us learn and translate each other’s languages presupposes an underlying rationality, as reflected in mathematics and the natural sciences, and most importantly, in the technologies by which we use the latter to control our environment. These institutions embody values that are truly universal, not “multicultural.”

Which is to say that cultural particularity has its own rationality. The example of “math is white” (see Chronicle 563) illustrates this principle less controversially than the firstness of the Jews, but both make the same point. Some groups of people do some things sooner and/or better than others; an identity-based quota system for any activity requiring any ability whatever never corresponds to rationality. This is not a matter of “privilege” but of objective reality.

Nor is it “unfair” that people transmit their advantages—first of all, the genetic ones—to their offspring. None of this contradicts the fundamental principle, instantiated in the originary exchange of signs, that the privileges of firstness cannot be made to outweigh the moral equality that made humanity possible in the first place. My purpose here is not to compete with Rawls’ Theory of Justice, but to try to place on a rational ground the current transformations of the political landscape.

My frequent criticism of victimary thinking or PC is a reflection of conviction, but also of frustration. The number of people in Charles Murray’s upper-middle-class “Belmont” who remain altogether indifferent to such criticism goes to show the effectiveness of the Left’s strategy. But this is only to say in other terms that the “marketplace of history” is forced to decide the question, such as in the past might have been settled by civil war.

When recently President Trump accused Jews who still vote Democrat of “disloyalty” to Israel, some found in this one more occasion to accuse Trump not merely of bad judgment but of “antisemitism.” The spectacle of presumably intelligent people accusing our most pro-Israel president of antisemitism illustrates the curious progression of history. When I was a child, all the Jews I knew were Democrats, and Harry Truman was the president who recognized Israel. Today, there are Jews prominent in BDS circles who bewail Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, as though that were the chief injustice to be righted in resolving the problems of the Middle East. Be that as it may, the increasing economic power of Israel and its role in protecting the Arab world from Shiite Iran have produced a number of breakthroughs, and, in the absence of a full-scale war with the latter, seem to be leading to a way out of the impasse.

As a number of recent works have pointed out (notably Joshua Berman, Created Equal, Oxford, 2008; Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, Harvard, 2011; Eran Shalev, American Zion, Yale, 2014; Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism, Basic Books, 2018), the exemplarity of the Hebrews as outlined in the Old Testament was a major inspiration for the Protestant model of the modern liberal-democratic nation-state, as opposed to multicultural globalism. That Israel is of all nations today the most conscious of the need to define itself as a nation is counterbalanced by the Left’s increasingly overt antisemitism and stigmatization of “Islamophobia,” with its implicit approval of Islam’s transnational universalism as trumping its antediluvian posture toward women, let alone homosexuals.

At a time when nationalism in Western Europe is fighting a rearguard action, and American politics has become a battleground on which the increasingly “progressive” Democratic Party tests out European post-national attitudes, the Old-Testament model that stood behind the modern nation-state, beginning with Britain’s “Glorious Revolution” and the American a century later, is increasingly exemplified, and above all, explicitly defended, by Israel itself, along with some nations of Eastern Europe.

In this context, the Left’s return to antisemitism after the Hitler era has the paradoxically positive, if so far minor, effect of tilting Jewish preferences away from “progressive” virtue-signaling. My point here not to see this as “good for the Jews,” but as a gain in clarity. Whatever one’s own loyalties, Israel exemplifies Jewish national existence in a context where “nationality” cannot be reduced to a geographical location fillable, as some Europeans would like to think, by any given population.

In this context, a return from the illusions of the 1993 Oslo accords and the “two-state solution” is crucial. The fact that over 25 years later the Palestinian Authority, let alone Hamas, refuses to accept the notion of a Jewish state, is gradually providing some clarity to the endless futility of the debate over an Israeli-Palestinian accord. The Palestinians are explicitly not concerned with “national interest.” Their doctrinaire refusal is based on the Islamic principle that territory once governed by Islam can never be voluntarily relinquished. The fact that Israel has had to put up with such “negotiating partners” for 25 years is a sufficient sign of the unique non-normalization of the national status of the one Jewish nation, surrounded as it is by countries that label themselves Islamic. Even yet, the position espoused by Caroline Glick, who argues for an Israeli (i.e., one-state) Solution (Crown, 2014), remains problematic. But such gestures as moving the American Embassy, increased informal ties with the Saudis, and generally improved diplomatic relations with the rest of the world suggest that the momentum is in the right direction.

This process cannot be hurried, and I doubt if I will live long enough (at 78) to witness stabilization, let alone political maturity, in the Middle East. But it would seem increasingly certain that here if anywhere is the boil that must be lanced, the crux whose solution will permit the dialectic of national vs. global to operate once more under historically creative conditions. So long as this sore spot remains, I imagine that the battles between “populists” and “progressives” will continue, to the detriment of the minimal harmony that liberal democracy needs in order to operate efficiently.

The Jews, whether or not “chosen,” are undoubtedly privileged as the inventors/discoverers of the One God under whose auspices the “Abrahamic” religions have created the modern world. This privilege has aroused a good deal of “Jewish guilt” to accompany the antisemitism, yet cannot simply be renounced. Allow me then to suggest a way of thinking about “privilege” altogether different from that taught today in the universities, whose response to Kipling’s “white man’s burden” is virtually never to use the image of a white male to illustrate any positive trait.

Anachronistic as it may sound, the old cliché noblesse oblige describes the only socially useful way to distribute the benefits of firstness among the general population. I think the chief reason for the recent popularity of Bertrand de Jouvenel’s works on power and sovereignty (see Chronicle 606) is the contrast he draws between the sacred contract between traditional monarchies and their subjects, and the practically unlimited demands made by the modern state on its citizens—accompanied in the democracies by the practically unlimited demands made by the citizenry on the state.

That power implies responsibility is a simple idea, but there is nothing simple about implementing it in the absence of an acknowledged transcendent authority. As Hazony persuasively suggests, the Hebrew construct of the nation may be the only viable alternative to established religion. Not that the ideal of global humanity, if not Gaia, should be rejected out of hand. Perhaps world government will come about someday. But clearly not all today’s societies are even remotely equally equitable and functional, however ludicrously this is denied for PC reasons.

If noblesse oblige is the proper reaction to firstness, the Hebrew gift of the One God to humanity remains the most striking example. Similarly, if white people of the Belmont variety want to focus constructively on the “privilege” they owe to family and economic circumstances, they should see it not as a curse to be atoned for but as an opportunity to contribute more to solving the world’s problems, whether or not by helping directly the less fortunate. Since the French Revolution, we have become so accustomed to equating the resentment against “privilege” with “justice” that we have lost sight of this principle, although most continue to honor it through charitable contributions and other activities.

