Author: staceymeeker

Although my first reaction to Trump as a political figure was that his aggressive posture reminded me of Mussolini, I was very soon attracted to what I saw as his near-unique intuitive hostility to what was then called the victimary and/or PC and has subsequently evolved into Wokeness. In the Chronicles on this subject before the 2016 election, I pointed out that among the many seekers of the Republican nomination, only he and Ben Carson, whom he included in his first cabinet, were sufficiently focused on combating this alarming trend in the Democratic party and the “liberal” West in general.

Thus I am obviously happy to see eight years later that Trump’s perspective, so viciously contested by his political enemies during his first term, has now become the majority position, and that his initiatives to end the reign of DEI have met with surprisingly little overt resistance. I can only hope that his efforts to reverse the disquieting “march through the institutions” of this 21^st century avatar of the epistemology of resentment will have the time to be successful. Above all I hope that despite the efforts over the past four years to Wokize the entire government apparatus, including our armed forces, the US still retains enough societal, industrial, and military strength to deter its enemies from attempting a major coup “before it’s too late,” such as an invasion of Taiwan or, yet more dangerous, an EMP attack disabling our electric grid.

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Since WWI, the contest for world domination can be most simply described as opposing nations that embody what we can call “republican democracy,” in which there are truly alternative projects of government whose choice is decided in popular elections, to totalitarian autocracies. The French Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Safety) created in 1793 is the ancestor of all these modern tyrannies.

The mark of all these regimes is that whatever ideology justifies their domination is best understood not primarily as a theory of government but as a pretext for taking and maintaining power. And whereas in the autocracies of the past, such as the Roman Empire, it was possible for concurrent factions to emerge and occasionally replace the current tyrant, in the modern era, particularly since the latter years of the 20^th century, autocracies have displayed remarkable longevity, irrespective of their frequent failure, whether or not deliberate, to improve the lives of the people under their control—Cuba being perhaps the most egregious example. This stability reflects the ever-more-powerful technologies by which centralized power can be exercised, a condition well anticipated in the pre-cybernetic era by Orwell’s 1984, and most clearly exemplified today in China.

Hitler may have been “worse” than Stalin, but even aside from the fact that he called himself as a “socialist,” today it seems clear that to emphasize the structural-political differences between them, or between them and Mao or the Kims or the Castros or Pol Pot or the Ayatollah or Chavez-Maduro, is to miss the point.

If Hitler indeed stands apart as belonging in a different category of evil than these other regimes, the difference does not lie in the autocratic structure of his regime, but in his focus on exterminating the founders of the Western conception of the sacred: the Jews. And anyone who might have doubted this, whether or not—as all too many in today’s West seem happy to do—he approves of genocidal antisemitism, cannot avoid seeing the primary societal conflict of today as once more centered on the Jews.

The nation of Israel is the critical point, the fulcrum of the opposition between the Christian nations of Europe and North America and what appears to be an emerging alliance between the two post-Christian heritages of Islam on the one hand and Marxism on the other. And the scandalous ambivalence of what I shall call the pre-Trump West toward Hamas’ barbarous massacre, filmed with pride by its perpetrators, is the sign of the West’s ambivalence toward the faith in human freedom and enterprise that had previously defined it.

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Thus Trump’s victory may well be the last good hope for the triumph—or at the very least, the survival—of the principle of a “free” society. To observe today the major nations of Europe: Great Britain, Germany, France—none are currently providing convincing demonstrations of the virtues of free elections. It is almost as if, given the results of its 2024 presidential race, the US were being asked, even begged by the remaining representatives of the political heritage of Western civilization from the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to provide a demonstration that there is indeed a “free world,” and that its capacity for political as well as economic and military action is indeed superior to that of the autocracies and démocratures that are gradually coming together in the BRICS alliance in the name of the “Global South.”

To have “faith in democracy” should not be understood from the victimary-moral perspective that we must allow “victims” to have a voice in their destiny even if tyranny is really more efficient, but rather as affirming that the democratic-republican system is superior to the autocratic because it has more “degrees of freedom” with which to exploit the affordances that reality offers to human praxis—meaning that this freedom is, on balance, a very good thing.

But how can we know if this is truly the case? Isn’t China’s military and economic power proof that a well-managed tyranny can be just as or more efficient than any democracy? For one thing, democracies are less capable of keeping secrets, and thus easier for tyrannies to exploit by means of industrial and military espionage, thereby annulling the advantage inherent in the freer interaction between their citizens.

But such weakness is a symptom of democracies that have come to see themselves as nations of usurpers and exploiters rather than as agents of human progress. We would hope that a democracy that has retained or restored its confidence in the superiority of its political system, as the US under the new administration promises to be, will be able to defend itself against all forms of unfair competition.

The European press still sees Trump’s MAGA policies more as a reassertion of American dominance over the West than as setting an example for European and Asian free societies to emulate. But we can expect that if these policies are implemented with the appropriate respect for America’s allies, US leadership will ultimately provoke more emulation than hostility, leading the international situation away from potential conflict to a gradually more integrated and interactive—and freer—world economic order.

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In this regard, it is disappointing that Trump’s accession has taken place in the context of a hostage agreement that, despite his previous threats to wreak havoc on Hamas if they failed to release the hostages, is even less favorable than the cease-fire agreement in the fall of 2023. But if we assume that this agreement is the last of its kind, and that the current conflict can be ended without either Hamas or the PA retaining power in Gaza, Islamic neo-jihadism, like Western Wokism, may begin to “wither away.”

However patient the Islamists may be, they need to feel they are making progress—and until now, the history of the Middle East has provided at least as much encouragement as disappointment to those who maintain Islam’s promise of eventual world conquest. (See in particular Ran Baratz’ “What’s Wrong with the Postmodern Military?” , which develops the idea also expressed by Daniel Pipes that despite its striking military successes, Israel has remained ambivalent with respect to the fundamental purpose of war—the achievement of victory.)

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Putting aside what is hopefully not a fatal weakness, the simple fact that the right of the Jews to a state of their own, a right gained as a consequence of history’s most serious attempt to eradicate the Jewish people, has become the central issue for the future of the West and of what can still be called the “free world” is a sign of an emerging awareness that the defense of Hebrew monotheism as the root of the Western sacred—and of what we should see as its primary anthropological intuition—is fundamental to the continued existence of the democratic-republican political system of the “free world.” By seeking to destroy the Jewish nation not merely as a current but as a historical entity, Islamism as a world movement hopes on the contrary to demonstrate that both Judaism and Christianity are, as the Koran affirms, ultimately destined to be transcended in an Islamic Aufhebung.

In this regard, any hostility to Islam on the part of the autocracies descended from the French Revolution via Marxism is simply overlooked, as the example of the West’s lack of attention to the plight of the Uighurs in China makes clear. The key battle remains that with the Judeo-Christian West, and thus in the first place with the Jews of Israel. And given the failure of world Christianity to defend the lives of the thousands of Christians massacred by Muslims in Africa and elsewhere, coupled with the ambivalence at best of most of the Western powers toward Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, it would seem that with few exceptions—of which the only clearly significant one is that of the United States under its new administration—the nominally Christian West is standing back and letting the “Abrahamic” issue be decided by whether or not Israel can beat back its current Islamic challenge.

If this analysis is correct, then the survival of the Judeo-Christian West to sustain its “mostly peaceful” competition with the avatars of its Marxist autocratic-revolutionary spin-off depends on the ability of Israel to inflict on its jihadist enemies an unambiguous defeat that will assure its ability to retain permanent dominance in its region. Hopefully Israel is finally learning that “mowing the grass” is no longer sufficient: it must soundly defeat Hamas in order best to deter similar challenges in the future.

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My hope is that a successful conclusion of this conflict will serve as a lesson to the West that unless it is able to defend its founding people against Islamism, it cannot hope to remain the world’s dominant culture. A West that cannot assure the survival of the Jews is one that has rejected its history, and thereby stands defenseless against the reinvention of history by revolutionary governments, whether Islamic or Marxist.

In a word: if the “free world” has lost the will to defeat those who claim that Jerusalem has always been a Muslim city, it cannot hope to overcome the true believers either of Islam or of “Xi Jin-Ping thought.”

As reported by the Jewish News Syndicate on January 14, 2025, a recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League shows that world antisemitism has increased, that young people are more antisemitic than their elders, and in short, that 46% of the world’s adults “harbor deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes.” As a concrete example, it suffices to note that the world’s overall reaction to the barbaric Hamas incursion on October 7, 2023 was an increased level of Jew-hatred, followed by hostilely biased reporting of Israel’s military response, UN and ICC condemnations, and a variety of expressions of hostility to Israel and sympathy for the Palestinians whose suffering is inevitably presented as the result of “genocidal” Israeli war crimes.

In a way, the Jews should be proud that they do not easily fit into the role of victim. It took the Holocaust to make this characterization stick for a couple of generations, and it shouldn’t surprise us that today’s young people are no longer concerned with nor fully aware of it.

That so many are so deeply envious of the Jews may not bring the latter any material or affective benefits, but it is in many ways the greatest compliment one can pay a people: a sign that what antisemites cannot altogether avoid admitting is a sense of inferiority toward the “elder brothers” of Western sacrality, which is as much as to say, of Western humanity.

