Author: staceymeeker

Let me repeat the first sentence of the original 1981 edition of The Origin of Language (TOOL): Mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity. To the extent that the word mystery has a genuine referent and is not merely a synonym for hoax or ignorance, there is only one human mystery, the mystery of language, which is also the mystery of the sacred and of the representational culture that separates us from our fellow creatures. Given that we have no way of understanding this mystery from without, we can assume that we will never understand it fully as the product of simpler components, which is another way of saying that faith will always be necessary, that we can only postulate, not demonstrate, the human essence we seek to explain.

Nonetheless, there is no need for mysticism. The object of Generative Anthropology (GA) is to minimize the mystery of the human sign, the sacred, and the other cultural phenomena that derive from it. It remains within the limits of “philosophical” reflection, discoursing on the elements of human experience without reference to the material substrate (neurons, synapses, genes, etc.) that embodies them.

We know from Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species (Norton, 1997) that human language is neurologically discontinuous with animal signal systems; their headquarters are located in different parts of a brain. And from our own experience we are well aware that human “calls” such as laughter, tears, and cries of pain are not continuous with language. Nor can language be understood simply as a “behavior.” There is no need to redo Chomsky’s demolition of B. F. Skinner’s attempt to conceive language as a system of conditioned reflexes. (See his “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior” in Language, 35, 1, 1959: 26-58, reprinted in Readings in the Psychology of Language, ed. Leon A. Jakobovits and Murray S. Miron, Prentice-Hall, 1967.)

But perversely, the clear indications that human language is sui generis appear to have led empirically minded linguists to focus entirely on the cognitive content of language as a way of “expressing thoughts” rather than on its communicative function. Since, on the one hand, human symbolic language differs absolutely from animal indexical signals, but on the other, it is transmitted to our fellows primarily by the broadly similar mechanism of articulated sound, the implicit conclusion is drawn that there is no particular need to concern ourselves with the latter aspect, since the true uniqueness of human language must be found in the former. But on the contrary, what is specific about human linguistic “behavior” is in the first place not its content but the uniqueness of the communication situation itself. The neglect of this insight is particularly troublesome given the notion of joint shared attention central to the work of the very same Michael Tomasello who thinks that religion can be dismissed in a throwaway sentence (see Chronicle 519). This kind of interaction is precisely what distinguishes humans from animals; as the occasion for language, it contains the act of signifying at its very core, lacking which we would merely have two persons attending to the same thing.

One of the key problems that has beset the current state of inquiry into the origin of language is the unreflective, one might say unconsciously Chomskian equation of “language” with its present, mature state, as manifested in all known languages. It is surely of interest to study child language acquisition, as has been done in recent years in great detail. But a child learning a mature language tells us nothing about how language itself came into being.

That we know of no speakers of “elementary language” does not of course mean that linguists believe that the structures of language appeared all at once; even Chomsky assumes that our Language Acquisition Device (LAD) evolved from a simpler state. But although it has often been noted, not without some surprise, that our fellow apes do not point, the idea that pointing at something is actually the emission of a sign, and therefore already a form of language, seems never to arise in the context of language origin. This is an idea that Raymond Tallis comes close to in his book on The Hand (Edinburgh, 2003), which expresses a view largely compatible with GA, as I had occasion to remark a propos of Tallis’s keynote address at the annual meeting of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference (GASC) in 2014.

Let us then rehearse the basic scenario of the originary event, with which readers may already be familiar. The purpose of this scenario, and of the originary hypothesis in general, is not to offer a guess as to was wirklich geschehen ist, but to provide a heuristic model that, in contrast to real-world events, includes only content relevant to the meaningful result that is presumed to emerge from it. The notion of the laboratory, as developed by the beloved French epistemologist Gaston Bachelard (e.g., La formation de l’esprit scientifique, Vrin, 1938), is as a place where distracting sources of variability are reduced to a minimum in order that experiments may be carried out in which the values of specific parameters are determined. The originary event as described by the hypothesis is so to speak a thought-experimental laboratory.

The fundamental “Girardian” intuition that presides over GA is that human representational culture comes into being when our immediate ancestors had become too mimetic to be able to continue to rely on animal mechanisms of violence-inhibition. The pecking order that operates among higher animals depends on the group’s forming a queue structure rather than a centralized community. The hypothetical originary event presupposes only that the progression of mimetic ability has reached the point at which this serial hierarchy breaks down.

Let us imagine an appetitive object, such as the cadaver of a large animal discovered or killed by a hunting party. The members of the group surround the object, the Alpha among them. But the level of mimetic tension in the group has risen too high for the Alpha to be able to rely on his primacy as in the past: appropriating the animal, taking his portion, then passing the remainder to the Beta, and so on. Under the pressure of increased mimetic rivalry, the Alpha taking the first piece of meat, from being simply at the head of the queue, comes to be viewed and resented as a unique privileged figure in opposition to all the others who for the moment are not benefiting from the meat distribution.

Hence the Alpha’s potential act of appropriation is contested not by individual rivals but by the group as a whole. Like the hands of children at a party reaching out for the last piece of cake, all make a gesture of appropriation toward the object, but, observing this symmetry, all including the Alpha hesitate to incur the aggression of the others by prolonging their gesture toward the object.

Thus the members of the group are obliged to defer their appropriation of the animal, and consequently abort their gesture. “Defer” (différer) is a term “anthropologized” from Derrida, who uses it to refer to the hesitation implicit in the choice of a word in a paradigm. But before the existence of linguistic paradigms, the originary object of deferral must have been the potential violence attendant on a worldly rather than a “symbolic” act. It is this aborted gesture of appropriation, designating the object but no longer directed at appropriating it, that we postulate as the first sign.

This suspension of appropriative activity would convert the “theater of action” in which the hunter/scavengers confront the animal as a source of nourishment into a scene where action is for the moment impossible but the group’s attention remains jointly focused on the animal at the center. The aborted gesture would then come to be collectively understood a new form of communication, directed both at the central object itself as the first “deity” and at the other members of the group. This originary occurrence of joint shared attention would arise through the consciousness shared by the participants of both their own gesture and that of the others, coupled with the awareness that peacefully exchanging this gesture in contrast to fighting over the central object makes this new form of exchange memorable and desirable, worthy of being repeated. The idea that the sign both reproduces and participates in the “aura” or numinousness of its referent while at the same time leaving it intact is the essential structure of signification.

In a less minimalistic form, mediated through his construction of the psyche around erotic energy, this same core intuition presides over Freud’s scenario of father-murder in Totem and Taboo, which was the direct ancestor of Girard’s scene of emissary murder. Indeed, the desire to distance himself from Freud may well have influenced Girard’s choice of the marginal scapegoat in the place of the patriarch, although the Crucifixion already paradoxically unites both figures. Regardless of the ostensible appetitive motivation of the group (for Freud, access to the women in the patriarchal harem, for Girard, finding someone to blame for a plague or other calamity, for GA, instituting a communal system of distribution to replace the failing pecking order), the core of all these scenes is the designation of a central figure by a sign, which I have consequently called the name-of-God. Once this is accomplished, GA is happy to accept the idea shared by both Girard and Freud that this central figure will be torn apart by the peripheral participants, although for a different purpose and certainly with superior alimentary results than in the other scenarios.

The event of the origin of language is the true origin of the human. Language and the scene of representation on which it takes place adds a new dimension to animal existence. This dimension can be understood as that of eventfulness itself, in which an incident leaves its trace as a sign shared with the community rather than a mere epigenetic inflection: an event in the human sense is ipso facto a signified.

The originary event cannot simply be assumed to have occurred in the minimalist fashion that this exposition of the originary hypothesis describes. Any such hypothesis must be in some sense a just-so story. But its heuristic value is undiminished. The point is that, unlike the progress of genetic evolution through mutation and selection, the emergence of culture, of a shared system of representations, starting ex hypothesi from a single shared representation whose sacred referent embodies significance-sacrality itself—this emergence is by its very nature self-representing. The precise instant at which the aborted gesture of appropriation that is the source of the first sign acquires a value in itself, not as a signal but as a sign that paradoxically both reflects and at the same time creates the separation of its now-sacred referent from the “horizontal” world of appetite, could no doubt not be determined empirically even were we capable of reconstructing the entire history of human evolution. It is nonetheless functionally a unique moment of creation that can only be understood as an event taking place on the scene shared by the proto-human participants.

All other theories of language origin agonize over the necessity of passing from, as Engels’ Dialectics of Nature put it, quantity to quality. But what distinguishes language is not the qualitative complexity of its content; it is the nature of the communication it enables. It is counterproductive to create complex cognitive blueprints that, once fulfilled, would allow language to “emerge.” Language is ipso facto a conscious, interactive phenomenon; it is our evidence for consciousness itself in a sense beyond animal awareness. The scene of consciousness exists in individuals when and only when it subsists as well as a scene of representation shared by other members of the group, as the basis for a cultural/linguistic community.

In my first descriptions of the originary event, I simply assumed that all the participants, fearful of making the first move and being attacked by the others, spontaneously aborted their appropriative gestures toward the central object and acquired the consciousness that they were not merely deciding not to appropriate, but that their aborted gestures had themselves become intentional signs embodying both deferral of action and the public communication of this deferral, while representing the object itself as the common focus of interest. The dynamics of the situation would lead to the pragmatic paradox that the more the object was represented and focused on, the less it could be appropriated. This progression would persist until the entire group, realizing that they were all agreed on the desirability of the object and on their common need for access to it, would approach it together in a collective sparagmos that would end with each participant possessing a roughly “equal” portion.

But Adam Katz suggested in “Remembering Amalek: 9/11 and Generative Thinking” (Anthropoetics 10, 2 (Fall 2004 / Winter 2005) that the discovery that to designate the object by an aborted gesture was in effect to represent it should not be assumed to have occurred to all the participants at the same moment—in other words, that an element of firstness was a necessary constituent of the scene.

One might say in defense of my original scenario that this differential element is of a lower heuristic order than the unanimous conclusion of the scene, with the creation of a human community linked by the sign, which I conceive here as taking place in a single event although the consciousness of the gesture as a sign no doubt emerged through many false starts. But I think the important factor in Adam’s emendation is not so much the gradualness of the discovery/invention of the sign as the differentiation this discovery would have effected among the participants. Since clearly the end result would not single out any individual initiator, given that the ethical equality of all the participants in relation to the center (what I call the moral model) is the necessary outcome of the signing operation, one might ignore this differentiation. But as we well know, as soon as surpluses come to be accumulated beyond the needs of immediate consumption, firstness will reappear as a social reality with the introduction of hierarchy, and will remain the norm, with a few minor exceptions, throughout human history. That is, the moral model of linguistic reciprocity will remain with us as our ethical foundation, but will no longer supply the model for the exchanges of goods and the power-relations they guarantee in the social order, as it had done at the origin and as it still does in the remaining “hunter-gatherer” societies. Linguistic and moral exchange will remain symmetrical, but economic and political exchange will henceforth be conducted among unequals.

Indeed, this may be said to have been inevitable from the outset. The moral model cannot dictate the entirety of human behavior, even human cultural behavior, and this because the scene of representation, on which the human pour-soi is free as Sartre defines it, is not limited to the public scene of ritual but belongs to each individual. If I have the freedom to intend the central object, then I have the freedom to contemplate manipulating it in a new way, and to formulate projects (Sartre’s term as well) that are not shared spontaneously with the group.

This is in my view the real importance of Adam’s emendation. An innovation such as the sign cannot be the “emanation” of a situation; it must be the product of innovative reflection of the kind that the scene of representation permits us each as individuals. Thus even if all the members of the group got the idea of the sign at the same time, the essential point is that each of them would have to grasp it as an individual reflecting on the scene shared with his fellows.

No doubt my depiction of the psychological nuances of the communicative relationship thus established is wholly speculative, but what must be understood as its minimal core is the sense, for the first time, of a scenic communication mediated no longer through an instinctive appetitive gesture or a signal derived from it via the Pavlovian process of “conditioned reflex,” but through a gesture that has so to speak turned back upon itself as a self-conscious, voluntary act, one that will be understood by all as referring to the common interdicted, sacred, significant object of desire.

To be continued…

For a year or so I have been contemplating an updated edition of The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (TOOL), published by the University of California Press in 1981. This is the only one of my books that had an advertising budget and was expected to make an impact on the world. But the book had its problems. It was written in a prolix “philosophical” language largely influenced by the French I had been writing and the German I had been reading, and it focused on the evolution of the forms of “elementary language” rather than on the scenic nature of language in general.

But its major flaw was that it did not expound a fully mature version of GA’s originary hypothesis. Written in the wake of my 1978 visiting professorship at Johns Hopkins, it remained too close to Girard’s “emissary victim” scenario of human origin (itself always ambiguous as to its specificity as an event). I had not yet thought through the idea that the most plausible scenario for the originary human event was not a lynching following a crise sacrificielle but simply a crisis in the system of food-distribution, reflecting the breakdown of the pecking-order hierarchy of ape society under the pressure of increased proto-human mimetic/intellectual capacity. Ape societies have no central organization; distribution follows a queue structure in which the (male) animals are ranked in serial order; any challenge to this order involves only pairwise (or clique-wise) battles for supremacy between, say, the Alpha male and a Gamma or Delta challenger. This change of perspective takes into account the central alimentary function of sacrificial feasts, an aspect that Girard neglects but that is amply illustrated by the animals—not persons—in cave paintings, and simply by common sense: we can live without killing each other, but not without distributing food, particularly if we eat the carcasses of large animals.

