Author: staceymeeker

Last week’s Chronicle 569 was inspired by Phillip Cary’s exposition of Martin Luther’s “performative” Christianity. That led me to think about how the notion of the performative, not mentioned in the first Origin of Language (TOOL), should be understood in the context of GA’s originary hypothesis.

The performative is not an utterance-form like the ostensive, imperative, or declarative. Performativity, “doing things with words,” is a quality of the effect of the utterance on the human community in which it is pronounced. J. L. Austin’s original idea was inspired by the fact that certain utterances (“I now pronounce you man and wife,” “I sentence you to …,” “I baptize you…,”) are guaranteed by social or religious authority as doing things, both in formal contexts (marriage, church sacraments, legal decisions…) and informal ones (making a promise).

But in the seventh of the twelve lectures that comprise Austin’s groundbreaking How To Do Things with Words (1955/62), having failed to find a grammatical criterion for the performative (understandable, given that performativity is not a specific utterance-form), Austin makes a “fresh start” that leads him to describe the effects of language in more general terms. Rather than seeking to define a class of performative verbs, he introduces a new vocabulary that permits him to distinguish among the effects of all speech-acts, effects which he separates into locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. The locutionary act consists simply in saying something, and its effect is simply comprehension. The illocutionary act is that of (successfully) communicating the effect implied by one’s words, whereas the perlocutionary act is the actual effect caused by the speech act. The specific nature of performatives is that their illocutionary effect automatically becomes perlocutionary by virtue of the power given to the words under specific conditions. In contrast to argue–persuade or warn-deter, as models of the illocutionary-perlocutionary distinction—a necessary consequence of your understanding my words as intended is that you have been argued (to)/warned, but only if the argument/warning takes effect have you been persuaded/deterred— if I sentence you to death, or promise to give you $100, you are ipso facto affected by my speech independently of any response on your part.

In this context, it is worth remarking that in Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species (Norton, 1998), his speculative scenario for the origin of language is the need for hunters about to leave on a hunting party to secure their relationship with their mates, given the particular difficulties of gestation and child-rearing for our large-brained species. Thus Deacon suggests that the first use of language was in a kind of marriage/fidelity ceremony, insuring that the returning hunter would have only his own progeny to bring up. This speculation is obviously fanciful, and hardly as “minimal” as the scenario proposed by the originary hypothesis, but it is clearly dictated by Deacon’s intuition that the first utterances must do something rather than merely exclaim/inform about it. How then should GA approach the questions of performativity and illocutionary/perlocutionary effect?

As the previous Chronicle made clear, the performative, and more broadly the Austinian perspective of linguistic functionality, provides an opportunity to deepen our understanding of originary language. Performativity is another word for the transformative effect of language in creating meaning, and thereby a cultural reality, where none previously existed. Whence the pertinence of Cary’s description of Luther’s insistence on the efficacy of the words of Christ in promising salvation, promising being one of the primary categories of performative—one that, significantly, is not limited to formally defined situations such as marriage or baptism, but available to any person in linguistic communication with one or more of his fellows.

That the illocutionary/perlocutionary element of the originary ostensive is indeed the key to its functionality is a tautology; were it not for its effect on the group performing it, it would never have been remembered and repeated. What Cary’s portrayal of Luther’s understanding of Christ’s promise adds to GA is to clarify from a fideistic perspective the link between the linguistic act and the social order it establishes—an human communal order in the place of an animal pecking order.

The hypothetical originary sign collectively enacts as a deliberate act the deferral of appropriative action toward the central figure, while emphasizing at the same time the unique non-instinctive attention given to it. This act of “joint shared attention” is the inception of a new, uniquely human attitude toward the world, focused on an object to which it attributes for the first time a significance, not a simple appetitive attraction but the mediated product of one so great as to defer appetitive action. This is the origin of linguistic performativity, the demonstration of the power of a communal sign over the appetites of the human community, and of the originary identity of the sacred and the significant.

In Austin’s terms, the illocutionary force of designating the significant central object produces the perlocutionary effect of deferring its appropriation, and in doing so, demonstrates the new power of the sign, by naming it, to do so. The institution of “illocutionary force” is the product of the originary sign; the fact that when we hear language, we are affected, “argued” even if not persuaded, warned even if not deterred, has clear parallels in animal behavior, but now the effect is produced not by an indexical signal but by a symbolic sign, a word, or Word. By focusing our understanding on this originary moment we are able to grasp the experiential source of all other forms of significance and of the sacred.

In responding in the January 2018 issue of First Things to the objection that the sacrament of penance in its standard Catholic formulation requires an appropriately penitent attitude on the part of its recipient, Cary simply insists once more on the performative nature of the sacrament:

The word is: “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father . . .” This contains no conditional clause such as “if you have sufficient contrition, your sins are absolved.” Hearing this unconditional word addressed to us means we cannot doubt that our sins are absolved, unless we believe the word is not true.” (6)

Just as pronouncing a couple “man and wife” or declaring a defendant guilty or innocent is effective regardless of their feelings at the time, so in Cary/Luther’s understanding, the sacraments are fulfillments of Christ’s promise to humanity and not conditional on their recipients’ inner state.From the religious standpoint, this distinction clearly has important consequences for the penitent’s future behavior and his confidence in his future salvation. The paradoxical Calvinist reading, as I understand it, of “salvation through faith” is not merely that our faith is always imperfect and requires God’s constant help to maintain us in a state of grace, but that since human faith can never be sufficient to respond properly to God’s promise, the only possibility of salvation comes from God’s own decision, which our actions in life cannot possibly affect without God’s prior knowledge, so that we can be said to be “predestined” to eternal life or damnation.

Although generative anthropology can rephrase these doctrinal differences in anthropological terms, it cannot determine which side is “more anthropologically correct.” Its function is merely to understand the underlying anthropological basis that permits such distinctions to be made, and that Cary’s presentation of the faith-works distinction facilitates.

I can say as the initiator of the originary hypothesis that very few subsequent insights have added to my understanding of its foundational nature. One has been Adam Katz’s point that interpreting the originary sign as a gesture of deferral and as a sign of its referential object would not have occurred simultaneously to all the members of the group. It would have been an individual revelation to each individual, with some becoming aware of this before the others, and so to speak teaching them its truth: the originary basis of human firstness or individual initiative, without which the very action of the sign in deferring our “instinct” of appropriation would be incomprehensible.

Now Cary’s article has allowed me to understand that the faith, inherent in the sign, that God/the human community guarantees the meaning of its signs, and by the same token, the integrity of its promise of peace, is whole in itself and not dependent on any additional conditions. For at the origin, the group would have had no other guarantee than the collective manifestation of the sign itself, as the substitute for the action of appropriation originally intended.

This foundational element of the originary hypothesis once put in its place, we might ask what clarification it offers to those who wonder how GA’s anthropological understanding may or may not contribute to their religious belief. To the extent that I myself ask this question, my answer is that as a Jew, I am blessedly not obliged, as Christians are wont to do, to agonize over the reality or the degree of my individual faith. Having been inducted into the Jewish people as a Bar Mitzvah in 1954, I am until further notice a member of this religious community—a membership that, had I been born in the same place as my ancestors a couple of generations back, would no doubt have made my life much shorter, but for which I have fortunately suffered very little if at all during my life in the United States. That I have always identified myself as a Jew, although I cannot say I “believe in God,” is to my mind an advantage of the Jewish religion that, whatever the rabbis say about it, we should appreciate.

Christianity—and all Western Jews in the modern sense of the term are Jews-within-Christianity—requires more in principle of its adherents, and from “our” perspective, too much. Yet I if anyone should have sympathy for the desire to “be as Gods” that Jesus’ example offers to Christians. Freud, Einstein, Durkheim were Jews, but the man I learned the most from was René Girard, a Christian who never denied the relevance of Judaism, but who was nonetheless convinced that Christianity represented a step closer to the truth—and who am I to deny this?

But I can say that if Jesus is the Word, then as someone history has defined by his non-acceptance of Jesus’ mediation, I am better equipped than René to understand both the truth and the danger of Jesus’ usurping the community’s role in defining and performing the originary gesture/sound/sign of deferral that first made us aware of the sacred. Or at the very least, to recognize that this originary gesture of the human cannot be, as John and even René himself must have been aware, understood without reference to originary language.

Let us hope as 2017 comes to a close that humanity will profit from the coming year to productively defer its resentments in the interest of love and self-understanding.

Of the relatively few students of René Girard who have attempted to build on his work, only Sandor Goodhart and I, to my knowledge, have been Jewish. But Girard himself always insisted on the essential continuity between Judaism and Christianity, understanding Judaism as the ultimate worldly religion—a position that, it seems to me, leaves completely open the question of whether one’s faith in Christ can succeed in “transcending” Judaism in a new religion. This Chronicle is dedicated to René on what would have been his 94th birthday.

The central mission of GA is to find an objective anthropological basis for dealing with such fundamental cultural questions, which otherwise remain enmeshed in the paradoxes that every non-originary perspective on language and culture creates for itself, paradoxes that religions at least have the grace to present in anthropomorphic terms.

My immediate inspiration for this Chronicle is Phillip Cary’s “Luther at 500,” in the November 2017 Catholic-oriented journal First Things (21-26). Cary commemorates the 500^th anniversary of the posting of Luther’s 95 theses by a brief but illuminating exposition of what Luther’s theology brought, not to Protestantism as a sectarian faith, but to Christianity as a whole. Given my admittedly limited knowledge, this strikes me as Christian ecumenism at its best, opening the door to a more nuanced understanding of the choices made by different Christian congregations.

But what is of greatest interest to GA is not the degree of confluence between Catholicism and Lutheranism, but the extent to which, as Cary argues, Luther’s theology sees Christ above all as a source of language, and in doing so, corroborates and enriches the understanding of the connection between language and the sacred embodied in the originary hypothesis.

Theology is not a domain where we should venture on an a priori basis. If it is true, as I like to say, that theology is good anthropology (but bad cosmology), then we must dialogue with it rather than “transcending” it. GA is not the authorized story of the Weltgeist, but a minimal way of bringing together the various ways in which humans have thought about the essence of their humanity, a new way of thinking that seeks to clarify their truth without simply replacing them. And it is no coincidence that religious discourse, and above all Christian discourse, is highly resistant to any such replacement, not out of mere belligerency but because of intuitions such as those attributed to Luther in Cary’s essay. This essay is not only an insightful perspective on Luther and on Christianity generally, in the service of reunifying the Church after half a millennium; for our purposes, its focus on God’s/Christ’s word as language offers a perspective on Christianity that greatly facilitates dialogue with GA.

Cary reminds us that Luther’s original point was not to contest the efficacy of the sacraments, but to rid the Church of the materialistic distortion of the sacrament of penance in the sale of indulgences, which claimed, as the English translation goes, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings/ The soul from Purgatory springs.” Luther assumed at the outset that the Church’s higher authorities could not possible be aware of such abuse; within five years, he refused obedience to the Pope, having learned that the Church hierarchy was profiting directly from the practice.

Cary emphasizes that in rejecting this commercial debasement, Luther by no means denied the value of the sacraments. On the contrary, being forced to meditate on the importance of the sacrament of penance and on the sacraments in general, he arrived at the conclusion that they were not less but more efficacious than the Church had realized. For in granting the sacrament of baptism, the priest, and eventually the Lutheran minister, was not simply allowing the child to enter the community of the Church, he was conveying the word of Christ that bears salvation.

This is the key to the faith/works divergence from Catholicism of Luther and, with variants, the other Protestant founders. As Cary puts it, Luther would abolish the “performance anxiety” of the faithful, who had striven to fulfill God’s commandments through good works in order to “merit” salvation. On the contrary, God’s grace is conferred by baptism itself, and reiterated by penance and the Eucharist. If we remain sinners, it is not because we have not performed enough virtuous deeds, but because we are unable to maintain perfect faith. But knowing this, Christ forgives us our sins on our promise to renew our faith in God’s promise of salvation. Which is to say that we fight our sinfulness, not by attempting to strengthen our will to resist temptation, but by convincing ourselves that in telling us through Christ that we belong to him and to his kingdom, God is indeed telling us the truth; for otherwise, we “call God a liar.”

The moral point of all this is emphatically not that if we are justified by faith alone, then in the absence of the “good works” performance anxiety, we may act as selfishly as we like; it is just the opposite. If we are so justified,

then works of love serve our neighbors, not our desire to justify ourselves or make ourselves holy. We are holy because Christ claims us as his own through word and sacrament . . . Luther challenges us to recognize that from the beginning of the Christian tradition, this is always how Christ has saved his people . . . Thus justification by faith alone is not new, even though Luther’s formulation of the doctrine is. (26)

Cary emphasizes throughout that Luther’s doctrine of faith finds its guarantee through hearing, through the word rather than any iconic presence. And it is on this point that he makes the essential linguistic distinction on which his ecumenical alliance with Luther depends:

Both the law of God and the Gospel of Christ are God’s word, but the former only gives us instructions while the latter gives us Christ. For the law tells us what to do, but the Gospel tells us what Christ does. . . .

A great many preachers, Protestant as well as Catholic, overlook the distinction between law and Gospel, thinking they can change people’s lives by giving them practical advice—as if telling them how to be inwardly transformed could help them do it. Augustine already knew better. Luther’s addition to Augustine’s insight is merely the glad recognition that there is indeed something preachers can do to help us be transformed: instead of advice, they can give us Christ. (ibid)

The preachers can “give us Christ” in the sense that the wafer “gives us” Christ’s body. Cary points out that Luther was not hostile to the idea of transubstantiation, but considered it unnecessarily literal, since if Christ’s body and blood are truly present in the sacrament, there is no need to require a miraculous transformation of physical matter. For Luther it is enough that Christ gave his word that “this is my blood . . . my body,” and that the repetition of the word in conjunction with the sacrament suffices to remind us of this promise. And in the same sense, the preacher gives us Christ by reminding us of Christ’s “good news” for us.

What for Cary is Luther’s central lesson for Christians, Catholics included, is that “Luther does not aim to see God’s essence but to hear him speak, for it is in his word that God gives himself to be known” (25). Throughout his essay, he is contrasting two aspects of language that correspond, roughly but not exactly, to the contrast between the declarative sentence, which offers “context-free” truths—about God’s law or his essence, or about the atomic weight of plutonium—and what could broadly be called performatives, Christ offering his promise of salvation and having his words repeated to us by his clergy. For Luther, the job of the clergy is not to tell us context-free truths about God and salvation, but to repeat to us Christ’s promise, for to have faith in this promise is to be “justified,” whatever propositions about God’s essence we may or may not be able to affirm.

The opposition between the law and the word of Christ is at the heart of the opposition between Christianity and Judaism. This is not the place to defend the Jewish position, which is certainly not the equivalent of the preacher “telling [you] how to be inwardly transformed,” but rather to clarify the nature of the distinction Cary is making between the statement of the law and what he refers to obliquely as telling us “what Christ does” and “giving us Christ.” What is the precise nature of the linguistic distinction he is making here?