My final point is that everyone has potentially some spark of firstness. Hopefully, as the relatively privileged succeed in ridding themselves of “white guilt,” the less privileged will be encouraged to turn from cultivating their resentment to cultivating their abilities, on what might be called the Booker T. principle. It is not within the race, gender, or “ethnic group,” and not yet in the world at large, but on the scale of the nation that the exchange of mutual advantages we call the division of labor is most efficiently practiced.

It would be nice if I could end by an exhortation to American Jews to aid in the acceleration of Israel’s emergence from pariah status. But increasingly, Jewish history, and even the historical destiny of nationalism, is being made in Israel itself. Enriching the ideas of GA in this domain may well be the most we can do at this juncture.

Everyone recognizes that there is a qualitative difference between human language and animal communications systems, but while the methods of empirical science can conceive of emergent structures, they have no way of conceiving transcendental ones. This is the crux that demonstrates the need for Generative Anthropology as a way of thinking distinct from religion, philosophy, or empirical science.

It is impossible, as they say, to prove a negative, and so, as Karl Popper pointed out, one can never empirically demonstrate a universal hypothesis. A black swan can falsify the thesis that all swans are white, but no number of white swans can prove it. In somewhat the same way, it is impossible to demonstrate the necessity of a transcendental hypothesis. In the real world, the dichotomy between one- and two-dimensionality, which allowed Claude Lévi-Strauss (CLS) to claim (see Chronicle 628) that language and signification must have appeared all at once, can always be described as a qualitative modification of an earlier state. Writing not as an anthropologist but as a philosopher, CLS was able to refer to this difference in transcendental terms by removing it entirely from the empirical sphere, with no attempt to create a plausible framework for its emergence. But once you come to refer to worldly creatures, the emergence of a new idea can inevitably be related to the ideas that were in their brains previously, and the “absolute” leap can be reduced, in Darwinian terms, to the result of an incremental physiological/behavioral change. Hence doing away with the “naïve” idea of a punctual scene of origin has been the implicit burden of the dozens of articles and book chapters that have appeared in recent years describing the emergence of aspects of language out of animal interactions and/or the evolution of the brain.

As I said at the beginning of this series, this is well and good; scientists shouldn’t even try to demonstrate a punctual origin for language. There is no point wasting time in arguments over whether language “really” begins with a “first” sign, or whether it’s only “pre-language” until it has declarative sentences, let alone a full set of syntactic markers. Transcendence is a theoretical model, not a “fact.”

Hence neither is there any point in my going through these articles one at a time to point out how each one fails to account for language’s transcendental nature. To my knowledge, the closest a scientist has come is Terrence Deacon, in his 1997 The Symbolic Species. Deacon distinguishes, in C. S. Peirce’s terms, the symbolic signs of true semiotic systems from the indexical signs used by animals, and furthermore insists that they do not derive from them, being located in different parts of the brain. Deacon even includes a chapter—the longest in the book—describing how language might have originated when males went off to hunt and wanted to insure the fidelity of their female partners with a “marriage” ceremony. Yet when I wrote to Deacon expressing admiration for this scenario, he pooh-poohed it as mere speculation.

Given that it is nonetheless useful for me to provide one more example of the scientific opposition to the language Rubicon, rather than going through a collection of articles that share a theme but not a thesis, I have chosen to discuss a recent book by a single author. Michael Corballis’ The Truth about Language (Chicago, 2017), a volume destined for the general public, is not afraid to reveal to the reader the rather ironic “truth” of the matter.

Mr. Corballis’ (C’s) credentials include a number of scientific publications, mostly dealing with gesture. His principal thesis is roughly as follows: Given that gestures, as opposed to sounds, are in their origin clearly indexical, yet, as the existence of ASL and other sign languages shows, they can be used to create sign-systems more or less equivalent to those of oral language, a gestural as opposed to an oral hypothesis of language origin—a presumption shared by our originary hypothesis—makes it possible to escape the absolute distinction CLS attributes to human language/signification. This conclusion would of course be, in CLS’ terms, a category error; but, precisely, his are not empirical terms.

As an example of the kind of absolute thinking C is trying to discredit, his book opens with a quote from Max Müller, at the head of a chapter entitled “The Rubicon”:

Where, then, is the difference between brute and man? What is it that man can do, and of which we find no signs, no rudiments, in the whole brute world? I answer without hesitation: the one great barrier between the brute and man is Language. Man speaks, and no brute has ever uttered a word. Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare cross it.

Müller’s text was delivered (in English) at the University of Oxford in 1861, in a series entitled “Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language.” In contrast with CLS, Müller emphasizes not the instantaneity of language’s appearance but the vastness of the distance from the “brutes” that it provides us. But in this particular formulation, the link between language and religion that was so fundamental to Müller’s thinking is not part of the equation. That we alone in the animal kingdom have language is a thesis that can be nibbled away at the edges, something much less easy to do to our unique notion of the sacred, which cannot be understood in the absence of transcendence. For Müller, Durkheim, et al, if not for today’s researchers, these phenomena went together.

I nonetheless find it refreshing to see a book that overtly challenges the Rubicon concept, because the author thereby provides the outline of a falsifiable thesis about language. On the one hand, the transcendental nature of language makes it vain to seek to deny the absolute nature of the distinction that CLS posed so clearly. But on the other, from the social science standpoint, all the articles and books I have been wading through are at least implicitly premised on the usefulness of reducing, not indeed the absolute nature of the difference, but of its worldly manifestations, which are another thing entirely, to their absolute minimum.

We can still figure this in terms of Plutarch’s famous image of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The Rubicon, which is a real river, has a certain width, which is what makes rivers, as opposed to brooks and streams, difficult to cross. The work of these researchers goes toward reducing the width of the river, by showing how much of the neuro-physiological-interactive capacity that we use for language had already been anticipated by what we can attribute to our pre-human ancestors. But even if the Rubicon could be narrowed to a little trickle, the separation marked by CLS’ distinction, the creation of signs, would remain a red line, the crossing of which cannot be explained in the gradualist Darwinian fashion of these researchers, let alone by the long discredited yet still endlessly repeated nonsense about the irruption of a “language gene.”

The purpose of the originary hypothesis is to provide a plausible scenario for the crossing of this line, one that takes into account, as do none of the social-science discussions, what strikes me as the self-evident fact that only a collective action, a memorable event could inaugurate this new form of communication. But an event is not an adaptation, and is therefore not acceptable to empirical science.

Be that as it may, our hypothetical event explains the crossing itself, whereas the empirical studies explain the narrowing of the river. These two conceptual projects are therefore not in conflict, but complementary, and it is in this spirit that I defend the necessity of the “fourth way” that is Generative Anthropology.

Even in its tendency to go on a bit too long about phenomena of peripheral relevance to language, C’s book deliberately underlines what all those scientific chapters exhibit in the small as a perfectly normal feature of any scientific endeavor, which can never be expected to provide a “final solution.” As C’s mildly debunking title suggests, he wants to show that the river had become over the millennia just a little rivulet, so that crossing it, however significant in its ultimate results, was just another of those incremental Darwinian accidents, such as the one that produced life itself.