There is no need to rehash all this here. The most important thing, after all, is that even in its still somewhat inchoate state, the “formal theory of representation” expounded in TOOL was qualitatively superior to all other theories of language origin, not only to those that had come before, but even more so to those which have appeared since. As some recent Chronicles (e.g., 444, 490, 519) have made clear, the world of the intellect, however great the progress we are making in such areas as medicine and computer science, has if anything gone backwards in the domain of fundamental anthropology. The simple fact that a major authority in cognitive science feels comfortable with dismissing the contribution of religion to human morality in the following sophomoric sentence, which I have already quoted twice in these Chronicles, is very simply an indictment of the entire world of the “social” or “human” sciences.

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

To help explain this sad state of affairs, let me recall the put-down I received the last time I attended an event sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion, an organization that I helped found, and whose inaugural speaker I introduced, who happened to be René Girard: “Religion is not a subject, it is a field.” Meaning that an amateur like me daring to show myself among these learned scholars was the equivalent of a humanities professor attending a conference of nuclear physicists, to be seen but not heard. But then, since Michael Tomasello is not a member of the religion “field,” how could he be expected to write knowledgeably about religion? QED.

How then to get started on the new edition of TOOL? On the one hand, going back over and revising the chapters of the original edition, as I did recently for Science and Faith—which required only correcting a couple of typos and adding a sentence or two and a preface (as well as a fine introduction by Adam Katz)—did not strike me as feasible. Although the core of the theory is unchanged, it would have to be wholly reformulated, a task too complex to make textual revision an option.

But, on the other hand, I couldn’t see myself just sitting down to write a second book on the origin of language. I’m too old, or too cynical, and above all, too habituated to the Chronicle mode of composition to write such a book from scratch. I did this for the little online 2012 memoir The Girardian Origins of GA, which Imitatio decided not to issue in a print version, and above all for my book on Carole Landis, A Most Beautiful Girl (Mississippi, 2008), but the first was not a major effort, and the second was a labor of love.

So after much reflection, I have decided that the best solution would be to write a series of Chronicles with a view of combining them into a book. I did this for my chapters in the antisemitism book I wrote with Adam Katz (The First Shall Be The Last: Rethinking Antisemitism, Leiden: Brill, 2015), and had done so earlier for A New Way of Thinking (2011) and The Scenic Imagination (2007). The difference this time will be that I will compose these Chronicles explicitly in view of putting them together rather than, as in the previous cases, bringing the Chronicles together only after I had written several on a common theme.

Here then, without further ado, is an introductory statement that should help to situate my hypothesis a bit more clearly in its intellectual context.

Why I understand language and the professionals don’t

I shall make my point a bit differently, and I think more sharply, than in my previous 1001 expositions of GA’s originary hypothesis. Let us forget for a moment about the originary event to concentrate on the “Sartrian” nature of the scene of representation itself. Sadly, no one reads Sartre any more; the inheritance of phenomenology that still informs modern “continental” philosophizing has been stripped of its conceptual rigor and reduced to a faith in “intuition” that at its best produces the kind of brilliant insights one finds in Deleuze; Derrida, for all his excesses, was the last true French philosopher of his generation.

Sartre, in contrast to Heidegger, was concerned with the internal structure of the scene of representation. His idea that the pour-soi differs from all other modes of being is not, like Heidegger’s fetishization of Being, a portentous carry-over of an essentially religious concept into philosophy—a dramatic but ultimately sterile anticipation of the unification of philosophy with anthropology that GA proposes. Sartre’s pour-soi contains, without his supplying a reason, since he treats it as a primitive, a néant that separates the human subject from the object of his intention. This is faithful to the essentially scenic framework of Husserl’s original phenomenological project in a way that Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is not. Because Heidegger’s subject confronts “Being” and not simply objects of consciousness, he cannot be said to have a scene of consciousness of his own. The sacred aura that surrounds Being in Heidegger in effect supplies its own néant of fearsome otherness to its interaction with Dasein. But what then explains the néant that inhabits the scene of Sartre’s human pour-soi but not, presumably, that of animal consciousness? Sartre, as I have pointed out (see Chronicle 378), never thinks to speak of language in this context; he accepts uncritically the great metaphysical tradition in which language is simply taken for granted as the voice of “reason,” the term logos being quite convenient for this purpose.

GA, for the first time in the history of thought, draws the proper association between language and the human pour-soi. Even independently of the originary hypothesis that proposes a plausible scenario for the emergence of this new phenomenon, even if we go so far off the deep end as to stipulate that the human pour-soi is the result of a new genetic mutation (perhaps the same one that permits for the first time “double-scope blending” [see Chronicle 528]), the core of the difference between my theory of language and all the others is simply this: on the scene of representation on which the sign intends its referent, there exists, between the human gesture that produces the sign and the referent it intends, a néant, a dead space of sacred interdiction within which action is deferred. The sign is and remains an aborted gesture of appropriation; it “intends” the object but is not intended to procure it directly. All the theories of language origin currently in vogue ignore this essential factor, which means that they fail to explain or indeed to recognize the essential difference between human language and animal indexical signals.

I wouldn’t waste my time explaining this to a linguist or to any social scientist, because this kind of “philosophical” discussion, in the absence of laboratory experiments to ascertain which neurons are or are not the agents of the deferral, would be characterized, as a Linguistics colleague recently put it to me, as unprovable. On the other side of the spectrum, the interest of philosophers in language, even of those who pick up on Austin’s admirable awareness that language does things rather than simply making constative statements, does not extend to speculating on how, and above all, why we ever began doing things with words.

I note parenthetically that Girard was often described in his later years as an anthropologist, although he was no more of an anthropologist than I am; we were both from one end to the other of our university careers nothing but French, or to give René a little more credit, Comparative Literature professors. French professors are supposed to know a bit more than “literature”; indeed, we teach about writers like Descartes, Pascal, and Rousseau who are more philosophers than “writers” in the standard sense. René as a member of the Académie Française was no doubt entitled to call himself an anthropologist if he liked. But my point is not that he was underqualified, but on the contrary, that by not having been trained in the social sciences, he understood what had been bled out of the minds of social scientists, which is precisely the difference between human signs and the culture built upon them and the cybernetic mechanisms that we have elaborated to facilitate their manipulation.

This doesn’t mean that machines can’t learn to “think” better than we can. They can already beat us at chess and even Go, and who am I to say that they can’t come to compose better poetry—they already generate better stuff than 99% of what are called poems nowadays. But whatever they can learn to do, they only learned it because humans first learned to use language, and unless we want to postulate some kind of nerd-God to update the watchmaker-God of the Enlightenment, we have to try to understand how we ordinary humans managed to create language all by ourselves—or if you prefer, receive God’s revelation of it.

I often wonder how many of the not-so-lucky few who take the trouble to read these Chronicles I have persuaded that this is the real point of GA, that the scenario of the originary hypothesis is only a way of imagining how a group of highly mimetic primates might find themselves faced with and forced to resolve the defining human situation of becoming the animal that is more of a danger to itself than the rest of the environment. The solution is not “cognitive,” but communicative, indeed, communal. Animals have families and societies, but humans alone have communities within which all participants share a common language and a common sense of the sacred, a common center whose uniqueness is regularly reaffirmed by what we call “religious” practices.

As Terrence Deacon made clear in The Symbolic Species, human language is indeed, as Monty Python might have put it, something completely different.

To be continued…

When Trevor Merrill lent me his copy of Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy (Encounter, 2016 [2012]), my reaction to the first chapters was that Legutko simply didn’t understand what “liberal democracy” was. In contrast to the communist system, most of which disappeared shortly after 1989, liberal democracy in one form or another remains the political system of the world’s most advanced economies and most of those approaching that level. And as I continue to repeat, I have seen no reason to reject Francis Fukuyama’s idea that this form of polity, although calling it the “end of history” is dogmatic and wrongheaded, is indeed the definitive framework of political organization, since however societies may evolve, a (relatively) free market overseen by a (relatively) free system of political representation must for both moral and economic reasons be part of the equation.

But after getting through his early abstractions, it soon became clear to me that Legutko was writing from a European, and chiefly from a Polish perspective, and that his concept of “liberal democracy” was very much like what Adam Katz and I had been calling victimocracy. Legutko’s descriptions of the mind-chilling identity politics that he identifies with liberal democracy are based on his experiences in Poland and with the European Union, whose vision of its inhabitants as “global” individuals endowed with rights and potentially victimary ascriptive identities has largely served the Obama administration as its model, and where legal restrictions on “incorrect” speech are in fact comparable to the regulations on many American campuses. Ditto for such things as hostility to Israel, indifference to the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries, and the other features of the victimary society that we had been coming to take for granted.

There is nothing really very shocking about these parallels. In contrast to the left-wing version of communist-“capitalist” convergence described in Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), a work highly influential in the 1968 era and beyond—still alive and well is Marcuse’s idea of “repressive tolerance,” which allows virtuous hecklers to chase “repressive” speakers from the stage—the picture Legutko draws of Western society is unfortunately quite credible. Marcuse was still retailing the Frankfort School idea of “late capitalism,” where the ruling class maintained its position by distracting the masses from their authentic revolutionary consciousness with the bread and circuses of “mass entertainment.” His critique was nominally addressed less to the West, whose capitalist society was decadent by definition, than to the Soviet Union, which he saw counter-prophetically as becoming complacent and consumerist on the American model.

For those were the days of Khrushchev’s “We will bury you!”—to which the heroine of Clueless might have responded “As if!” Whence my fundamental agreement with Fukuyama; whatever you think of materialistic consumer society, it’s a lot better than the dialectical-materialist alternative. But Legutko, writing after the demise of Western communism, takes its unsatisfactoriness for granted; his point is that, economics aside, the “Western” ideology that replaced it in Poland is ironically very similar to it in its dogmatic, self-righteous pseudo-egalitarianism and its rejection of traditional, particularly religious values. This is of especial significance for Poland, whose population’s religiosity as Roman Catholics fortified by their historic resistance to Russian Orthodoxy is comparable to that of the US rather than the other countries of Europe. No doubt whatever Europe’s current problems, Western economies are incomparably more productive than those of the old Warsaw Pact. But we can well understand how someone who has lived through the communist era and its aftermath might be deeply disappointed to encounter, just at the moment when he has supposedly left a failed utopia for “the realm of freedom,” the same kind of pseudo-utopian jargon enforced with much the same fanaticism.

The surprising appropriateness of this comparison makes one realize the importance of the evolution of the Western Left after the fall of communism. Already by Marcuse’s time, the communist example had become one of disillusion, and if it wasn’t yet obvious in 1964, it certainly was ten years later that the Soviet Union wouldn’t catch up with the US, that despite Sputnik, socialism would not provide a comparable, let alone a superior level of prosperity to that of “capitalism.” On top of this, unlike that of the USSR, Eastern European communism had never been an inspiration to anyone. Tyranny there, as in Milan Kundera’s novels, was semi-comic rather than tragic, although there were plenty of small tragedies among those who fell afoul of the regime.

Trevor and I had often spoken of the ominous similarities between today’s university atmosphere and that of Kundera’s Czechoslovakia. But not until reading Legutko’s essay had I thought to compare the spiritual impoverishment of the old communist bloc with that of today’s “liberal-democratic” West as a whole. My impression is in fact that the Warsaw Pact intellectuals were more cynical and consequently freer in their souls if not their bodies than today’s Western intelligentsia, who rarely give evidence of not truly believing every word of the dogma they preach.

The victimary line is, after all, unfalsifiable. Unlike the citizens of communist Poland, we are not asked to affirm that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. On the contrary, the ideological power of the post-communist Western Left lies precisely in its detachment from any utopian vision. Thus it can denounce ascriptive inequalities without needing to offer any blueprint for a better social order. Victimary thinking has no endpoint in view; it merely makes short-term “demands” that once granted can always be increased. Legutko’s focus is therefore not on these demands but on the stultifying ideology behind them.

This said, there is something essential that Legutko has missed, that Trump’s election and Brexit make obvious, and that allows me to maintain my Fukuyaman faith in liberal democracy. Although the Marxist dogmatism Legutko describes was an essential, permanent feature of communism as practiced in the Soviet bloc, as well as in places like Cuba and North Korea, victimocracy is neither a defining nor a permanent feature of liberal democracy. It is regrettable that in 2012 one could even begin to make a case for victimocracy as the default mode of Western democracy, but the operation of the familiar left-right “pendulum,” so beautifully illustrated by yesterday’s inauguration ceremony, suggests that the left side’s runaway pseudo-egalitarianism is still balanced by a respect for the traditional categories of firstness on the right.

Nonetheless, Legutko’s thesis should lead us to reflect on what is required to maintain the equilibrium that enforces the necessity of genuine negotiation between left and right. After all, Clinton didn’t lose by all that much, and would have won had the vote been a simple referendum. Would the “pendulum” have survived another four or eight years of victimocracy?