It is easy enough to understand what the preacher should not do: study the Gospels so as to understand the “divine essence,” then attempt to convey to the faithful how this essence should be applied to their own lives. Cary makes no distinction between this procedure and adherence to the letter of the law. He argues on Luther’s behalf that “if God is a person rather than a principle, coming to us in the person of his own Son, isn’t believing what he has to say about himself the deepest and most appropriate way to know who he is?” (25). But this still doesn’t give us a clear idea of what types of statements we are to take as exemplary and how our acceptance of them gives us what he calls “a kind of secondhand knowledge” as opposed to allowing us to “[see] the ultimate Truth for ourselves.” If Euclid tells me that “two points determine a line,” then Euclid remains a person, but the principle he is enunciating is one that I can assimilate fully and not “secondhand.” Whereas the promises of the Gospel are valid only “secondhand,” on the authority of God through Christ.

I think that the distinction Cary is making, which strikes me as essential for understanding religious language as opposed to that of factuality, as well as demonstrating by its very vagueness the ultimate impossibility of finding an “objective” criterion on which to make this distinction, can be clarified by reference to GA’s critique of metaphysics as falsely assuming the “eternity” of the declarative sentence or proposition. The performative language, what Austin called “doing things with words,” that is at the core of Luther’s faith in the efficacy of the sacraments, consists in utterances such as “I baptize you” or “I absolve you of your sins,” in both cases, in the name(s) of the Trinity. In the latter case, for example, he describes Luther as teaching that, given the promise in Matthew 16:19, “Whatever you absolve on earth shall be absolved in heaven,” “to doubt the word of absolution is to call Christ a liar” (22).

These distinctions cannot simply be assimilated to that made in The Origin of Language between the elementary linguistic forms (ostensive and imperative) and the declarative. “I absolve you” is superficially a declarative sentence. But it is not a constative, like the declarative that arises in answer to a failed imperative. On the contrary, its performativity, its doing things with words, answers a need in the hearer by means of the words themselves. And in doing so, it provides the “missing link” between GA’s hypothesis of linguistic origin and the performative language of Western religion.

We should note that we are only assured of the efficacy of these sacraments through our faith in the promises made in the Gospels. The sacramental words do not have a “magical” effect in creating new realities; they operate through the mediation of God’s prior promise, that if these words are pronounced on Earth in the appropriate context, they will be so to speak honored in Heaven. This promise guarantees the link between the words and the thing they do.

Yet what is really “done” by the sacraments that transcends the purely sacramental context? After all, saying that one is “justified” or “saved” or “purged of one’s sins” is ultimately only of significance in relation to one’s life with one’s fellow men. Cary’s whole point in insisting on the relevance of “justification by faith” for all Christians is that as a result, “works of love serve our neighbors, not our desire to justify ourselves or make ourselves holy.” That is, we understand love as a relation, mediated by God, between me and my fellows, not as a mode of self-purification in which I relate uniquely to God. However this may be understood in Judaism, the whole point of Christianity is to emphasize the primary importance of the moral relation with others, as so many examples in the Sermon on the Mount, and elsewhere in the Gospels, that put human care above ritual make clear.

In the ostensive language of the originary event, all the members of the group share the sign that represents the central being as what can be possessed by all only once the symmetry of the group is recognized by all. This first ostensive is indeed a word that does things: it creates a human social order where before there was only a pecking order, a queue structure no more integrated than a line in a supermarket. And it does so by the most fundamental linguistic act: the assertion of significance— in this case, at a moment when the very concept of the significant/sacred did not yet exist. To focus the attention of the group on an object that can only be contemplated is to create in our relation to it a distinction between its “idea” or “image” or “signified” and its physical being that cannot be accessed, to make of this “signified” no longer a component of our appetitive drive toward the object, but a being, or Being, in its own right.

The significance of the central object is man’s first experience of the sacred, which is to say that at this stage, the two terms are synonymous. The various attributes that for us identify God, or even “a god,” are derivations from this primordial characteristic of a being that can no longer be accessed from within our world but that is the focus of our desire. Of course God is more than a sacrificial animal, but the separation between the central locus of human attention and the object of the subsequent sparagmos would not yet be realized in emitting the originary sign. Theology, the understanding of God, is nothing but the attempt to define the nature of this sacred centrality.

When John identifies Christ with the logos, the word/sentence/utterance, he identifies the sacred with the emergence of language, which is “with God” because God can only emerge into the human world along with language. Whether we believe that God preexisted language, or that he is a creation of the human mind in its invention/discovery of speech, the two emerge into our world simultaneously.

Hence, to return to Cary’s analysis, Luther’s emphasis on “hearing” is a foregrounding, not of language in its declarative, information-bearing function, but of linguistic performativity, as the central function of language from the beginning. The socially sanctioned performativity of “I now pronounce you man and wife” is only conceivable because language has the power to assign significant meanings to worldly beings, and the significance that these meanings embody has its root in the originary sacred/significance conferred and recognized by the first sign.

What Cary praises in Luther is his restoration to the sign of the full sense of its originary sacrality. The Church had given priests the power to baptize, but in Luther’s view, this sense had been reduced to a kind of licensing procedure, in which Christ gives the new member of the congregation the potential for salvation, whereas if we would not “call Christ a liar,” we must consider that baptism, along with penance and the Eucharist and the other sacraments Luther considered directly grounded in the Gospel, must be understood as actually conferring salvation on the baptized.

Cary does not elaborate on how the latter, through lack of faith, can lose this originary guarantee and be obliged to renew it periodically. But just as the ritual repetition of the originary sign renews the sacrality of the central locus and the being that occupies it, the repetition of the sacrament is necessitated by the inevitable infidelities inherent in earthly existence; even if we know that only one thing is sacred, we cannot survive if we remain entirely focused on it.

But this is a secondary matter. The important message is that the language itself conveys the sacrament because it repeats the promise of God through Christ, and in that sense, renews as well the performative element of the ostensive that is lost in its repetition as “ordinary language.” For if the first use of the ostensive names the referent, in the sense of giving it a name, subsequent uses that repeat the word “name” it only in the sense of recovering its name as a means of identifying it, that is, of signifying it, while taking its significance for granted. But the sacred use of language is never simply the recalling of the name, but always a naming anew.

Thus Cary’s view of Luther’s religious intuition is that the sacrament is only real, and indeed, only of any use whatsoever, if it restores this original performativity that is the originary effect of language, what makes it the source of our sense of the sacred and simultaneously of human communal solidarity.

In the same way, GA’s fundamental purpose, without calling us to religious belief, is to remind us of this fundamental function of language. The ostensive is not just a social “performative,” but the originary performance of the human community’s existence, both in its collective and its internal, individual moments. I cannot vouch for the orthodoxy of Cary’s interpretation either in Catholic or Lutheran terms, but I am wholeheartedly in support of the anthropological intuition that he expresses, in religious form, in this admirably revelatory essay.

Adam provides here the clearest and most strategically plausible program I have seen for Generative Anthropology, not merely to survive but to contribute fundamentally to human self-knowledge. He proposes a collaborative intellectual ethic very much in the spirit of the deferral of violence at the core of the human. It’s up to us to make it happen. -EG

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One possibility that I have never seen considered within discussions of the originary hypothesis is that thinking in terms of the hypothesis is simply incompatible with any other way of thinking. GA, in that case, would represent a new way of thinking repellent to old ways of thinking. For example, Eric Gans has proposed for many years that originary thinking provides a way of mediating, or establishing a dialogic space for, atheists and theists, given the formula, generated by his hypothetical account of the originary scene, that “man creates God/God creates man.” To this day, has anyone taken him up on it? Even among GA’s most devoted and sophisticated adherents, debates continue to proliferate regarding how to “reconcile” one’s particular faith with the hypothesis. I think the assumption behind Gans’s proposal is that every faith comes into being under specific conditions, requiring that certain anthropological insights be brought to the fore and framed ritually, while those insights can in turn be re-framed and deepened through an understanding of the originary scene. That sounds reasonable, but maybe only in “Enlightenment” terms, that is, only if you are already thinking about your faith primarily in terms of its “anthropological insights” (which would, of course, assume a readiness to exchange faiths if one with more profound or more necessary insights comes along). The same would hold, for that matter, for those invested in Enlightenment terms, which presuppose their own anthropological insights, ones which may not react well upon exposure to GA’s radically different ones. The resistance to any “penetration” by GA into the institutionalized and “hardened” disciplines (the Human Sciences) is, if anything, more complete: even leaving aside the victimary turn these disciplines have taken in recent decades, the founding assumptions of literary studies, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, economics, and even sociology may simply be too embedded in the daily practices of members of those disciplines to allow for GA to become visible, much less plausible.

The assumptions founding these disciplines (and all their sub-disciplines and inter-disciplines) are, I think it must be said, arbitrary—which is to say, articles of faith. I now make a point to remind myself, in thinking about “ideas,” to go to Google’s Ngram viewer and see the trajectory of the use (in books) of the words denoting those ideas over the past few decades (or centuries if relevant). It’s a fascinating exercise. For example, pretty much all of the current catch-phrases in contemporary academic discourse (“multiculturalism,” “critical thinking,” “homophobia,” “white privilege,” among many others) all started to take off during the very late 70s to very early 80s. Something clearly happened around that time. “Sociology,” meanwhile, was introduced, apparently, sometime in the 1880s, became gradually more popular up until 1940, then, following a brief dip in the early years of World War 2 (why?), shot up, reaching its peak in the mid 70s, then declining slowly but steadily (edged out by the victimary theories?), finally evening out in the mid 80s. There are enormous opportunities for young scholars to make their mark in innovative data-driven forms of research that would employ far more nuanced searches. Needless to say, the meaning of this or that shift in usage is not transparent. But it’s always helpful to keep in mind that whatever words we use and must use just to conduct our most basic business as academics, teachers, and intellectuals, were first used by someone, and then used by others, and used instead of other words, and all for reasons that we could in principle learn much more about—and that would not, to put it mildly, completely coincide with the conceptual coherence and power of the words in question. What I conclude from this realization is that the healthiest attitude we could take toward any of the disciplines is to assume there is an excellent chance that it needs a complete overhaul.

No mode of thought could have a greater interest in initiating such overhauls than GA. If all established discourses are, we might say, GA-proof, we must really go for broke and direct our efforts toward establishing GA as the One Big Discipline. A good starting point for doing so would be by inquiring into the conditions under which GA might eventually be installed as that One Big Discipline. At the very least, we would then be acknowledging what every human science now insists on implicitly denying, that any mode of thought is historical, and enters the world as an event. (How and when did psychology “discover,” say, “cognition” as a human “faculty”? If man creates God/God creates man, “cognition,” in the sense of “cognitive science,” must have both revealed itself somewhere and at a specific point in time, and have been “constructed” as an object of inquiry. I’m sure a history of psychology could—perhaps already has—answer that question with greater or lesser precision [my guess from a quick look at Ngram, is that the concept was consolidated in the early 40s], but contemporary psychology is certainly not interested in “grounding” itself in any such event.)  And what about the origin of the originary hypothesis itself? Eric Gans’s account of his articulation of Girard and Derrida (although I believe there is some musing over the esthetics of the French declarative sentence in there) points us in two extremely interesting directions. First, through Derrida, to the “linguistic turn” in 20^th century thought, that not quite conclusive blow to traditional metaphysics (“linguistic turn” also shoots upward on Ngram starting from the very early 80s), which imposed the recognition that all concepts are, in fact words; second, through Girard, back through a history of inquiries (including Freud and early 20^th century anthropology) into constitutive violence, into what we might call that in the archaic world which our modernity leaves us least prepared to see. This yoking together of, not opposites but certainly “disparates,” is an origin we can always return to as ground.

There are two possible paths toward one big disciplinarity. The most familiar one, attempted by virtually every “revolutionary” theory in the human sciences (historical materialism, psychoanalysis, even deconstruction in its way) is the establishment of a controlling meta-language. GA certainly has the materials for taking this path, in a set of “foundational” concepts (desire, resentment, deferral, center, scene, sign, etc.) defined precisely and contextually through a series of cultural, literary and social analyses. A contest of meta-languages is the almost universal, indeed practically the only conceivable mode of contestation among competing theories. You put forward your concepts, and I put forward mine; we then look at various objects of analysis and each of us provides an “explanation,” with the “better” or “stronger” one winning. Of course, this is a big problem, since there is no theory-free criterion for distinguishing between “stronger” and “weaker” analyses. We also know that there is no level playing field on which these meta-theory contests take place—rather, the process is historical, with the new theory taking aim at the dominant one. Post-structuralism hit North America in the 1980s with sophisticated analyses of the Romantic poets and canonical novelists like Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe because it was through its readings of such figures that the established New Criticism controlled the field. Which theory prevails might depend far more upon which provides more opportunity for novel PhD theses, grant proposals, and tenure track positions, and what determines that? I’m not reducing everything to power relations, and both New Criticism and Poststructuralism provided powerful and, in their time, innovative ways of reading texts; but it would be very hard to show that one theory displaced the other simply because it was “better.” The Kuhnian theory of the replacement of one theory by another through the emergence of anomalies in the existing system that multiply and generate increasingly strained attempts at resolution within that system, ultimately to be resolved within a new paradigm including the previous one as a limit case, might describe what happens in the natural sciences (I have my doubts). But when it comes to the human sciences, there’s no doubt that a far more complicated process, closer to the kinds of transformations described by Paul Feyerabend, in which economics, politics, and institutional imperatives weigh in heavily, determines the outcome. We will never be able to market our wares in a free and open marketplace before informed “consumers,” and it’s hard to see even a younger, leaner and meaner generation of originary thinkers (were such to emerge) engaging in the kind of marketing and politicking and just sheer ganging up that’s needed for a theory to prevail in the universities.

There’s another reason to be skeptical about the grand field of meta-theoretical contest. Such struggles encourage polemics, and polemics encourage the hardening of lines, the fetishization of the intellectual materials and the introduction of coercion into matters where it has no rightful place. It was not only Marxists who turned conceptual differences into life and death organizational struggles (or vice versa); psychoanalysis almost immediately split into competing versions, with each singling out a particular element of Freud’s analysis and all anathematizing the others.  It was not very different with Derridean, Lacanian, Deluezean, etc., versions of poststructuralisms. If there were to be an institutional stake in GA, enough to draw in “fresh blood,” we would quickly see lines drawn over “orthodox” and “heretical” understandings of “resentment,” the “moral model,” and every other concept. Of course there need to be discussions and there will always be disagreements over any theory, GA certainly included, and disagreements, properly conducted, are generative for any discipline. But the struggle for institutional mastery doesn’t provide the field where those kinds of disagreements could take place. I would also add that the days of grand theoretical battles in the university, at least the American university, are probably over: between victimary inquisitions, budgetary shortfalls, and the business model imposed on universities, forcing English Departments as much as anyone else to explain how they will be providing students with the kind of “critical thinking skills” they need to get jobs, leaves little zest for genuine theoretical battles.