Hence C’s book, to put it bluntly, is not primarily about language at all, in the sense that many of the technical studies focus on language-related physiological-neurological-linguistic details. The body of the book deals with functions that we commonly associate with language, but that C wants to assure us are essentially independent of it. In contrast with Deacon’s and CLS’s Peircean distinction between symbolic and indexical signs, he tells us of various brain-based activities: episodic memory, “mind wandering” (daydreaming), mental spatial mapping, toolmaking… that are both shared in part with other species and have something in common with language.

The second of three parts of the book, entitled “The Mental Prerequisites,” includes three chapters, “Thinking without Language,” “Mind Reading,” which discusses the evidence for a prelinguistic “theory of mind,” and finally, “Stories.” This last spends a good deal of time describing various genres of story-telling, from primitive myths to novels and detective stories, even video games. C’s point is that storytelling is an operation that uses language rather than being of language. For example, you can tell a story in pantomime, or in dance, or by drawing a series of pictures, as in a comic book. Language as we know it is in C’s view more a product of storytelling than its prerequisite. (“Narrative does indeed seem to form a large component of our thinking and may well have been the initial spur to language [101].”) If we surmise that some branch of pre-linguistic hominins enjoyed “telling stories” by miming or gesturing, then it is clearly a short step from this to inventing/discovering the formalizations characteristic of language, such as arise spontaneously, for example, in “Nicaraguan Sign Language,” a language newly invented by deaf students not previously exposed to signs. And voilà, language without a Rubicon!

C’s model of language use is never specified, but always seems to be implicitly one-on-one conversation. The notion of a scene of language, even independently of whether it was “the first,” is absent, as is any reference to collective ceremony, let alone worship. When C speaks about telling stories without language, as though any other species told stories in any way whatever, he never makes reference to a center from which the words/music/dance emanate toward a peripheral audience. (Everyone can participate in a dance, but not if it’s supposed to tell a story.)

C defines language as “a form of technology rather than a mode of thought (186).” I’m not sure what it means to call language “a mode of thought” as opposed to a medium of thought, but calling it a “technology” assimilates it to all the adaptations by which living things control their environment: chimpanzees, beavers, even amoebas have “technology” of one kind or another. Rather than a “mode of thought,” language is a mode, a technology if you will, of social communication and control that, in the terms of our hypothesis, serves to avert conflict over a desirable object by deferring its appropriation. Needless to say, none of this is considered here, nor indeed in the entire literature on the question.

No doubt for C, as well as for the authors of the technical articles in these collections, in insisting on an originary event, GA simply doesn’t get it. In their perspective, the idea of a qualitative leap—although C’s model of this is clearly not Müller’s revelation of sun-worship but Chomsky’s “language gene”—is simply naïve, modeled on religious revelation.

The authority of the originary hypothesis derives uniquely from how well, and how minimally, the reader finds that it explains the realities of culture as he knows them: its various “scenes,” from casual conversation and teamwork to religious ceremonies, including the “sacrificial” meals we still share; and how well our account of originary deferral comports with the best attempts to explain the specificity of the human psyche: Girard’s account of mimetic desire, Derrida’s différance and its phenomenological predecessors, notably Sartre’s pour-soi.

In the spirit of Occam’s razor, the hypothesis’ parsimony should be taken not as a mere attribute of elegance but as a presumption of truth. This criterion is classically that of logicians. But today, when even logicians work with “big data,” we should recall that William of Occam was not only a logician but a man of God—which is to say, faith aside, one aware of the indispensability of transcendence.

As was John, who defined “the beginning” by the Logos. So close to Lévi-Strauss, yet so much more complete, for the signs of the Logos also contain the sacred, the transcendental intuition of the unity that binds the sign, its referent, and its source, in the anthropological analogy to the Christian Trinity for which GA’s originary hypothesis provides a minimal formulation.

One of the unexpected pleasures in going through a number of books on language origin was coming across the following passage from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (CLS) Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss, which I remembered vaguely but had never examined seriously as a statement about the origin of language.

Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the ascent of animal life, language can only have arisen all at once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually. In the wake of a transformation which is not a subject of study for the social sciences, but for biology and psychology, a shift occurred from a stage when nothing had a mean­ing to another stage when everything had mean­ing. Actually, that apparently banal remark is important, because that radical change has no counterpart in the field of knowledge, which develops slowly and progressively. In other words, at the moment when the entire universe all at once became significant, it was none the better known for being so, even if it is true that the emergence of language must have hastened the rhythm of the development of knowledge. So there is a fundamental opposition, in the history of the human mind, between symbolism, which is characteristically discontinuous, and know­ledge, characterised by continuity. Let us con­sider what follows from that. It follows that the two categories of the signifier and the signified came to be constituted simultaneously and inter-dependently, as complementary units; whereas knowledge, that is, the intellectual process which enables us to identify certain aspects of the signifier and certain aspects of the signified, one by reference to the other—we could even say the process which enables us to choose, from the entirety of the signifier and from the entirety of the signified, those parts which present the most satisfying relations of mutual agreement—only got started very slowly. It is as if humankind had suddenly acquired an immense domain and the detailed plan of that domain, along with a notion of the reciprocal relationship of domain and plan; but had spent millennia learning which specific symbols of the plan represented the different aspects of the domain. The universe signified long before people began to know what it signified; no doubt that goes without saying. But, from the foregoing analysis, it also emerges that from the beginning, the universe signified the totality of what humankind can expect to know about it. What people call the progress of the human mind and, in any case, the progress of scientific know­ledge, could only have been and can only ever be constituted out of processes of correcting and recutting of patterns, regrouping, defining re­lationships of belonging and discovering new resources, inside a totality which is closed and complementary to itself. (Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, tr. Felicity Barker, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950, p. 60-61. Italics mine.)

It is fascinating to reflect on the similarities and differences between this passage and the conception of language origin presented by the originary hypothesis. CLS is not at all interested in the worldly circumstances of this originary moment, which he presents as a transcendent revelation rather than a gradual emergence from animal communication systems, indeed, one that is “not an object of study for the social sciences, but for biology and psychology.” Hence his idea of all at once is very different from that of GA. The difference lies precisely in the absence of a link between the significant and the sacred, between the abstract category of being the potential object of a sign and the infinitely particular category of possessing a transcendental significance, not simply as a (biological) “value,” since its possession is interdicted, but as something new: a meaning.