Let me begin by pointing out that a less controversial Republican would probably have scored a more decisive victory over Clinton, whose candidacy was handicapped in various ways. The best approach to understanding the choice of Trump in both the primary and the general election was that the voting public was willing to take a chance on the one viable candidate who was openly opposed to the victimocracy, rather than choosing another Republican like McCain or Romney who could be expected to mitigate its effects without confronting it directly. Whence what I called the felix culpa of Trump’s excessive feistiness: it signaled that he wouldn’t let anything prevent him from striking back at victimocratic forces and those allied with them, even at the limit in cases where his remarks could be construed as “racist” or disparaging to those with disabilities, etc. What Trump in fact legitimized was not “racism” but a less stringent level of civility that, despite occasional lapses, is actually closer to real mutual regard than that dictated by the constraints of PC—the kind of civility that is banned by the University of California guidelines that forbid calling the USA a “land of opportunity” or suggesting that an Asian might be good in math. Instead we learn to be constantly on the defensive against the possibility not so much of really offending someone as of leaving ourselves vulnerable to victimary stigmatization and administrative sanction.

This is all, one might say, the tip of the iceberg. The Obama administration’s blatant disregard via “phone and pen” of the usual checks and balances has weakened the democratic process. The Senate filibuster, for example, may be on its last legs, as partisanship appears to have reached the point where common respect for traditional rules is no longer possible. Yet the fact that the Republicans now dominate state governments as well as both houses of Congress as they have not since before the Depression is strong evidence in the pendulum’s favor. Obama as the first black president was a very special case, and the decline of his party’s fortunes that began in 2010 clearly reflects an adverse reaction to the extremism of his policies, with which the media were too much in sympathy to analyze them objectively.

The key to GA’s anthropological understanding is paradox, which makes impossible in human affairs the linear pursuit of a goal to its end, beginning with the deferral of appropriation in the originary event that leads to the peaceful division of the sparagmos. The advantage of liberal democracy over all the other systems except for which it is the worst is that, like the market, it incorporates paradox into its political decision-making process. Left and right are always in disequilibrium, and the left in particular would not be itself if it accepted the two sides’ simple symmetry, but to the extent that the democratic system works, both sides are forced to negotiate, “bracketing” their core values of traditional firstness on one side and deconstructive egalitarianism on the other. The most productive political dialogue is the most openly paradoxical, in the sense that although those on both sides seek to achieve their goals, both also realize that if this achievement too greatly damaged the other side, it would destroy the system itself. Liberal-democratic political debate requires that all value the survival of the institution that maintains the dialogue more than any given victory.

Every political system must respect to some extent the paradoxical foundation of human culture, the necessity of taking both a universal perspective and one’s own included within it. All systems of government, even the most tyrannical, must implement this principle; even the absolute tyrant cannot administer his realm if he fails to take into account the needs of his subjects. If he keeps all wealth for himself and starves everyone else, his tyranny will vanish. But the republican system of “checks and balances” such as that our founding fathers in their wisdom created maximizes the degree to which each member of society can follow his own interests while taking those of the whole polity into account. No individual citizen can be expected to grasp the needs of the whole, but the “political market” of free elections offers the best chance for a self-equilibrating result.

Legutko does not deny this so much as leave it unmentioned as irrelevant to his spiritual argument. And Trump’s wholly unexpected success demonstrates the pertinence of Legutko’s analysis, while vindicating the point made in a number of these Chronicles well before the Trump campaign that the real danger to American democracy was the increasingly victimary cast of the administrative state. Trump’s victory in the face of the establishment of both parties showed the victimary factor to be more central than nearly anyone thought. Even if we go so far as to stipulate that this factor has a minimal effect on the economy, its devastating effect on mainstream culture was what delivered Trump the presidency.

But after breathing a sigh of relief that the pendulum worked this time, that the final phase of what Allan Bloom called some years ago the “closing of the American mind” has been forestalled, the question of furnishing a counterweight to the victimary remains. The despairing tone of many recent Chronicles reflects the fact that for the past couple of decades the victimary “march through the institutions” had seemed unstoppable. The traditional Burkean values of civil society were being revealed one after the other as hollow shells. Thus homosexual marriage, which until a few years ago was simply unthinkable, has become universally accepted by the political class as well as by a large majority of the younger generations. Irrespective of the value of the arguments pro and con, the rapidity of this development demonstrated the alarming fragility of what had been since the beginning of history a universally respected social norm. No wonder the Left now examines every similar norm for its content of “discrimination.”

Nonetheless, I cannot help seeing recent developments of resistance to the victimary trends of the EU and the US not only as proof that the democratic process continues to work but as signs in both cases of a modest religious revival. (I know Trevor would agree with this.) In France in particular, the surprising victory in the conservative primary of the practicing Catholic François Fillon, who is more than likely to win the presidency later this year, would put the leadership of France in the hands of the first serious practicing Catholic since de Gaulle, and the first since Marshal MacMahon in the 1870s to emphasize the importance of his faith. In the US, Trump’s victory was dependent on the strong support of evangelicals and Catholics. No doubt Trump himself is hardly a religious man, but I agree with Victor Davis Hanson that whatever the irregularities of his private life, he is a man of tradition, as more unproblematically is his vice-president, in a way that the Democrats clearly are not.

As an expression of optimism in the longer term, I can only reiterate my faith in the eventual acceptance of GA in the place of the dogmatically atheistic anthropologies currently in vogue. The survival of what can broadly be called Girardian thinking is not due to a mere “cult of personality,” nor is it directly dependent on organized religion. Whatever the religious convictions of the Girardians or of those active in GA, their distinctive quality is that they take religion not exclusively as an article of faith but as a central source of anthropological insight. This is not simply the “respect for religion” that was in its day a more benign form of PC, but an understanding of religion’s central importance to human society even on the part of those who do not participate in its rituals.

The paradoxical quasi-identity drawn by GA between cultural significance and the sacred is not a mere metaphor. We need not accept the Dostoevskian dictum that if God does not exist, anything is possible, for the human itself depends on the moral model inaugurated in its founding event. Christianity and Judaism each in their own way, and in different ways the world’s other major religions as well, insist that God is the guarantor of the moral equality of all human souls, and of their consequent obligation to respect this equality in their dealings with others.

As Richard van Oort remarked some time ago, GA is not a substitute for religion, and would be of little use in the foxholes. But as a means of bringing together, if not reconciling completely, religion and anthropology, I think its fundamental insights have their role to play in the preservation of liberal democracy, in such a way as to satisfy Legutko that the West and those who follow its model are indeed capable of freeing their valid concern for moral equality from the disfiguring excesses of the victimary era.

The “world” contains no paradoxes; paradox is a property of systems of representation. And humans alone possess systems of representation, or simply language, in contrast to the signaling systems of animals. Pavlovian “paradoxical states” are not paradoxes in our sense; hesitating between incompatible actions, like Buridan’s ass between two bales of hay, or overreacting to a stimulus out of frustration, do not possess the defining quality of paradox, which is the necessary incompleteness of self-inclusion. Once one has a system of representation, it cannot be prevented save by artificial means from representing itself. Self-representation is indeed always paradoxical, even when it involves no contradiction with logic in the strict sense. Thus the sentence “This sentence has five words” is “true” enough, but a paradoxical construction nonetheless, since what it represents is not independent of the representation itself—whence for example, the substitution of equivalent terms, such as “The present” for “This,” can falsify it, which is not compatible with the rules of logic. And if you are allowed to say that, you then can say, “This sentence is true,” which is meaningless, and then graduate to “this sentence is false,” which will be called self-contradictory if we allow sentences to tell about themselves. Yet how can we not? Passing legislation only imposes an outside authority; what is going to prevent me from writing or speaking such sentences? Which is to say that the attempt to legislate paradox out of existence, as via Russell’s Theory of Types (which, as is well known, can itself be used to construct paradoxes), is useful only in the context of a specific sub-system of representation, not in that of representation, or language, itself.

Yet to take the problem a bit farther, we discover that all language is paradoxical in that its representations are unavoidably included in the universe they represent, and more concretely, in the ethical sense that the language of the representation cannot be segregated from the human universe it describes. No doubt the moons of Saturn do not care what we say about them, which is why natural science is generally safe from paradox. Thus I am skeptical about physical theories that imply that our knowledge of something (rather than the disturbances we cause in attempting to obtain it) somehow affects its existence. Scientists aren’t very sophisticated as anthro-philosophers (or anthropoeticians), and I don’t trust them not to introduce ghosts into the machine; talking about “information” being retrieved from a black hole makes me nervous regardless of the IQ of the physicists involved.

But in any case, as I have been trying to make clear for the past 35 years or so, language is in the first place ethical; its representations concern in the first place human matters, or “divine” ones that are revealed only as counterparts of the human. It is the insertion of our representations into the human situation that matters, and here even a statement about a remote galaxy, however little effect it might have on that galaxy, has one on the human world to which it is addressed.

Logic and mathematics are human-made systems of representation with internal constraints. As a result of our awareness of these constraints, we are tempted to take a “Platonic” view of these systems as existing independently of our will and even of our existence. Many will say (the word believe begs the question of whether one can consistently “believe” such statements) that even if all humans and any other hypothetical intelligent beings vanished from the universe, that the “truths” of mathematics would remain. And no doubt this is correct if what is meant is that given the postulates that define arithmetic, etc., the conclusions we have drawn from them, from the multiplication table to Fermat’s Last Theorem, could all be proved by any hypothetical creature capable of performing the operations of the system—forgetting about the necessity of such a creature to formulate the hypothesis in the first place. And no doubt if there were some other life-form capable of understanding language, it would come up with the same truths: there is no system of representation in which, given the usual definitions, 2+2=5, or a fifth-degree polynomial can be solved by radicals.

But this in no way demonstrates the independence of these systems from the human act of representation. That constraints are inherent in systems independently of the will of their constructors is a truism, ultimately a tautology. Just because one can deduce conclusions about these systems that were not explicitly given in their definition is no proof that the systems somehow “exist” independently of humanity, any more than the constraints of an internal-combustion engine have somehow resided for all time in a Platonic realm of Ideas. No doubt the manipulation of numbers seems so basic to the universe that we can’t imagine that any intelligent being would not be drawn to devise a homologous system, even if it preferred base 12 to base 10. But given that outside of science fiction there are no other known examples of “intelligent,” representation-using creatures in the universe, our imagination concerning such creatures is wholly gratuitous. Perhaps we can conceive nothing else, but the proverbial man searching for his keys under the streetlight is in precisely the same position.

More germane to the subject of paradox is the conundrum that since every statement made within the generalized scene of representation of human communication modifies the minds of those who hear it (including the speaker), every statement about the world is implicitly paradoxical. The world after I have made my statement, or someone hears it or reads it a second or a hundredth time, is not the same as the world about which I originally made the statement. No doubt the reception of most statements does not modify the world sufficiently to make them false or deprive them of factual content, but the point is that the model of a “vertical” representation or language-world that represents the “real” world is never truly self-consistent.

That mathematics itself is vulnerable to “external” representation is the burden of Gödel’s famous theorem, which shows that, given a system homologous to arithmetic, one can make true statements about the system that cannot be demonstrated using the axioms from which the system is constructed. Whether this is a coincidence or a direct homology between ethics and mathematics, or whether such a question itself can ever be “scientifically” answered, fortunately need not be decided here.

For it is the ethical, communicative nature of representation that concerns us. The fact that the natural world is unaffected by representation (if not by its real-world manifestations), so that we can use language and its offshoots to study its regularities and develop technologies that make use of them— in a word, Enlightenment— should not blind us to the original purpose of language and to the consequent impossibility of explaining the emergence of language as a simple product of “cognitive” development. Knowing the world and even to some extent predicting and anticipating its processes, as the more intelligent animals do, in no way “gives rise” to language.

Even if we stipulate that “double-scope blending,” the ability to think of an idea in two different contexts at the same time, is a specifically human cognitive capacity, the following declaration illustrates cognitive science’s surprising blindness to the foundational reality of human language:

• • The indispensable capacity needed for language is the capacity to do double-scope blending.
  • The development of double-scope blending is not a cataclysmic event but, rather, an achievement along a continuous scale of blending capacity . . .
  • Language arose as a singularity. It was a new behavior that emerged naturally once the capacity of blending had developed to the critical level of double-scope blending. (Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, Basic Books, 2002: 181)

Since “blending” is a mode of thought it is difficult indeed to conceive of it in the absence of language; but above all, it is an extraordinary category error to describe language as an individual “behavior” “emerging naturally” from our cognitive capacities rather than as a new form of communication that ipso facto could appear only in a collective situation. At least Terrence Deacon proposed a marriage ritual as a hypothetical scenario for language origin.

Language can only be understood as a communicative phenomenon that arises in order to prevent conflict by deferring “instinctive” appetitive action. Jacques Derrida explained his revolutionary notion of différance by the hesitation implicit in the use of a (linguistic) paradigm, for which the user must decide which member to choose. But independently of the dubious psychological basis for this explanation (when we see something red, do we really determine this only after rejecting [which?] other colors?), what he was really aiming at was the indubitable fact that any use of language is a stepping back from “instantaneous” or “instinctive” reaction to its referent. Whence the importance of Sartre’s notion of the néant that separates (human) consciousness from its intended object, even if Sartre himself never refers to language in this context.