The other path toward “owning” the transdisciplinary field has never, as far as I know, been tried. That path is learning to speak the theoretical languages we wish to supplant. This is more like body snatching than planet smashing. Let’s take an example that has come up often lately, due to the importance of cognitive psychology to the latest GASC conference in Stockholm: the computer model of the mind. Obviously the computer model is an antagonist to the originary hypothesis, insofar as it takes a product of human thinking aimed at supplementing human thinking in certain areas, and retrojects that product back as the model for human thinking itself. Saying that the mind is a computer is not really all that different from saying our bodies are automobiles. It defines down the human essence to one of our tools, rather than engaging in inquiry into the human essence that enables us to create, use, and criticize computers and cars, and to do many other things as well. But once we make our arguments, then what? The computer model of mind enables the inquirer to describe in interesting and complex ways all kinds of things. If I say that as a result of “experience” (refining an already existing “feedback mechanism”) humans construct and continually revise “algorithms” for determining, automatically, specified responses to probable phenomena, can it really be asserted that nothing illuminating can emerge from such an approach? When I am faced with a “choice,” I can, we might say, run some probability calculations, based on available evidence and subject to time constraints, so as to continually enhance the “effectiveness” of my choices. At the very least, the computer model is a source of provocative metaphors and ways of subverting various sentimentalisms.

We can certainly speak and think in these ways because the “computer model of mind” is a language, with its rules, idioms and tacit assumptions (to use a famous metaphor from Wittgenstein, it’s one of those newer suburbs built, in a planned and grid-like manner, around the more eccentric, improvised old city—perhaps an industrial park!), and we are language-using beings. I find it irritating and exhausting to repeat the same arguments over and over, which is what one has to do if one is determined to “refute” and “defeat” the “computer model of mind.” But we can speak to the computer model of mind by speaking within it. Asking an adherent of the computer model of mind to lay bare the algorithms he has followed in constructing an experiment so as to test the working of this model in some experimental subjects might be more instructive than hectoring him with its contradictions and dehumanizing consequences. The computer model of mind, like any discourse, has its origin and its originary structure (the iteration of its origin in its ongoing operations), and the way to discover this is not just by going back to the records of that conference in 1944 or whenever (unsurprisingly, Ngram has the “computer model of mind” shooting upward in the mid-80s), but by noticing what kinds of things must be said within the discipline and what kinds of things must not be said: by entering it as if it were just emerging and its terms needed to be learned by applying them to its emergence. By thus infiltrating the disciplines, we might get them to speak their own truth, which (we must have faith in the power of our own discourse here) must both iterate and evade its originary structure.

How do we remember our own origins while thus present undercover in the disciplines; how does One Big Discipline emerge from what appears to be dispersal? The real “proof” of GA as the “strongest” theoretical discourse will be that it can keep showing whatever disciplinary space it inhabits that this space needs the way of thinking only originary thinking can provide to address the anomalies in its own discourse, anomalies which the originary disciplinary inquirer will have trained himself to detect (yes, there is also a place to speak Kuhnian). The proof, that is, is in the way we will have clarified in a collaborative manner whatever those in that discipline have devoted themselves to studying—not in how we distract them by pointing out mistakes that might not seem such, or seem relevant, to them. If we find ways to “represent” so as to defer resentments in the course of any inquiry, we exemplify an originary intellectual “ethic,” which can in turn become a compelling topic of conversation. “Our” language, in other words, can take its place within the disciplinary language, and that is where something like genuine intellectual competition takes place, through the framings and counter-framings of intellectual collaborators. We would have to have faith that one day all might wake up and find themselves speaking generative anthropology; of course, along the way something like a crisis would have to take place in each of the various disciplines, and a substantial part of what we are studying now are the elements of that possible crisis.

This is also, I think, the best way to the best way to maintain GA, as we must do, as an autonomous disciplinary space, where we try out new concepts and new formulations and compare results from the field. You could certainly say that other GA practitioners practice a lot more of what I preach here than I do. Keep in mind that working within a field is not the same as eliciting the originary structure of that field. Regardless, I do something different (in addition), which I will just point to here as another possibility, complementary, I believe, to the one I’ve sketched out here. I’m trying to invent possible disciplinary languages out of the originary hypothesis. You could call it a kind of “skunkworks,” creating originary structures that might have various ramifications. (I am referring to what I call “originary grammar.”) On a “personal” level, I would rather fail at this than succeed in many other ventures. Whether there’s a place for the idiosyncratic space I’ve carved out in our discipline is ultimately for others to decide. I am attempting to insinuate the possibility of a dismantling of any utterance whatsoever into the succession of speech forms along with the possibility of its subsequent reconstruction, now marked by its articulation of that succession. It could be seen and used as an all-out orchestrated attack on commonplaces, grounded in the moral imperative of making our utterances new and ever more cognizant of their historicity. A grinding out of everything generic so as to reveal the originary in language—I hope it will be a portable laboratory for putting disciplinary languages under the microscope.

A final note: One Big Discipline would mean everything, “religion,” ritual and theology included. It’s hard to imagine that what we now call “psychology,” “economics,” “education,” “communications” and all the rest would become regions of originary thinking, but that somehow we’d still be talking about faith and ritual in the same ways. Religion is simply inquiry into some revelation of the sacred, and is in principle no different than any other discipline, which all rely (and deny their reliance) on the “auto-probatory.” The same process of infiltration would occur within religious institutions and vocabularies. There’s nothing compromising about inhabiting opposing, in some points incompatible, vocabularies—that will always be the case, even in the One Big Discipline, which would always be under constant review and revision. Remembering that concepts are words, and that there is that in the archaic which we need to bracket our modernity to see, provides a frame for conducting such conversations, within oneself and with others. In the One Big Discipline we would always be learning from the externalization of our resentments, which is probably what religion is best for, and which we would keep trying to make religions (as regions within the One Big Discipline) better at. And that’s something we can always begin to do.

Daniel Everett, a linguistic anthropologist whose work was given considerable publicity by Tom Wolfe in his The Kingdom of Speech (see Chronicle 525), has published the latest high-profile book on language origin, How Language Began (Liveright, 2017). This work is full of basic information about all aspects of language, from pre-sapiens evolution to phonetics, pragmatics, language disorders, Grice’s maxims of cooperation, Austin’s locutionary categories, the relationship of spoken language to gesture… It also provides a more systematic refutation than Wolfe of Chomsky’s conception of grammar as a “module” in the brain resulting from genetic mutation. I have previously expressed the opinion that Chomsky’s idea of generative grammar is best understood as a systematization of linguistic syntax with a view to its eventual computerization (to which it has greatly contributed) rather than, despite the word “generative” that GA has been obliged to share, a theory of the origin and evolution of language. But I have no quarrel with Everett’s overall view of language evolution, or of its early origin, including his thesis that language is not a recent development but dates back to Homo erectus some hundreds of thousands of years ago (see Chronicle 169). Yet although virtually nothing Everett says actively disagrees with the ideas expressed in TOOL (not surprisingly absent from his otherwise extensive bibliography), the vast difference in perspective lets us better understand both the disciplinary and the epochal differences that have fated GA to remain obscure although by no means obsolete, let alone falsified by the developments of language origin research and theory since 1981.

I referred in Chronicle 555 to the influence of “big data” on the cognitivists’ approach to language. Here we have a less technologically driven yet analogous development, one dominant in popular non-fiction: aggregating material encyclopedically (or Wikipedically) from all aspects of a subject, in contrast to developing a line of reasoning. Everett does have a thesis of a sort: he rejects Chomsky’s idea of language-as-grammar, more specifically of language-as-recursion, in favor of the more pragmatic approach favored by the cognitivists, for whom language is not an “instinct” localized an a “module” as the result of a genetic mutation, but an activity that makes use of many otherwise non-specialized parts of both the body and the brain—to which Everett has the common sense to add that language is not an emanation of the individual human brain but a means of cultural communication.

This seems to me all to the good, nor is a discussion of “how language began” the place to defend the virtues of Chomsky’s system. But having made the valid point that language is not a biologically determined module, Everett seems to think he has resolved the central difficulty of language origin. It suffices to postulate that the growing intelligence of the Homo line must lead to the invention of what C. S. Peirce called “symbols,” and once this Rubicon has been crossed, “language is not that difficult” (112). As for such things as syntax and word order, Everett gives as his example of a primitive utterance the pop song title Shamalamadingdong (p. 212ff), which somehow would be broken down into shorter words by accenting different syllables: either a theory of the origin of syntax so absurd as to defy refutation, or a mock demonstration of how simple the whole thing really is. Everett uses the example of the movie title Eat. Drink. Man. Woman. to show that, without syntax, we nevertheless find this utterance perfectly comprehensible—although, not having seen the film, I frankly have no idea what this is supposed to mean. [Addendum 9/7/18: Having seen the film, the non-grammatical nature of the title is clearly intended to reflect the pre-cultural nature of our “drives.”]

To make a long story short, although Everett’s good sense is in the right place in emphasizing that language is in the first place a means of communication and that it exists only as a part of a culture involving a great deal of shared and presupposed “dark” knowledge (a culture I would call representational to distinguish it from the Pavlovian “cultures” of animals), the idea that the emergence of human language entails not just one more step on the Peircean scale but a whole new scene of consciousness, as described in 20^th-century philosophy by such terms as Dasein and pour-soi and Derrida’s idea of différance, is altogether absent from this book, along with any other sign of concern with the age-old preoccupation of metaphysics to understand, if not the origin of language, the roots of human thought.

Thus the need to argue for, or even against, TOOL’s contention that only an evenemential hypothesis can explain language origin is altogether alien to this work. On the whole, despite its accumulation of source material, it illustrates contemporary anthropology’s vastly diminished level of intellectual and cultural sophistication in comparison with the tradition of Western anthropology from Tylor to Roy Rappaport or Clifford Geertz. It is thus not surprising that this book, although written by someone who has done extensive fieldwork in the kind of tribal cultures that provided the raw material for Frazer, Durkheim, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, and all the other students of archaic religious practices, discusses the evolution of early humans and their culture without a single reference to religion.

If there is one point that Everett makes that I think provides some food for thought for GA, it is his insistence that language from the first could not have been limited to gestures. For, aside from specialized languages for the deaf, no natural language is based on gestures, whereas conversely, all spoken languages involve gestures as (we might put it) analog complements to the digital flow of speech. In TOOL, not being concerned with the specifics of language production, I limited my speculations on “the first word” to gesture because this provided a direct link between an indexical sign that would be an element of the practical action of appropriation and a symbolic sign that would result from maintaining the physical act after the “abortion” of its practical function. But no doubt this action would have been accompanied by vocalization, and it might have been useful to give some thought to how language evolved into a primarily vocal system, in which gestures were an accompaniment but did not bear the weight of meaning. Not that Everett’s non-evenemential descriptions provide any hint of how either the original or the later mixture was achieved, except by suggesting that even at the outset, it would be necessary to consider the vocal component of the appropriative act.

On this point, it is hard to imagine any useful speculation on the nature of these originary sounds, or the first principles of their differentiation, since whether indexical or symbolic, vocalization is hardly a functional aspect of reaching for or even of eating a piece of meat. But it is useful to note that although the gesture of appropriation must be aborted, the vocalization need not be, and it is reasonable to consider this factor as conclusive in favoring sound over gesture as the definitive instrument of “formal”/linguistic as opposed to “institutional”/ritual representation, to use the distinction made in TOOL.

Everett’s use of Peirce as presumably providing a guarantee of his assertion of the ease with which we can understand “how language began” exemplifies a kind of intellectual fetishism that is very much a feature of today’s “digital” thought-processes:

Peirce’s theory indirectly predicts a progression of signs from natural signs (indexes), to icons, to human-created symbols. (16)

The archaeological evidence in fact supports the order predicted by the sign progression of C. S. Peirce—indexes would have come first, followed by icons and then symbols. (65)

The introduction of intentionality in the human sense is simply adduced, never explained, and Everett confuses the issue by stating that “intentionality is a property of all animal minds” (86), so that the only specific attribute of the (human) symbol is its (culturally determined) arbitrariness, the origin of which is never explained.

Here and elsewhere, Everett takes the mere existence of a theoretical continuum, such as Peirce’s index-icon-symbol, or so-called G1-G2-G3 languages, as proof that it “is not that difficult” to get from one level to the next: “Newspaper headlines, store regulations [e.g., “No shirt. No service.”], movie titles . . . are occasionally reminders of how simple language can be” (65).

In particular, Everett presumes that the discovery of multi-million-year-old stone fragments or “manuports” that bear a possible iconic resemblance to, for example, a face or a phallus, allow him to declare that even Australopithecus may have been on the way to developing communally recognized arbitrary symbols. But even if the preservation of these ancient stones is indeed a sign of the recognition of iconic resemblance, this tells us nothing about the collective status of such signs and their possible ritual uses, let alone of their place in the evolution of human language.

However language originated, it must have been in a communal event because, as Everett himself insists, language as we use it today is dependent on unstated communal knowledge. Thus any use of language remains today as in the beginning an event of communal communication, even when instantiated by typing this Chronicle on a computer keyboard.

But here as elsewhere, the refusal to see the deferral of violence as fundamental to the constitution of the human is accompanied by the utter neglect of the “institutional representation” of originary unity in religious ritual. This is the institution that from the beginning maintained what Durkheim called the “solidarity” of the cultures within which languages operate, and which Everett understands as the repositories of the “dark matter” of shared assumptions about the world.

But religion is not commensurable with the cybernetic understanding of the human brain and culture that makes up what we might call the “new synthesis.” As a close observer of the Amazonian Pirahã culture, Everett must have a considerable experience of, and no doubt respect for, its sacred rites, but his intellectual formation, in contrast to that of a Durkheim or a Malinowski, obliges him to consider such “emic” matters as epiphenomena in relation to the society’s practical needs. Yet it has been the sacred-based deferral of humans’ mimetically intensified passions that has permitted creatures concomitantly gifted and cursed with our intelligence to achieve the stable societies within which this intelligence could achieve its present and future conquests.

Having no desire to pick on Everett, I am willing to read the following prize sentence, written in refutation of Chomsky’s dictum that recursion is a sine qua non of human language, charitably as an unsuccessful attempt at irony:

However, the fact remains that no language has been documented in which any sentence is endless. (224)

But if we can forgive Everett this absurdity, we cannot help but regret his reliance on the common-sense assumption that the qualitative difference between the human brain and all those that preceded it can be explained by just one more step on the Darwinian ladder, one more degree on the Peircean scale of signs, without the intervention of the negative, “Girardian” element of mimetic rivalry and its dangers. Beyond the sad fact that the ideas put forth more than 35 years ago in TOOL are not refuted or even disputed, it is regrettable that the study of “how language began” has been stripped of all philosophical sophistication, of any dialectical sense that some new level of being is called for.

Now that everything in the universe is presumably reducible to a form of “information,” and thought is understood as just another term for computation, we need no longer interest ourselves in what for 99% of our history was considered most important, the human dependence on the sacred, and that of our capacity for cooperation on the deferral of culturally unmediated contact with reality, of violence. I dare imagine that Everett would find this last sentence as absurd as the assertion that linguists have so far failed to encounter an endless sentence.