Jewish efforts at humility have not succeeded in reducing the hate they arouse, nor have their efforts at reducing enemy civilian casualties make their enemies any less bloodthirsty. All humans are equally human, but the Jews’ historic firstness suffices in many cases to inspire others to deny this truth, even in the absence of any manifestation of Jewish arrogance.

The danger for GA of insisting on Jewish exceptionalism is that the specific hatred Jews inspire distracts us from drawing general conclusions. For the most anthropologically significant question about the Jews is why monotheism which, although clearly the minimal, Ockham’s-razor theory of the sacred, is not after all practiced all over the world, cannot avoid acting as a curse on its discoverers.

To mention in comparison Akhenaton’s attempt to reduce the Egyptian pantheon to a single god can only be to contrast to the Hebrew example what is in effect a “minimal polytheism.” The Hebrew God is not a god, despite the traces of such belief in the use of the plural Elohim, or in the passage in Genesis 3 where Adam’s sin is denounced as a step toward eating the fruit of the tree of life and acquiring immortality. Although these passages are indeed part of the Torah, it is clear that they are witnesses to Hebrew religion’s ancient roots rather than signs of doubting God’s singularity. They reflect rather the confidence that the believers’ mature belief will have no reason to see them as excuses for backsliding, given their anthropological intuition that the singularity of God is not merely that of the center of a given scene (where other centers are possible) but of centrality itself.

But centrality, you might say, is an abstraction; a real scene has a real center, not a “centrality.” And precisely, a God embodying centrality is not a “natural” being, even an imaginary one. God is everywhere, as we say; he is at the center of all scenes, whose specific centers imitate his divinity. But there is no use in attempting to describe a universe, however intellectualized, in which the sacred can be made to appear as a participant; the sacred, the principle of the Für-sich-Sein or différance that frees humanity from the material world, is the prior condition of any conception of a “universe,” or simply of a scene, including those that we find already in cave-drawings or marked by handprints or inhabited by the earliest stone or clay figures.

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There is really no mystery about the hostility engendered by the first people to invent/discover the unity of the sacred. “The sacred” can be spoken of as an abstraction, but the One God, whose “name” cannot be pronounced, is both an anthropological discovery and the object of a revelation to a specific people. Whence the necessity of an additional step in order that this revelation of the unity of the sacred be transmissible to other peoples, that it form the basis of a “universal religion.” Or to relate it more closely to its historical context, that the revelation of monotheism might challenge and eventually defeat the polytheism that surrounded it.

That a similar process did not take place in China or India, for example, shows that such a development was not inevitable, but given the subsequent (and barring total disaster, irreversible) course of history, in which Christian civilization came to dominate the West and created modernity while Islam as the religion of the West’s outsiders flourished in its wake, it seems clear that Christianity’s trinitary theology was the most anthropologically satisfactory means of transcending the indelibly “tribal” nature of Judaism to become a potentially universal religion. It is only apparently paradoxical that the minimal expression of monotheism could not become a universal religion, any more than the originary sign could become the basis of a universal language. What made Christianity a universal or transnational religion was necessarily a result of its break with Judaism, which had been in its origin the response of a specific people to the polytheisms that surrounded it—a people preoccupied to assert its difference rather than, as would have at that time been inconceivable, seeking to convert these believers to its own faith.

For Christianity’s “transcendence” of Judaism took place in the context of the polytheistic universalism of the Roman Empire, whose dilution of the sacred into a plurality of gods and a plurality of polytheistic sub-religions was in effect a reductio ad absurdum of polytheism as a universal belief-system. The first Christians saw themselves as superseding Judaism by their recognition of the Messiah, whom the Hebrew texts had portrayed as the savior of their people in an apocalyptic future, but whom the Christians took the “absurd” step of situating now, in the person of Jesus. In Old-Testament times, only the Hebrews had felt the presence of the One God, whereas Jesus’ crucifixion took place now, before the eyes of the Romans as well as the Jews. And accordingly, in all four Gospels, a Roman Centurion, described as witnessing an earthquake that heralded Jesus’ death and tore the veil of the Temple, declared Jesus to be the son of God (e.g., Matthew 27:54)—the first moment of the transformation of the tribal religion of Judaism into the universal religion of Christianity.

As a result, the early Christians saw themselves as called upon to witness their faith by accepting martyrdom on Jesus’ example. And no doubt the willingness of these martyrs to bear suffering unto death as proof of their faith demonstrated the superior performativity of monotheistic religion to that of polytheism, whose gods’ unproblematic immortality, as we saw in the Iliad, had no use for human martyrdom—just as its conception of human afterlife was, as Odysseus discovered, one of diminishment rather than the fulfillment of divine judgment in the spirit of Dante’s Commedia.

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The Trinity, although a fourth-century construction, was in its primary feature of making the “Son” a “person” of God along with the Father implicit in the worship of Jesus as Christ, as not in any way opposable to God the Father, yet as a separate “person” of Him. And what is perhaps even more remarkable, the third person of the Trinity, their messenger the Holy Spirit—whether “spirated” by both Father and Son, or just by the Father, as in the Orthodox church—anchors the human and the sacred in language as the primordial expression of humanity. Even Aristotle’s awareness of the centrality of mimesis to humanity does not cut as sharp an anthropological contour as John’s Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος—In the beginning was the Word.

Where in Genesis the One God had created the world with words, in the Christian version, the logos and the Son were alike persons of the Father-Creator—nor can one read this line from John without equating them, even before the immediately following passages make this parallel explicit (e.g., 1:10-11 “He was in the world / That had its being through him / And the world did not know him. / He came to his own domain / And his own people did not accept him.”) The Son’s eternity as (for Roman Catholics) the co-spirator of the Word demonstrates that what we see as before and after, as firstness and lateness, is in the realm of the sacred an illusion.

It is only in this perspective that Hebrew monotheism, incapable of accomplishing what Hegel would call the Aufhebung of its own firstness, can be experienced as excluding other peoples from the Jews’ privileged relationship with God, simply by the fact of situating their religious discovery in time, as history—failing which, we must not forget, the subsequent “absurd” Christian synthesis would have been inconceivable.

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Epilogue

This seems to me the appropriate moment for me to recall what I consider my most memorable conversation with René Girard.

René never saw the point of my analyses of the origin of language, and he viewed my subsequent attempts to “minimalize” my hypothesis of the scene of origin, very different from his insistence on scapegoating or “emissary murder,” as a betrayal of his vision of “fundamental anthropology.”

Nonetheless, I would trace my first real understanding of what I would call the Judeo-Christian sense of the sacred to a brief exchange with René during my student years at Hopkins in the early 1960s, decades before my speculations about language.

In this scene that I have often returned to in my reflections on the sacred, I picture myself standing with René behind Gilman Hall.

Speaking as a Jew to a Christian, I express skepticism that a man could be le fils de Dieu—the son of God.

René’s reply: Nous sommes tous fils de Dieu—we are all sons of God.

Whether or not this assertion is fully in accord with Catholic dogma, it will always embody for me the essence of what we must call Judeo-Christianity, the foundation of Western civilization’s understanding of the human.

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Biblical citations are taken from The Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday, 1966).

With reference to the link between ancient Israel’s firstness and antisemitism as we read in the Chronicle of Saturday, December 7th, 2024, I find this priority as too abstract a notion to arouse racial hostility, though perhaps it underlies a resentment that goes by other names and symbols. As to ancient Israel’s firstness in its own cultural environment and its enduring impact among us there is no doubt whatsoever, and in many ways that I think do not receive proper attention.

Solely in my capacity as a literary humanist, the attraction of Jewish scriptures is unavoidable for their variety and richness, narrative and poetic, as, along with Greek epic, drama, and philosophy, the fountainhead of Western literary masterpieces that we rate as canonical. That very distinction owes its origin to first-century decisions on the part of Jews and Christians independently of each other to delimit the number of writings as sacred. Their canons are the model for our literary canon, composed of what have come to be regarded as culturally authoritative writings, cognitively, esthetically, and ethically. Hawthorne and Melville are unthinkable without the Jewish Scriptures, as are the English Renaissance and Reformation. This is not a matter of “influence,” as old-style comparatists would say; it was the air they breathed, thanks to the magnificent language of the King James Version of the bible.

That a literary masterpiece should be produced by a committee of scholars should not surprise us when we consider that Jewish Scriptures themselves were first composed from different traditions (Yahwist, Eloist, Priestly, etc.), then enhanced, redacted, and compiled over centuries, in a process that Walter Brueggemann has called its “traditioning,” as the achievement of a virtually millennial committee assigned by its mostly anonymous leaders. Israel is first in this practice of scrupulous editing and self-criticism (Sacks). This process is continued in the post-canonical discourses of Talmud and Midrash, in which we can identify a model for both biblical and literary hermeneutics. This is another—philological—first: Sandor Goodhart has shown that the Thomistic fourfold interpretation of Scripture (for Augustine it is threefold) is a replay of Jewish hermeneutics.