I find it hard to understand the failure of the cognitivists to recognize the importance of either the deferring or the communicative features of language. Nor do they get any argument from today’s humanists, who devote to their works the same rapt attention they formerly gave to “French Theory.” The “two cultures” dichotomy C. P. Snow wrote about in 1959 has clearly been resolved in favor of the scientists. Rather than defending the cultural essence of language, professors of humanities “on the cutting edge” invest their energies in the victimary disrespecting of culture as such. Indeed, this was already central to the deconstructive project, but Derrida was too subtle a thinker to reduce deconstruction to victimary resentment.

The scene of representation, in particular that of language, is paradoxical en puissance because it purports to be an extra-worldly “space” in which the world can be represented, yet in the literal, physical sense it remains within the world, like a map that cannot represent itself without falling into mise-en-abyme. Language is not in the first place a mechanism for the rational modeling of reality but for deferring the appetitive, and using it for “rational” purposes however defined is the product of a discipline guaranteed by its peace-making effects and not simply inherent in language-users’ “cognitive” competence.

The key point of human as opposed to animal cognition is precisely that an intelligence that makes use of the models of the world available to animal capacities of perception and appetite is incommensurable with one that can step back from the world’s immediacy into a scene of representation whose “objectivity” is guaranteed by the fact that it is shared with a language community. Language, even when used in private, is a collective phenomenon, and the sharing of other forms of representation is analogous.

For example, the idea of creating iconic figures that reproduce the patterns of perception to create recognizable images is available only to the species that possesses a scene of representation. Why, after all, don’t other animals, even our “closest relatives,” draw pictures? They don’t need advanced “cognitive” abilities for this, nor do they (appear to) need language. Yet they are not interested in representation, and the reason for this is that they lack a scene of representation whose reproduction in the brains of human individuals is derivative of its public existence. Once this scene exists, we can have the idea of reproducing on it not merely the (linguistic) signs by which we have learned to communicate in public but other representational acts, including iconic signs whose recognition by others one can presume without their being the products of a prior convention.

But given that it is difficult to think of language, representation, culture as essentially paradoxical, it is the cultural function of religion to reconcile us to the paradoxical nature of the human. As individuals, we experience this paradox most crucially as a contradiction between the permanence of representation and our individual mortality—we do not simply fear death, but experience it as incomprehensible. Because our words and thoughts are not mortal, the knowledge of our physical mortality strikes us as scandalous. The idea of an “immortal soul” is the natural corollary of the “immortality” of our representations. The sacred is the domain within which this element of human paradox is thematized.

Not that religion and the sacred were created in direct response to this conundrum. The originary hypothesis situates the first use of the sign as a communication of desire/signification/sacrality implicit in the abortion of what we conceive of as a common gesture of appropriation toward the central object. This life-saving deferral of appropriation as a result of the “impossibility” of individual action confers sacrality on the object, which appears to exist in “another” sphere that is for the moment inaccessible to us. Because this deferral of the appetitive through the sign keeps us alive in the moment of crisis, we are driven to invoke it in other moments of danger, from which such deferral may not suffice to save us.

To speak of the “verticality” of the sign in reference to its object, its existence in “another world” (Karl Popper’s “World 2”) reflects our theoretical understanding of representation, but for the originary participants, the sign appears as the result of the existence of its (sacred) referent in “another world.” This sacred existence turns what had been appetite into desire, not simply because it is mimetic of the desire of the others, but because the resultant of this collective mimesis is the object’s inaccessibility.

The “absurdity” of the sacred object’s being on the one hand simply before us and on the other inaccessible in “another world” is the experiential foundation of paradox. If it is in our world, why can we not appropriate it? If it is in another world, how can we see it as physically proximate and in principle appropriable? This contradiction inherent in the notion of the sacred historically precedes the paradoxes of logic. It may be restated as what I call the fundamental paradox of signification:

The sign confers signification on its referent as already significant.

For the significance of the object is experienced not as conferred by the sign but as its motivation. Yet at the origin there can have been no prior notion of “significance”; originary signification defines significance as the equivalent of sacrality, which is necessarily experienced as independent of one’s will.

In short, the religious sphere, the sphere of our dealings with the sacred, is the cultural locus where paradox is manifest, where the human reveals to itself, in terms that can never be fully rationalized, its paradoxical nature.

As I tried to show a propos of the Mahayana philosopher Nagarjuna’s writings on language (see Chronicles 515 and 516, which together comprise a paper on Nagarjuna and Zeno delivered at the Nagoya GASC in June 2016), this school of Buddhism makes linguistic paradox much more central than Western thought. Examining Zeno’s paradoxes as counter-examples, it is not difficult to interpret them as conundrums pointing to not-yet-available scientific formulations in terms, for example, of infinite series or calculus—”transcendental” but surely not paradoxical supplements to arithmetic and Euclidean geometry. But for Nagarjuna, these same paradoxes do not point to improved scientific representations. They are put forth in great number to indicate that what we consider rational thinking necessarily raises problems it cannot solve, that rational thought is in itself illusory, and that the only escape from illusion is to empty one’s mind of representations to contemplate a reality that cannot be thought, that is, the (paradoxical) empty scene of representation.

Buddhism, less appreciative than Judeo-Christianity of the central role of violence-deferral in the human project, is for that reason more open to the direct association of paradox and the sacred. Its project of emptying the mind is clearly less “dialectical” than that central to the West, which defines sacred paradox by the coexistence of human and divine personhood in the crucified Jesus. Here, in contrast to the empty scene sought by Buddhism, the “logos” is incarnated in the exemplarily suffering human. Girard was fully justified in noting the more sharply anthropological bent of the Christian mystery, which renews “pagan” sacrifice to/of the deity as the revelation of the sinfulness that we must ever defer through identification with the victim. The paradoxality of this identification is very different from that of Nagarjuna’s “the traverser does not traverse.” The two can be seen as broadly homologous only if we are willing to accept GA’s understanding of language as primarily not a way of stating facts but of deferring human mimetic violence.

Clearly this subject cannot be exhausted in a single Chronicle. The recently discussed paradoxes of antisemitism as well as those of liberal democracy deserve elaboration in their own right. Yet it seems useful to sum up in a word, or two, the specificity of human culture. The cognitivists’ willful ignorance of the nature and function of religion, as exemplified by Michael Tomasello’s recent foray into human morality (see Chronicle 519), cannot be divorced from their obliviousness to what is unique about human language and the human in general.

Let me stress in conclusion that I am not a religious “believer.” René Girard certainly was, and I respected him for this and admired the refusal to deny the relevance of his faith to his theoretical work that was the source of his greatest intuitions. For my part, I have tried to understand religious belief as far as possible in the rational terms of anthropology. My ultimate aim would be to reach the point at which paradox and faith are understood as synonyms, a point that cannot perhaps be lived, but that these Chronicles exist above all to approach.

In Chronicle 527 I spelled out a point about antisemitism that everyone knows who writes on the subject, yet that is virtually never mentioned: that the term was not invented to stigmatize the biased but to proudly assert the scientific validity of what risked being considered an antediluvian religious prejudice against “Christ-killers.” No, Semites, which really meant Jews, were an inferior race, a mongrel mixture of European/Aryan and African, and efforts to limit their influence jusques au feu inclusivement were on the contrary not only rational but urgently necessary. Thus our habit of accusing people of being antisemitic is largely dependent on the universal recoil from the Nazi horrors, and the sardonic retort that Jews “always” paint as antisemites those who point out their iniquities is in its way justified. The term “antisemite” is essentially dead because it can no longer serve its original function, which was to justify rather than stigmatize hatred of the Jews. Jews who know this all too well but are reluctant to make this point, having found a shibboleth they think will protect them from “prejudice,” as the word “racism” seems to protect so many others, should spend some time on a university campus. The fascinating quality of antisemitism, the thing and the word, and the inextricable ensemble they form, a fascination which is in no way separable from its virulence, offer a valuable opportunity to reflect on the Girardian notion of the Scapegoat. If there is any archetype of the Scapegoat in Western and now in world history, it is certainly the Jews, or better, The Jew. Yet antisemitism is a subject touched on by Girard only peripherally, notably in reference to accusations of well-poisoning during the Black Plague (see Le bouc émissaire, Grasset, 1982, Ch. 1, “Guillaume de Machaut et les juifs”). And the reason for this is obvious. For Girard, the essential quality of the scapegoat is that he is arbitrarily chosen. No doubt the scapegoat can be characterized by a borderline relationship to the community, a lack of powerful connections who might avenge him, stigmatized personal qualities such as Oedipus’ swollen feet, and so on. But it is precisely the “so on” that is essential; the uniqueness of the scapegoat cannot be a quality preceding his choice, for that choice, although Girard never associates it directly with that made by the linguistic sign, is the very moment of hominization, the origin of the human. Whence the ambiguity of his presentation of “the” emissary murder, which is both a unique event with a unique victim and a pattern repeated in a thousand crises sacrificielles. I have often pointed out that Girard finds the resolution of this conundrum of the multiple and the unique not in scientific rationality but in his Christian faith. John’s In the beginning was the Logos says it all, for the Logos is both language and Christ, both the faculty for referring to “anything” and the unique being for all time who was both Man and God. The Jews have been blamed for too much already, so I won’t blame them for Generative Anthropology, but clearly one cannot be a Jew and accept the uniqueness of the Incarnation. (This recalls my conversation with René described in The Girardian Origins of GA [Amazon Digital Services, 2012]: in response to my expression of disbelief that this man was the Son of God, he answered, Nous sommes tous fils de Dieu. Not only does this reply explain how Girard’s faith informed his anthropology, it also poses a challenge to GA to interpret this anthropology in a maximally secular fashion.) Whether the arbitrary but unique choice that resulted in the first word and the first deity fell on the carcass of a mammoth or a bison was no doubt of little consequence to the future of humanity, save in the “chaos theory” imagination where the wings of a butterfly can cause a tsunami. But that it was the Hebrews who uniquely discovered/invented the One God is surely not arbitrary. Akhenaton had the intuition of a single god, but as Martin Buber pointed out in his Moses (Humanity, 1988), henotheism is not monotheism in the Hebrew sense. The One God of the Egyptian empire was not only charged with a people’s destiny but weighted with its prior worldly status—an “Apollonian” god, to use the pregnant dichotomy of Yuri Slezkine (The Jewish Century, Princeton, 2011). In contrast, the “Mercurian” Hebrews were a people that began without a land and who, still in Biblical times, lost the land they had conquered while nonetheless remaining a people, while the Egyptians have remained in and of their land even when conquered by others. The “democratic” nature of the Hebrews, a subject deeply meditated on by the 17th-century Puritans, and their creation of a script that allowed ordinary people to read the sacred texts (see Seth Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew, Illinois, 2009), as is still done in orthodox synagogues where the Torah is read if possible by a member of the congregation rather than the rabbi, offer only a partial explanation of their “election.” But my burden here is not to explain why it was the Jews who gave monotheism to Western civilization, but simply to point out that being thus “chosen” by history is very different from being selected as a pharmakos for a sacrificial festival. (Concerning Girard’s etiology of myths, we might note that in the Greek tradition summed up in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the gods are clearly anthropomorphic, unlike the theriomorphic gods that populate Lévi-Strauss’ Mythologiques, human pharmakos-like victims such as Daphne or Callisto are metamorphosed only into demi-gods; this origin is never postulated for the gods themselves who transformed them.) Antisemitism is anything but arbitrary; it attacks, precisely and apparently irrepressibly, the one group of humans in the ambit of Western and now planetary civilization who cannot avoid the historical fact that, having announced the One God to the world, they are willy-nilly his “chosen people” even if, indeed, particularly if, he does not “exist.” Yes, of course, the Jew is a scapegoat, blamed for evils he did not cause, portrayed as the representative of evil whose misery and/or extermination demonstrates to the others their potential salvation. But what is missing from Girard’s scapegoat is precisely the “Jewish” category of firstness. The Jews’ great crime was to be chosen, not by a lynch mob, but by God, History, or Chance to be the annunciators of the One God, failing which there could never have been the other annunciation that is for Girard the maximally un-arbitrary revelation of the arbitrariness of the scapegoat. That great civilizations can do without such an annunciation is amply proven by the grandeur of Chinese and Indian culture and their offshoots. Buddhism internalizes sacrifice; Confucianism subordinates it to the human order; but in the West the centralization of the One God and then his human incarnation produced inarguably the most dynamic of civilizations, the only one whose techniques and discoveries can be objectively transferred to other societies independently of religio-cultural “meanings.” I have always appreciated Girard’s insistence that Western culture is not simply Christian but Judeo-Christian, which would go without saying had Christian supersessionism not had its long history. It is not simply that Christianity is unthinkable without Judaism, but that even in the Christian era the Jews supply an essential counterweight (see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, Norton, 2014). To be able to “supersede” the Law, the people of the Law must continue to defend and live by it; the ups and downs of this functioning are one way of understanding what our departing president would call the “arc of history.” In our world of ever-increasing practical rationality, the “irrational” hatred called antisemitism continues to make sense in the West and by now in the entirety of “global” civilization. For had the Jews not been “chosen” to make their revelation to the world, with all this implies of the resentment of everyone else, we would not possess the key to our historical liberation from mere ritual hierarchy that would eventually permit both the technological and the spiritual greatness of modernity. And in order for the discovery of the One God to be implemented in history, those who made it could not be worshiped in his place; au contraire. Their election as “a light unto the nations” could not give them power over others. Today it makes even their attempt to carve out a tiny country for themselves a scandal that, like all the other “reasons” for hating the Jews, is an expression of the originary envy of their firstness. That the Jews, at least since the era of the Exodus, were the original inhabitants of Palestine can be denied by the Palestinians because it is incompatible with their Mercurian status; Jews can never be “natives,” only “colonialists.” Whereas the Apollonian Palestinians are natives by definition, regardless of their recent implantation in the region; their steadfast refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and their insistence on a maximalist program of de-Judaization is their unquestionable right as possessors of the soil, a status the Jews by definition can never acquire. Hence when the Jews of Israel win defensive wars they alone do not gain a right to the territory they conquer, despite the fact that the “occupied” territory had never been part of “Palestine” but of Jordan or Syria, and before that, of the British mandate… and long before, of the ancestral Hebrews. More than UN resolutions and historical details, the most important aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the absurdity of recognizing the Jews’ right to territory of any kind. Even those who accept that at least some parts of Israel are purportedly legally its own cannot help remembering that “Palestinians” once lived there, or might have lived there. Whereas the Jews who inhabited the region over the millennia could never thus put down roots in the soil: the wandering Jew who worships a “rootless” God is fated to wander forever. If Israel is a scandal qualitatively greater than the statelessness of the Kurds, China’s absorption of Tibet, the Russian annexation of Crimea… it is because Israel is our scandal. Western white guilt is a distorted admission that the West shares (and profits from) the Jews’ firstness, that we are all Jews. For the inhabitants of the West, being hard on Israel is just a painless way of being hard on ourselves­—which is why this position is attractive to so many Western Jews, even many Israelis. I needn’t point out to my readers that to thus serve as a marginal guilt-bearer is exactly what a scapegoat does. Whence the extraordinary naturalness of the current international crusade against Israel. While deservedly condemning Obama for his refusal to veto Resolution 2334, the latest outrageous example of UN anti-Zionism, we should not forget that in addition to such “democracies” as Venezuela and Somalia, Britain, France, and Japan voted in favor of this measure. These are modern, democratic nations, the first two with considerable Jewish populations, fully capable of appreciating Israel’s delicate international position and the arbitrary nature of the UN’s obsession with the Israeli “occupation” of “Palestinian” territory—but not with the fate of the Jews driven out of the Arab countries in the region at the time of Israel’s creation—no “refugees” there. Yet just as in its day the word antisemitism, however spurious its “racial” accusation, was, by supplying an “objective” term for prejudice against the Jews, a sign of growing self-consciousness, even more so is the fact that anti-Jewish hostility is now primarily directed at the nation-state of Israel, so that Jews are attacked in the first place as its citizens or partisans. This is, however unpleasant, a movement in the direction of normalization, a stage of demystification of the mystery of Jew-hatred into something closer to garden-variety xenophobia. It is of the greatest importance that anti-Zionist activities in the UN and elsewhere have caused far less radical damage to human life than, not to speak of the Holocaust, the old pogroms, which were not amateurish terrorist attacks but wholesale slaughters with little cost to the attackers. And these activities can only with some credibility be presented as “criticisms” of Israeli “settlements,” etc., because, unlike pogroms or the Nazi death industry, they are directed at the inhabitants of a nation-state. Thus along with Iran’s desire to expunge Israel from the map comes a countervailing conciliatory evolution among the Sunni Arab nations that may one day lead to stable diplomatic relations. Of course, as normalization proceeds, so does the drive to bring about the apocalypse. One needn’t be a follower of Nostradamus to see the fate of the Jews and their country as the world’s, at least the Western world’s, central historical drama. Like GA’s originary hypothesis, our explanation of anti-Zionism is simple. Too simple, no doubt, for those who would subject the latter, like antisemitism before it, to the event-phobic analysis of today’s social sciences, for which there can never be enough detail and “data,” the idea of seeking a master cause that stands ontologically above the detail being dismissed as “unscientific.” Yet Adam Katz and I proposed in The First Shall Be the Last (Brill, 2015) a simple explanation of antisemitism by the Jews’ firstness in the revelation of the One God, just as GA’s originary hypothesis offers a simple model of the originary event of human language. The West is anti-Zionist because in a world where the Apollonian nations of Europe have had at least until recently the luxury of thinking themselves “post-national,” the nation-state of Israel, where the Wandering Jew comes to rest, is both an admission of guilt and a contradiction in terms. One need not be a prophet to predict that Western civilization will be, in all the term’s ambivalence, fulfilled on the day that Israel’s survival and legitimacy are no longer in question. Much as I might pray for this day, I cannot face the prospect of such fulfillment without the disquieting sentiment of ambiguity that has characterized the Jewish psyche since time immemorial. To call the Jews the chosen people is to call them the people of paradox.