Steven Pinker has famously noted (The Better Angels of Our Nature, Viking, 2011) that despite all the massacres of the twentieth century, our lives are not only much longer, but much more peaceful than those of past centuries. Whether this makes the Holocaust less or more horrible is another question, but one can’t deny Pinker’s point. Yet what is perhaps its most important consequence is rarely alluded to, although it has had a great influence on the decline of social cohesion in our time.

Religion was once constantly regenerated from the worldly society that recalled its origin in the communal solidarity occasioned by the “sacred” deferral of violence. Today, although the ultimate danger of human violence is ever greater, it is because of its very immensity “almost always” deferred, and therefore need not and indeed cannot be faced as past generations faced theirs, in times when a deadly fight with a neighbor, a marauding gang of desperadoes, or a small-scale natural disaster, not to speak of illness, were a constant threat. Now that we can expect to live to be 80 or even older, the sense of release that had always been central to our attitude toward death has been largely replaced with the idea of putting it out of our mind until it becomes, at a later and later time in our lives, absolutely unavoidable.

The general understanding of religion down to the nineteenth century and beyond was based on a worldview that has become foreign to us, although it largely remains that of the inhabitants of poor countries today: Life is a vale of tears. This being the fundamental human condition, given the originary promise of harmony and peace that is at the core of all human culture, the idea of being “gathered to one’s fathers” at death is quite credible, independently of any imaginings of celestial bliss, let alone the fear that after a painful life, Hell will be even worse. That such imaginings could be used to reinforce the faithful’s conviction concerning the “afterlife” would mean little had it lacked credibility to begin with.

The traditional attraction of the afterlife, which today is mutating into a vision of some kind of post-mortem digitally-driven resuscitation, if not simply of immortality tout court, makes little sense to people whose lives are dominated by the imperative to enjoy life. We see death as deliverance only for those who are suffering from wasting and/or painful terminal diseases, whereas the archetypal medieval peasant, whose “old age,” beginning at 45 or so, was not made tolerable by modern medicine, had few reasons to want to keep growing older, even aside from the now greatly diminished risk of everyday human violence.

But just as the digital age has placed a new strain on the originary moral model, founded on the more or less symmetrical sharing of the means of communication, modern hedonism has had a similar effect on social solidarity. It’s hard to complain about living so much better that we actually enjoy it right up to the end, but like eating lots of sugar or not getting enough exercise, this byproduct of modern life puts new strains on an organization designed in earlier times; and the most fundamental mode of human organization is still what we call religion.

We in the West appear to be witnessing the re-inversion of what Hegel and Marx described as the “inverted world” of religious eschatology. If life is a vale of tears, then paradise is our compensation. Can we still understand its attraction, as though only in heaven could we be without pain and suffering, hunger and deprivation?

None of life’s pleasures can quite compensate for the resentment caused by the impossibility of acquiring greater relative prestige, a problem scarcely considered when one must struggle to survive. But to the extent that the afterlife resolved this problem as well (“the last shall be the first”), the weakening of the primary evidence for its necessity removes its plausibility as a solution to humiliation as well as suffering. This is certainly an important factor in the enormous growth of the phenomenon of public humiliation (“shaming”) and the vast proliferation of base insults and curses in the social media in the context of the victimary quasi-religion of our era.

In the domain of sexuality, normally considered the source of our most intense and least “mimetic” pleasures, the evolution has also been clear. The “sexual revolution” of convenient contraception has led not only to a fall in the birth rate but to an actual decline in real sexual activity. As has been astutely noted by Kevin Williamson (“Harvey Weinstein’s Sexual Semiotics,” National Review, October 30, 2017) much or most of the “sex” of which the current crop of abusers have been accused is of the “semiotic” variety, starting with Anthony Weiner who is currently serving time for an offense that involved neither physical contact nor even proximity. (Reassuringly, the French Dominique Strauss-Kahn never seems to have been satisfied with “semiotic” sex.) And this tendency will presumably be vastly accelerated by the growth of virtual reality, now in its infancy. The Christian tradition has never expected the afterlife to provide such things as sexual pleasure; at best, we might take its earthly form as a premonition of the far greater pleasures of Paradise. But such expectations are very vague, whereas the pleasures provided by VR and AI-enabled sex dolls (see “Silicone sex dolls get an AI makeover,” Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2017) are very real, at least in physiological terms.

To the extent that formerly rare earthly pleasures become easily accessible in advanced societies, the contrast with less advanced societies helps explain the rise of a very un-Christian millenarism in the Islamic world. The intense desire to negate the West’s hedonism even at the cost of one’s life is an extreme form of the cultural critique expressed in more civilized terms in Erdogan’s recent message to Turkish families in the West (“Turks urged to multiply in Europe,” New York Times, March 18, 2017): to seek the highest forms of social and financial success, and to have not three but five children, where the Europeans cannot even manage two, thereby assuring the triumph of Islam by simply demonstrating its superior demographic viability. Can the Judeo-Christian West stand up to such a challenge?

When we speak of religion’s ability to console us for physical suffering, the skeptical reader is likely to smile at our naiveté, and even believers are known to “lose their faith” on learning of a disaster, whether man-made or natural, too horrible to be explained as the result of divine providence, such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake immortalized by Voltaire. But none of this in any way casts doubt on GA’s primary “Girardian” tenet that our notion of God is centrally derived from the deferral of human violence. It is precisely because human violence is of more urgent concern to us than the violence of nature that the evidence of divine protection from it is taken as a guarantee of God’s ability to ward off natural violence as well, and to the extent that we are able to accomplish this on our own, of our God-given ability to cooperate rather than fight among ourselves. Faith in providence as a solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma is not unreasonable, although our very description of this dilemma suggests the suspicion that we no longer live in a well-ordered society where reciprocity can be expected but a dictatorship whose arbitrary power isolates us. Clearly if the reward for defection did not put an end to the “prisoners’” mutual relationship, it would be far less attractive.

But in the hedonistic modern world there is less connection between individuals and less chance that the victim of a given defection will have his chance at revenge, or even at reproach. For “defection” does not normally occur within the narrow confines of a two-person prison cell. “Selling out” is seldom a matter of betraying a single individual, and even then, it tends to be supported by a complex administrative cum legal system. And conversely, the rewards for cooperation may not be obvious even if one is willing to transcend the temptation of immediate gain.

As the force that liberated the energies of modernity, the liberal-democratic market system was not coincidentally founded by pious people. The self-restraint characteristic of the old bourgeoisie was mediated by a world-view that saw life as directed at a goal, both financial and spiritual, antithetical to that of “enjoying life.” The least controversial point in Max Weber’s thesis is that the “capitalist” deferral of gratification is analogous to the Calvinist suspicion of such gratification, coupled with the hope that the ability to resist its allure might count as a sign of one’s ultimate election. Salvation was less a compensation for a painful existence than the nominally predestined result of having been able to withstand the temptations of worldly pleasures.

But the “consumer society” changed all that, starting already in the nineteenth century with Emma Bovary and the characters in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames. One would be perverse indeed to ask people to forgo the affordable pleasures of the modern world on principle, whether this principle be interpreted in Calvinist terms as a sign of predestination or in the more contemporary alternative of a self-liberating Buddhistic renunciation of worldliness. (Buddha, we should recall, was opposed to asceticism, which he saw as a sign of obsession with the world rather than of liberation from it.) Rather than hypocritically lament the softness of a lifestyle few of us—not necessarily the wisest—would be willing to abandon, we should rather make our awareness of this situation an instrument for better understanding the religious needs of our current civilization.

“Enjoying life” implies not less but more dependence on culture’s benefits, but it is a consumer’s attitude rather than that of a participant. This is already implicit in the Heideggerian idea of being “thrown” into the world, whose roots go back to the Romantic period, and specifically to the modern notion of “adolescence,” which allows the young person of a certain class a time of reflection upon his entry into the adult world, in contrast with the abrupt initiation of more primitive societies. (We should recall the transitional state found in the 18^th century in such characters as Mozart’s Cherubino or the young Chevalier des Grieux in Manon Lescaut, who passes abruptly from child to post-pubertal adult at the sight of Manon.) Once one becomes aware of one’s childhood state not as simply liminal but as an alternative to adulthood, one experiences the responsibilities of the latter as an imposition, and rather than simply attempting to forget them (say, in sensual excess), one seeks occasions to renounce them in such activities as “vacations” or “retirement,” categories of leisure that were virtually unknown to ordinary people in past centuries.

What for our “Calvinist” ancestors was a temptation and a test of our suitability for salvation has become a guiltless mode of restorative relaxation. It is certainly no surprise that societies attuned to this pattern have trouble reproducing themselves, or even in engaging in sexual activities that might remind us of such consequences, despite being protected from them by contraceptive devices. As Jean Baudrillard liked to say, we live in the age of the simulacrum, where we hope to have the semiotic benefits of “enjoyable” experiences without the messiness of reality—all of which takes for granted that our material needs, which cannot be “simulated,” have been taken care of.

In the context of the present “decline of the West,” it cannot be without significance that among Western countries, Israel is the only one that seems to find, amidst well-known dangers, enough positive value in life, as opposed to mere “enjoyment,” to be able to reproduce itself. Israel, however founded on a religious idea, is not a particularly religious nation. Yet the tension between the ultra-religious—and particularly fertile—Haredim and the secular mass of the population embodies the dual character of what Judaism has become in lieu of fusing into a homogeneous whole.

Perhaps we should take this religious dualism, which is duplicated on a very different level here in the US (say, the Mormons vs the DINCs), and has nearly disappeared in Christian Europe, as a model of our religious future—assuming that the West can avoid either degenerating into the passivity of Houllebecq’s Soumission or submitting to the presumably benevolent technological despotism of the emerging Chinese model.

It is difficult to think of the Haredim as the chosen bearers of the “spiritual principle” that reminds us, as religion always does, of our scenic origin, or to imagine that an analogous quasi-monastic impulse (e.g., the “Benedict Option,” hopefully combined with a Haredi-like focus on large families) is the only hope of the West. But the degrees of freedom open to secular Western civilization in the victimary era certainly give the impression of running out.

The other day Adam Katz, who has kindly read over my draft of the new edition of The Origin of Language (TOOL2), questioned my use of the term “aborted gesture,” since the gesture that becomes the sign is not itself aborted, but only its appropriative element. Thus he suggested I call it a “gesture of aborted appropriation.” This recalled to me that many years ago, Andrew McKenna had made a similar point, although I can’t recall exactly what emendation he proposed.

Given that Andrew and Adam constitute perhaps 20% of my readership, I can’t afford to neglect their comments. Yet whichever way you put it, there is really no totally coherent way of describing the originary sign. It starts out as a gesture of appropriation, and I insist on the appropriateness of the word gesture, since had the Alpha been able to maintain his precedence, his gesture of appropriation, that is, the indexical sign of his action, would have served as a signal to the others to wait their turn in the pecking order. Such a signal is not at all the same as a sign in the human, that is, symbolic sense (to use Peirce’s still-helpful terminology), but it is a kind of sign nonetheless.

But the question is really what the gesture is “trying to do,” and in the case of the originary sign, it functions very differently at its conclusion than at its beginning. Once it becomes truly a “gesture of aborted appropriation,” that is, a sign that one repeats not to appropriate but to demonstrate that one is not appropriating, then it is no longer just an indexical sign incidental to the accomplishment of an act, but a new intentional mode of communication (however many repetitions may have been necessary at the outset to make this clear to first at least one, and finally all the participants).

This gesture is easily imaginable in its physical configuration but unexpectedly complex in its functionality. For one thing, although we must call it the first true or “symbolic” sign, the ancestor of all the signs of language, it is hardly “symbolic” in its nature. The ostensive, even a verbal one, seeks to direct the hearer’s attention; it is in itself a pointing, and as such is deliberately indexical, suggesting its meaning through metonymic proximity. Indeed, it is not coincidentally the very archetype of the indexical, with the index finger as its natural instrument, whereas the original gesture of appropriation would not have thus involved a single finger. If we wish to imagine the passage from appropriative gesture to sign, we might well picture the transformation of the grasping hand into a pointing one with only the index finger extended, although such imaginations go beyond the minimal necessity of the hypothesis. But the important point is that the enunciator of a sign as opposed to the producer of an index must intend the sign and not merely produce it on the way to achieving a result. The sign has its own Gestalt, its own esthetic.

All use of language bears the trace of this transformation from index to symbol, this moment of deferral that cuts off the gesture from its original object to make it turn back on itself as a pure sign. Without this transformative deferral, we have only the equivalent of a code, the conversion of one sign into another, as in the translation of machine code into assembler and thence to higher computer languages, a configuration where there is no “original,” for the referents of words and indeed their “meaning” are not part of the algorithmic process.

I have no desire to speculate on how this transformation is implemented in the nervous system, although that would seem to me a most appropriate topic of research for neuroscience, if it can rid itself of its mindless tendency to understand language as a “cognitive” operation whose communicative essence is so to speak an afterthought. What I call the “internal scene of representation,” Sartre’s phenomenological version of Hegel’s für-sich, the pour-soi, in which a néant intervenes between the consciousness and its object, is a reasonably clear intuition, but that says nothing about how it “looks” inside the brain.

As I explained in TOOL1 over 35 years ago, despite René Girard’s indifference to language, I believe he was correct in his unique intuition concerning the specific difference that led to the emergence of humans from prehuman apes: the tendency of increasingly powerful mimesis to lead to violence. If the cognitivists have a point, it is that the development of our cognitive faculties increases our propensity to mimesis and our ability to carry it out in detail; that is what learning mostly is. Girard supplements this Aristotelian wisdom with the observation, gleaned from his previous study of the novel, that the intensification of mimesis leads to a greater lability of desire, to “mimetic rivalry,” and thence to an increased potential for violence.

Girard exemplifies this by a scene of emissary murder, where a social crisis provokes the contagion that turns some local hostility into a collective lynching focused on one or a few scapegoats whose murder calms the violence of the group. But two things are lacking in this scenario, which in itself is perfectly plausible.

The more important element is precisely the human element of deferral that permits the separation from the instinctive relationship with external reality that had heretofore defined the worldly capacities of animals. As Derrida intuited, although deliberately denying any possibility of finding an anthropological correlate, it is the deferral of decision, the standing back from one’s appetitive drives, not merely through inhibition, which is nothing but a contrary drive of its own, but as a result of a new, conscious relation to one’s object, that defines the human.

The second missing component is a model of social behavior that explains how this new behavior emerged from the breakdown of the old. Collective murder and subsequent calm do not create social structure. Girard never mentions the pecking-order social organization of the higher apes, but it would seem that one must give both a plausible explanation for its breakdown (for which my own explanation is unproblematically “Girardian”) and a plausible path to a new system of organization, that is, to the egalitarian pattern of hunter-gatherer societies even to this day, which is the inverse of the Alpha-Beta configuration of their ape forebears.