Ancient Israel is unequivocally acknowledged as first in its ardent monotheism of a personal god, and consequently its “monotheism of truth” (Haw). “Truth is one,” per Girard in an essay on Proust (1962, 12), per Faulkner in Go Down Moses (275, 314). Moreover, ancient Israel is first in the conviction that God is love, hesed being his unique profile throughout the Psalms. This is translated as “lovingkindness,” a compact, or if you will parsimonious, formulation where the emotion implies the action (Held). For ancient Israel love is truth, truth is love, an indissoluble entanglement reprised by evangelical narratives and epistles and not a few dramatists and novelists.

Ancient Israel is first in its ardent iconoclasm, such that neighboring cultures viewed it as atheist, (as indeed were early Christians for lacking monuments of their savior God). Its unimageable creator is so utterly transcendent of his creation that nothing within it could configure its presence to his worshipers, however much that presence is constantly affirmed. We owe to this aniconic worship the dazzling resourcefulness and versatility of the Jewish scriptures’ textual richness, narrative and poetic, that fills the void left by carved images—as if, for lack of monuments, they must resort to speech and to writing, even to the point, in Ecclesiastes, of contesting divine providence altogether in human affairs. Israel’s unseen God is first known to his people as their emancipator, and as Eric Gans has rightly observed (1990), is made known in a declarative sentence, YAWEH, whose being is all but nameless except as the Name, Hashem. The Thomistic refinement of this idea—I am who am—is that God alone has being; the rest is history (Carr).

The Mount Sinai revelation remains the standard bearer of everyone’s idea of freedom, defined as emancipation from slavery, of liberation from violent oppression as fundamentally and universally desirable.  Freedom from domination and privation, imperial or other, was a “Jewish idea” before it became the inflection point, the wellspring and clarion call, for every decent political activism: “We hold these truths….etc.”—regardless of the flagrant mendacity of its slave holder signatories. Everyone today is nominally in favor of this, however much that rubric has been weaponized by vile conspiracy theories. Its most virulent form in the 20th century has been an antisemitism whose exterminationist horrors remain the unique manifestation of the absolutely worst violence that humans can be persuaded to do to one another, as evil incarnate (Neiman). Every philosopher’s scruples about absolute values is confounded by this unique atrocity.

It is singularly the most grotesque of ironies in Western culture, which today is global culture, that the people who invented scapegoat rituals yearly at Yom Kippur, its most important feast, as a rituals aiming at the expulsion of guilt and sin from among them—that this people were, since the middle ages, the victims of violence that we denounce by that very name for unjust persecution (Girard, 1992).

Towards the very outset in Leviticus, guilt and sin offerings are prescribed for offenses, transgressions, of the Law (“sins” in KJV, “crimes” in Robert Alter’s more exacting translation), including in early chapters (4-5) those committed “unintentionally,” “unwittingly.” Humans need not have awaited the famous last words of Christ on the cross to apprehend that “we know not what we do.” For Girard this truth, contra Freud, is a defining report on the unconscious as the ubiquitous potency of crowd mimesis: cheering now, howling next. It functions spectacularly, for example, in Peter’s threefold denials of identity among Jesus’ followers. This episode concerning its founder-disciple is prescribed in all the liturgies of the Lenten worship of Christians, as if a reminder of the fragility of their faith.

The history of Western culture is still being written, but for a sense of its meaning we have to return to Israel’s desert experience. For ancient Israel, moral consciousness and historical consciousness are one, emanating from the Mount Sinai revelation and their passage through the desert to a better life. Forty years are prescribed in order to outlive the generation of relapsarian idolaters. This is replicated in the Christian calendar as the season of Lent, prescribing abstention from material—bodily, appetitive–gratifications.

Amidst his foundational program for the social sciences, Emile Durkheim stated the “religion is a social fact.” Anthropologists define religion as a system of beliefs and practices, and chief among practices is ritual, which is also a cultural universal, however much it may be observed in putatively secular institutions. We see this in the protocols of court procedure—”All rise” at the judge’s entrance, followed by swearing in of witness, “so help me God”; we see it in fandom behavior at sport events, replete with totemic outfits. We see it in the virtual tribalism of Proust’s Combray, so awash in its rituals of belonging as to invite correlation with the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Most infamously, Nazi and KKK assemblies were charged with ritual, as anyone can see by consulting images of them on line.

Formal worship, Lit-urgy, “acts (urgy) of the people,” is enacted as ritual, which, in the case of ancient Israel, exhibits an unheralded intelligence of its purpose. It is another first as we realize when we attend to the material specificities prescribed in Leviticus for this or that sin or guilt offering, which have to be repeated yearly because of the peoples’ proclivities of relapsing into idolatry or other violations of the law. Yom Kippur is translated in French as “le Grand Pardon.” This is an all too unacknowledged manifestation of what is vaunted as the “wisdom of Israel,” namely a process of intentional acts and words, an attention–getting strategy of embodiment, of muscle- and tissue-memory to embed professed beliefs. There is an anthropological realism in this indissoluble integration of consciousness- and conscience-raising activity.

In the following observations I am going to focus on what I regard as ancient Israel’s own incarnational integrity, its adherence against all comers to rituals that are intended to embody its relation to an unseen God. Here again, ancient Israel is first in its conscious, strategic regimen of worship as embodiment, which is more than suggested in its first commandment as reprised in Deuteronomy (6.5): “And you are to “love Adonai your God with all your mind and all your heart, all your being and all your strength”—”all your resources,” “everything about you” in variant translations. “Everything about you” must needs include human embodiment. Many are the Psalms that communicate this sensorial dimension that conveys Israel’s uniquely palpable feel for their creator: “You have turned my dirge to a dance for me” (Ps 30.12); “he put in my mouth a new song” (Ps 40.4); ” Kindness (hesed) and justice I would sing/ to You O Lord, I would hymn./ I would study the way of the blameless” (Ps 101.1-2). Here and elsewhere “hymn” is an active verb, expressing a musico-cognitive dimension, as in Ps. 108 1: “My heart is firm, O God; Let me sing and hymn/ with my inward being too” (Ps 108.1); “Awake, O lyre/ Awake, O lute and lyre./ I would waken the dawn” (Ps 57.9).

Idolatry is reproved in a Psalm (115.4-7) that evokes all five senses, a full body scan: “Their idols are silver and gold,/ the handiwork of man/ A mouth they have but they do not speak./ eyes they have but they do not see./ Ears they have but they do not hear,/ a nose they have but they do not smell./ Their hands—but they do not feel;/ their feet, but they do not walk; they make no sound with their throat./ Like them may be those who make them,/ all who trust in them. Psalm 94.8-9 questions rhetorically “Who plants the ear, will He not hear?/ Who fashions the eye, will He not look?” The oft repeated prophetic appeal to “those who have ears to hear and eyes to see” references the real body experience of the senses, as probative, epistemic. There is nothing metaphysical about this. Conscious appeal to our sensory apparatus is systemic and thematic; a realism of the kind that will eventually it will show up in Western realist fiction.

Goethe writes somewhere that “beauty is a fundamental category:” it is not secondary or only an ornamental feature of human experience. It didn’t take 800 or 1800 years for that idea to become available. We find it in Plato, of course, along with the good and the true, but he notoriously fights shy of any emotional, affective involvement with it out of a well-grounded fear of mimetic contagion among the unenlightened (Lawtoo). Beauty’s emotional force is the work of the Psalms and the prophets, as especially available in Robert Alter’s translations. The Psalms of Praise (149, 150) enjoin musical accompaniment with a precise list of every instrument available; psalms of joy are psalms of enjoyment. Psalm 28 begins, “Lord, I love the beauty of your house/ the place where your glory dwells.” Exegetes tells us that it is referencing the Temple; but the Temple is destined as a resplendently small-scale model of all creation, whence its lush prescription in Torah. In ancient Israel, beauty is regularly dramatic, or scenic, to draw from a core theme of Generative Anthropology (Gans 1997).

The creation story in Genesis 1 is recognized as an anti-Babylonian polemic in the deliberately hymnal, celebratory narrative of the world’s coming into being without violence. Its deftly layered series of separations, with antiphonal divine approbation (“God saw that it was good”), is also a prototype of structural analysis (Brague), of taxonomy, of material creation as a system of differences. This resonates with the credo of every physicist, namely, that the material world exists, that it is orderly, and knowable—and “good,” according to its creator. The tale, or fable if you will (because it has a moral), ends with the human, which God said was “very good,” “supremely good” in some translations,” as made in God’s image. Whence Israel’s firstness in its prophetic claim of a universal religion, a call to “all the nations” that Paul will reprise as “the Israel of God.”

For all that Israel’s’ feasts fill out a cyclical calendar, scholars have acknowledged another first in the move from cyclical to linear time for a people motivated by the idea that they are going somewhere, which is what I mean by historical consciousness, whence the narratives of relapses and reforms. Now we know, if we know anything about history, that time accelerates like the spirals of Yeats’ gyre, such that technological innovation affording the luxuries of consumerism proceeds apace with the menace of environmental catastrophe. Speed is the nature of this historical spiral, from the invention of the wheel to jet-propelled annihilation in a matter of minutes.