My recoil from social media save in their most marginal form (a very spare LinkedIn account and a membership in Schoolmates.com) is probably understood by younger generations and most of my contemporaries as the kind of cantankerous Luddism associated with the elderly. But my objection to these programs is not mere nostalgia, like preferring radio to television; it is instinctually moral. All moral intuitions do not deserve credence as if divinely inspired, yet I note that many others of my own generation who have adapted contentedly to all the other technologies of modernity seem to share my discomfort with one or both of these otherwise ubiquitous programs.

Facebook and Twitter are very different from more traditional modes of Internet communication. A Facebook account reflects the drift of the word face, which originally designated the facial features of college students, in particular, those of female students whose attractiveness could be judged by this means, to a public face or persona that the user is invited to create for the consumption of his group of “friends” and, at a lesser level of intimacy, others interested in knowing about the individual in question, and possibly in becoming “friends” in their turn.

My visceral objection to this is as a presumptuous dictation of the way I am to present myself to others. Facebook, unlike an email program or a WordPress template for a webpage, is not a mere neutral platform; its structure and above all the conventions that have grown up around it dictate certain behaviors. One is expected to update one’s site regularly with photographs of one’s activities, another artifact of the omnipresence of screens and cameras to supply them with images. To participate fully in Facebook, unlike LinkedIn, a business tool that allows for any level of presence or neglect, one is expected to share the details of one’s personal life, as though declaring the minutiae of one’s dinner or trip to the beach as being of universal interest. I resist this imposed pretentiousness in chronicling my own life in a way that in the past was reserved for celebrities of one kind or another—a chronicling performed then and now by gossip columnists, not by the celebrities themselves.

And although the quasi-universalization of Facebook membership reduces the differential arrogance of the individual user to near zero, that one is following the crowd makes the presumption no less real. This is a higher level form of conformist nonconformity than, for example, the fashion of wearing “informal” clothing at public events. Here what one does similarly to others is to define one’s unique self. No one’s Facebook page is a direct imitation of anyone else’s; it is the act itself of posting on Facebook that is uncomfortably mimetic.

But of far more interest than my personal choice to participate or not in Facebook is the fact that this is the kind of choice that individuals never had to make in the past on anything like this scale. One could decide to join a club, or contribute to a charity, or do volunteer work of some kind, in the context of “civil society,” and one’s choices would be variously subject to the judgment of “one’s peers.” This universe in which one is free to make social choices but must face the consequences of such judgment is roughly that of the novel, where unlike in tragedy, the characters have no socially dictated destiny as kings or warriors, but must nevertheless acknowledge the reality of “public opinion.” But now, instead of or perhaps on top of a variety of local social arrangements dependent on voluntary associations, one is faced with a monolithic social choice: social media or anonymity.

The idea that social conformity might become so to speak informally formalized via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and a few other popular applications requires us to reflect on the status of “civil society” in the Internet age. These applications have no official status, yet the presence of their logos on nearly every public webpage gives them a formidable presence on the public scene. That Donald Trump as president-elect or as a candidate or even as a TV celebrity might use Twitter is quite comprehensible; but that myriad others from celebrities to ordinary citizens use Twitter regularly as both followers and tweeters creates a situation that even more urgently than Facebook demands critical examination.

Whereas the choice to “follow” these Chronicles is separate from any other, to subscribe to Twitter is to join a service that solicits its members to follow popular tweeters and whose members customarily “retweet” tweets they find interesting to their own circle of followers, creating “viral” crowd-storms of communication. Thus although Twitter’s organization of the space of public discourse is voluntarily chosen by its clients, its cumulative effect is to solicit unanimity, and on many occasions to direct this unanimity in the form of lynch-mob-like swarming (“shaming”) at a particular victim.

Even more than Facebook, the very existence of such a service is coercive in a new way, forcing a choice between participating in the public debate in what is after all a commercial rather than a truly public format or remaining on its periphery. We cannot fail to note the mimetic structure of these behaviors, which however “free” are nonetheless greatly constraining. Not to have a Facebook page is seen in many contexts as a kind of anti-social “statement,” one that employers, for example, are likely to interpret as the sign of a less than appropriately interactive personality. Yet participation on Facebook and all the more on Twitter involves by its very nature an artificial form of self-presentation that contrasts with those modes that possess the Burkean quality of tradition.

We see here once more the consequences of the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft replacement of traditional religious sociability as a source of social norms by an implicit collectivity all the more subject to mimetic “bubbles” in that its norms are generated ad hoc and founded on only the vaguest criteria of appropriate interpersonal behavior. The vastly increased use of four-letter words in the social media era is one symptom of this; the facile cynicism of the ubiquitous expression WTF, cleverly turned into a recent movie title using the ICAO alphabet (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot), reflects the immature bravado that the unsolicited publication of one’s opinion without argument that we call tweeting necessarily involves.

We tend to take the raison d’être, or what one might call the enabling situation of these new forms of “public” communication for granted. Public communications in the past were sharply restricted by the nature of the media available for their transmission. But since the advent of the Internet, anyone with a minimum of literacy and financial resources is enabled to offer up his opinions for the world to see. Twitter is the most extreme of these new forms of communication because, given the minimal length of a tweet, its posts cannot rely on the strength of their arguments or on the evidence other than visual (via linked photographs or video) they bring to bear; a tweet’s interest is either the revelation of something shocking or the expression of an opinion whose value is measured by the prestige of its holder and/or the degree to which it confirms the prejudices of its reader.

Yet to emit a judgment about the social media in one of these Chronicles is to raise the possibility of reflection on the medium I myself am using. The newfound importance of the social media sites I have mentioned is surely not without effect on the growth of a category of writing that might be called Internet punditry, which marginally includes essays like this one.

I may disdain to express my thoughts on social media, but I have surely been among the most assiduous users of the Internet to disseminate my ideas. My material on the web includes over five hundred of these Chronicles, something like a million words. All of this material, however, is composed in traditional formats only superficially modified by their digital presentation. The Chronicles, which preceded and are not quite the equivalent of “blogs,” are online essays. Like Anthropoetics itself, one of the first of subsequently many e-journals, they follow old conventions which have merely been “ported” to the web. As opposed to Facebook and Twitter, we use the Internet as though it were merely a new medium, as though texts from the old media could be transported as is to the screenic world of the internet, ignoring McLuhan’s admonition that the medium is its own message.

And the reason I was at first happy and even enthusiastic about doing so (believing, as some of the early Chronicles demonstrate, that the Internet was a means of liberating the intellectual life from the narrowness of an increasingly compartmentalized professional world) was that I had not anticipated the degree to which the One Medium would force the traditional genres of intellectual communication even farther into a specialized set of pigeonholes. Thus the “learned essay” would increasingly become the exclusive province of domain specialists in the various university departments, whereas essays of more general interest would remain that of high-circulation middlebrow publications (e.g., The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker). Meanwhile, the kind of serious exploration of non-specialized ideas that these Chronicles represent would find its way to “blogs,” where even when on a high intellectual plane, these ideas tend to be expressed in subjective terms for narrow groups of partisans rather than as attempts at persuading an a priori neutral audience.

The message of these Chronicles could not be stated either in the hortatory terms of Twitter or in those of “professional” Internet punditry, like the little essays on National Review Online or Steyn’s or Spengler’s occasional pieces, along with similar writings on the Left, directed to well-defined and interlocking audiences among whom authors of opposite political persuasions often cite each other. That there is little audience for the Chronicles suggests rather that their role is to remain outside the “public” debate and to comment on it.

For although there is no inherent limit to the layers of dialogue, there remains always that provided by the actual interaction of its participants. Human language, as Chomsky likes to say, is defined by its capacity for recursion, or in more philosophical terms, for self-inclusion. But just as grammatical recursion as a practical matter is limited to two or three levels, so does the number of levels in which it is useful to distinguish commentaries from commentaries on commentaries choke off equally quickly.

The freedom of the outsider, even if most often an empty one, like that of the homeless man screaming expletives in the street, remains a value in itself, one that readers of these Chronicles should more than most appreciate. And as the recent election so dramatically demonstrated, those outside the normal channels of communication can on occasion profit from their freedom to transform not only these channels but the larger society itself. It is this faith that provides me with the impetus to continue producing these essays in the age of the social media.

Whereas philosophical explorations of human language such as that in Charles Taylor’s recent The Language Animal (Harvard, 2016) never propose anything like an originary hypothesis, having no interest in speculating on language before it attained its mature state, works of cognitive science make more substantial claims about its origin. A prominent example is The Way We Think (Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner, Basic Books, 2002), which will be the focus of this Chronicle. (For a brief account of generative anthropology’s originary hypothesis, the reader is referred to the introductory text at anthropoetics.ucla.edu/gaintro.htm).