CLS’s “revelation” is not made to anyone in particular about anything in particular; it is an entirely intellectual event, the kind of discovery depicted in cartoons by a shining light bulb. It is a bit like Archimedes discovering his “principle” in his bathtub, but as CLS is at pains to point out, it is wholly unlinked to worldly knowledge. For this idea of universal application is not about “reality”—it is transcendental. It gives rise to no knowledge, but to an infinite possibility of knowledge, allowing us to use the indefinite multiplication of signs to manipulate ideas and to seek to discover their connections. Already implicit in this discovery is the possibility of science, the construction of laboratories where such connections could be tested—and still more generally, of everything, religion excepted, that distinguishes us from our fellow creatures.

CLS cannot be said to be suggesting, like Chomsky and some of his followers, that the revelation he describes took place in a single mind. He is simply indifferent to the circumstances of the birth of significance and rejects the temptation to create a scenario, plausible or otherwise, for its occurrence. Since signification is revealed entirely as an instrument, it has no originary content, and it therefore can be described as though it were a matter of indifference whether it was revealed to one person or ten million. CLS’ point is simply that human language, the use of signs, must have begun at some point, and since the signifier-signified relationship that makes the sign possible is in itself indifferent to its components, its application to anything immediately implies that it must apply to everything.

Here we have precious proof that social science cannot grasp the event of language origin because it is simply indifferent to it (“not an object of study”), even when it has the clear intuition that this origin was indeed a punctual event and not a gradual series of improvements to our cognitive and signaling abilities. In contrast with Max Müller’s intuition of the originary identity of the sacred and the significant in the word for sun, one is tempted to say that CLS, in the spirit of a certain anthropology of “primitive” religion, sacralizes everything. But no; it is a purely logical matter. Now that we have signs, we cannot help applying them to, thinking about the world, like Adam let loose in God’s creation and about to give names to the objects of nature.

Thus CLS’s affirmation that “The universe signified long before people began to know what it signified” should be read not to mean that it “always already” signified. He means simply that once humans have language, they see the whole universe as potentially significant, but that the worldly–cognitive content of this significance, that is, the way things fit together, the laws of nature, which are in CLS’ phrase “what it signified,” remain to be discovered. Once we have signs, we have the task of ferreting out the articulations of the universe from what William James called its “blooming, buzzing confusion.”

The reader familiar with GA cannot fail to have noted the diametrical contrast between the proposition of the originary hypothesis that language begins with a single sign designating the single sacred-significant being in the universe and CLS’s presentation of the notion of signification/significance as applying to the entire universe from the outset. Yet these two conceptions are not as far apart as they appear.

CLS’ idea is an abstract one: the idea of “significance,” meaning having-a-sign-for, inherently applies to everything. If there are not words for “everything,” it is because not everything is significant in the sense of being worthy to speak about, but in principle we can always find, or invent, a sign for any item.

In contrast, the originary sacred distinguishes one object in contrast to everything else. Yet it is obvious with respect to signification that, unique as the first sign may have been, its uniqueness was not essential to it; if you can have one sign, then you can have a million.

One might object that, given Durkheim’s key distinction between sacred and profane, the first sign defines everything else than the central object as “profane,” unworthy of signification. No doubt this distinction in religious practice serves to establish a “sacred space,” that is, a scene, that reproduces the originary revelation. Yet the “profane” instruments of everyday life are not thereby deprived of importance, of potential significance. Genesis presents the things of this world not as opposed to the sacred but as derived from it, as elements of God’s “good” creation. And as humans extended significance from the unique center to the other objects of the world via what I called in TOOL the “lowering of the threshold of significance,” these objects come to be revealed as having been from the outset potentially worthy of being assigned a sign.

The difference is one of anthropological perspective. CLS, as a “real” anthropologist, is not interested in speculating about an imaginary scenario for the birth of signification, but merely insists that once the idea of the sign, signifiant/signifié, exists, it applies in principle to everything that we can conceive, ideal objects as well as real. But if we seek a model of the event by which this idea might have appeared, it is only understandable as a new idea if we conceive it as applying, first of all, to some single thing that stands in a new relationship to the human group, a relationship that we can call the “sacred,” and that is also the significant.

The view of signification appearing like the light bulb is diametrically opposed to René Girard’s idea of the origin of the human and its signifying capacity in “emissary murder.” As opposed to CLS’ eirenic scenario, Girard views mimetic violence as in itself a sufficient model of the origin of human culture, which emerges as the murder is succeeded by the controlled lynchings of sacrifice, of which language is merely a secondary accompaniment. For CLS, everything is significant; for Girard, significance emerges from the body of the—necessarily human—victim, although the progress of culture will lead to the substitution of (edible) animals for the cadaver he postulates. In one, the “idea” begins as transcendent-in-itself; for the other, even a linguistic sign would be too abstract. Girard thought of language as a secondary development of emissary sacrifice, with the remains of the victim supplying the first “transcendental signifier”—however such a “signifier” may conceivably be related to those of human language.

After reading chapter after chapter seeking to explain the emergence of human language through the evolution of the categories of mature language, with never an event to mark the passage from the prehuman to the human state, I have found only in Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox (Pantheon, 2019—see Chronicle 614), which treats language itself as a gift of the gods yet ironically offers an explanation for its emergence closer to the originary hypothesis than any other, a focus on Girard’s key revelation of the violent potential of mimetic rivalry. What better proof is there that the subject of language origin is too important to be left to the specialists?

Before I could construct the scene of the originary hypothesis, I needed the revelatory light bulb of signification to supply the différance of its potentially violent mimetic motivation. I have many times acknowledged the contributions to the originary hypothesis of Girard (mimetic violence) and Jacques Derrida (deferral/différance). Yet, curiously enough, neither Girard nor Derrida conceives of the birth of the human as an event. Both are—in very different ways—prisoners of the toujours-déjà: Derrida because his notion of différance is just a bit too clever in combining the human non-act of deferral (différer) with the abstract category of difference, which applies just as well to electrons and protons; Girard, because he views human self-consciousness as dawning slowly, independently of language, and only being fully realized with the coming of Christ.

Maybe CLS didn’t care about where, when, and to whom the light bulb first lit up, but he nonetheless had the intuition, absent not just from our two master thinkers but from all recent specialized writing on the subject, that human language is not just different but of an altogether different species than animal “language,” that this difference consists in adding a transcendental dimension to the world of prehuman reality, and that the revelation of transcendence cannot be conceived as a gradual progression.

So let me add to the duo of Girard and Derrida the name of Claude Lévi-Strauss, 20^th-century France’s most distinguished anthropologist, as the man who threw the switch. Merci, maître!

Responding to strictly linguistic studies of language origin is simple enough, for such studies have few points of contact with GA. Even in the area of the origin of utterance forms, which makes up the bulk of both editions of The Origin of Language (TOOL), there is little common ground, for the influence of generative grammar is so great that linguists simply cannot conceive of language that is not always already, as the French say, based on the declarative sentence. To be sure, children have a “one-word” and a “two-word” stage, but the words they hear as real speech, as opposed to vehicles of instruction (saying “cat” when pointing to a cat), are mostly already in declarative sentences, so it is easy to interpret these “stages” as stopping-points on the way to the declarative. Thus linguists never think of the declarative sentence as having emerged from more elementary forms.