This resolutely historical point of view is another “Jewish idea.” The ancient Greek and Roman historians have no notion of historical progression. Virgil is the pro-imperial exception, but no historian, and there is evidence of his recensions on the matter on imperial myth (Broch). For Herodotus, history is just one thing or another, indifferently; he mixes the factual and the fantastical. The same can be, and has been, said of the Bible (from Voltaire and Gibbon through D.H. Lawrence and Christopher Hitchens), but for the defining difference in songs and stories of a people whose averred destination is peace and justice, as we read, for example in Psalm 85.11-12: “Kindness and truth shall meet; justice and peace shall kiss./Truth shall spring out of the earth, and justice shall look down from heaven.” Without proposing a general rule, Thucydides is decidedly “décliniste” as he records the self-destruction of Athens: because they were winning against Sparta, they declined to negotiate a peace, and, like La Fontaine’s frog who blew himself up in his efforts to be as great as the bull, went off to conquer Sicily, where they lost an army and their autonomy thereafter.

Of more recent developments in this cycle, or rather spiral, I am reminded of Gladstone’s parsimonious two-point foreign policy imperatives: preserve the empire; don’t go to Afghanistan. Because the US was victorious in WWII, we went, in a cascade of failures, to Vietnam, to Afghanistan, to Iraq. Napoleon (who invented “total war”) and Hitler after him dominated all of Western Europe, so they went to Russia: sic transit vis imperiorum. The lessons of history are tragic proof against human ability to learn from its mistakes, from pathologies of obstacle-driven over-reach. That is the job of prophets and our own best writers: “Le monde va finir,” writes Baudelaire in his journal against the bourgeois myth of progress; and de Tocqueville warns against the blessings of modern equality in a way that speaks to our present crisis of difference:

Where are we then? The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and of intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true? (Democracy in America, Introduction)

In sum, by “realism” I mean, for example, that Don Quixote is crazy because thinks—desires to believe—windmills are giants; ancient Israel is not crazy when it argues that we don’t know ourselves as its god knows us, a view recapitulated by Rabbi Paul and Augustine before it was a model for literary masterpieces as a “discovery procedure” (Gans 1997), the discovery of the non-entity of a “self,” of one’s prior reliance on others’ modeling to direct its “own” desire. “The form is the content” (Gans 1997), the novel arising since Cervantes as the narrative of conversion that is discovered in time and space, in human interaction, “a more fundamental category than being” (Gans 1997). The experience of the novel as a work of art, an art object worthy of admiration, of enjoyment, as “beautiful,” is another example of ancient Israel’s firstness in its firm and coherent interlinking of beauty, truth, and goodness, to which the philosopher aspires dispassionately and so vainly, and which Jewish scriptures dramatize.

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When I began this little series of Chronicles, I hadn’t given any real thought to the interaction of the Jews and the Greeks as it played out in history, having simply taken for granted the synthesis of Hebrew and Greek elements in what must still be called Western Civilization. But given that by fate or coincidence this series brought us to the “holiday season” when, as rarely occurs, Christmas and Hanukkah began on the same day, I found that we could not avoid reflecting on this chronologically youngest of the Jewish festivals, which indeed concerns a real-world conflict between our two cultural “protagonists.”

For the Maccabees were fighting not against “antisemitism” but against a more insidious, if less ugly and violent, danger to the Jewish people’s continued existence: assimilation. And the “Greek” nature of this assimilation, as embodied by Antiochus IV’s invasion of Judaea, was no accident; as has remained the case throughout the history of Western civilization, the quasi-secular classical world, whose religious traditions are remembered and transmitted via the arts, and in particular through literature, a secularized form of sacred legend in which the individual reader/spectator’s sense of the sacred is appealed to not through accounts of human history but through fictions. Fictions are hypothetical models of human action that we “imitate” in our souls, and whose truth we experience—or not—according to the ability of the artist/narrator to create and transmit them, and ours to grasp and vicariously experience them, as significant, in the sense of providing believable and meaningful models of human behavior—which we are asked on the one hand to understand, that is, to mimetically “resonate” with, and on the other, to judge as to their agreement or disagreement with the sacred morality most simply formulated in Hillel’s Golden Rule.

No doubt the victory of the Maccabees was temporary, and the classical world of Greece, and then Rome, ultimately conquered and destroyed the Jewish polity, inaugurating for the Jews two millennia of “exile.” But Hanukkah, particularly after the (re)establishment of Israel in 1948, is a celebration of spiritual resistance that has confirmed and justified the Jews’ unflagging hope to return to their ancient homeland.

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It is worth pointing out at this preliminary stage that Judeo-Christian Western Culture, although founded spiritually on the two Testaments, is founded culturally on a corpus of European literature whose core is constituted by classical Greek and Latin texts. That Freud’s attempt to define the roots of the European psyche found his models in Greek mythology rather than in Biblical narratives seems so natural to us that we rarely reflect on why Oedipus strikes us as providing a clearer model of the tensions within this psyche than any Biblical character. This occurs precisely to the extent that he is indeed literary, providing for the reader/listener of his story a far stronger mimetic appeal than the personages of sacred history. For it was in Greece and not in Israel that sacred myth/legends were acted out rather than simply recited as sacred texts, that is, offered to their audience in a scenic context—one that, like the originary event, begins in medias res rather than, like the Bible, “in the beginning.”

For despite the appeal of “the Bible as literature,” the Bible really isn’t literature in the sense that the Greek tragedies and the Homeric epics are. It is very clear that when the stories of the personages of the Bible are adapted to literature—for instance, in films of Bible stories—it is as popularizations of sacred material not comparable in significance to the works of high culture, which first found their material in classical mythology and later in courtly and crusade adventures before finding it in the “realist” realm of ordinary life.

And thus it is that Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire, which lies at the root of generative anthropology, began with his study of the modern “realist” novel, in a world where the characters no longer have a predetermined social role but must make their way by finding and discarding models encountered in their process of maturation—a perspective that makes the Freudian categories rooted in myth appear somewhat archaic. Girard’s analyses show that modern literature is fundamentally an instrument of moral education with the intent to purge our “soul,” our repository of the sacred, of the mimetic desire that is ultimately unworthy of our fundamental intuition of human reciprocity, in contrast with classical literature’s focus on its protagonists’ ability to fulfill their predefined destiny in a world where the challenges of modernity have not reached the level of requiring the individual to work out his destiny for himself.

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The Iliad as a full-fledged literary masterpiece is no longer, like the Gilgamesh Epic, an allegory of the transition from the archaic to the Axial world; it already fully belongs to this world. But what then is it about Achilles that makes him a literary figure where David or Solomon is not? Achilles’ so-called founding “myth”—that he was dipped in the Styx and thus invulnerable except for the spot on his heel where his mother Thetis held him and prevented the protective water from reaching his skin—is an accretion posterior to Homer; it does not prevent him from embodying for us the Greek form of the key paradox of the human condition: the human resentment of the gods.

But Achilles’ resentment as expressed in the Iliad’s first word, menin, the objective case of menis, rage, is directed toward Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition, who has “pulled rank” to take for himself Achilles’ captive Briseis when he was forced to return his own captive because she was the daughter of a priest of Apollo. This rage leads Achilles to withdraw from battle, leading to a series of defeats for the Hellenic forces. This presence of resentment as an obstacle to social harmony in carrying out a common task, that is, as putting into question the viability of the social order and its hierarchy, may be seen as the beginning of literature per se, whose eternal theme is the management of mimetic desire within human society.

It is thus after Achilles’ transcendence of his resentful rage that the most moving and revelatory moment of the Iliad occurs. In the last of the 24 books, Achilles, reconciled with Priam after defeating his son Hector in battle, lets him have Hector’s body for the burial that concludes the poem. This moment of reconciliation is made possible by the transcendence of all human rivalries/resentments by that between the humans and the gods, which Achilles recognizes as simply the condition of our existence. As he puts it in lines 24.525-6:

Thus have the gods spun the thread for wretched mortals,     That they should live in pain; and themselves are sorrowless.

Here Achilles’ resentment of his hierarchical superior is shown both to reflect and be necessarily defeated by that of the more fundamental difference between mortal man and the immortal gods. In contrast, this potential of rivalry is “always already” transcended in monotheistic religion, and its “Faustian” re-emergence beginning in the Renaissance marks the transition from the neo-classical to the modern era. Unlike the Faustian, Achilles is not asserting a “right” to transcend this barrier, only deploring the condition of mortals in comparison to that of the gods, both groups being presented as comparably multiple categories of beings, in contrast with the one-many distinction between the One God who creates the world and the various populations of its inhabitants.

We should note the difference in thrust between Achilles’ statement and its closest equivalent in European literature, Gloucester’s lament in King Lear 4, 1:

Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

This affirmation, beyond bewailing our fate, attributes our mortality to the gods’ desire to kill us for their own amusement, an attribution that reduces them to our level. It is this potential flaw in the polytheistic system, invisible to the Greeks, that demonstrates the ontological superiority of monotheism, which clearly separates the will of the sacred from human desire. In this context, Gloucester’s “polytheistic” lament provokes in the audience not sympathy so much as our realization of his ontological error: human mortality must be borne and transcended; the sacred is not our rival but our providence, our source of meaningfulness. And by the same token, this passage figures the contrast between Greek and Jewish culture and its synthesis in Western civilization, in which the polytheistic configuration survives as the basic of secular literature that in fact embodies its own form of sacrality and is the object of its own kind of “worship.”