Girard would situate the moment of peaceful inaction that corresponds in his model to deferral at the end of the emissary murder, when the group’s aggressive impulses have been exhausted, at which point the murder victim would appear to the group as the “divine” source of their newfound peace. But as I have reiterated, this image is in fact that of the Crucifixion, and is not suitable as a model for an originary scene in which a sign executable by the participants, not merely the shared (?) remains of the victim, must emerge as a functional rather than merely commemorative means of communication among the group. Lacking this, the scene could not be recalled save by the individual memory traces of the participants. The murder, unlike human sacrifice, must also provide nourishment; and it is by no means irrelevant to point out the persistence of the pattern of the “sacrificial” feast in our own secular age every time a family sits down to dinner, and particularly at festive moments such as Passover, Thanksgiving, or Christmas.

Whence the originary hypothesis, which begins with the aborted gesture of appropriation that defers appetitive action and inaugurates a uniquely free human consciousness that contemplates its object in an internalized version of the collective scene. The participants defer their appropriation of the central object for fear of the collective hostility that might be aroused by any individual’s completion of his gesture to secure it for himself, until such time as they can share it through the collective sparagmos or tearing-apart.

The salience of the referent in ostensive and imperative utterances, whether designated or demanded, obliges the hearer to modify his attitude toward his environment in order either to react to the object of the ostensive or to seek to procure that of the imperative. It is essential to understand that the declarative sentence is not the originary form of language, that it can only be understood as itself derivative of these elementary forms, in which language is used to single out some element of the environment that the interlocutor is required to act on.

That is, the deferral that is at the origin of the linguistic or signifying relationship to a worldly referent is not simply a suspension of action, but the passage to a universe of deferred action, what we call the scene of representation. This scene, even for an isolated individual, is not simply an internal state; it is a locus of communication, which is what is missed by Sartre’s phenomenological analysis of the individual pour-soi. This is in principle in preparation for a newly conceived non-instinctual, deliberate action, in a word, a praxis, derivative of the originary sparagmos. The onset of linguistic communication is thus the inverse of the passage from the gesture of appropriation to its abortion; to hear or read a communication is to put oneself in a mode of reception that defers but is ultimately directed to worldly action.

Metaphysics as exemplified by Western philosophy situates communication with the Other too late in the process, as though the self, even if “thrown” into the world as the Existentialists would have it, is nonetheless self-sufficient from the outset. But the “self-sufficient” creature that preceded human consciousness communicated with others only through his “instinctive” reactions; he had no will, defined in human terms as the instrument of freedom, that is, once more, as an agency dependent on the deferral of reflex action. On the contrary, human self-sufficiency, which demands this space of deferral, does not owe its existence to the self alone. It can only come into being in a communal situation where the sign, and the scene of representation on which the sign is used for communication, is the product not of individual “genius” but of the urgent need to communicate that one has renounced the pursuit of instinctual satisfaction. The metaphysician’s defective anthropological understanding corresponds to the metaphysical presupposition of the eternal existence of the declarative proposition, whose preexistence to philosophy itself is never questioned.

The main focus of collective attention in the originary event is of course on the animal remains at the center—the now-sacred, inviolate object of the appetitive interest that led to the original breakdown of the pecking order. Between the original uncoordinated appropriative gestures which must be aborted and the effective, at least minimally coordinated gestures of the sparagmos, we may assume that, now that the old hierarchy is no longer able to maintain order, the designative sign, which as we have observed acquires its own form, acts as an intermediary, organizing and no doubt rhythming the eventual acts of appropriation so that they are in harmony rather than a free-for-all.

Once the gesture that is no longer appropriative acquires an esthetic and becomes an object of intention in its own right, we can say that language has emerged. Not because our brains are full of ideas that we somehow feel the need to communicate, but because the peaceful communication of language, anticipating a peaceful feast, is a nourishing respite from conflict, and a transition from the animal state to that of humanity.

The Wikipedia entry for “Populism” comes in at 35,000 words, and is of not much help to one seeking a coherent definition of the term. All political terms are vague, but the vagueness of this one is a degree of magnitude greater than most. As always in dealing with political concepts, the difficulty is in parsing the interplay between the two fundamental elements of the human condition, the moral model of reciprocity and the differentiating element of firstness. Whereas most such concepts, like “socialism” or “liberal democracy,” are minimally defined by ways of implementing this interaction in the economic and political spheres, the term populism is used to stigmatize political movements as expressing not a viable alternative, but merely popular resentment of those in authority. And as I have often noted in our victimary era, while the Left’s resentment is never described as such in the media, the term is liberally used for “populists.”

The frequent references to populism in the past few years in connection with the Brexit campaign, various nationalist parties in Europe, and of course Donald Trump’s political constellation, obliges us to reflect on its real significance. Does it have a genuine anthropological core, or is it merely an insult, a milder version of the even more vaguely defined term “fascism”? But although the latter term has been bandied about since the 1930s as an insult to conservatives, in the past year or two, populism has been revived to suggest the existence of an inchoate international movement sweeping the West and the weaker precincts of liberal democracy, such as Latin America.

I have not been fond of this term, and have rarely used it in these Chronicles. No party, as far as I know, calls itself populist. It is a generic label that includes Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and Obama’s “clingers,” the global elite’s expression of contempt for backward native members of a national culture, divorced from the more advanced sectors of the economy, and generally lacking a university education. The sociology of populist voting blocs is similar, mutatis mutandis, in the different countries in which such parties have arisen. In Europe, particularly in the East, these movements often have a xenophobic element that, given Europe’s catastrophic demography and the mass immigration resulting from recent unrest in the Middle East and Africa, is based on not unwarranted fear for the continuity of their national culture.

One could say that the phenomenon that I shall label neo-populism reflects the problems unleashed by the increasing globalization not merely of the economy but of culture itself, which comes into conflict with local traditions. When Western Europe began its project of integration after WWII, its national cultures were fairly well-defined and its populations relatively homogeneous. Increasingly in the past few years, the postwar turning away from nationalism has led to a politics of “multiculturalism” that tolerates alien cultures to the point of self-mutilation, and that has shown itself highly vulnerable to the newly reawakened forces of Islam. Most Muslims may be “moderate,” but after a century of quiescence, Islam’s militant element has fed on the West’s vulnerability and renewed its primordial attempt at conquest that was thought to have ended in the 17^th century at the gates of Vienna.

In the United States, although immigration remains a sore point, there is far less sense of a demographic and cultural invasion. But if we agree that Trump’s victory can nonetheless be associated with this neo-populist movement, it provides a cleaner example that should allow us to better understand its foundations.

For one thing, “multiculturalism” is very much part of US tradition. If in France it is still illegal to classify people by race or national origin, so that census takers can’t even count the number of Muslims or Africans in France, the US is used to hyphenated Americans—as well as all too familiar with disparate impact as a motivation for decisions. The American provenance of the term “PC,” commonly adopted now in Europe, is a sign of the greater clarity of the American political landscape in this respect. Xenophobia per se is far less of a problem in a nation formed from many groups of immigrants, and the fact that the archetypal American minority is “African-American,” that is, a group whose ancestors have been in this country for several more generations than most of the others, is also a radical difference.

I have written quite a bit about what I conceive as Trump’s primary role as a bulwark against the PC phenomenon. As we saw in last week’s Chronicle, the extreme point of victimary thought, one toward which many of our institutions seem to be feeling their way, is the denial of any non-communal, objective criteria for human behavior, to the point that any activity, such as mathematics, at which some are measurably superior to others is accused of “Whiteness.” I hasten to add the qualification that the activity must be wholly symbolic, directly recalling the abstract basis of the originary scene of representation. The whiteness association would not be made for a skill like musical or artistic or athletic performance, domains that indeed served to showcase minority talent even in the days of de jure discrimination.

Left and Right correspond grosso modo to the two constitutive elements of the human condition: the moral model of reciprocal exchange and recognition, and the element of firstness that allows human beings, liberated from “instinct” by the scene of representation, to construct and propose initiatives for the benefit of the group.

All evidence suggests that the egalitarian organization of archaic hunter-gatherer societies is the least effective in regulating violence. Every offense, real or imagined, is an affront to equality, and every injury must be responded to in kind, unto the nth generation. It is in reality these “utopian” societies that embody to the greatest extent the war of all against all that Hobbes’ Leviathan, or shall we say, the ethnologist’s big-man, helps to defer, thereby making greater, but better organized and less self-destructive violence possible.

Left and Right having a clear anthropological basis, what then can we say for populism? In the past, American populism was associated with the Democrats, traditionally the party of the Left, although until the Civil Rights era they were also the party of Jim Crow. Now Jim Crow is anything but a policy of equality, yet it is not either a policy of the Right. On the contrary, it was the Republicans who defined themselves as the anti-slavery party, and Lincoln was their first president. If we can understand this conundrum, unique to the US, but precisely exemplary of the populist problem in a way that European “populism” is not, we will better be able to understand the resurgence of the phenomenon today, and in particular explain its association with Trump’s visceral Burkeanism.

For the postwar evolution of the two parties toward a clear Left-Right division is both more and less simple than it appears. Less simple, because the present composition of the Democratic party that includes both the “lower” and “higher” classes, billionaires and minorities, is closer to that of the old Tory party than Labour, and we have seen that the working class has largely deserted the party as it has moved farther to the left, which should be a contradiction in terms. (Compare the French situation, where Mélenchon’s France Insoumise still retains the basic demography of the old Left, with the addition of large numbers of Muslims; its ambition, indeed, is to combine traditional leftism with nationalist suspicion of the Brussels-directed EU.) But also more, because the evolution of the two parties allows us to understand the paradoxical contrast between the Left’s disparate electorate supporting equality, and the relative homogeneity of the difference-affirming Right.

We should recall that the origin of today’s victimary Left is the postwar reaction against Nazism. This is not simply a matter of moral revulsion; extremism clarifies the mind. The specifics of left-wing tyranny—to cite a recent example, the descriptions of the horrors of China’s Cultural Revolution in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Norton, 2016), with students beating and torturing their own teachers—are in a way even more sickening than the more impersonal horrors of the Holocaust. But they lack the latter’s ascriptive emphasis. Those accused of rightism are spoken of in terms just as venomous as those the Nazis used for the Jews; but these persons are blamed for their sin, which is to say that, nominally at least, their human moral freedom has not been denied, as was that of the Nazi Untermenschen. (We should note the similarity to this of the Islamic attitude toward ascriptive difference; in principle, at least, the Islamic umma is meant to include all humanity, whatever their prior belief systems; convert and you will be spared.)

Our horror at Hitler’s extreme affirmation of racial difference demonstrates by its historical lateness that the denial of essential difference among ascriptive human categories had not previously been considered central to the social implementation of the moral model. As we inevitably fail to recall, the doctrine of Anti-Semitism was proudly affirmed as scientific truth, much as “climate change” is today. And well before the birth of “scientific” racism, nothing was more common than the conviction that other “races” (and this term could be taken very narrowly, as in the prejudice of the English against the Irish, or the Tutsi against the Hutu) were inferior to one’s own.

The most significant positive moral outcome of WWII was the definitive rejection of de jure ontological differences, and the consequent affirmation of a virtual worldwide human community. The process of deferral that we call civilization is always in disequilibrium, and bears no guarantee of continuing indefinitely. But the stigmatization of “racism” in principle is a major step toward “one world.” It has become so natural today to speak of all humans as essentially equal that one can understand, if not accept, that the facile accusation of “racism” (let alone “sexism”) might be leveled at just about everyone who lived before WWII, from Columbus and George Washington on down.

None of this means, however, that all ascriptive groups have statistically equivalent levels of ability in every domain. The disparate impact doctrine, in other words, is not implicit in the extension to all of humanity of the moral model that previously had been confined by most to their own group and extended restrictively to some others, and rarely to all.

This allows us to understand why, in the post-bellum era, and even up to WWII, Jim Crow was not felt to be incompatible with the egalitarian impulse of the Left. The “poor whites” of the South clearly shared, on the one hand, a desire to reduce their disparities with the “rich,” and on the other, a desire to maintain their privileges over the blacks. And by the same token, we understand why it was the Republican party, based in the Northern liberal-industrial elite, that opposed slavery. For the promotion of firstness in the modern world, the agriculture-based slave economy was archaic—indeed, Left-wing cynics like to insist that this was the real reason the Northern capitalists opposed it. But liberal democracy’s mode of integration of difference with moral equality is incompatible with slavery on a moral level as well. Slavery had already disappeared from Europe, and even in Russia, Alexander II emancipated the serfs in 1861, at the very beginning of America’s Civil War.

The perpetuation of black legal inferiority by Jim Crow had its echoes in the North, in housing covenants and other more or less open forms of discrimination, albeit not in such egregious areas as use of public facilities. For despite the abolition of slavery, the idea of ontological racial difference was not dead—put on the defensive, it indeed became more assertive in the late 19^th century—and in the US, it could be finessed via the hypocritical notion of “separate but equal.”

Describing Jim Crow as a characteristic expression of populism permits us to define the term, while explaining its acquisition of a pejorative tinge. The de jure racial privileges of the Southern poor whites had been overturned by the 13-15th amendments. Their reinstatement of these privileges through various subterfuges embodied populism as a flight from the liberal-democratic free-market’s meritocratic model to the safety of a racial caste system incompatible with this model, yet, in the pre-Hitler era, still permissible on the basis of so-called intrinsic racial differences. In this respect, the “scientific” racism that proudly affirmed the justification for antisemitism was a respectable ally. No doubt blacks shouldn’t be chattel slaves, but they could still be considered essentially inferior to whites, just as Jews, not despite but because of their demonstrably superior intellectual talents, could be considered “inferior” in a more obscure moral sense. The tail end of this Southern populism can be found in the resistance to the Civil Rights movement and the campaigns of George Wallace, who in his later years rejected segregation and embraced racial equality.

Now let us return to the 21^st century and attempt to situate the neo-populism that arouses such fear in the global elite. Needless to say, the Democrats love to pinpoint any marginal leftovers of the KKK and neo-Nazi groups they can find as “typical” examples of Republicans in general: for example, the recent Virginia campaign advertisement in the wake of the New York City jihad attack, showing a truck with a Confederate flag bearing down on minority children, along with clips from the recent Charlottesville march. Calling Trump’s voters “deplorables” as well as racist, sexist, and all the rest is to define them in pre-Hitlerian terms, to accuse them at the very least of living in a more morally primitive era, and more simply, of rejecting the conclusion that all good people are obliged to draw from WWII, that any establishment of moral inequality among ascriptive groups is an evil in itself.

What allows the victimary left to consider the KKK and neo-Nazis as typical examples of the neo-populist Republican electorate is that “racism” is now defined no longer as discrimination but as non-discrimination, that is, as rejection of the doctrine of disparate impact. If police arrest and courts jail proportionally more blacks than whites, that is cited as res ipsa proof of the police’s and court’s—perhaps “unconscious”—racism. Similarly, if Latinos do worse on the SAT than Asians… And so on.