As for the origin of “the first word(s),” this always seems to them something of a formality, as though at a certain level of cognitive development ideas and their signs cannot help appearing. Well before I thought of writing on the subject, I always found the basic Chomskian idea that language is first of all an internal “cognitive” mechanism and only secondarily a system of communication simply absurd. It is the equivalent of saying that the originary function of the genital organs is masturbation, and only fortuitously do we discover that they can be brought together to produce offspring.

In contrast, those who approach language from the “social” angle, and who therefore at least nominally recognize the primacy of its communicative function over its internal structure, have by that very fact much more in common with GA. There has been much research done in all areas relevant to the “social” evolution of language since I wrote TOOL forty years ago. And in a not altogether paradoxical sense, these various strands of research into protohuman social arrangements and signaling, even touching on “ritual,” if not religion per se, make a more urgent case for GA than the linguistic strand, which, to be fair, starting with Chomsky himself, does not really see the origin of language as a crucial matter, any more than biologists focus on speculating on the origin of life rather than studying its diverse forms. It is in relation to the social-science-oriented study of the evolution of language as a social activity that GA as a “new way of thinking” is truly relevant.

For on the one hand, one cannot expect scientists to base a theory on a purely speculative scenario, the only “evidence” for which is retrodicted from much later cultural phenomena. But on the other—and this is a point that GA alone can make, since it belongs neither to science nor philosophy nor religion—lacking the possibility of an originary hypothesis, not simply a “scenario” like Hobbes’ scene in Leviathan but the reconstruction of a minimal originary event, we have no effective secular substitute for a theoretical model of the origin of what we can simply call transcendence. And the proof that such a model is necessary emerges far more clearly from the lacunae in these studies than from those of the linguists, whose domain is not history but structure, the diachronic evolution of which does not require speculation about its origin.

One finds in this subset of studies occasional references to points I have shown in my Chronicles to be absent from the more popular books on language origin. The names of Roy Rappaport, of Claude Lévi-Strauss, of Terrence Deacon do appear, albeit episodically and with no real concern for the transcendental nature of religion that at least the first two of these authors, as anthropologists in the old-fashioned sense, were obliged to respect. Nonetheless, their names are a reminder of the connection between the origin of language and what I called in TOOL the institutional forms of cultural representation.

At the same time, these scattered allusions reveal in their superficiality the loss of the intuition that presided over Max Müller’s naïve but, I dare say, luminous idea that the first human word was the word for sun. We cannot help recognizing the analogy to the interdiction that surrounds the sacred in the power of the sun’s presence that makes it impossible to look directly into it. The core of the notion of transcendence can be found in the identity between the significant and the sacred that situates the language-culture complex in human history; Müller’s intuition captured this central feature of language that the originary hypothesis would make explicit. In contrast, these studies contain numerous references to ritual, and even occasionally “religion,” but neither is conceived as anything but a set of collective practices, never as the institutionalization of a revelation of transcendence.

Yet without transcendence, none of the terms that allow us to distinguish ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom have any meaning. Husserl’s original conception of intentionality was clearly a way of interpreting concrete human experience in terms of transcendence, that is, as something more than animal perception, even if many of his analyses focused on the way in which we “intend” an object do not emphasize this fact. And in the later phenomenological generations, Heidegger’s Dasein and Sartre’s pour-soi—and of course, Derrida’s différance—explicitly partake of a transcendentality that is denied to other species.

Indeed, the specific human character of our sociality cannot be described as mediated by the signs of language and culture without adding that the very existence of the sign, that is, the process of signification, is inconceivable without the notion of transcendence. We can easily see through the awkward attempts of early semioticians to describe sign systems as “the substitution of one thing for another.” A sign is not a “thing” substituted for another “thing,” indeed, it is not a “thing” at all. But even the Saussurean sophistication that makes a science of semiotics possible, and that allows us to see computers as “thinking,” has no explanation for language’s emergence into the human world.

Transcendence is, if anything, an ontological category; indeed, it is the ontological category, since there is no other way to distinguish kinds of being while allowing them to participate in the same universe. The sign is “transcendent” with respect to the material world in the sense not that it is made of some different material, but that it “stands above” the world and its contents, including its “ideas,” and can “represent” it. Within the material world, the sign can only manifest itself materially, but as the manifestation of a transcendental reality/category/being representing a material or conceptual reality.

The operation of transcendence is easier to experience than to “explain,” because “explanation” is itself a transcendental category that we can normally take for granted. If we use d=gt² to “explain” the motion of a falling body, it goes without saying that the terms of the equation cannot be understood as “one thing substituted for another,” but as the expression of a relationship between material things, a “law” of physics. But the contingent phenomena of life, whether or not their regularities can be formalized in similar “laws,” are equally susceptible of being represented by signs that categorize them, as “the cat is on the mat” categorizes the presence of a certain type of entity in a certain location.

The key question in all this is why we need to assimilate significance to sacrality, as though we cannot avoid giving religion its place in human ontology. This is indeed the crux of generative anthropology, and the fact that contemporary social science prefers to treat religious belief as outmoded superstition does nothing to solve the problem (see in particular Chronicle 519).

GA is not creationism. There is nothing in GA that should prevent the most adamant atheist from accepting its originary equation of the sacred with the significant. Indeed, I would warn the latter against the “mimetic” danger of making the affirmation of non-existence into an unavowed inverted worship. The French have an expression: Brûlez ce que vous avez adoré; burn what you adored. We can all recognize this phenomenon in the Black Mass’s profanation of communion wafers, which for the “true” atheist are just biscuits, but Satan is not so easily denied. The core condition of the originary event, preceding the first emission of the sign, which in our hypothesis is rather the realization by one or more of the group that the abortion of his appropriative gesture can be understood as a sign, is the mimetically-generated sacred “aura” surrounding the object that prevents the Alpha, and all the others, from appropriating it. It is its sacred, that is, its universally interdicted and therefore “otherworldly” status that inspires the members of the group to “intend” the sign, as opposed to merely letting it be an index of the aborted gesture, and this “intention” is explicitly one of communication. As sacred, the object cannot be assimilated into our world, but only communicated about, that is, signified, by means of the sign.

This simple idea, which I expounded in the first edition of TOOL in 1981 and have sharpened since throughout my Chronicles and in the 2019 second edition, is a necessary component of a minimal anthropology that gives an intelligible account of human difference. But under currently imaginable conditions, it is fundamentally unprovable by empirical means. Indeed, I would say that social scientists working on the problem of language origin should not even try to prove it. My claim is rather that they should recognize, as a precondition of their own researches, the need for an originary hypothesis as an explanation of the transcendentality of human language and culture. For even one who denies all truth to religion, who views it as the opium of the people, cannot explain its intimate originary connection with language without the notion of transcendence. GA is, precisely, its minimal explanation.