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To understand this broadening of the concept of sacrality, we must return to its origin in the abortion of the gesture of appropriation of the originary object. This is done not simply out of fear, but in response to our sense of the sacred that demands that we refuse to perturb the peace that reigns among those attracted by the object. When Hillel equated the whole Torah to his Golden Rule, he was pointing, in contrast with the modern version of his Rule that resets it as a positive formula for action, to its abortive function, as so to speak: “Abort whatever you think of doing that you wouldn’t want another to do to you.” In this respect, Hillel’s Rule may legitimately be called the first theorization of generative anthropology, reducing the sacred to its minimal moral component.

This obliges us to reflect upon the fact that this minimality, which corresponds to that of monotheism itself, is paradoxically incapable of becoming, in its originary “tribal” form, a “universal” religion that transcends the ethnic particularity of its origin. However clearly Hillel’s Rule applies to everyone equally, his understanding of it was as the essence of the Torah, one that implicitly required its prior study.

In other words, this minimal expression of the sacred could only be acquired as the distillation of the history of God’s creation as focused on the people of Israel. The sacred is supremely general and universally true, but its understanding requires knowledge of the specific history through which our understanding of it would be revealed at a historical moment when this understanding could in principle become universal—that is, through writing—a practice that had not been necessary for the original composition of its contents, but that was indispensable for its canonization as a document whose distribution among a largely literate population, as were the Hebrews at the time of the second Temple, insured the reproducible permanence of its canonical form.

This configuration contrasts the simplicity of the sacred intuition with the complex process by which it is instilled and maintained as the implicit foundation of the Hebrew religion. The 613 mitzvoth are no more than instruments in the process of implanting and reinforcing the Golden Rule. But they are not thereby of secondary importance, for they are the means of maintaining the cohesion of the Hebrew/Jewish community, all the more important throughout the period of exile. Whence, as we have already observed, the inappropriateness of the Hebrew/Jewish religion, despite its underlying simplicity, for the role of world-religion taken on by Christianity and then by Islam.

The return of the Jews to Israel/”Palestine” is perhaps the best demonstration in the history of the West of the persistence of sacred in contrast to secular projects. One has only to recall the line from Israel’s national anthem Hatikva (The Hope): Hatikva bat schnot alpayim—the hope is (lit.) the daughter of two thousand years—to appreciate in what sense a people can be defined by the paradoxical connection between the universal One God and its historical implantation in the land where the idea of Him was forged.

And similarly, the deep hatred of the Palestinian jihadists for the Jews, as demonstrated in their exhibition of sadism on October 7, 2023, demonstrates that this Jewish sacred is no illusion of a people that imagines itself as “chosen.” Several centuries after the Christian construction of a “transcendence” of Judaism that opposed a new/modern time (the one we still use for our calendars) to an ancient one—a form of transcendence that, when the dust seemed to have settled, allowed a Pope to call the Jews Christianity’s “elder brothers”—there was still a position to be taken in the Abrahamic dialectic: that filled by Islam, for which the Jews had crudely anticipated the definitive revelation that would be given to Muhammad. Thus they, like the Christians, were deemed worthy of not being summarily forced to choose between death and conversion, yet obliged as dhimmis to pay a fine (jizya) for their failure to recognize the true religion.

But since the establishment of Israel, all bets are off: “Palestine,” with Jerusalem as its capital, has become the eternal abode of its Muslim Arabs; the Ashkenazi founders of Israel are Khazars, Turkic nomads unrelated to the original Hebrews, while the Mizrachi Jews who had remained in the area but were expelled from the Islamic lands on the founding of Israel (where they now reside) are assimilated to “settler-colonizers.”

Fundamentalist Islam cannot be content merely with punctual miracles, such as Christians affirm in defining their faith by the Virgin Birth, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, but denies transpersonal historical realities that can be confirmed by countless facts of public knowledge—such as the “so-called” Holocaust.

Of course, as sacred matters go, if Judaism denies objective reality only in the mode of legend, which at the time the Torah was composed—centuries before the Greek historians—was the accepted way to describe historical phenomena; and Christianity adds an element of what Tertullian called the “absurd,” confined to a few specific cases, the only possible third position in the dialectic is the outright denial of the well-attested historical facts that establish the historical priority of Judaism among the Abrahamic religions. In Islam, the religion-founding ontology that allows for revelations of the sacred in daily life, however contrary to normal possibilities, reverts from the historical present of the New to the “legendary” style of the Old Testament to emphasize the Quran’s claim to originarity, not as a supplement to the latter, but as a perfect revelation meant to replace it.

Yet it is unfair to take the wholesale denial of Hillel’s Golden Rule that we find in today’s radical Islam as proof of the religion’s unworthiness to represent the Abrahamic tradition. The post-colonial era has encouraged a form of Islam dominated by resentment of the Christian West, a resentment that has focused, now that the colonial era is past, on the “scandal” of Israel’s renascence as a Jewish state whose European origins allow for its facile assimilation to a creation of “settler colonialism.” And no doubt Islam has from the outset thrived as the religion of Western civilization’s outsiders, whose faith is demonstrated by their willingness to give up their lives in battle in witness of its truth, often with the dehumanizing cruelty displayed in the October 7 pogrom.

Nonetheless, the success of the first Trump administration in developing the Abraham Accords and the promise of their expansion under Trump II demonstrates the feasibility of fraternal relations with Muslim nations from which both sides can benefit—most importantly in weakening throughout the West the force of the epistemology of resentment, for which Israel’s current struggle with Islamism has shown itself to be an ideal stimulant.

In the perspective that sees the three Abrahamic religions as the definitive configuration of the Western sacred, the ultimately dehumanizing insistence on absolute loyalty to the community of faith (the Umma) that provoked the 10/7 pogrom should be seen not as the essence of Islam, but as a sign of its never-fully-transcended sense of marginality with respect to the established cultures it first opposed (and largely conquered), a marginality powerfully renewed by European colonialism and even more radically by the (re)creation of Israel as a reassertion of Hebrew/Jewish firstness, to which Islam has “instinctively” reacted with violence as did the original followers of Muhammad. The second Trump administration should have a strongly dampening effect on this atavistic mode of Islam, which will no longer be left free to evolve in the direction of nihilism, as illustrated by the genocidal threats and boasts of the theocratic leadership in Iran.

And if we see this nihilistic faith in its crudest form in jihadi Islam, we must observe that the Western-originated “Marxist” principle that has ruled the “socialist” dictatorships of China, North Korea, Cambodia, et al, and that lacks any reference to the sacred, is little different. Gulags, concentration camps, slave labor, gas chambers… are imposed without any consideration of the Golden Rule; but most important, they reject even the safety valve of conversion that in principle remains possible in Islam until the very end, demonstrating thereby its ultimate unwillingness to deny the Golden Rule. Indeed, the kind of dictator-worship most clearly exemplified by North Korea’s quasi-deification of the Kim dynasty suggests that its model, rather than any of the Abrahamic religions, is pre-Axial king-worship. In other words, the mode of sacrality that drives these “revolutionary” systems is one of an atavistic sacred  irreconcilable with Hillel’s principle, since as the term “revolution(ary)” implies, it is focused not on fraternal interaction with its other but on its destruction.

Thus where Islam’s tertiary outsider relationship to the earlier Abrahamic religions has always remained open in principle to the familial reconciliation already in progress between its “elder brothers,” revolutionary “Marxist” atheism erects a secular pseudo-sacred for which the shared humanity that links the societies under its domination to those of non-believers has no value. The virtual universality of the Umma, which in principle permits all to participate through submission (Islam) to its conception of the sacred, does not exist in it; indeed, the very notion of “fellow humans” has no meaning in this doctrine. And if the atrocities of Islam enact features of the religion that, while hardly peripheral, do not belong to its central core, to put it most simply, revolutionary dictatorships recognize no dhimmi status.

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Today when the Western world as a whole is no longer in thrall to Communism in its various forms—as had remained the case for many peoples until the dissolution of the USSR—this nominally post-religious but in reality pre-modern form of sacrality appears to us, whatever our attitude toward religious belief and/or practice, as more alien than any form of such belief, as well as than the simple denial of the sacred that we call atheism. For in any of these cases, we can still understand as fundamental the universality of the Golden Rule, whereas in the Marxist/Communist world, certain classes and their characteristic modes of exchange with their fellows are by their very nature incompatible with the laws of human interaction, and consequently beyond the pale of human reciprocity.

For the source of the sacred as experienced reality is the individual soul; the reciprocity of the Golden Rule is not a “law” we must be taught, but an intuition that we can and must cultivate, because its seed is “always already” within every human being. In contrast, the “golden rule” of Communism, expressed in the Communist Manifesto as “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” is based on factors that we have no way of determining directly: what are your abilities, what are your needs? Only the apparatus of the socialist state can make such judgments, which are consequently inaccessible to an intuition that recalls to us the originary deferral of appropriative action and its transformation into a sign.