In Europe, the neo-populist phenomenon is defined rather in terms of recent immigration, which is a problem not as easily parsed in moral terms as racial discrimination. Do the European countries somehow owe admission as a moral obligation not merely to genuine refugees, but to migrants of all kinds? European liberals from the Pope to Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron often speak in this sense.

At issue is a world vastly more interpenetrable than during previous episodes of mass migration, as well as one where the international wealth-demography disproportion, expressed in the old pseudo-lyric “the rich get richer and the poor have children,” has never been so extreme. Future projections of the exponentially growing African population are particularly disquieting, and this has nothing to do with the skin color of the persons involved. The idea that seems to have been behind Merkel’s welcoming stance, that since in the post-Hitler world we are all morally equivalent, third-world migrants can supply a work force to make up for Western Europe’s endemic demographic deficit, fails to take into account the cultural differences that discourage assimilation as well as the extensive resources of the dysfunctional in advanced industrial welfare states. This is visible enough in the US, but in Europe, whose women seem barely able to produce one child apiece, and where masses of poorly assimilated immigrants are lodged in crime-ridden residences at public expense, but where it is considered “racist” to attribute to their presence any consequent difficulties, this has produced a full-blown crisis, and the rise of neo-populist parties, often with a more sinister neo-Nazi presence than the American alt-Right, has discomforted many.

We can thus explain the phenomenon of neo-populism as founded principally on the reaction to the victimary faux-egalitarianism of “PC,” which in different ways dominates the intellectual class of both Western Europe and the US. No doubt Trump’s voters come largely from the white working class that has been disadvantaged in the digital age, but it is not “racism” that makes them resent the racial preferences that make it harder for them to be hired or for their children to go to college. Similarly, in Europe, the souchiens or “native Europeans,” who happen to be white, are understandably upset by the invasion of large numbers of foreigners, not because they are of another “race”—as far as I know, Middle-Easterners are just as Caucasian as Europeans, and the category “Aryan” is no longer taken seriously—but because they are of a different culture. This poses a problem independently of the jihadism that is still so hard to attack directly, although Europeans are coming to deal with it, as no doubt will Americans now that a jihadist attack has been carried out in New York—even as Mayor De Blasio warns us not to “cast dispersions” on the Muslim community.

In a word, Euro-American neo-populists are those who identify with the majority culture and wish to protect it from what they perceive as compensatory policies toward “disparately impacted” minorities. In the post-bellum South, this political stance was indeed expressed as racial discrimination, which roughly corresponded to the “imperialist” policies of the colonial powers—the parallel, once more, being made explicit by the disappearance of both in reaction to the Nazi example. Today’s neo-populism is quite unfairly tarred with the same brush.

These clarifications do not, of course, resolve the political problems that these post-victimary movements have arisen to confront. Rather than attempt to propose a “solution,” which would be a form of pontification contrary to the free-market spirit of liberal democratic politics, I would suggest that the positive way to view the existence of these movements is as a means of restoring a Burkean position in a political configuration that otherwise provides no real defense against the victimary, as Obama’s two terms demonstrated all too well. We need affirm that Trump and his European counterparts are on the “right side of history” only to the extent that they help reestablish a counterweight to what still insistently claims to be not a political faction but “justice” itself—to the point at which the term social justice is used as an all-purpose justification for the coercive imposition of intellectual uniformity.

Visit a university campus if you don’t believe this. Next week, UCLA’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy is holding a colloquium entitled:

On Race: INDIVISIBLE and the Resistance

INDIVISIBLE seeks to cultivate a progressive grassroots network of local groups organized across the United States to build political power, to resist the destructive political agendas of the Trump administration, to challenge structures of white supremacy, and to advocate and realize bold policies for social justice.

Anyone who can provide an announcement of a university-sponsored colloquium on the destructive political agendas of the Obama administration is welcome to correct my error. Failing this, I think we should all realize, and the never-Trumpers of the Republican party most of all, that what is called “populism” here, and I venture to say in Europe as well, is in its essence conservatism in the classical Burkean sense, the defense of traditional norms as a means of protecting necessary social differentiations. In opposition to these norms, the Left deserves to have its say, but it must be prevented at all cost from permanently imposing its monopoly.

Douglas Murray’s “One Hundred Years of Evil” (National Review, 10/30/17) provoked a smile of déjà vu. Why indeed are the Nazis permanent figures of evil, when Communists responsible for far more unnecessary deaths are tolerated and in many cases adulated? Why do we print up T-shirts for Che and none for Reinhard Heydrich? Why does China continue to honor Mao, and Russia to revere Stalin (who topped a recent Russian list of the all-time great men of history), whereas Hitlerian celebrations are outlawed in Germany and treated with contempt elsewhere? Of course the Nazis lost the war and Hitler shot himself, whereas Stalin died in bed (helped along perhaps by some of those “Jewish doctors” he suspected), but clearly there is more to it than that, and Murray’s article masterfully explores this point, albeit without really explaining it.

As I understand it, the Left promotes the moral model while the Right defends the privilege of human difference, or firstness; liberalism tries to find the least bad compromise between the two without ever denying the fundamental principle of moral equality. Hitler too was a “socialist,” but his socialism denied the founding principle of human morality by making ontological distinctions among “races,” while the bloodiest of Leftist murderers were acting in the name of the “people.”

This said, I think Murray exaggerates the amount of “Marxism” on the left today, even as a slogan, let alone an ideological reality. How many of our Antifa goons or campus crybullies have ever heard of “the falling rate of profit” or even the “labor theory of value”? The word “socialism” is indeed bandied about by Bernie Sanders and his followers, and of course remains a current political term in Europe, although many parties of the old socialist international like the former Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière or the German SPD have not done very well lately. But serious Euro-Marxism is all but dead; the formerly mighty French PC has all but blended into Mélenchon’s France Insoumise.

What requires reflection is rather the turning of the Left away from Marxism toward a utopian “victimism,” whose ideology, beyond its moral basis, is diametrically opposed to the “scientific socialism” of Marx and Engels. Marxism supplied discipline and, let it be said, a largely successful strategy for taking power in countries without a strong liberal-democratic tradition. Today’s victimary left may have a few thugs on its side, but its real power is its ability to capture the hearts of so many of the “privileged” and to inflict on all but the most resolute of the others a sense of White Guilt and the fear of unleashing the wrath of the virtuous haters of hate.

The originary hypothesis explains the eternal tension between the egalitarian moral model and the problematic element of firstness. The moral model of reciprocal exchange is intuitively grasped because it is inherent in language itself, and in all other cultural representations that we are constituted to share. But the sharing subject is also an individual who contemplates these representations for himself and cannot be assimilated to a simple member of a mob. We all know this, of course, but the current largely uncontested domination of victimary thinking is a clear proof that we do not know it well enough.

At the end of the Supplement to last week’s Chronicle I gave a link to a fascinating review (https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10005), by Toni Airaksinen, of a book-chapter that claims that “mathematics itself operates as Whiteness.” It was discovered on the web by Daniel Greenfield, David Horowitz’ most active associate (http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/268213/u-illinois-prof-math-racist-daniel-greenfield ). This prize piece of victimary insanity has also been noticed by Katherine Timpf on the National Review‘s daily web post: http:// www.nationalreview.com/article/453106/math-racist-university-illinois- professor? utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20 Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-10-5&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives  It concerns a chapter entitled “Political Conocimiento for Teaching Mathematics: Why Teachers Need It and How to Develop It,” by Rochelle Gutiérrez, in a collective work on mathematics instruction entitled Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods, which recently appeared at Western Michigan University Press, that is, with the imprimatur of a presumably respectable academic institution.

I advise readers to go directly to the “serious” review article on the CampusReform site so you don’t think that Greenfield and/or I are exaggerating. This is one of those pieces about which one says, “you can’t make this up.”

Yet in its very fanaticism, it offers an admirably pure version of contemporary victimary thinking, at the antipodes of Marx’s claim of an objective, scientific socialism. This item can serve as a template for the application of victimary thought to every subject in the universe. Its fundamental agreement with GA’s originary hypothesis about the centrality of the moral model, while totally misunderstanding the element of human firstness/freedom, is of great pedagogical usefulness for us, whatever use it could possibly have for teachers of mathematics.

I hope Mr. Greenfield will not mind my plagiarizing his (fairly complete) selection of passages from the Airaksinen review. Passages in quotes are taken directly from Gutiérrez’ text:

Rochelle Gutierrez, a professor at the University of Illinois, made the claim [that algebraic and geometry skills perpetuate “unearned privilege” among whites] in a new anthology for math teachers . . .

“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White.”

Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”

Math also helps actively perpetuate white privilege too, since the way our economy places a premium on math skills gives math a form of “unearned privilege” for math professors, who are disproportionately white.

“Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?” she asks, further wondering why math professors get more research grants than “social studies or English” professors.

. . .

“If one is not viewed as mathematical, there will always be a sense of inferiority that can be summoned,” she says, adding that there are so many minorities who “have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms . . . [where people are] judged by whether they can reason abstractly.”

. . .

Gutierrez stresses that all knowledge is “relational,” asserting that “Things cannot be known objectively; they must be known subjectively.”

As we see, the most fundamental categories of human knowledge are reduced to means for assuring “white privilege”; mathematics is described as a “white” activity (although presumably usurped by the “whites” from non-white inventors), of use primarily not for solving objective problems but for affirming “Whiteness.” If we merely substitute firstness for this last term, we have an absurd but quite consistent system that offers real insight into the mindset of a large portion of today’s population.

Unlike the relatively innocent gesture of wearing a Che T-shirt, this is a serious attempt at establishing an anthropological thesis, one that takes to its limit the doctrine of disparate impact. The statement at the end, that the truths of mathematics are not truly objective but “subjective” and “relational,” is accurate in a way. Since math is a product of human representation, whether or not its verities correspond to certain structures in the world, the verities themselves are not “out there” but dependent on human minds and their membership in the human community.

This is of course a far cry from implying that these verities are arbitrary, as Greenfield suggests by citing Dostoevsky’s classic “2+2=5.” But this claim, like all else in this fascinating example, has a real anthropological foundation; indeed, it counters the authority of 2+2=4 with its own brand of victimary existentialism. Why should Sartre’s doctrine of human freedom not apply to arithmetic? No doubt this reductio is not in the text itself, but although Greenfield’s point is to emphasize the text’s mindlessness, we can also see in it an expression of an all-consuming faith in the moral model as the answer to all problems of human difference, excluding all conceivable manifestations of firstness, at the cost of an utter indifference to objective reality. Or in the terms of The Origin of Language, regressing from the “metaphysical” world of the declarative proposition to the ostensive.

Why indeed should these “white” mathematics professors be granted respect not available to their most ignorant students? Well, from the standpoint of fundamental human morality, they should not. If there is a fire or an earthquake, those with PhDs have to wait in line with the others.

We should understand this form of thought as an extreme humanism, one that takes no account of the objective world and is solely concerned with the internal relations of the human community. That mathematics might help us to build a house or cure a disease is irrelevant; the important thing is that, on an exclusively inter-human level, because it imposes objective criteria, it separates us.

This is indeed the “moral philosophy” of the originary scene anterior to the sparagmos. For until that point, it matters not if the center be occupied by an edible animal or by an abstraction. The Hebrew God makes this point emphatically by refusing to give himself a name, and Christianity follows up on this intuition by replacing the sacrificial feast by the consumption of a wafer that embodies God’s love but provides little caloric benefit (the wine of course does, which is why it was eventually withheld from the congregation—cf. the ironic alcoholism of Bernanos’ curé de campagne).

The “spiritual” truth of this objectively imbecilic declaration would be touching if it were not impregnated with racial resentment. One could see a mystic, perhaps a Buddhist, reading this as an exercice spirituel meant to undermine the worldly vanity of the mathematician: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the ability to solve differential equations, and lose his own soul?

But, precisely, Buddhist monks and desert anchorites don’t teach math, let alone prepare math teachers. The insanity of this discourse is, although less bloodthirsty, even more extreme than the fanaticism of the ISIS crew who execute you for smoking—or the Khmer Rouge, if you showed you could speak French. Math teachers explaining the Pythagorean Theorem are about to suffer the fate of my poor friend forced to apologize for speaking well of Columbus (see Chronicle 538).

All joking aside, this analysis has the virtue of allowing us to understand in objective terms the religiosity of victimary thinking, and at the same time to clarify what we really mean by religiosity. Anyone who was around before 1989 or so will remember the critique of Marxism as a “religion,” or perhaps a “substitute religion.” But the resemblance between Das Kapital, or for that matter Xi Jinping’s Thought, and the Bible is admittedly rather distant. A vague similarity in the behavior of the faithful toward sacred objects is not quite a serious analogy. The next step in such discussions would be to wonder whether Michael Jackson or Madonna were the objects of “idolatry.”

But this little essay lets us clarify our minds. It is the reductio ad absurdum of a purely humanistic view of the world that takes the human scene of representation as the be-all and end-all because it is indeed the originary object of the new pour-soi’s attention. And it pushes to the maximum the wisdom contained in parables like Matthew 5:23-24, “So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”

In this context it is important to understand the role played by “Whiteness.” Paradoxically, this unmarked quality is presented as embodying the fundamental violation of human moral equality. Whiteness is the locus of privilege, and as Greenfield does not fail to point out, it applies to anything that can be “useful,” that is, that leaves the scene of inter-human relations to confront some aspect of the real world. If Dostoevsky’s underground man thinks that 2+2=5 is rather nice, it’s precisely because he is expressing a refusal to submit to objective reality, which is from the Existentialist point of view a way of affirming his freedom. In more appropriate anthropological terms, what it affirms is the priority of this freedom of the pour-soi in assigning signs to the objects we are called upon to represent. Thus we could not assert 2+2=4 as a meaningful proposition if we were not also able to assert, however erroneously, 2+2=5. But of course the paradox is that once you set up systems of representations, of which mathematics is our name for the maximally abstract ones, the systems have rules of internal consistency that dictate the truth or falsity of propositions constructed in them. (Let’s not get into such matters as Gödel’s incompleteness proof.)

Dostoevsky’s point (or rather that of his “underground” hero) is that everyone knows and can say “2+2=4,” but to say “2+2=5” is an act of personal will. No doubt the right answer is an element of the shared reality that allows us to construct a human world around ourselves rather than merely accepting what we find in nature; but first, we must be at peace, and this peace entails each individual being “reconciled with his brother,” not feeling resentment toward the others in the group.

The originary designation of a central being involves no calculation and its centrality allows all to agree on its presence. But equations are not ostensives, but declaratives. And here the “wisdom” of our text once more demonstrates its anthropological insight. In order to agree on a declarative, we must go beyond the ostensive presence of an object to think about it; in this case, to solve an equation. Which, as Greenfield would put it, is a “useful” act. But to say this is to open the door to some people being better able to solve the equation than others, and consequently to the arousal of the latter’s resentment. In order to prevent this, we declare the solution of the equation a matter of subjective preference. In this way, as in those T-Ball games where everybody wins, the result is “correct” in your own terms, and you have no reason to resent anyone else.