It is easy to understand why here, as in Taylor’s book, GA’s originary hypothesis goes unmentioned. Were this theory brought to these authors’ attention, they would dismiss it outright as (1) not grounded in empirical evidence, and (2) dependent on a “Girardian” measure of human development, intensity of mimesis. Unlike the cognitively oriented discussions of mimesis by Merlin Donald (see in particular Origins of the Modern Mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition, Harvard, 1991, and A Mind So Rare: The evolution of human consciousness, Norton, 2001), this perspective focuses on mimetic rivalry as the source of potential human violence. But if humans are uniquely defined as the creatures capable of experiencing such phenomena as “joint shared attention” (Tomasello) and “double-scope networks,” the idea that these phenomena, involving complex and still scarcely explored neuronal connections, owe their existence to the need to control the human propensity to violence would seem a gross category error.

Nor has the pious hope of Girard’s followers that by calling his thought “mimetic theory” it can be automatically made to include all these cognitive factors made it any more attractive than GA to these researchers. Girard’s analyses in La violence et le sacré and Des choses cachées… are, I think rightly, unconcerned to draw more than the broadest link between emissary victimage and human cognitive superiority. But the link must indeed be drawn, not simply by presuming that once Girard’s theory is defined in terms of mimesis, then any evidence of mimesis lends it credibility, but by proposing, as does GA’s originary hypothesis, a plausible scenario for the originary scene of human language.

The kernel of Fauconnier and Turner’s own tentative hypothesis of language origin, expounded at length on pp. 180-82, is the following paragraph:

Language arose as a singularity. It was a new behavior that emerged naturally once the capacity of blending had developed to the critical level of double-scope blending. (181)

What this tells us is that language appears “naturally” once the cognitive capacity of the proto-human species becomes able to master “double-scope networks,” in which inputs from two differently framed imaginary scenes or “input spaces” can be combined in a single “blend,” such as, to use the authors’ simplest example, “same-sex marriage” (269-70), which combines the frame of same-sex relationships (freely chosen sexual relations and companionship) with that of “traditional” marriage (legal status conferred by secular or religious ceremony).

With all due respect for the researches the authors have conducted, I find this assertion of “natural” emergence on nearly the same level of absurdity as the now little heard “Darwinian” notion that language emerged as the result of a mutation giving rise to a “language gene.” That presumably intelligent persons could even begin to entertain such a nonsensical proposition is a sign that all magic has not been purged from “science.” Indeed, Chomsky suggested something similar to explain the appearance of his “Language Acquisition Device (LAD).” But to be fair, Chomsky is not really concerned with the historical origin of language; his LAD, whatever its theoretical merits, need not be understood as more than a heuristic construct.

The “cognitive” explanation is no doubt a better deus ex machina than a hypothetical gene that suddenly appears from nowhere and allows us to speak. But that this explanation leads to no simplification of the problem, indeed, that it denies even the possibility of such simplification, is evident from the list of criteria the authors had provided a few pages earlier for the “best theory” of the origin of language:

The best theory of the origin of language would have the following features:

• • A recognition of the singularity of language. There is no phylogenetic evidence of sustained intermediate stages, and no evidence of present human languages that are rudimentary.
  • Rejection of an extraordinary event as responsible for the extraordinary capacity. In other words, no Cause-Effect Isomorphism.
  • A continuous path of evolutionary change over a very long period as the cause of language, since that is how evolution almost always works.
  • A path that is a plausible adaptive story: Each change along the path must have been adaptive in itself, regardless of where the path ultimately led.
  • Hence a continuous evolutionary path that produces singularities.
  • A model of what mental operations developed along that path, and in what order.
  • An explicit account of what continuous changes produced what singularities, and how they did so.
  • Robust evidence from many quarters that human beings actually perform the mental operations on that hypothetical path.
  • Intermediate steps not for the function of language itself but for the cognitive abilities that finally led to the precipitation of language as a product.
  • Evidence in the anatomy or behavior of today’s human beings pointing to the history of these steps, just as anatomical evidence in today’s human beings points to our once having had tails.
  • Other things being equal, a parsimonious way of explaining the emergence of many related human singularities as products that arise along the same continuous evolutionary path. (177)

The most notable feature of this list is its utter indifference to Ockham’s razor. The very first criterion referring to the “singularity” of language cites the fact that there is “no evidence of present human languages that are rudimentary,” as if it implied that the “singularity” of language is a feature of language as it exists today. Has the “anthropic principle” now infected evolutionary biology? Isn’t the best way to understand the “singularity” of language to conceive of it not at its most advanced but at its most primitive stage of development? Must we assume that because all modern languages are complex that language has always been complex, that it was somehow born complex, like Athena emerging from the brow of Zeus?

As we have seen above, the authors really appear to believe this. Yet when they write two pages farther on: “Paradoxically, language is possible only if it allows a limited number of combinable language forms to cover a very large number of meaningful situations” (179), thinking in terms of the great adaptability of syntactic constructions, it takes only the slightest change of focus to realize that if in the beginning language consisted solely of one simple construction, it would then ipso facto apply to all “meaningful situations.” Which might then suggest to the researchers to examine just what kind of situation might be the first to be meaningful—a term which is really just a synonym for “needing to be represented in language.”

I think it would have been preferable, before giving a list of eleven “features” of the “best” theory of the origin of language, to decide what exactly we are looking for. The origin of language is not concerned proleptically with its future “evolutionary path” of “change over a very long period,” save to the extent that it must not be such as to make this “path” impossible.

I fully sympathize with the authors’ “rejection of an extraordinary event” (the appearance of the “language gene”? God’s creation of Adam?) as providing a facile explanation of language origin, but they are nonetheless too quick to reject the notion of an event as such. Without language and other forms of representation, there would be no such thing as an “event”; this is a point that natural scientists never seem to get straight. To put it more sharply, you can’t call something an event if you can’t represent it—a sentence which is in fact a tautology. One simple way of defining the human is as the creature that “has” events. And the right way to understand the origin of language is to construct a model of the simplest event, which will be by definition an event of language.

The subsequent evolution of language into the complex systems we have today is surely of great intrinsic interest, but the problem it poses is trivial in comparison to that of the origin of language itself. Once language has come into being, its future evolution into something like the languages of today is perfectly understandable from a Darwinian, or let us say, a cultural-Darwinian perspective. The evolution of the human speech apparatus, the descent of the larynx and the rest, is easily explicable as driven by natural selection for the most effective users of language, as is the growing efficiency of the linguistic structures themselves. With respect to the latter, what is perhaps most surprising is that although all languages appear to possess the same basic functionality, those of simpler societies tend to have far more complex syntactic structures than those spoken in more advanced ones. Since literacy has become common, grammatical apparatuses have generally been greatly simplified, as students of Latin and Sanskrit are well aware. But these are epiphenomenal details compared with the fundamental question of language origin.

Although these reflections seem to me rather obvious, you will not find anything like them in the copious literature on language origin cited in The Way We Think. That The Origin of Language (California, 1981) is not found in its bibliography is by no means the result of conscious rejection. Social scientists have simply been trained in such a way as to render such speculations invisible. Similarly, philosophers, even language philosophers who might be expected a priori to have more sympathy for a heuristic approach, turn a deaf ear to any notion of “language” that does not always-already include declarative sentences or propositions. The “little bang” that GA proposes as the originary scene of culture is too humanistic a tableau to appeal to social scientists, who want corroboration by empirical data and are fearful of conceptual leaps of any kind, and too anthropological for philosophers, for whom the idea of a heuristically constructed scene of origin is unpardonably naïve. The idea of finding the germ of language and culture in deferral might be thought to appeal to those who still view deconstruction as liberating philosophy from its authoritarian grounding in the spurious myths of “presence.” But on the contrary, the deconstructors conceive this liberation as the revelation of the “violent” origin of language itself, with regard to which the “pacific” originary hypothesis appears to them to represent a state of denial.

The obsessively repetitive insistence on evolutionary continuity in the Fauconnier-Turner criteria listed above clearly reflects a powerful desire to subsume the whole of the evolution of language in its beginning, like a genetic myth where the essential substance of all future generations is physically contained within the original germ plasm. But this suggests that it would require only stropping Ockham’s neglected razor and opening the mind to the legitimacy of conceiving language’s minimal originary moment in order to reorient the discussion of language origin toward the kind of scenario that GA proposes.

As things presently stand, the idea that it is legitimate to describe a hypothetical first event in perspicuous terms, knowing full well that historical events are never so clear, is acceptable neither to philosophy nor to science. It is for this reason that I have called GA a “new way of thinking.” Unlike the earlier stages of biological evolution, the emergence of the human cannot be understood by breaking it down into a series of evolutionary steps, because the new phenomenon of representation adds a new dimension to the world, even if in reality the emergence of this new dimension could certainly not have established itself definitively in a single event.

To use a topological analogy, the introduction of language is like poking a hole in a sphere. No simple, stepwise deformation of the sphere, however long and gradual, could transform it into a torus. However narrow the original hole, however slowly it may have become enlarged, the “singularity” the authors speak of was that hole.

The point of creating a heuristic model of an originary event rather than seeking to break the phenomenon of language down into a myriad discrete cognitive components is that if the event-nature of the first use of language is not foregrounded in our explanation, even if it was in fact less so by the participants themselves, then we have explained nothing. Once we accept the idea of language as a solution not to a cognitive problem but to a social one, then it becomes easy to see that, insofar as the deferral of violence brought about by the sign increases the probability of the successful distribution of the central object of the scene as a source of nourishment, the use of the sign will be reinforced in human behavior, while at the same time being ever more clearly understood as designating its referent as sacred.

None of this means that the authors’ criteria, repetitions aside, are not appropriate for theorizing the subsequent evolution of language to the mature state in which we find it today. But if decades of ethological research have taught us anything, it is that whatever animals do to accommodate and appropriate human linguistic behavior, they never truly become language users. Why is this? I would suggest that isn’t a matter of “cognitive intelligence” but of something more basic: animals do not have an internal scene of representation. This scene within each of us is linked to a human collectivity; language is not in the first place “cognitive” but communicative. An exact analogy to the human community within which alone language exists has never been and no doubt cannot be constructed for the benefit of chimpanzees, although the most proficient language use among them has been achieved by chimps who were brought up in a human context, such as the bonobo Kanzi. Discovering exactly what the neural substrate of the individual scene of representation consists of is certainly a valid and indeed crucial goal for empirical research. But I would speculate that cognitive scientists would find it much more quickly if they knew what to look for.

Where in our nervous system can we locate Sartre’s néant? This is a question to which philosophers and neuroscientists alike would no doubt react with scorn. Yet GA is not spiritualism; calling this psychic locus of representation a “scene” gives an idea of how it operates, but not at all of how it is physically constituted in the brain.

Let us hope that at least one adventurous young neuroscientist will one day be inspired by these words to redefine the object of his research. In the terms of Fauconnier and Turner, this would exemplify a creative “blend” of different networks whose consequences would go far beyond mere ideational manipulation.

I hope readers will excuse the desultory nature of these reflections inspired by the recent election and its immediate aftermath.

1. Faith in democracy

Although it is not immune to the lessons of future events, I retain a faith in democracy that the recent rise of the victimary has shaken but not destroyed. Thus I am happy to learn in all humility from “human events,” as we have always learned, that being after all what “the human” and its freedom is all about. I can’t say that I predicted the election result from the beginning, or even that I fully understood Trump’s appeal, but it is clear that on the key issue, I, or I should say, GA, grasped that the victimary (“PC”) was the central focus of Trump’s campaign and that he alone (along with Carson) recognized its real danger to the equilibrium between reciprocity and firstness that defines human society. I (whether or not along with Barack Obama—see Chronicle 503) continue to share Francis Fukuyama’s view that this equilibrium finds its most effective implementation in the left-right dialogue of liberal democracy. Given the unsurpassable strength of this social model, a little prodding out of occasional complacency should allow it readily to overcome challenges from more authoritarian systems.

Thus I see Trump’s victory as an occasion neither for tit-for-tat revenge nor for history-ending utopian accord, but simply for a return to a more traditional level of tension between the two parties. I tend to be impatient with political analyses that focus on breaking down the categories of conservative and liberal voters, even when they go beyond the racialist excesses of “identity politics.” For the real tension remains that between right and left, and although certainly conservative publications as well as liberal ones perform a valuable service in dissecting the factional divisions within the parties, whether or not this is helpful in winning elections—the results having shown Trump’s unprofessorial analysis of the electorate to have been surprisingly correct—these analyses tend to obscure the central, binary issue in a two-party system.

The fact that the word resentment is commonly used to refer (correctly) to the phenomenon on the “right” that on the left evokes terms such as injustice and racism is not simply the effect of journalistic prejudice, although the media’s blindness to this double standard is no secret. To those who fear the almost entirely mythical violence of Trumpian brownshirts, the simple answer is that one must defuse situations of majoritarian resentment before they provoke anything in the least comparable. The difference between our era and the thirties in Germany is that between the frustrations within a still successful society brought on by a decade of increasing victimary arrogance and the social panic of a failed economy in a new, weak, and unstable democracy where any order would come to appear preferable to anarchy. Unlike the unfortunate Germans, today’s Americans still have a functional model to fall back on, a Burkean normality not yet forgotten and whose return even on a modest level will bring general reassurance rather than a descent into hysterical violence. Moreover, it seems clear that, no doubt with the exception of illegal immigrants whose status is likely to remain unclear for some time, this reassurance will touch minority communities as well, whose votes will have to be earned with effective programs, perhaps most urgently for freedom of school choice.