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In the final analysis, our faithfulness to this fundamental intuition is the minimal core of the sacred that defines us as human, and that defines our modes of social organization as humane. Whatever denies the universal brotherhood of humanity is anthropologically incoherent and morally unsustainable. We can grasp this basic idea outside of organized religion, but not without recognizing the universality of the sacred, even if we prefer to call it by another name. And in the absence of this recognition, the only alternative to the dictator-worship that we find in China and North Korea is the cynical mafia-like organization of Russia—which itself is not without its peripheral dependency on Orthodox Christianity, as the Mafia was on the Catholic Church.

In response to the recent renascence of antisemitism, a number of analysts have made the point that the United States is not simply a Christian nation but a Judeo-Christian one, founded on a Protestantism that, in contrast with Catholicism, emphasizes the covenantal aspect of the nation’s founding. Which is to say that American Protestantism is more conscious than European of the Old Testament’s focus on the creation of a nation that, unlike the other nations of the world, was founded as the home of a new people, one not defined by blood ties but, on the analogy of the newness of Hebrew monotheism, by adherence to the values affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, as the Hebrew nation was consecrated to the Ten Commandments.

It is surely a sad irony that the inspiration for the quasi-pogroms that have dotted our own landscape, although far less violent than those we have seen in Europe and of course in the Middle East, is an importation from this original Hebrew homeland, whose Palestinian inhabitants have infused a sense of purpose into anti-Zionist demonstrations, as well, by extension, from a Europe that so far has done little to belie the Islamist vision of “Eurabia” (Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye’Or: UNKNO, 2005), or indeed that of Houellebecq’s 2015 Soumission, which ends with France under the control of Islam. Yet for the moment, this threat remains virtual rather than real, putting to the test the residual energy of the Westphalian national system, which shows itself increasingly challenged in Europe (not to speak of Africa, Latin America…) in the face not only of Islamist jihad but of the empire-building tendencies of Chinese communism on the one hand and Russian neo-imperialism on the other.

This raises the question of the place of the American mode of statehood and its continuing potential to serve as a model for the other nations of the world. Trump’s victory at a time when many had feared the worst has demonstrated once more the resilience of the American polity. Indeed, the very names of our two major parties, a configuration not far from two centuries old, reflect not merely the tension between democracy and republicanism, but also their ability to interact and indeed work together without either absorbing the other. This is an ability largely lacking in the European parties, whatever their names, whose division between “left” and “right,” as figured by the 1789 Assemblée Nationale, lacks the organic connection that our two parties, however mutually hostile they may at times become, will always share. Just as the failure of French President Macron’s first attempt at a center coalition opposed to both Left and Right extremes was just demonstrated by the latter’s joint decision to join forces, however much they detest each other, to bring down his attempted center-right government.

In this perspective, Trump’s victory should not be seen as simply a triumph over the Democrats, but as providing them with a lesson to rethink their policies in the spirit of American democracy, which cannot continue to descend into the demagogy that the recent excesses of Wokism have so clearly manifested. Indeed, the Democrats’ decision to replace Biden, even if they had no choice other than his embarrassingly untalented vice-president, reflects their tacit recognition that Biden himself was chosen for no personal talents other than being a familiar figure who was not-Trump, and that in descending from a party of popular democracy to a party of racial demagogy, the Democrats were in effect declaring their bankruptcy. The failure of this decision provides a tacit avowal of their need to sever their ties with the radical Left and become once more the party of Roosevelt and Truman—which may take a little while!

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It is far too early to start cheering, but Trump, for all his “unprofessional” style, is a true political leader whose instincts have served both him and the country well. I was encouraged to note in reading the December (post-election) issue of Commentary that the supercilious tone remarked on in Chronicle 810 is scarcely apparent. Indeed, Trump’s faith in what we can only call his genius has been borne out.

Some geniuses “fit in,” but the hallmark of the genre is their ability to have faith in themselves when (almost) everyone else thinks of them as figures of fun, or simply as “playing out of their league.” This often implies committing a certain number of tactical errors that others interpret as displays of arrogance, as though retaining faith in one’s gut intuitions—in what is, for any individual, his sense of the sacred—were a blasphemy against authority and thus ultimately against the One God. But on the contrary, such “arrogance” is the sign of faith unsupported by external corroboration—the only real sense of “faith”—without which no greatness is possible.

Our attribution of this sense of self-confidence to God is not in fact a gesture of self-abnegating humility, but one of accepting that what I find in myself is not my own creation, but that of the human in general and my particular formation within it in particular. To be thus “chosen” to embody a new insight into human reality is a privilege that the individual must consider not as placing him above his fellows but rather in their service, obliged to make the best gift possible of this insight to his people and ultimately to humanity—which, as we should remember, was born with the first différance, the first renunciation of an act for oneself that became a sign for others to share.

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In WWII, Roosevelt was obliged by the urgency of the Japanese conquest of the Pacific to put together a group of industrialists and scientists who would reward his faith in the American polity and secure victory in the wake of the humiliating setback at Pearl Harbor. Trump’s task is not of this degree of urgency, but it is nonetheless comparable, in that several generations without major conflict—and without the military draft—have dulled our sense of danger. The 23 years that separated 1918 from 1941 bear no comparison to the 79 years that separate us from 1945, or even the 51 from the end of the Vietnam conflict that last involved American conscript troops. Trump’s inclusion in his cabinet of Elon Musk, the Edison/Ford of our era, is a sign that he recognizes the urgency of this new era of conflict, one that does not oppose us to foes as formidable as the Axis powers, but that possesses a worldwide dimension that the Atlantic-Pacific element of WWII only hinted at.

One must say on behalf of the Islamists/jihadists that, like the Nazis (and Communists) before them, they have been willing to put their lives on the line for their cruel beliefs at a time when decadent Westerners are wasting their emotions on victimary thinking. But whether or not this is the “final conflict” predicted by the Internationale—and all of history is there to tell us that it is not—we cannot get past it by seeking compromises and blaming the nation of our elder brothers for the shamefully inappropriate crime of genocide.

With every passing year, the genius of Churchill’s WSWEATO** definition­ of the democratic-republican free-market system, which we might just as well call “capitalism,” becomes a bit clearer: it is surely messy, but in the end it gets things done, because it maximally realizes, far more than any top-down system that purports to do so, the Communist Manifesto‘s promise of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” with neither a gulag nor a Nomenklatura—no doubt imperfectly, but as the man said… And we must recognize that, at least so far, the USA has been the one nation that, however imperfectly, has best maintained the spirit of this system, economically as well as politically.

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The sudden collapse of Assad’s Syrian regime appears to be the penultimate stroke before the disintegration of the Iranian “empire” in the Middle-East, from which just over a year ago a vicious pogrom was launched in the hope of bringing down the Jewish state. Given the lack of popular support for the mullahs’ regime on the one hand and its minority Shia base on the other, it is curious that it was Iran that led the consortium of jihadists against Israel. Yet, not long ago, voices were heard suggesting that we, and presumably the Israelis as well, should defend Assad against the regime’s enemies in an effort to improve relations with Russia, his other chief sponsor. And now that both Russia and Iran have demonstrated their weakness, and Trump has wisely declared that the US will not get involved in Syria’s internal affairs, we might wonder how the consequent bolstering of Turkey’s own imperial ambitions along with those of the Sunni jihadists will pan out. But the fact remains that the sequence of events initiated with the vicious pogrom on October 7 of last year has demonstrated, to the surprise and relief of many, Israel’s ability to decisively defeat its enemies and thereby demonstrate its standing as the “strong horse” in its corner of the world.

Can the recent surge of antisemitism survive such a demonstration of Jewish power? Not, I think, if the US, as it will presumably under Trump, stands firmly beside it. Israel has no territorial ambitions beyond the “west Bank” areas inhabited mostly by the Palestinians and a few strategic points such as the Golan Heights and now Mount Hermon. If the end of the Gaza war can be—as is far from certain—the beginning of the end for the current spate of neo-jihadism, there is no a priori reason why a gradual emancipation of these territories cannot eventually lead to the creation of a Palestinian state as not an enemy but a partner to Israel.

Indeed, if the display of Israeli power and ingenuity that 10/7 aroused can eventually convince all its neighbors that the Jewish state is there to stay, not as an enemy but as a helpful neighbor, the Middle East has the potential of evolving into a new area of growth and international cooperation that can serve as a model for our gradually emerging global society. If the Abrahamic religions can truly come to see each other as “brothers,” anything is possible.

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**Worst System With the Exception of All The Others

No doubt there are varieties of Christianity, such as Unitarianism, that reject the miraculous element in the Trinitarian church, considering Jesus merely as an exemplary human being and denying the Resurrection. But these varieties have never in any sense replaced the original; they reflect the tension between Christianity’s native Tertullianism and the Enlightenment. It seems obvious that the central focus of the Trinity, Jesus’ role as the Son, is not merely an integral part but the very core of Christianity—in other words, that Tertullian’s vision cannot realistically be denied.