And here is where the originary hypothesis can make its essential point. If we begin from a purely human configuration, such as Girard does in his scapegoating scenario (which is, however, never spoken of as an originary event), we never leave it. If the point of the originary event, whether we call it this or not, is simply to resolve the resentments of the group by turning it into a unanimous-minus-one lynch mob, then it solves its human problem, but at the expense of dealing with the rest of the world, which remains shrouded in méconnaissance.

This is a constant of Girard’s vision of desire from the beginning. The novels of Mensonge romantique, in contrast with Lukacs’ category of la maturité virile, are described as stories of the renunciation of mimetic-tainted worldly goals for the only true mediation, that of God (the Son). But although, to paraphrase Jean-Pierre Richard, on ne mange jamais dans les livres de Girard, for the original humans, it was not enough to resolve the questions of precedence and replace the pecking order by an egalitarian community: they still had to eat. Thus the importance of situating an edible animal (which might, but is unlikely to be, an unfortunate proto-human) at the center of the scene.

And so we see in our text what a radically “Girardian” reading of our culture, unredeemed by Christianity, would look like. If we have a math exercise in class, then just as with the T-ball game on the recreation field, everybody wins, and certainly not that “white” mathematics professor who microaggressively asserts that some specific answer is “correct.”

I must unironically thank Prof. Gutiérrez for her text, (which I hope to read someday in the original). No doubt its anthropological possibilities were not in her mind, but neither are the ideas inspired by a work of art in the mind of the artist. What this text reveals, in all seriousness, is a fundamental structure of the human, and to refute its delirious conclusion, rather than simply dismissing it, is to make precise the necessity that the element of firstness be included among the essential constituents of the originary scene.

The quasi-apotheosis of Xi Jinping at the 2017 Chinese Communist Party Congress is a useful occasion to reflect on the future of democracy and of the continuing validity of Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that liberal democracy is the ultimate framework for large-scale human societies. This development is far from determining the “end of history”; the future evolution of both the mechanisms by which the economic and political markets operate and the scale of these maximal social units, whether nations, federations, or world government, remains undecided, not to speak of the effect of future human and natural catastrophes.

The liberal-democratic model is based on the regulation of the economic market by a political system that shares the quality of the market by bringing to bear collective judgments rather than granting absolute powers to a tyrant or a self-perpetuating decision-making group. Freely contested elections and political debate are essential to allowing the various members of society to propose and enact measures to assuage their resentments. All members of the society are presumed to accept the legitimacy of the political system and to seek to change it only within its own rules, which can include amending its fundamental document or constitution. American democracy today still adheres to this ideal. I find much of the criticism of our current president shameful and scurrilous, but I think we all agree that it is preferable to the forced sycophancy of the “constituents” of Kim Jong-Un.

In the 1950s, Khrushchev said “we will bury you,” but the Soviet system was creaky and corrupt and clearly no match for the market system. Xi represents a new challenge. He clearly feels he has reason to believe that in China, the socialist system can beat “capitalism” at its own game. Xi seems to take a clear-eyed view of the need to avoid corruption, and centralized decisions can control and guide the economy without eliminating the market as an indispensable feedback mechanism.

Xi is putting back on the table a question that we all thought had been settled back in 1989-91, and we cannot be certain that his is a losing bet. China is not North Korea; it holds out a promise of genuine prosperity that so far has been largely realized. If this must be at the cost of the kind of political freedoms we enjoy in the West, it forces us to take another look at how well these freedoms are indeed operating and to what extent they are continuing to provide the basis for social cohesion.

For social science, this is an empirical question to be answered with statistical data, including surveys of individual satisfaction—although in a dictatorship one can hardly obtain “sincere” results to such queries. But if the authorities truly know best, like doctors recommending foods or exercise that we find superficially distasteful but recognize as good for us, then how are we to judge how “satisfied” we are? It is hard to avoid returning to the age-old objective criteria that have always determined the relative success and survivability of societies: their economic power and their will to translate it when necessary into the form of military force, as China has recently not been shy about doing.

But we can deal with this issue on a more theoretical level that is nonetheless not altogether abstract and fanciful. What the current challenge of the China model suggests is the need to pose its alternative to the Western system in fundamental anthropological terms. Of course one can never eliminate the specifics of history, but the only way to understand history is to attempt to see through the messiness of reality to basic ideas—a skeptical Hegelianism, as it were. As I noted in Chronicle 555, the era of Big Data and the successes of AI have tended to discredit such “philosophical” approaches to human phenomena—leading in the case of the origin of language to a complete misunderstanding of what language is. (Big Data has not said, will never have said its last word; who can say that we will not create one day a working algorithm to allow us to simulate the origin of language on a computer in such a way that the known history of language is retrodicted from the model? Let’s just say that this has not yet taken place—and if and when it does, I bet it looks a lot like the originary hypothesis.)

Liberal democracies are subject to various imperfections, since the “balance of powers” is always working itself out and at times no longer functions as originally intended. In the USA, for example, for homosexuals to marry, one would assume that an act of Congress would be necessary. Instead, this and various other major new “rights” have been assigned by the Supreme Court on a creative rereading of the Constitution. But the Court, although insulated from the political marketplace, does ultimately depend on it, a point that was strongly made in the last presidential election. Some form of feedback mechanism remains so long as the system does not collapse in violence. And this rarely happens in democracies, although Venezuela offers a troublesome counter-example, as of course did Italy and Germany between the wars.

The “ideal” nature of such systems is not simple (“utopian”) but paradoxical; it was well expressed by Churchill’s famous quip that “democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” What makes this line more than a joke is that it respects the paradoxical layering that is inherent in any global decision-making process. For before we judge the individual measures that democracy offers, directly or indirectly, for our decision, we have tacitly consented to the system in toto, including the obstacles it presents to our desires, as meriting our allegiance. In an autocracy, we are not asked but told to consent to the system and are given no opportunity to change it, whereas the democratic system implies the “consent of the governed” at every level; even the retention of the original Constitution is considered a tacit decision made at every moment and rescindable if necessary.

To assert the viability of this system takes for granted that when disequilibria occur, it has the time to right itself before major damage is done. The Venezuelan counter-example, the result of the prior evisceration of the political balance of powers leading to the collapse of market discipline, would seem to reiterate after so many others the lesson that “socialism” is not only inseparable from political tyranny but ruins the economy as well. Yet Xi’s China, in making great efforts to counter this apparent truth, obliges us to reopen the dossier.

Clearly the Chinese system, unlike that of the USSR, has major “capitalist” elements. The most obvious difference is that whereas the USSR was largely autarkic and produced virtually nothing of economic value to the West, China has a vast export industry geared to Western markets. Such industries cannot be “planned” independently of the economic data furnished by these markets. Even if the government controls many sectors directly and can fund new research or technological projects without input from the public, its dependence on exports alone forces it to avoid the farcical performance of much of the Soviet economy (“we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”). The opportunity these markets give for pirating Western technology is a more ominous feature of this strategy.

In the absence of political parties and free elections, political debate in authoritarian societies takes place among factions whose pluralism varies inversely in proportion to the strength of the central power. If previous Chinese leaders, wary of repeating the disastrous results of Mao’s later years, have preferred to share power among several factions, Xi’s economic successes appear to have provided him a sufficient basis for a new hegemony, allowing him to acquire near-absolute power, so far at least without the irrationality that characterized the reigns of Mao or Stalin.

Among the more striking facts of recent history is the ease with which central authorities perpetuate themselves unless toppled from without. Aristotle and Montesquieu described the perilous nature of the tyrant’s role, as illustrated by the oft-assassinated Roman emperors and various examples of “Oriental despotism,” but today’s despots, including Putin and Erdogan, let alone the Kims and the Castros, or for that matter, Saddam and Khadafy before their countries were attacked by Western powers, seem invulnerable to internal overthrow. The crucial difference between them and “strong men” like the Shah or Hosni Mubarak would seem to be greater ruthlessness. But in none of these cases has autocracy provided, as Xi promises to do, superior economic performance in exchange for the loss of political freedom. (Singapore under the late Lee Kuan Yew might be considered an exception, but this city-state can hardly serve as a model for a full-sized country.)

The fundamental question is whether such a system can ultimately become more prosperous than our messy old market system. In schematic terms: one market or two? Economic markets in both cases, but in one, the higher-level regulation of the market is imposed by a self-perpetuating central authority rather than in the hands of changing representatives of the electorate.

The crux is whether an authoritarian system can generate greater political efficiency to make up for its diminished economic efficiency, which will presumably be affected by the damage to morale inflicted by thought control. Which obliges us to turn once more to the rise of the victimary in the West and the not-so-soft institutional thought control that it produces, increasingly indoctrinating the young with victimary clichés and taboos and obliging its citizens to salute, in place of the national flag, the idol of “diversity.”

Xi’s ambition for “modern socialism” challenges my response to Ryszard Legutko’s ominously ironic assimilation of Western PC to the dogmas of Eastern Euro-Communism (The Demon in Democracy, Encounter, 2016 [2012]; see Chronicle 532): that, à tyrannie égale, at least the West has relatively healthy economies. But leaving the economy aside for the moment, if there is indeed to be tyrannie égale, then the very foundation of liberal democracy on the continued implicit consent of the governed is placed in jeopardy. Grosso modo we may say that the rise of the “alt” versions of right and left reflects this tendency, neither one accepting the traditional gentlemen’s agreement that its opposition will remain “loyal.” Significantly, in contrast to the Old Left, with its high hopes for the Soviet Union, the new alt-left is not at all dependent, nor even terribly interested in the fate of socialism outside its home borders. Its conviction of the inherent evil of “capitalism” is not based on a contrast with an exemplary model, utopian or otherwise, but is fundamentally moralistic. Victimary critique takes the place of every form of structural criticism. Since every practice can be shown to “victimize” in some way or other, we must engage in a constant battle against all of them, with “the end of discrimination” the only ultimate goal.

American society’s ability to deal effectively with victimary extremism has yet to be demonstrated. Trump’s election was a powerful step, but its results are still very much in doubt. Certainly Trump’s erraticism offers an unfortunate contrast to the sagacious Xi, who is as far from Trump as he is from Kim Jong-Un. Trump can only be a transitional figure; although I have no patience with the facile contempt of the never-Trump crowd, I cannot deny that his improvisational style can only be justified by the urgent need to resolve our victimary crisis and recenter our norms of political behavior. Xi sees this, of course, and finds this a fitting moment to assert his ambitions for China. This should indeed give us one more wake-up call.

Not altogether divorced from the rise of the victimary is the demographic issue that preoccupies Mark Steyn and others who fear for the future of our civilization. Western nations have no obvious means to arrest their drastic population decline save by permitting a continued influx of poorly assimilated non-Europeans. No doubt China’s unwise “one-child policy” has left it with serious demographic problems of its own, but if the state can influence the production of children in one direction, it is also capable of influencing it in the other. Meanwhile in the West we continue to witness the results of the loosening of family structure, the decline of marriage, and the increased pressure on young women to follow a masculine model in both their career and their sexual activity.

I certainly do not advocate putting limits on women’s career ambitions. (My French stepdaughter is a child psychiatrist with two doctoral degrees, recently chosen to head a university hospital program, and the current president of the Société de l’Information Psychiatrique; she also has three children.) But on a global scale, Israel appears to be the only advanced country whose women, certainly as liberated as any in the West, average more than two children apiece. It is highly unlikely that any other advanced democracy will spontaneously begin to reproduce itself in this fashion.

I have suffered enough from the autocracy-lite that increasingly pervades our institutions to be anything like an advocate for real autocracy in China or elsewhere. The question comes down to whether our inverted authoritarianism, like our pervasive anti-racism and anti-Islamophobia, is the inevitable destiny of liberal democracy as much as economic inefficiency has been the inevitable accompaniment of socialism. I certainly hope not. But if this is indeed to be the case, then we must judge Western society not only in comparison to the world of Islamic soumission, as in Michel Houllebecq’s recent dystopia, but to China, whose model cannot be taxed with simple historical regression. The fact that the Judeo-Christian West has trouble arguing with the medieval crudity of Salafism even on its home turf, let alone protecting Christians from it in the Middle East, gives little reassurance that it will be capable of standing up to the aggressive “modern socialism” that Xi Jinping sees as China’s gift to the world.

For the moment, I have not lost hope that liberalization is the necessary future of an increasingly “bourgeois” China, and prefer to see Xi’s efforts to avoid Gorbachev’s fate as an ideological screen behind which China will become the first nation to make a fairly smooth transition from communist tyranny to a new variant of liberal democracy, becoming a friendly rival rather than an implacable foe. But we cannot shut our eyes to the opposite possibility. Meanwhile, we must continue to hope that obscene tweets and lynch-mob accusations of “white supremacy” are not destined to remain in historical memory as the last fruits of Western liberalism.

♠♣♥♦

Supplement (October 24, 2017)

Having read this Chronicle, a friend pointed out to me an October 21 piece by Rachel Botsman in Wired magazine entitled “Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens”, which describes an elaborate rating system that gives everyone a “national trust score,” and that will become the official Chinese basis for all kinds of judgments well beyond financial credit by 2020.

This gave me the idea of a clearer way of comparing Chinese with Western authoritarianism. These scores will definitely put a premium on loyalty to the regime, and, to the extent they are detectable, keep expressions of dissent to a minimum, as well as stigmatizing easily detectable vices such as video games. Certainly a step toward neo-1984. But there is an upside to this reliance on “objective” measures.

China (and Japan, and I imagine, South Korea) admit students to universities based on examination scores. American universities, even where racial criteria are supposedly illegal, as in California (hard to believe that prop.­ 209 would get the vote of today’s woke electorate), increasingly give out admissions based on “diversity.” There is also increasing pressure to do the same in industrial hiring, and we are constantly asked to lament the “white privilege” of the whites (and Asians) who get most of the good jobs in high-tech industries. So if we can say on the one hand that the West’s freer economy is a plus over the managed economy of socialism even at its most enlightened, and that it’s arguably preferable to be able to express one’s resentments freely rather than whisper them with the shower turned on, the advantage of these freedoms is certainly offset by the dilution of objective criteria in personnel selection. As opposed to the old Soviet dogmas, today’s Chinese dogmas are more methodological than doctrinary, and in contrast to such things as Lysenkoism, they take their science straight (even when taking ours). What this suggests is that the autocratic nature of the society and its repression of dissent bear increasingly on the mechanisms of social control rather than on the specifics of decisions to be made in the economic and technical spheres.

Of course this discussion brackets such things as the Chinese takeover of “territories” in the South China Sea, and its under-the-table encouragement of North Korea, as well as China’s push for economic hegemony in Asia (New Silk Road) and throughout the Southern Hemisphere. But it does allow for an element of objective comparison. As our society becomes more digital-technological, hence farther from the old norm of “labor power” as the rough equivalent of moral equality that inspired Marx’s Labor Theory of Value, meritocratic selection becomes increasingly important—not just to get the “best” people, but to get everyone to strive to be the best. (Which is the major reason why—but don’t let the UC Diversity folks hear you say this—Chinese kids are good at math.)