Thus I do not believe the hysterical reactions Trump’s victory has provoked should be taken too seriously. Some friends have called it the equivalent of Kristallnacht and lamented that Jews can no longer feel safe; another described it as an “extremist alt-right coup.” But the turn from Obama’s hypervictimary administration can only bring about some degree of renewal of political dialogue, not between “whites” and “minorities” but between left and right of a kind that is bound to be more productive than it has been for the past eight, or indeed, sixteen years.

2. A point about antisemitism

As a partisan of binary explanations, I find hairsplitting over whether anti-Zionism is “really” antisemitism naïve and profoundly unproductive. The general point that tends to be forgotten is that words are not founded on Platonic archetypes to which all semantic discussions can be referred. But more importantly, the specific forgotten point that is never recalled, even by scholars who know it better than I, is that antisemitism, as opposed to the attitude it expresses, was originally a positive term. One was proud, as indeed were the Nazis, to be antisemitic; this was no mere “prejudice against Jews” but a “scientifically” based concern with maintaining the best strains of the what we would call today the human genome, whence the fear of its corruption by inferior ones. Like many ideas in these debates, one doesn’t need a 175 IQ to understand this, yet I can’t recall the last time I saw it pointed out.

Hitler was proud to be an antisemite; but we all know who won the war. So afterward, antisemitic was not something one wanted to be. Antisemites like to insist that the Jews “always” accuse their enemies of being antisemitic as a way of preventing others from looking into their conspiratorial activities. I doubt that a German Jew in 1935, let alone in 1942, would have thought of “accusing” the NSDAP of being antisemitic. So today’s antisemites have to use other terms. This is not simply hypocritical; it is a fact of language. Just as in more extreme cases, the very words by which one refers to oneself can change. I don’t think young people today realize that when I was young, the common, universal, polite term for black Americans was “negro.” It was only at the transition between the civil rights and the victimary era that this term came to be rejected as servile by groups like the Black Panthers, and the term black came into common use. Earlier, believe it or not, to call someone “black” was considered a racial slur, foregrounding skin color in a way that “negro” or “colored” did not; the inversion of this was indeed the central factor (“black pride”) in its adoption.

But I digress. My point is that although Hitler claimed to be an antisemite, virtually no one, even a neo-Nazi, does so today. What we are really concerned with is an anomalous hostility to Jews. One-sided fixation on the sufferings of the Palestinians along with a propensity to excuse the most vicious violence and condemn any Israeli response to it is obviously a new form of Jew-hatred. And just as the old antisemites were proud of being so, and alleged “good reasons” for this, so anti-Zionists do so today. This isn’t “hypocrisy,” but another form, under another name, for what is fundamentally the same (res)sentiment. And although my tolerance for such people is quite a bit lower than that of Adam Katz (let me put in a pitch for our book, The First Shall Be the Last: Rethinking Antisemitism [Brill 2015], although it’s still a hardback no one can afford), I will say that if you must react, it’s better to argue with them than play the victim and simply dismiss them as, to use a recent term, deplorables. Maybe the Jews really are dangerous. Maybe Israel really is the chief source of evil in the world. Let them defend this view, as a position and not a prejudice. Calling them antisemites is an attempt to reduce debate to name-calling.

But if you agree with me that such discussions aren’t likely to be productive, then we should stop worrying about labels and just remember the eternally problematic nature of Jewish firstness. If people want to hate you, there’s not much point in arguing with them. You simply need to prevent them from monopolizing the discussion—another troubling trend of the victimary era to which the new administration should restore some balance.

Meanwhile, those who hear in their dreams the sound of the brown-shirted alt-right smashing windows and heads might remember that Trump’s beloved daughter Ivanka, in many ways the most impressive member of his family clan, is an Orthodox Jew.

3. Reality check

The term “reality” in “reality show” is more than a bit ironic, as the mere fact of knowingly being part of a “show” is precisely the opposite of what 19^th-century novelists meant, or thought they meant, by “realism”—a term Flaubert always disliked. When Balzac called his novels la comédie humaine to contrast his imaginary world to Dante’s, he meant that it was the novelist and his privileged reader who should see the world as a spectacle, not that we lived in what would later be called la société du spectacle. But this is what Hegelians and Marxists used to call “dialectic”: the novelist’s ambition of making the world into a spectacle “for the reader” reflects a mimetic awareness that eventually makes it impossible for any of the inhabitants of the world to escape becoming themselves self-spectators. The “realist” novel was one of the early reflections, or symptoms, of this; I needn’t mention its more recent, more obnoxious indices, except of course for “reality TV” itself.

With Trump this dialectic has reached a new level. My first Chronicle (493) on Trump, which dates from way back in August 2015, as well as a more recent one (512), referred to the concept of “reality TV” as a locus of resistance against the victimary and, using the example of Caitlin Jenner-Kardashian, for creating a new reality for/of/in oneself. But the joke is on all those of us, even including me, who exploited this facile irony. No, he wasn’t a TV boss saying, “You’re fired!”; the man won the election because he understood “reality” in the “real” sense better than everyone else. As they say in France, chapeau!

But this should also be understood in more sober terms. For precisely, and this is a sign of the merit of Trump’s candidacy as a test of democracy, in contrast to that of Obama whose very victory was already a triumph—one unfortunately caricatured by the Peace Prize which, to be fair, the new president would have found it awkward to refuse—unlike his predecessor, Trump must produce results. Being the first billionaire president, at least by some calculations, is not like being the first black one; Trump has not to be but to do. Which is after all how politicians are “really” supposed to be judged.

Amity Shlaes’ informative 11/18 WSJ review of two books on Herbert Hoover  pointed out how drastically Hoover’s progressive-technocratic Great Engineer persona was wrecked by the failure of his early efforts to stem the depression. Not that Roosevelt really did much better, but he at least understood the problem, if not how to remedy it. Hoover had three years to deal with it, and his failure made everyone forget the early triumphs of this Stanford-educated social and political engineer in directing mines, digging harbors, shepherding the new radio industry, running worldwide relief operations, and generally embodying the greatest hopes of the technocracy. Hoover’s later image, as I recall from my childhood, became one of rather pathetic superannuated failure. This, not unleashing some new Fascism, is the real danger we face under the incoming administration.

In order to justify his election, Trump must make the economy healthier and improve our international standing, open up our educational system and restore our military, remove the ideologically motivated restrictions of the victimary-environmental era while keeping the lid on pollution, fix the VA, clean up the IRS and the Justice Department, and on and on. And in four years, and already in two, the public will have the opportunity to evaluate his efforts and judge his successes and failures. As the electorate indeed judged the Obama administration’s failures in the Congressional elections already in 2010 and even more drastically in 2014, but as it could not do in the 2012 presidential election for reasons that in Trump’s case will clearly not apply.

I hope that meditating on the evident truth of this last observation will inspire the remaining never-Trumpers on both sides to put off filing their Canadian immigrant applications. You don’t have to love the guy, but he has certainly earned a fair chance at showing us what he can do.

Although I was not as surprised as some, I can’t say I anticipated that Trump would win the “blue wall” states that gave him victory. But beyond the cordiality shown by all sides in the aftermath of the election, from Trump’s own upbeat victory speech to Clinton’s gracious concession to Obama’s positive and refreshingly unsnarky remarks, even if we cynically take them in the spirit of La Rochefoucauld’s hommage que le vice rend à la vertu, I have been pleased to see a number of analyses that share my sense of the urgency of reining in the victimary and restoring a sense of national unity. Such points are, of course, made primarily on the (non-never-Trump) Right, whereas a good portion of the Left, when not seeing Trump’s victory as the equivalent of the 1933 German elections, cannot find enough words to describe the furor of his electorate. In the space of 88 words, the Thursday 11/10 LA Times lead story “Victory by Fury” (!) used “rage” (in the sub-head), along with “seething anger,” “ravenous desire for change,” and “mad.”

Years ago, I would listen tranquilly to the PBS News Hour, where Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil pointedly refrained from voting in elections in order to remain neutral. In that now-distant past, the Friday two-pundit sessions used to feature recognizable representatives of the tendencies of the two parties. But in recent years, the “debates” between Mark Shields and David Brooks have increasingly centered on which one can find the Republicans more lamentable, and I almost always find Shields, the old-time Democrat there since forever, more authentic and cogent than Brooks, whose “conservatism” appears to have been wholly digested away by victimary microfauna. (On Friday 11/11, Brooks could at best offer the frustrations of the famous “white working class” as a partial excuse for their supporting Trump’s “bigotry.”)

But Thursday’s newscast, which led off with a clip of Obama and Trump conversing in the Oval Office, was the most gracious and least acrimonious I have watched in years. Even the two feminists, convoked to present both sides of the Trump victory—a left-right balance that itself would hardly have been likely during the past eight years—scarcely disagreed, although one had supported Trump and the other had surely not forgotten all the evidence of what one conservative writer had unconservatively described as his “sociopathic misogyny.” (The intellectual pathology of the never-Trumpers far outdistances that of the Left; this is in its way a Good Thing, since it positions Trump where he indeed belongs, in the middle of the spectrum and, hopefully, in a position to catalyze some bipartisan cooperation.) In answer to several questions clearly designed to elicit lamentations about how Clinton’s defeat was a sign that women were not yet truly respected, etc., this latter young lady responded, I would almost say, cheerfully, that the important thing was not electing anyone in particular to the presidency, but giving women an equal chance, and that under such circumstances, we would surely have a female president one day. If Trump’s election had given us nothing but this non-victimary reply, his manic Tweets and lapses from good taste would have been worth it.

This is not to be Pollyannish. Democracy does not demand, or even want, “unity.” The Left-Right divide is what makes it function as the worst of systems with the exception of all the others. What has gone wrong in the victimary era is that the resentment of the Left, as it has done in the more extreme moments of various revolutions, had risen to a moral fervor no longer open to compromise, in which its traditional claim to the moral high(er) ground became the contrast between Heaven and Hell.

The operations of culture that bring order out of chaos, and more pointedly, defer mimetic violence—René Girard’s great and still almost universally unappreciated discovery—are never final, but operate by revealing and then dissimulating their constitutive paradox. The dialogue-debate that defines liberal democracy necessarily always hovers between the tyranny of unanimity and anarchic dissolution. There are no truly stable positions in this debate, since the two sides, representing the two elements of the moral model central to our humanity, and that are themselves in paradoxical tension, can never fully agree. But the effective operation of the system requires recognition by both sides of at least the formal legitimacy of their adversaries. This has been increasingly lacking in our victimary era. Young people are taught reciprocal morality to the exclusion of reward for merit, even merit tested by objective examination, let alone by superior force, not long ago the primary deciding factor among nations and still, whether we like it or not, the ultimate source of international authority.

The fragile truce that the last few days have realized is one I believe likely to endure far longer than people expect, nor need it lead to an Era of Good Feeling where lions and lambs lie together in peaceful harmony. No doubt when Trump takes office in January, things will heat up considerably. But that’s fine. The important thing is to have useful discussions, heated if necessary, but that lead to viable policies. These may be biased toward the concerns of one side or another, so long as they are conducive to a more dynamic economy and a more respected and stabilizing presence in world affairs.

Many are surprised that, after so ugly a campaign, the country seems to be returning to sanity, and to the renewed sense of national-secular sacrality as exhibited in the Obama-Trump Oval Office conversation. Like many things in history, even for those of us who had the intuition of this change, it could not have been understood until it had actually happened.

Trump’s election allows us to dial back our critique of Obama for his reliance on the victimary ethic. Self-serving as it may have been, we must accept the fact that the first black president, even were he not a creature of the academic Left, could hardly have avoided embodying—fomenting, but also helping to discharge—the accumulated resentment of a community that has indeed endured over the centuries, and still well into my lifetime, the most degrading forms of humiliation. No, this doesn’t make Michael Brown a heroic victim, but the pride Obama’s presidency has lent the black community will, I am sure, continue to pay dividends in the future—as, I keep saying, it seems to me that it already has in the increased cordiality of everyday black-white relations.

Nor need we view too harshly the negative reactions to the election results on the part of illegal immigrants, who are justified in feeling threatened, or certain Muslims who find themselves the targets of unmerited hostility. If we can begin to admit that Islamic terrorism is indeed a problem within the Muslim community—as inner-city gang violence is a problem within the black and Hispanic communities—then we need have no sympathy for the handful of right-wing bigots, even as we insist that the fact of having won their votes does not make Trump their representative.

Politics, like all human endeavors, is always paradoxical and only most exceptionally follows an optimal path to enlightenment, for the simple reason that with very few exceptions, no such path exists. If it did, of course, we would need neither religion or art. We have no doubt heard this from philosophers before, but GA alone adds: nor language either. The verifiable constative proposition of science, “the cat is on the mat,” is the conquest of paradox just as love is the conquest of resentment, and both are endless processes with no endpoint. The “ends of history” are many, and always relative. And can it be a coincidence that the word “end” is itself paradoxical? It means both “termination” and “goal”; yet if you still have a goal, you have not reached the termination.