Indeed, when it comes to minimalism, Judaism is a far better candidate, since God’s human-like activities all belong to the past, so that belief in Hashem takes place in a world where we have no reason to expect him to intervene even verbally. Thus the sole significant difference between the Hebrew One God and what GA calls simply “the sacred” is defined by His “historical” role in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible, and what taking this role as historical truth entails—the object of the rabbinate’s infinite rereading of the text and its commentaries. Where Christian fundamentalists had difficulty accepting Darwin’s theory insofar as it contradicted the text of Genesis, Judaism accepts our experience of historical reality as in effect an interpretation of the Biblical text, unbound by narrow literalism. In contrast, for Christianity to abandon the “absurdity” of God’s actions by denying the Resurrection would be to destroy its fundamental connection to the sacred; if Jesus is merely an “exemplary” human, then Christianity is a moral doctrine like Stoicism, and its rites are merely the equivalent of historical commemorations. To deny God’s ability to realize and demonstrate the truth of the Trinity would be the equivalent of denying his creation in Genesis I.

Whereas the other miracles of the New Testament are of the same kind as those of the Old: “absurdities” that do not profoundly trouble our common-sense ontology and that are of the same type as the miraculous events in fairy tales, the Resurrection is of another kind altogether. Jesus’ human suffering on the Cross is depicted as real, and we must identify with him in the horror of his agony. Yet he has promised eternal life to his disciples: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die…” (John 11:25-26). Whence his appearances to his disciples subsequent to the discovery of the empty tomb, in which he makes clear he has returned to life, confirm, not that he has escaped death, but that he has died and subsequently returned to Earth in his “eternal” form, as his believers had been told they too would be.

Indeed, the minimal difference between the Jewish and the Christian attitudes to the sacred is this Christian insistence on the persistence of the miraculous. The New Testament was written in the context of Jesus’ life in the present time, and the Church’s insistence that miracles still occur prolongs—as does our calendar—this presentness indefinitely into the human future. In Judaism, rabbis and scholars can argue about the afterlife, but there are no affirmations of the persistence of the miraculous in our times.

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The notion of “eternal life,” as promised by Jesus to his believers, is an essential element of Christianity, in contrast to Judaism, precisely because Christianity has no “people” of its own; all are welcome to become Christians, but Christendom is neither a people like the Jews nor an Umma like the potentially world-encompassing community of Muslims. As Jesus repeats his sacrifice regularly in the Eucharist, the faithful receive the renewed promise of the above-quoted verses as individuals.

And it is no accident that arguably the greatest masterpiece of medieval literature is Dante’s Commedia, which conforms to the Catholic understanding of the afterlife as the perpetuation of individual souls. The perpetuation of the “tribe” through the generations that is the focus of Jewish ritual, and that becomes in Islam the promise of the world-wide extension of the Umma, is rejected in favor of the persistence of the individual soul in communion with The Son.

It is no accident that, just as the richness of individuality we find in the Commedia is no longer conceivable in the modern nation-states of Europe, so European Christianity itself is increasingly more a historic glory than a lived reality. The rejected suggestion that the reopened Notre Dame de Paris charge tourists for entry is a sad recognition that Notre Dame has become more a national monument to visit than a cathedral in which to perform one’s devotions. The increasing religious dominance of Islam in Europe reflects the energy that post-colonial resentment has added to its promise of world conquest, that is, as an Umma. In this respect, the Jews reunited after their millennial dispersal increasingly view Israel as the Umma’s inverse image; not a product of world-conquest, but simply their own little country—yet one that (necessarily, one might say) includes a piece of the Muslim Waqf, where the two concepts of peoplehood come into open conflict.

And however much the Islamists believe in their paradise and 72 virgins, the real stimulus to their faith unto death is indeed the dream of achieving their goal of world conquest. Whereas the Jews would be happy simply to possess Israel without the surrounding hostility—and will fight to the death to preserve it. Indeed, the infuriating realization that, however modestly, the Jews have in fact already satisfied their territorial dream is no doubt the most powerful stimulus to Islamist Jew-hatred. For is it not a point of humiliation that the Jews now occupy their historical homeland, having remained after all these millennia a single people, so that in consequence, the atavistic dream of Islamic conquest has revealed itself as more a response to the creation of Israel than an authentic project?

Hence the Palestinian Arabs are presented as a separate nationality by both the Christian West and the Islamic East as a symbol of Islam’s dissatisfaction, not so much at not having conquered the world, but at seeing the Jews returned to the homeland that Islamism refuses in any way to recognize—naming al-masjid al-aqsa (the farther—i.e., from Mecca—place of worship) the very location of the two Hebrew Temples, and outraged at its possible contact with the Jews’ “filthy feet.”  As Girard knew so well, mimetic desire is an endless source of ironies.

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The above leads me to the following unsettling thought:

At the time of Israel’s creation, the cliché was that, now that the Jews had finally returned to their ancient homeland, they would become just like all other nations, their différance having been their existence in exile and their need to define themselves as a people in other people’s lands. But the truth is exactly the opposite. While the Jews were in the Galut, people had as an excuse for disliking them that— particularly in an era when, considering that most of the population was attached to the land, nations were composed of reasonably stable mixtures of peoples—they were different, and at the very least could not simply be included in local social groups. Unless they converted, the Jews could not intermarry with their host populations, and so even forgetting about their elder-brother “Firstness,” wherever they lived, even in what had formerly been their homeland, they were in the scapegoatable position of quasi-outsiders.

But now that they have a homeland in Israel, after being obliged to defeat the armies of neighboring countries, and now that they have become a power on the world stage to match their intellectual achievements…

                 …the reasons to hate the Jews have only multiplied. Bringing together their European heritage plus that of the Mizrachi Jews expelled from the neighboring countries, they have shown the Muslims (and Christians) of these nations how much more skillful they have been in dealing with the tools of modernity. And their very insistence on granting the Muslim and Christian Arabs equal rights is just one more humiliation, if not for these Israeli Arabs themselves, then for those of the surrounding countries, who are forced to see these ethnic brothers and sisters in far more prestigious and wealthy conditions than themselves, a situation to which their rulers can only respond by urging on them the opposite of the “positive mimesis” that would lead them to emulate these lucky souls.

In a word, after gloating for 2000 years that the Jews are cursed and “wandering,” their neighbors now have had to face the fact that, as a people (despite their comically awkward political life—for as they say, where there are two Jews, and even more so, Israelis, there are at least three views), the Jews are pound for pound the most successful of all, if only because they have constantly been winnowed by the crudest form of Darwinian selection: that exercised by their fellow humans.

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Thus the antisemitism we are witnessing today throughout Europe and in some areas of the US, especially on university campuses, is all too clearly founded more directly on simple resentment than on the old complex of supersessionism and scapegoating. The Jews are not being blamed for the latest plague, but simply for defending themselves against barbarous violence. Finding reasons to accuse them of “genocide” is so transparent an inversion that it points to a quasi-hysterical state of dissatisfaction, particularly in a Europe whose inhabitants prefer to view their increasing fear of Muslim self-assertion not as submission (the translation of Islam, as well as the title of Houellebecq’s possibly prophetic novel—Soumission—about France’s takeover by Muslims) but as a sign of their generosity to the victims of Jewish “genocide.”

Thus after the entirely mythical medieval “blood libel” accusing the Jews of crimes they never committed, Israel’s current Gaza military operation is truly a godsend; the Jews are actually killing people! So that, forgetting about the jihadists who beheaded Samuel Paty and shot up the Bataclan and the Charlie Hebdo office a few years ago, the Europeans can identify with the victimary Palestinians whose body-counts are calculated by Hamas itself in accusing the Jews of “genocide”—as if to demonstrate that Hitler was only wisely anticipating the horrors the Jews themselves would have perpetrated generations earlier had they had the chance.

In contrast to the old antisemitism, this new variety is virtually unconnected to the experiences of daily life. It’s not the memories of the Jewish tailor down the street who made the pants too long or the moneylender who charged too much interest, but the images in the paper and on TV of suffering Palestinians that provoke this new variety, not to be sure in the majority of the population, but in enough malcontents to comfort radicalized Muslim immigrants in their quasi-pogroms. No doubt the Amsterdam “pogrom” was hardly comparable to Kristallnacht, but its spirit was there—along with the authorities’ refusal to protect the Jews that has been witnessed in a number of other street incidents, including those on American and now British and other European university grounds.

Is this refusal motivated by European hatred of the Jews? I think rather by the confused and uneasy desire to be “nice” to these potentially dangerous immigrants, whose Jew-hatred one does not share directly, but is willing to accept at second hand, in contrast to the Jews whose very peacefulness can be seen as an attempt to obscure the cause of their assailants’ anger: a combination of cowardice and self-justification that makes it easy to choose sides.

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After Trump’s return to the presidency, with the US firmly in the Zionist camp, things will surely be different from the Obama-Biden years, and America’s strong support of Israel will make her allies’ quasi-neutrality much harder to maintain. How this will mesh with Trump’s desire not to become involved in foreign conflicts is impossible to predict with certainty. As David Wurmser makes clear in his many-layered analysis for the Jewish National Syndicate  https://www.jns.org/reflections-on-the-outlandish-navigating-the-strategic-earthquake-in-the-fertile-crescent/ , there are many players in the Middle East, and Trump’s presidency, following up on Israel’s aggressive self-defense, makes any confident prediction of coming developments impossible to gauge. But it is precisely in such situations that a strong sense of moral judgment and the courage to stand up for it are most valuable. The US is still the world’s greatest power—when it is willing to assert itself.