Reading these studies arouses in me a number of questions that I think should be of interest to humanists. When I look at articles of “hard science,” for example in the copies of Physics Today that my neighbor and UCLA colleague George Morales sometimes passes on to me, I can’t say I understand them, but I can well see them as parts of an overall construction, bricks in the edifice, even if I have no way of measuring their importance. In the case of a number of the articles about language origin, however, even though I readily admit that my knowledge of the elements of the nervous system is insufficient to fully appreciate them, I have a very strong impression that they are exercises in an intermediate genre between true scientific publications that present results and popular overviews of a field, like those articles in Scientific American I talked about in Chronicle 611. They sum up results of scientific research, but, as far as I can tell, not in a way that will advance the understanding of the emergence of human language to the next plateau. Not all the chapters of these books are in this style, but more than a few are.

To truly demonstrate this point, I would be obliged to reproduce entire articles or book chapters. But let me give you a sample of what I am talking about. The following passage comes just before the end of a 32-page chapter entitled “Embodied Meaning,” by Don M. Tucker, in The Evolution of Language out of Pre-language (John Benjamins, 2002), p. 75:

In his evolutionary-developmental study of cognition, Werner proposed that the differentiation of specific cognitive form out of holistic and syncretic precursors is characteristic not just of the child’s development, but the development, or microgenesis, of each idea (Werner, 1957). As he considered the microgenetic process within the context of neuroanatomy, Brown recognized that the progression must be, at least in broad outline, phylogenetic. The development of an action, and a concept, must begin in the arousal and motivational centers in the upper brainstem, must recruit some adaptive resonance with diencephalic and limbic circuits, to be unfolded across paralimbic (e.g., cingulate) association (e.g., supplementary motor) and finally premotor cortices, before being instantiated in the motor cortex (Brown 1987). [Italics mine]

Although all these references to parts of the nervous system may be relevant to understanding how the elements of language are processed, they have no clear relationship to language’s specificity, that is, to its transcendental difference from the perceptions and interoceptions that we share with animals. Although “meaning” is presumably the subject of this chapter, there is nothing beyond a couple of brief references to meaning at the very beginning of the article, let alone a discussion of how what we normally mean by meaning is related to cognitive processes whose location in the brain is insisted on but the nature of whose content is wholly taken for granted.

I was struck in this passage by the term concept. The author puts together “[t]he development of an action, and a concept” as though it went without saying that they are the same kind of thing. His insensitivity to the vast difference between the movements of cilia and concepts such as love or democracy makes me very dubious that all this physiological jargon has anything specific to say about human language. Would he say that amoebas too have concepts, such as “hot,” “cold,” “food”? One wonders what Hegel would have made of that. And what indeed does it mean to refer to the “instantiation” of a “concept” in the “motor cortex”? Unless, of course, you are an amoeba.

I would not leave the reader with the impression that all the chapters in these books are equally insensitive to the specificity of human language. In a subsequent Chronicle or two I will discuss some of those that strike me as particularly relevant.

And let me insist that my main point in discussing these essays is not make light of them or to reveal, in contrast to GA, their irrelevancy to the subject. It is rather to demonstrate why, as a fourth way of thinking other than science, religion, or philosophy, GA is indispensable to provide an explanation of why human beings have signs.

Last week I spent a good deal of time working on a Chronicle about the victimary “Zeitgeist” that has taken over much of our culture. Yet I ultimately found that expressing once more my opposition to the victimary, along with a few analytical remarks I had already made more than once, was not useful. No doubt there are times when one must dare to protest, but an online essay by a retired professor with a few dozen readers is not a world-historical act, particularly when he has already made the same points previously. What seems to be needed is a morality, or more precisely, an ethic, and at least the outline of a political program, to counter the insidious moralism that allowed Obama to greet Raul Castro before a monument to Che Guevara, while in the US, “progressive” institutions, after demolishing statues of Robert E. Lee, are painting over murals dedicated to George Washington.

I have no sympathy with the fundamental victimary premise that Western culture is fundamentally flawed by its adherence to “white” supremacy and its practice of various forms of (often unconscious) discrimination against “intersectional” victimary groups. But I do have sympathy for those in GA circles who are impatient at my writings on the subject. For I must admit that, whatever the value of my analyses alleging the digital revolution and the increased emphasis on symbolic as opposed to physical manipulations as what the Marxists would call its “infrastructural” sources, they have not led to a plan of action, or produced political arguments that have any promise of effectiveness.

In what we might call the “Burkean” past, the society maintained itself through the wisdom of inertia. Religious institutions, which understood that the real world necessarily depends on inequalities that always risk being interpreted as injustices, played the principal role in reconciling people with the objects of their resentment.

Burke made his points in a strictly secular context in reaction to the French Revolution, where (see Chronicle 621) resentment was set at the center of moral epistemology, a place from which it has never since been driven. Faced with the problems of the catastrophic tyrannies of the left and so-called “right”—the latter of which are in fact evil twins of the left, as Hitler’s “socialism” was of Stalin’s—liberal democracy has remained since the British and above all the American Revolutions the solution of choice. I have not yet lost my Fukuyaman belief in the ultimate superiority of this system—always, as Churchill put it, as the worst with the exception of all the others. But I must admit that my confidence has been shaken as I watch victimary folly spread nearly unchecked through the culture.

The power of “PC” comes from our reluctance to “blame the victim,” not simply for undeserved persecution, but for “disparate impact,” measured as a correlation between ascriptive categories and outcomes. UCLA and everywhere else wouldn’t be hiring deans of “diversity and inclusion” in every division and school for any other reason.

The originary hypothesis, and the universal human faith in the “moral model” born in the originary reciprocal exchange of signs, form the basis of any conceivable universal ethic. What makes all such ethics problematic, and will presumably always do so, is that the freedom that deferral provides to human consciousness is also the source of a vastly enhanced potential of firstness, in ability but above all in achievement. Chimpanzees, like humans, make tools, but I need not point out which species has done more with them.

Let us recall Adam Katz’s point that the sign, being the first product of a truly human initiative, could not have been the “spontaneous” discovery of the entire originary group, but must first have been grasped by one or a few of the members as potentially something other than a mere indexical consequence of the “aborted gesture,” and thereupon transmitted to and adopted by the others. Given this originary model of firstness, it is most significant that we must suppose that this “leadership” conferred no special status on the sign’s originator(s).