Until this election, the political temperature had been rising for some time, and its persistence risked doing much more damage to liberal democracy, and to the world, than “climate change.” If the new cooling trend can last for a while—and if it can happen on PBS, it can find its way to the campuses and boardrooms—we may even find efficient ways, without wrecking the economy, to lower the literal temperature, which has recently been in the 90s in mid-November in Santa Monica.

The rise of authoritarian regimes, of which the Islamic State is the ultimate caricature, is primarily a reflection of the contradictions of the West. If we can’t stomach the need for firstness along with egalitarianism, here are cultures that show how they can be most simply combined. Hierarchical order past a certain point is egalitarianism. As I have said before, one reason Western feminists find it hard to complain about the conditions of women under Islam, or for that matter the conditions of citizens under Chinese communism, is that in a totalitarian system, all are “equally” subject to the law that subjugates women to men or ordinary people to their Leader(s). The Salafist male can simply answer the criticism of benefiting from Sharia by claiming that had he been born a woman, he would have submitted to the same subjugation that he now exercises. But even in a secular system, where laws must respond primarily to the model of reciprocal morality, and only Rawlsian criteria like societal efficiency can justify inequality, adherence to such justifications remains a matter of personal submission founded ultimately on faith. All societies, even those that proclaim their “atheism,” remind us that the human is never fully liberated from the sacred.

And the current election offers a excellent lesson, because wholly “secular” in its manifestations, on the role of the sacred in human society. Trump’s sins, for example, mocking a handicapped journalist, cannot be justified in themselves. Yet their effect, even before his election, of helping to liberate the public from the deadly burden of political correctness, where the fear of being accused of “racism” of one kind or another makes unflattering truths unutterable even when they are fully relevant to the evaluation of performance or public safety, is on balance salutary.

From a Christian perspective, even the Crucifixion was “justified” as the source of man’s incomprehensible salvation, on the model of the felix culpa of Eve’s giving Adam the apple—the originary act of feminine resentment (see Chronicle 419). These are miracles, mysteries, leaps of faith, or if one likes, acts of genius, like cutting the Gordian knot, in which the intuition that provokes the “evil” act that brings eventual good cannot be calculated in advance. Their paradoxically undeterministic configuration requires, as we see, no supernatural interventions, merely the human openness to innovation or firstness that is what got the human started in the first place.

No, the millennium has not arrived. But some of the air has been cleared. If my own resentment of the victimary has been eased and I can even find the silver lining in Obama’s presidency, I think this may well be the case for many others. It is certainly about time.

A couple of years ago we were inundated with books attacking belief in God. Now it seems the hot topic is human language. Language has been a perennial subject of philosophers since the “linguistic turn” at the turn of the 20^th century, but the idea of defining the human as the language-using animal, which goes back at least to Aristotle (zoon logon echon), has had its ups and downs. Most recently, the turn from generative grammar to cognitive linguistics has downplayed the specificity of language and Chomsky’s “biological” Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in favor of a blending of language with other human cognitive abilities, so that, for example, in How Homo Became Sapiens (Oxford, 2003), Peter Gärdenfors (who is scheduled to speak at our next GASC in Stockholm) is able to describe language as a “very recent addition to human abilities,” as “explained by the fact that language presupposes the existence of the other cognitive functions presented here” (p. 14), which is to say: thought, representation, imagination, planning, self-consciousness, and free will.

That a popular writer such as Tom Wolfe, astute but anything but rigorous, would write a book (The Kingdom of Speech, Little, Brown, 2016; unfortunately, page numbers below refer to the Large Print edition, the only one available in my library at the time) identifying the human with language can be understood in two ways.

In principle, it is a Good Thing, since the idea that the acquisition of language can be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution, which in Chomsky’s case (where, to be fair, the origin of human language is virtually irrelevant to the overall theory) means that the LAD is presumed the result of a “mutation,” intraspecific communication not being required at all, is patently inadequate. Wolfe’s own “explanation” in the last chapter of his little book, that language is simply a mnemonic device, is so clearly tautological that it requires no refutation. But it is just as clearly an afterthought; Wolfe’s real point, and he does have a point, is that language is a free human invention, not the product of a genetic mutation acquired through natural selection. The many mutations that have helped us improve our language skills have indeed been selected for, but only once language itself came into being. Claiming that we “invented” it, however, although no doubt correct in principle, provides no explanation for its emergence.

Whence my second, more personal reaction to Wolfe’s book, which is one of rage. Having proposed the originary hypothesis in The Origin of Language (TOOL) some 35 years ago, I have yet to see in reaction, not merely a reasoned refutation, let alone an admission that the hypothesis in fact represents a qualitative advance, but even an intemperate dismissal. Although TOOL was published by the University of California Press and even advertised in the New York Review of Books, this work is never included in bibliographies on the subject; it was simply, in 1981, too far ahead of its time, and not having been authored by a certified member of the linguistics (or anthropology) profession, has simply been ignored. I have resigned myself to this in hopes that I may live long enough for the social science community to finally understand the need for something like my hypothesis. But reading Wolfe is really frustrating, since he so enjoys telling stories about how the Great Minds have misunderstood the question and reacted by putting down those who would respond to it, without even dreaming of what would really make his story conclusive as well as providing it with an even more obscure protagonist.

There are two such stories in Wolfe’s book. In the first half of the book (Chapters 1-3), he takes on Darwin’s “victory” over Alfred Wallace in obtaining the credit for the theory of evolution, despite the fact that Wallace’s 1858 paper, published jointly with one of Darwin’s, was in fact the first publishable statement of the theory (which Darwin had long been elaborating but, fearing rejection, had been slow to present in written form). Wolfe insists, without providing any clear evidence, that Darwin’s central purpose in developing his theory was only secondarily to describe the emergence of the various forms of life, but primarily to show that man was “descended from the apes,” a point only brought out in Darwin’s second major work on the subject, The Descent of Man in 1871. In this book, Darwin makes great efforts to find animal forms of communication that might have evolved into language, notably bird song.

Throughout, Wolfe relentlessly and sarcastically opposes Darwin (along with Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker) as “Gentlemen” to poor Wallace the “flycatcher,” who was forced to finance his explorations in the Amazon and Malaya by catching and sending home large volumes of (dead) insects and similar specimens. But the crux of these chapters is that unlike Darwin, Wallace, and more pointedly, the philologist Max Müller (see Chronicle 192) understood that natural selection cannot account for human language. Wallace’s later descent (or rise, according to tastes) into spiritualism reflected this—just as Creationism did in a later era. As for Müller, he specifically declared that “Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it” (Wolfe p. 86, quoting Müller’s “Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language,” Nature 1, 1870).

Whether or not these denials of the biological origin of human language were as great a blow to Darwin as Wolfe claims in his inimitably hyperbolic style is irrelevant to our purposes. Claiming that man “invented” language instead of “evolving” it from animal behavior is a good start, but the claim is vacuous unless one can offer a hypothesis concerning the circumstances of this “invention.”

The second half of the book is wilder and woolier. After noting Noam Chomsky’s meteoric rise, with Syntactic Structures (1957), to the top of the linguistics profession even before he finished his doctorate, and his utter dominance over that profession for several decades, Wolfe brings in a missionary-anthropologist named Daniel Everett to play the role of David-Wallace in bringing down Chomsky-Goliath. Everett did his research in the 1980s, but the fat hit the fire in 2005 when he published a paper in Current Anthropology concerning his researches, deep in the Amazonian jungle, among the Pirahᾶ tribe, work that eventually led to a 2008 book entitled Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes— purportedly the tribe’s rather ironic way of saying goodnight. According to Wolfe-Everett, the Pirahᾶ language has no tenses other than the present, nor any numbers other than “few” and “many.” (Since I’m not planning a trip to the Amazon—whose many dangers Wolfe describes with great relish—I suppose I have to take this at face value, although it’s hard to imagine that a language could have no word for one.) The real scandal of Pirahᾶ language, however, is that, again according to Everett, it does not involve recursion, a quality that Chomsky considered fundamental to the syntax of human language, and the one that he referenced most conclusively in his well-known refutation of B. F. Skinner’s behavioristic Verbal Behavior (1957)—a refutation which, however arrogant it may be, I consider totally correct.

Since, in the text of an interview with Chomsky that Wolfe quotes on p. 235-36 as a demonstration of his arrogance, the Great Man makes what strikes me as the perfectly cogent point that, given that these tribesman are able to learn Portuguese to speak with those outside the tribe, the idiosyncrasies of their language have no bearing on the hypothetical existence of the LAD, it doesn’t really matter anyway. But to stipulate the correctness of Wolfe’s account, the “scandal” occasioned by the discovery of a language without recursive constructions (e.g., subordinate clauses) was a key element in permitting cognitive linguists such as Michael Tomasello to take over the dominant position in the field after several decades of Chomskian formalism. Whereas Chomsky and his followers, considering all languages as essentially equivalent and our ability to learn them explained by the LAD, put the study of multiple languages and of language acquisition on the back burner, the new linguistics emphasizes both the specificity of different languages and the necessity of studying language use in early childhood to show how grammatical constructions are learned, not, as per the doctrine of generative grammar, as abstract structures upon the child’s minimal exposure (the “poverty of the stimulus”), but in the context of specific syntactic constructions integrated with their phonetic and semantic components.

These internecine quarrels of linguists are of little concern to GA, and although there is no need to dismiss Chomsky’s formalism out of hand (science is always about making models, not studying “the thing itself”), the cognitive approach seems to me much more potentially fruitful in allowing us to develop GA’s own linguistic hypotheses beyond the suggestions of TOOL. Nor does the cognitive approach require, as in the above citation from Gärdenfors, that we downplay the unique quality of language as opposed to other cognitive functions. Chomsky’s description of the LAD as a kind of organ can only be understood as a formal simplification, conducive, for example, to reducing language to a set of algorithms. Even if such an “organ” could be said to exist somewhere in the brain, the idea that we are born with it and just need to “set” its various parameters has as far as I know no justification in neuroscience, and the claim that it came into being in one fell swoop via a mutation is an extravagant just-so story.

But as we have seen in these Chronicles, Michael Tomasello, the leading member of the cognitive school, who has done much important and meticulous work on language acquisition, and who is associated with the most important idea of this school, that of joint shared attention, is incapable even of taking religion seriously, let alone of formulating a hypothesis concerning its origin along with language. Wolfe is not seeking to promote cognitive linguistics, in which he shows little interest. His point in the second part of the book is to debunk Chomsky and his “biological”-evolutionary conception of human language, and the fact that Chomsky’s structuralism is inherently indifferent to such things as speculation about origins is the least of Wolfe’s concerns.

And so, after carelessly tossing off his “mnemonic” explanation without realizing its utterly tautological nature (as though the names for the colors of the spectrum were derived from “Roy G. Biv” rather than the other way around), he concludes with a paean to Speech to which we can all say Amen. Yes, language is the fundamental attribute of the human, and no, it can’t be explained via Darwinian evolution. But, let me repeat, just saying that we “invented” it doesn’t explain by what new mechanism it might have appeared.

It was the first recognizable version of just such a mechanism that I recognized in René Girard’s La violence et le sacré in 1972, and that I later refocused on representation—the deferral of violence through representation— starting with TOOL in 1981. I won’t repeat for the nth time how the total neglect of my hypothesis only proves its superiority to the feeble attempts at creating scenarios of origin from mothering to grooming to gossiping to hunting to … No, I can’t demonstrate that things went according to my scenario, but I can show that unless you can explain the coeval scenic emergence of language-significance and the sacred, there is nothing that a sign can refer to in a different way from a signal. This is really a rather simple idea, and I have a feeling that it would have found a more receptive audience in the era of Durkheim—who didn’t think of religion as the process by which shamanistic tribal leaders claimed to have “somehow been anointed by a deity or in some other supernatural way.” Durkheim understood religious ritual as a means of reinforcing solidarity, which may at the very least be taken to imply that such solidarity was not a simple given and risked breaking down in violence in the absence of ritual activity.

If you are reading this, you are one of a tiny and insignificant minority in our intellectual universe. These Chronicles have been posted on the Internet for 21 years, and there are now 525 of them, well over a million words. Yet the total readership of all of them together is probably less than that of a single semi-popular blog by an Internet pundit, or the viewership of a single “viral” cat video. Assuming that there is a good chance that you share at least in part my conviction that the originary hypothesis offers a unique and qualitatively superior theory of the origin of language and of human culture, this seems to me to be a good time to suggest that you stand up and be counted.

One thing Wolfe’s book has persuaded me to do is to pursue a project I had been hesitating over, that of producing a second edition of TOOL. It will have to be simplified and greatly shortened, and above all brought up to date to reflect not so much the results of “research” as my own thinking on the subject. But I can at least hope that this may be a moment when such a book would actually be read by more than the few dozen persons who take the originary hypothesis seriously at the present time.

In the next Chronicle I intend to discuss another recent book defining the human through language—and like Wolfe’s, not having the least clue about the need for an originary hypothesis—by a very different kind of author, Charles Taylor’s The Language Animal (Harvard, 2016).