Conversely, it is precisely the evil of meritocracy (“disparate impact”) that is the focus of the ascriptive victimary thinking that has virtually eliminated all other thought on the Left today.

I won’t waste your time with this nonsense, but you might take a look for example at http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/268213/u-illinois-prof-math-racist-daniel-greenfield or http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/268212/college-pres-shoving-white-female-student-price-daniel-greenfield , just in one day’s Front Page. Maybe we shouldn’t put people in the gulag for thought crimes, but these people should certainly be put somewhere where they can do no further harm, assuming there are still enough others left to take their place.

As I hope my faithful readers notice, although my writings on the victimary are somewhat repetitive, each time I try to work through some new idea. The last time, it was the notion that as society becomes more technologically advanced, although this does not mean, as Marx thought, that capital would come to outweigh labor and bring down the rate of profit, it does mean that the intellectual component of capital, which is to say, the conceptual labor involved not only in designing machines but in elaborating the material, human, and financial connections of a technologized economy, would become increasingly complex and demanding, and as a consequence, less and less reflective of the human interactional elements of desire, resentment, “scapegoating” and the like. Whereas, so to speak in compensation, the “culture” as the broadly shared component of sociality, of “living together,” would increasingly become detached from serious matters and float along on top of the society.

This does not exactly demonstrate that this “culture” would become victimary, but I don’t think it is very far from it. “Culture” is ultimately the means for deferring resentment. The simpler the culture, the more crudely this is done. Calling people “racists” or “white supremacists” need only be demonstrated by the disparate impact of our income distribution; it is unconcerned with the roles these people play in the socio-economic order. Whence the spectacle of Harvard students—recently declared the most privileged college students of all by the WSJ—preparing for lucrative careers in the economy by holding up signs denouncing White Supremacy while Betsy DeVos was speaking in support of charter schools in poor neighborhoods.

Which is why I insist on the Gallicism victimary to describe the current program of the Left. The Left has always been victimary in the most general sense, since it sees the less fortunate as victims of firstness, but it has jettisoned the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle based on a structural theory of the “capitalist” economy for the binary Nazi-Jew model of difference-as-oppression. The details of the system of production are unimportant. Victims by definition have no agency; once the label has been affixed, their sufferings, defined simply by disparate impact, are “our” fault, the fault of white privilege.

Religions (and responsible political philosophies) have never accepted this kind of reasoning. The “Calvinism” noted in the previous Chronicle, if it were a truly religious doctrine, would apply to all, not just to “whites.” The ironic phrase, “soft racism of low expectations” describes the real racism that classifies victimary groups as ontologically inferior to the “privileged,” as so to speak too damaged to have a soul. And this “theological” error is once more a caricature of Nazi race relations. Given that the Jews at Auschwitz (not to speak of Treblinka) were deprived of “agency,” how then can we “blame the victim” for earning less or going to jail more often? But if God truly loves us all, we should not live in his world as though it were Hell.

To put the binary cultural hypothesis very simply, the more bytes required to organize the material economy, including the entertainment (thank you, Frankfurt School) that painlessly discharges our resentments and satisfies our appetites with fast food and eventually with self-driving cars and AI-enhanced sex robots (in the business section of the September 27 Los Angeles Times: “Silicone sex dolls get an AI makeover. These ‘girls’ will ‘have sensual conversations and tell naughty jokes’”), the fewer bytes needed to maintain cultural solidarity. The Internet is maintained with terabytes of know-how in order to allow people to Tweet the crudest obscenities.

Local versions of this dichotomy are everywhere. At the university, in the embarrassing contrast between highly sophisticated and theory-driven scientific research and near-universal ideological idiocy. Not to speak of GA’s difficulty in obtaining a hearing. For its complexity is based in ideas rather than algorithms, and it thereby falls between the cultural and technical stools. In a world run on big-data-based algorithms, when it comes to exercising the imagination enough to conceive an “originary hypothesis,” the response is one of intellectual panic: how can you speculate without data, on the basis of what you fancy to be our shared intuition? No one really “understands” particle physics or string theory, but these are not things to understand, merely equations to work out. “Cognitive theory” has equations; GA has only imagination, and there is no longer enough of a common symbolic world to allow sharing imaginary constructs as a mode of truth-seeking.

Once we have all become positivist creators and “trainers” of algorithms, we can no longer allow the kind of “gentlemen’s” criteria for success that still existed in my youth, which permitted the less favored both to resent the “caste system” yet be reassured by its authority. Today, all that counts is either knowing the right people, which is not the same as being part of a loosely aristocratic old-boy system, or getting a high score on an exam. For those who don’t know the right people, getting the score is all, whence the reign of disparate impact.

What new leverage does this analysis provide us with for mitigating victimary fanaticism? By its very nature, mere explanation cannot persuade believers to abandon their belief system. Yet even if Trump must remain for the moment our chief bulwark against the victimary, and we should therefore learn, however regrettably, and perhaps not so regrettably as all that, to accept his eccentricities as the only practical way to deal with the victimary forces, we should nonetheless do our best to promulgate our arguably superior analysis of the reduction of our cultural bandwidth.

For one thing, we must learn to appreciate Trump’s strategy even if it is based more on “instinct” than on theory; so is effective street-fighting. One cannot meet the one-bit victimary argument head-on, since it is founded on a “fact” of its own choosing, ascriptive identity, and dismisses other potential causal factors as arbitrary, if not deliberately misleading. But to the extent that Trump’s strategy has succeeded, it is because by simply reaffirming in strident tones the legitimacy of the old distinctions that the victimary would abolish, he reminds a majority of the population that the new ideology is not self-evident, as its partisans would believe, but (cf. Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution) an arbitrary imposition upon a system of values that has largely stood the test of time.

The Jewish example: firstness and the victimary

It is no accident, either that the word scapegoat comes from the Old Testament or, more pertinently, that the Jews hold the undisputed historical victimization championship, precisely because they are never perceived as inherently “victims.” It is not merely “poetic justice,” but a prime example of the paradoxical nature of culture that, just as it was the extreme persecution of the Jews by the Nazis that gave birth to the victimary era in which we still live, it was the inevitable result of the survival of some of those Jews that antisemitism would be the one exception to the victimary mania. For in the oppressor-victim dichotomy, it was inevitable that the Jews would one day find themselves on the site of White Guilt rather than victimary suffering. The Holocaust happened a long time ago, and even those who do not “deny” it can easily become fed up with being reminded of it—a reaction that the “true” victims of our day experience only from “white supremacists.”

The Jews are scapegoats because they embody firstness; this is a point I have made many times, and that Adam Katz and I expounded in a book on the subject. Other “minorities,” even successful ones, do not. Thus although Asians do better than whites on average, even if they sometimes hop on the victimary bandwagon (how dare they say, “you’re Chinese so you must be good in math”!) —although their real complaint is that they are discriminated against in favor of less successful minorities—there is no anti-Asian “racism” to speak of.

Whereas criticism of other minorities is denounced as “blaming the victim,” not so of the Jews. But then the Jews had the misfortune to create a new state in the Middle East that has proved to be in different league from the largely dysfunctional Arab states that surround it. Making a positive contribution to the world economy and being rewarded for it, that is the unforgivable sin.

Like the Holocaust, firstness cannot be “denied.” Some people, some groups, whether or not we call them “races,” tend at a given historical moment to do better than others at some or most of humanity’s essential tasks. There is nothing here that violates the moral model. We all have equal moral worth and are all equally deserving of being saved in an emergency, an eventuality that “moral philosophers” ponder ad infinitum in such things as “trolley problems.” And when emergencies do occur, we observe that neither meritocracy nor affirmative action is generally necessary to encourage people to “do the right thing”—as recently in Las Vegas, for example, where, by and large, the men forgot about “gender equality” and tried to protect the women.

But the control of resentment is another matter, and this is where the Girardian concept of scapegoating has its relevance. To listen to the victimary ideologues, the “scapegoats” are those victimized by the white majority. Yet the role of the Jews, as often, is that of the canary in the mine. The growing presence on American campuses of virulently anti-Israel and sometimes transparently anti-Jewish movements is no small matter. Calling the Jews the “new Nazis” is just a way of returning to the same mode of Jew-hatred that the Nazis themselves practiced. For the latter, it was the Jews who were the “Nazis,” in the sense of an evil and inhuman minority ruthlessly seeking supremacy, one that could not be reasoned with but only destroyed.

The parallel is obvious, but just as people have “suppressed” the Holocaust, so today’s Jew-haters suppress such parallels, on the basis that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” Of course it isn’t, but only because Jew-hatred remains the same while its alibi changes. Anti-Semitism, as we love to forget, was invented as a “positive” doctrine. One was proud of standing up for racial purity against mixed-race mongrels, and the fact that Arabs too were Semites was an irrelevancy to the inventors of the term.

Taking contemporary antisemitism as the model for the victimary in general, we note that it experiences the superiority of Israel over the other states in its region as the scandalous proof of its illegitimacy. If the Jews do better in the marketplace than the Arabs, it is somehow the result of their usurpation of “Palestinian” land. That “Palestinians” never existed before 1948, that there have always been Jews in the territory that is now Israel, that the land that made up Israel before 1948 was purchased from its prior owners rather than “conquered,” and that the 1948 partition and its collapse only became a Nakba for the Arabs because the armies of several Arab countries tried to destroy the Jews, as they had every expectation of doing—these facts are irrelevant, because Jews are simply not supposed to possess territory. The “wandering Jew” is not merely a Christian myth; it is essential in a way that even Yuri Slezkine’s crucial Apollonian/Mercurian distinction (The Jewish Century, Princeton UP, 2011) cannot fully capture. No doubt the Jews lost their kingdom in 135 AD after the Bar Kochba revolt as they had lost it before to the Babylonians, but clearly there is more here than a historical reference.

What is the underlying anthropological substance of the “mind-matter” distinction that Slezkine draws between what Barrès called la terre et les morts and the world of the intellect? This opens the wound of “antisemitism studies,” on which Katz’s and my book has had zero impact because we dared to explain Jew-hatred by the envy of firstness rather than calling it a “disease” or some other metaphoric redescription of what was supposed to be explained.

Israel is a scandal in itself because, as in the originary event, the archetype of pure firstness has no right to exploit the scarcity of the physical world. The God who gives his name in Exodus as a declarative sentence at the same time designates a land for his people, but the two relationships, as God was presumably aware, are not on the same level. On the one hand, the eternal, paradoxical relationship between the nameless One God and “his” people; on the other, the promise of an earthly location that history would demonstrate to be unnecessary to the survival of that people, and certainly to its exemplarity. The scene of representation opposes the sign that can be shared by all to its “real” referent that can at best be divided up, and hence opposes from the beginning the moral model of reciprocity to the principle of scarcity. But at the same time, it exemplifies the necessity of firstness in the domain of the sign itself, the need for the individual use of the différance of the scene to discover new revelations about God and man.

Antisemitism as resentment of the “Mercurians” reflects the insight expressed in Katz’s point that the originary emission of the sign must already have exemplified firstness. That is, the very initiation of “egalitarianism,” of universal reciprocity, was the product of individual initiative, just as the revelation/discovery of the One God was the result of one people’s, if not one individual’s, initiative. Unlike the material world, where scarcity is a physical reality and therefore a so to speak justifiable source of inequality, the sign-world generates inequality through the individual freedom made possible by the deferral of the appetitive on the scene of representation. Even Rousseau described the “origin of inequality” as Le premier qui dit: ceci est à moi…. That is, acquisition not by brute force, but through the concept of ownership.

The collapse of the cultural into a primitive binary system of good victims and evil oppressors modeled on the world of Auschwitz is what leads to such things as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” based on the fiction that since the Europeans failed to treat the Indians and other “indigenous peoples” as equals, the triumph of Western civilization is not merely flawed but simply evil. Whence the brainless sloganeering that greets expressions of respect for Western Civilization on today’s campuses, and the denunciations of “cultural appropriation” along with outlandish attributions of Western creations to other cultures. So long as Western technology continues to dominate the world, as it does in North Korea and China and Syria as much in the West—and where it does not, the local populations must depend on others for assistance—it matters little that Western culture be dominated by White Guilt. Until, of course, such a time as it will matter, if the suicidal demography of Europe and its broad acceptance of Islam as its instrument of penance cannot be stopped.

As Girard clearly recognized, victimary thinking is not only a caricature but a betrayal of Christianity. When Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world,” he recognized the distinction between our fundamental moral equality and the worldly need for firstness and differentiation, if not the causal connection between the reciprocity of the scene of representation and its capacity for generating human difference. Those who perpetuate the culture of victimary dualism have simply eliminated the latter from the model for the benefit of the former, with the essential but “unintended” result of permitting the complex of modern technology and the web of human relations that supports and improves it to maintain its operations, on condition of making a few relatively inexpensive apotropaic gestures. If the Girardians would like to see the operation of “primitive” sacrifice in the contemporary world, this is the place to look.

The point must be made ever more clearly that human difference is a product of the human scene of representation as much as human moral equality. A West whose children play games where “everybody wins,” where we read on the front page of the October 7 Wall Street Journal, “You’re All No. 1! High Schools Say ‘Vale’ to the Valedictorian,” and where, not coincidentally, the number of children is well below the replacement level, had better hope that it can transmit its technological know-how before it’s too late to the Africans and Middle-Easterners who will replace them.

A final reflection: No one can dispute that making women wear veils or worse in public, let alone “honor-killing” them for speaking to strange men, does not rank very high on the scale of moral equality. But the White Guilt that tolerates it is not solely motivated by fear of “Islamophobia.” It reflects a guilty distortion of the healthy idea that women’s destiny, whatever else they elect to do, is to bear children; that, in other words, female biology, at least at the present stage of human technology, is still “in service” to the society as a whole. Women are not solely to blame for the West’s low birth rate, but in a world where women are not subordinate to men, ways must be found to encourage couples to reach a replacement level of population as we live ever longer as individuals, unless of course we would prefer to disappear.

However crude and barbaric these archaic customs may be, they are not simply “irrational.” Not everything that one dislikes can be understood as a variant of Nazism. The idea that the subordination of women, or slavery, or even human sacrifice, is simply “evil” does nothing to explain why it has existed, let alone why it has been abolished in societies that can afford to do so. And calling it “scapegoating” is just one more one-bit explanation.

Following in the footsteps of old Thomas Paine, I decided to call this Chronicle “Common Sense,” there being so little of it left in public discourse today. Ours is far from the best of all possible worlds, but Dr. Pangloss was a lot closer to the truth than our one-bit ideologues. And what allows me to affirm these truisms with such confidence is simply that I am using a better anthropology than those who allow themselves to forget them. Generative Anthropology, based on a minimal hypothesis, is a minimal culture for a society that needs to spend most of its intellectual efforts on modifying the physical world. But, above all when it is minimal, you have to get it right.