But well before the invention of sedentary agriculture in the Neolithic, the opening up of human consciousness by the deferral inherent in language would have permitted many small triumphs of firstness, which is only to say, of human initiative. Indeed, the high level of violence in most remaining hunter-gatherer societies would seem to be a testimony to the disequilibrium brought about by a strict distributional egalitarianism. Someone can always be thought to be taking more than his share, and some certainly do; feuds and murders tend to abound. The usurpation of the center by the big-man was not the violation of an Edenic “state of nature,” but a concession to firstness at the point when it could begin to serve a universal social function.

Ever since, humanity has faced the question of balancing firstness with moral equality. That this requires concessions to the less gifted to compensate their lesser earning power is a common feature of today’s liberal-democratic “welfare states.” What is new today is that victimary politics is far less interested in trying to raise the potential of those left behind in the digital era than in explaining their condition as a fundamental injustice rooted in racial and related discrimination.

A theory of origin is not a magic formula; its virtue is to provide a universal model of humanity’s fundamental traits, one of which is certainly not the color of our skin. Here, then is a brief statement of a GA-inspired ethic and, in a way, a suggested political program.

By separating people into ascriptive groups, victimocracy makes political dialogue and compromise impossible. “Math is white” may be ridiculous on its face, but it makes a real point, which is that in politics, power does not come from the logical strength of one’s reasoning. The young people who have made a hell of the Providence school district (see https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-education-horror-show-11562532467), as well as of so many others, need not formulate the idea in such bald terms, but the tragedy is that they enact it in the classroom. And teachers who fear suspending students “disproportionately” are incapable of putting an end to this situation, which benefits the students least of all. A society that establishes racial quotas for everything from delinquency to college admissions is on the wrong track.

We are all one “race.” Skin color has become an absurd fetish. Natives of India/Pakistan, who years ago were simply called “Caucasians,” are today classed as “POC” or “brown” people. The US has accommodated better than just about any other society a variety of immigrants from all over the world, and has done its best to abolish the traces of slavery. It is shameful to witness the constant attempts to destroy our citizens’ identification as Americans to the profit of an “intersectional” mixture of resentments, including that of the application of immigration laws to illegal migrants.

As I have tried to show (see Chronicle 597), the Western-style nation-state, with its monotheistic roots, offers its citizens the most direct connection to the originary unity that made humanity possible. But affirmation of national unity in turn implies a race- and ethnicity-blind legal system.

The United States should stop dividing its citizenry by ascriptive categories. Attention must be paid to economic conditions, and laws against discrimination must be strictly enforced. But racial quotas, whether or not wearing the fig leaf of “diversity,” are alien to the spirit of our Constitution and should be abolished.

“Affirmative action” should be maintained where needed. But it should be practiced as it was originally intended, not as a demeaning gift of points on an SAT score, but as an added opportunity for remedial work for those whose talents may have been overshadowed by inadequate preparation. Whatever advantages might be conferred by supplementary help are unimportant if in the end we all take the same test. For we are all one people, and should be expected to meet the same criteria, be they manual or digital.

As Chief Justice Roberts put it in 2007, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Let us hope that the Supreme Court can rise to the occasion and produce a humane but effective plan to do just this.

In this year’s GASC talk in New York, and in a few recent Chronicles, I have alluded to the limitations of the hard-science approach to language origin, which eschews any allusion to an event of origin. But rather than simply asking you to take me at my word, let me provide an example of what I am referring to.

The following passage is from Denis Bouchard’s The Nature and Origin of Language (Oxford, 2013), a book whose focus is on demonstrating the feasibility of the author’s “Sign Theory of Language” (STL), inspired by the Saussurean signifiant/signifié conception of the sign, but expanded to include syntactical “signs” (contiguity, agreement, etc.). This does away with the need for Chomskian Universal Grammar and its Language Acquisition Device (LAD), and consequently simplifies the task of conceptualizing the evolution of language through natural selection. As a layman, I had never been persuaded by Chomsky’s arguments for the LAD, which have since been largely discredited, nor by the various mutations of Transformational Grammar since the 1960s. Thus I find Bouchard’s arguments quite compelling, and am quite ready to accept his version of the process that led to our capacity for mature language.

But the point of GA is not the evolution through natural selection of our language capacity, but the event of its origin. Here, in the book’s conclusion, is Bouchard’s take on this issue:

Questions on the origin of language relate to the fundamental question of who we are. At the personal, functional level, we have a language faculty with several properties that are different from the properties of other animal communication systems, making us unique in several ways. Darwin showed that our existence was not inevitable, that we are the result of numerous complicated and unpredictable processes, and that, on this scale of things, we do not differ much from other animals, and only a very little bit from other primates. One of the key distinguishing properties, language, in all its apparent surface complexities, is also actually just a small step removed from properties of other primates. As is so often the case, a small difference in a complex system such as a living organism can result in huge differences in the overall system. In human beings, a small change in the way some neurons function produced Offline Brain Systems* that gave us human language, and most likely human Theory of Mind. This echoes Tattersall (1998)**, who concludes that the innovation “that set the stage for language acquisition [ . . . ] depended on the phenomenon of emergence, whereby a chance combination of preexisting elements results in something totally unexpected,” a “sudden and emergent event,” presumably “a neural change [ . . . ] in some population of the human lineage.” The innovation leading to signs and all the linguistic properties that derive from it, required only a very small step, given all that was already there in the meanings and the forms: all that was needed was a way to get concepts and percepts together in a suitably matching form in the brain to link them. The emergence of OBS was sufficient to induce the advent of signs, given the contributions of other elements such as the general laws of nature, and of cognition.
(334-335; brackets in the text are the author’s)

——

*These “systems” were previously described by Bouchard in the following paragraph:

My proposal is that the human capacity for language rests on minute neurological changes that provided some human neuronal systems with a new “representations” capacity, resulting in a cascade of new functional capabilities. These Offline Brain Systems emerged due to an increase in synaptic interactions that was triggered by several compounding factors. One of these side effects is the possibility to link concepts and percepts, thus accounting under the STL view for the two core properties of language: the capacity to form signs follows directly; recursion is a result of the self-organization triggered by the chaotic system that emerged. These properties no longer pose insoluble challenges for natural selection. (106-107)

**The Origin of the Human Capacity [sic]: New York: James Arthur Lecture Series, American Museum of Natural History.

After over 300 pages in which he demonstrates the superiority of STL to Chomsky’s UG, one cannot say that Bouchard is unaware of the capacities of human language. Yet he begins by denying that language has any significant causality; it is just a “small step” away from the capacity of other primates. This assertion is not an objective scientific conclusion; it is a dogma, an expression of parti pris, which no evidence, let alone common sense, could disprove. If the only force that can bring about change in living creatures is natural selection, then nothing other than incremental changes can occur. But the similarity of our genome to that of the chimpanzee should only make it all the more imperative to explain the origin of the vast difference between our respective cultures.

Indeed, the dramatic expression “sudden and emergent event” in Bouchard’s paragraph—significantly, quoted from another authority—suggests that something more consequent has occurred than “a small change in the way some neurons function.” But the drama is immediately belied by its characterization as “a neural change in some population.”

This is simply incoherent. How is the appearance of “a neural change” in any sense an “event”? Certainly a genetic change in a “population” could not take place all at once, as events are presumed to do. Tattersall is clearly referring to a mutation. In the more naïve past, we used to hear from Chomsky and others about a “language gene” that “suddenly” appeared in a similar manner, its communicative properties being in any case subordinate to its “representational” qualities. Today, our authors are more cautious. Even if this mutation adds the key ingredient that permits the emergence of language, it can be spoken of only in austere and general terms as “a neural change” or “an increase in synaptic interactions.” Language is never more than what Stephen J. Gould called a spandrel, a secondary consequence of the real fitness-enhancing changes in the nervous system, although once it got going, it can be assumed to have had its own “Baldwinian” effects on the genome.

There is, in fact, another variety of language-origin book that deals with language’s “social origin,” where our incremental superiority to our primate cousins is measured not in purely cognitive terms but in those of the “small steps”—never either eventful or scenic—that separate our different “societies.” I will deal with these in a subsequent Chronicle. But in works like Bouchard’s that remain wholly focused on the mechanisms of language, the idea that a social-communicative element might play a role in these “sudden” developments is never in the least hinted at. Everything takes place in individual brains.

Now language is certainly one “behavior” that cannot be explained by an “emergent event” affecting single individuals. How indeed did this mutation not merely “suddenly” appear, but spread to an entire “population,” yet without a word concerning its effect on reproductive fitness, which is the mechanism through which selection operates? Well, we can say the change constitutes an improvement in general intelligence. But presumably such changes had been taking place for a while in the hominin line; why is this change “suddenly” productive of an entirely new form of collective behavior? Need I insist further that every language-specific question raised in this paragraph is simply begged?

Similarly, the Offline Brain System (OBS) had “emerged” without any apparent feedback from the collective social order. Bouchard well knows that the “arbitrary” signifiers of language are in no way outgrowths of the indexical signals of other primates, a point Terrence Deacon made quite forcefully in The Symbolic Species. But now an “increase in synaptic interactions” suddenly allows our ancestors to link “concepts to percepts.” If the term “concept” has any meaning, it cannot mean what animals “conceive” as families of percepts, such as “prey” for a carnivore, and which evoke specific behaviors. For to the extent that animals have “concepts,” they must already be linked to percepts to exist at all.

What then is the differentiating factor in creating human concepts that can be represented by signs? But, we learn, the transition poses no problem at all. As Daniel Everett tells us (see Chronicle 567), “language is not that difficult.” Or in Bouchard’s terms, “the capacity to form the sign follows directly.”

There is nothing in these passages, nor in the entire book, that sheds any light whatever on the emergence of “signs” that are not simply the product of “synaptic interactions” in individual animals, but are somehow shared by an entire group of creatures such that they can be communicated among them. Such sharing requires not only a Theory of Mind, by which we intuit the intention of the other, but, if not a grammar, certainly a lexicon. How could humans have created even a single sign without somehow coming to agreement on its meaning?

Thus we have, on the one hand, a sophisticated discussion of linguistic phenomena, and on the other, mere Darwinian patter to disguise the same old wishful thinking that adding some new synapses and “neural changes” suddenly enables an entirely new and life-transforming system of communication.

The taboo that surrounds the revelatory event of human language allows us, at the very least, to be secure in our confidence that GA’s invisibility has a cause beyond our collective ineptness at attracting publicity. GA must remain invisible, as women’s bodies remain invisible under Sharia. Watched any Iranian movies lately?

To speculate a bit further, it seems obvious that there is a causal relationship between the unrelenting increase in the dogmatism of victimary thinking in the softer parts of the campus and the increasingly rigid methodological dogmatism in the harder ones. Certainly the increase in scientific rigor in the fringes of the victimary world, say, in the “digital humanities,” reflects the desire of many younger scholars, if not to combat the PC mania, then simply to sidestep it by resorting to provably “objective” methods.

The last years of the 20^th century, which saw the publication of Deacon’s Symbolic Species and (posthumously) Roy Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, both of whose authors saw no difficulty in proposing a cultural and even religious causality for language, have by now become ancient history. That was the now-distant Clinton era, when the reign of the victim was just beginning. Remember Sister Souljah, the black activist whose praise of black-on-white violence Clinton won votes back in 1992 by denouncing? (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtSifopiL1g) Let’s see a Democrat try that today.

Today’s scientists, whether students of neurons or of language, want nothing to do with anything that suggests culture. Even what Wrangham naively called language’s “mysterious dawning” (see Chronicle 614) can only be a spandrel of the evolution of our internal capacity to create the Saussurean signifier-signified relationship. Although the study of language origin might not appear to be vulnerable to considerations of identity politics, just think of the fact that in Deacon’s scenario, as in mine, it is men who invent language—in his case, to insure the fidelity of their women. Such speculation today would surely run afoul of the campus Title IX officer. And imagine daring to suggest that sacred rituals might have a function other than duping the masses into following the Great Leader. How much less troublesome to describe it all in terms of synapses and neurons and (non-sex-linked) genes.

And how much less troublesome as well to avoid the disturbing implication that language somehow makes us superior to the other denizens of the planet. In Genesis 1:26, God gives Adam “dominion” over all other creatures. Today, we still acknowledge that we are indeed smarter than our primate cousins, but only by “a very little bit.”

The paradox of it all is that it is the very existence of superiority, of firstness, less between humans and other creatures than within the human race, that generates all this nonsense, from anti-white and anti-masculine resentment to antisemitism. Humans are both the same and different, and our greatest challenge, one that renews itself in different guises at unpredictable intervals, is to reconcile our fundamental moral equality with our unequal ability to contribute to the human community. As a solution to this problem, victimocracy, like socialism, is just another repressive horror disguised as an Eden.

CODA: The limits of belief

I thought that the idea of mathematics as “white” (see Chronicle 563) was the limit of victimary absurdity, until I saw this passage, from a piece by a non-woke Harvard student on the National Review site.

When a close friend told her roommates that she believed in biological differences between the sexes, she was forced to change dorms because she had created an uncomfortable environment for one of the students.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/what-conservatives-get-wrong-about-campus-wars-woke-culture/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-07-04&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

Need we further proof that the victimocracy, as embodied in the Harvard administration, is plumbing hitherto unexplored depths of abjection? Belief in witches, or in alien abductions, (1) would not have resulted in the young lady’s expulsion, and (2) supplements the real world with dubious phenomena, but does not deny its most fundamental components.

Following on the Sullivan affair (see Chronicle 621), Harvard would appear to be striving to prove itself the most contemptible “institution of higher learning” in history.