Whether this will lead to peace or a worldwide revolt against American power along with that of its Israeli ally is unclear. But of one thing we can be sure: antisemitism, Jew-hatred, is not now and may never be ready to disappear. Now that the West is beset by White Guilt, it finds it hard indeed to resist the temptation to choose as scapegoats for that guilt the still-surviving members of the people who, in however diplomatic a fashion, cannot cease to remind their fellows that they are the biological and cultural heirs of the creators of Western civilization’s conception of the sacred—its “chosen people,” to coin a phrase.

Thanksgiving Day 2024 offers a most appropriate occasion to express my relief at Donald Trump’s solid victory and the Republican capture of both houses of Congress. The Obama-inspired “leading from behind” in international affairs, coupled with its pro-Iranian bias and its promotion of the victimary extremes of Wokism, could not have continued for another presidential term without disastrous consequences. And so this year’s result turned out to be one more confirmation of Winston Churchill’s judgment of Western republican/democracy as “the worst system in the world except for all the others” (WSWEATO), operating just when we needed to shift our course before going over a cliff.

I had originally thought of Nikki Haley as the best candidate for 2024, and I’m sure she would have made a fine president, but particularly after his narrow escape from the poorly defended attempt on his life, it became obvious that Trump was the only appropriate candidate for the Republican Party. Charisma combines the three qualities of greatness in Shakespeare’s famous line from Twelfth Night: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” In Trump’s case, all three criteria were at work, but having one’s ear pierced by an assassin’s bullet does quite a bit of thrusting.

Indeed, perhaps the simplest way to understand the proliferation of démocratures in our era is its capture, not by charismatic leaders like Hitler or Mao, but by tyrannical political institutions, Communist or similar party apparatuses powerful enough to imprison and kill any charismatic opponents, such as the late Andrei Navalny.

In a truly democratic system, as the USA still is in a pinch, such institutional oppression, as we have been fortunate to discover, is still impossible in the long term. Reaffirming this proof, even more than electing Trump, was the greatest gift given us by his election; a country that could be influenced and/or cheated into electing his opponent in this critical time truly risked passing the point of no return.

Trump’s reversal of the Democrats’ century-long domination of the “working class” put an end to the increasingly false opposition between the Democratic “party of the people” and the Republican “party of the privileged” that the Roosevelt era had made credible, and of which Truman’s victory over Dewey in 1948 seemed the perfect demonstration. Today’s Democrats represent not only the federal bureaucracy (the Swamp) but the Wokeness-infested degree-holders and their corporate masters, for whom support for “intersectional” minorities from blacks to transgenders offers the opportunity to eat away from the safety of their gated homes at the traditionally self-policing fabric of daily life.

The surfeit of virtue-signaling and DEI-mongering that offers benefits to minorities at the price of defining them as victims had reached caricatural proportions; trans-men, almost always with their genitals intact, winning women’s swim meets, races, volleyball games, even boxing matches (at the price of injuries), are anything but a demonstration of true egalitarianism. Wokeness, as I have previously pointed out, is an extreme development of the epistemology of resentment in which one “takes the part” of the “oppressed” in order to reaffirm one’s own privileges through Tartuffian virtue-signaling.

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But this is describing the past; what does Trump’s victory herald for the future?

What leftists hate about Trump is, one might say, his TRiUMPhalism, his refusal to pretend to mask his superior qualities in false humility. For in general, the left praises victimary self-affirmation in preference to the heroic performance of humanitarian deeds—making an example of a transgendered person for courageously “coming out” rather than of the fireman or soldier for saving lives at the risk of his own. Ultimately in the world of Wokeness, all rights belong to the victimary class and its defenders—whose own personal advantages thereby lose any need for justification.

The intensity of the barrage of publicity for this position, given the unanimity of the mass media—all the more sinister because not imposed from above—had seemed to equate it with common sense. Thus the fact that the “democratic process” was able to overcome this unanimous propaganda backed by billions of dollars and decades of public prestige offered a much-needed demonstration that “government by, for, and of the people” is still the WSWEATO—or more simply, that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

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Whether or not he is really the world’s richest man, Elon Musk is clearly the unrivaled leader of tech entrepreneurs. Getting that rocket back in the tower on the launchpad was an achievement that had escaped NASA and its governmental competitors. However much the new DOGE headed by Musk and Ramaswamy will be able to thin out the Washington bureaucracy, the fact that private enterprise still shows itself to be more inventive than government agencies is one more demonstration that our “capitalist” system is superior to its various authoritarian competitors.

And Trump’s victory should serve to remind us that, aside from making life far more livable than any of these authoritarian systems, “capitalism,” and by extension, Western civilization, is still the WSWEATO on the economic and potentially the military front as well, provided we don’t allow ourselves to get soft and fancy that we can pusillanimously substitute words for actions.

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At this point, concerning the election, no more need be said. One can speculate on future events, but the bottom line is that, having learned with relief that our system’s temporary corruption was not a permanent decadence, we can now let the political process continue on its way without burdening it with our words of wisdom. GA may explain better than before how language and the sacred came about, but it cannot predict the future, beyond expressing its confidence in our system and the administration it has voted into office.

Since the three revolutions at the end of the 18^th century, industrial, American and French, ushered in the birth of the modern era, the West has dominated every aspect of world culture. To the point where any contestation of this dominance can only be attempted through the use of weapons, whether economic, political, or military, whose scientific and technological basis evolved first in Western Europe and North America.

It is easy to see the connection between the analytic thinking of the pre-Socratics and the later developments of mathematics and empirical science. But the spiritual basis of Western culture, its “Abrahamic” heritage, is, unlike its political-intellectual Greek heritage, riven by discord, as is borne out by the contrast between the two “younger brother” religions’ perennially emergent hatred of the first-born Jews, as opposed to the universal respect for and emotional indifference to the Greeks.

At this moment of the West’s civilizational crisis, it is important that we understand the connection between these two key elements of Western Culture’s success, if only to be able to evaluate the relationship of this crisis to what Oswald Spengler called the West’s Untergang.

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From the standpoint of GA, as I have tried to make clear since A New Way of Thinking (Aurora, Colo.: The Davies Group, 2011), the “original sin” of philosophy is its metaphysical nature, which I define simply by reference to Plato’s myth of the cave in the Republic: the principle of metaphysics is that the language of thought is not the product of the interactions of the human community, but the result of our reflection on Ideas that preexisted their human discovery.

This understanding is parallel to our intuition with respect to the realities of nature, which are clearly understood as existing independently of human perception, and which we discover rather than invent, so that our “ideas” of them (cows, trees, planets) are the products of this discovery. Yet it misses the very core of language, which is the fact that we have “ideas” at all. Animals can be said to discover worldly realities in the same way as humans, and may be said to retain a trace in their brains that corresponds to what for us is an idea. But what is missing in this comparison is a grasp of the difference between a human word and an animal’s mental “image,” which differs from it not in its worldly referent, but in its participation as an element of the human scene of language.

In contradiction to Plato’s myth, the Ideas that appear on the walls of the cave—and in my view this applies even to the fundamental concepts of logic and mathematics—cannot be separated from the (human) scene on which we exchange them. Metaphysics, as  philosophers began increasingly to note and find problematic from Descartes on, and certainly after 1848, has been increasingly experienced as a fetishization of these ideas, which is to say, as treating the existence of a word such as Being/Sein/Etre as implying some non-linguistic objective reality that it is our aim to grasp in its “essence.” Indeed Heidegger’s fame can be said to derive largely from the insistence with which he maintained in our “existential” era the mystique of a philosophical essence, a metaphysic, such that Sein or Denken (and even a sememe like Fug) were considered worthy of meditations that were never presented as focused on human experience but on a mysterious prior ground—in a word, in an unavowed mode of sacrality.

We should always refer such claims to Roy Rappaport’s insistence that language and the sacred (or “religion”) are coeval, that one cannot exist without the other. It is no accident that the mystery that we discover in Plato’s cave, and of which Heidegger may be seen as the last true believer, necessarily evokes in us a sense of embodied sacrality, or divinity—in Plato’s myth, the god who projects the idea’s shadows on the walls. Save that Plato assigns this meta-physical reality to a predefined sacred domain, whereas metaphysics focuses not on the divine source of the Ideas but on the “substance” referred to by their written/verbal signs. Thus if we would truly be anthropologists, we must reject this metaphysical ontology as a violation of Ockham’s razor, and do away with the “realm of Ideas” as something distinct from the human community and its scene of language/representation on which these ideas/concepts/signifieds are manifested.

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But this being said, there is no doubt that the tension between this metaphysical Greek heritage and our Hebrew one, in which all things emanate from God, far from being a weakness, has been arguably  the core of the strength of our civilization, permitting a fruitful dialectic that led to world domination. And what I would call the anthropological critique of the Greek sacralization of the Ideas does not apply to the Hebrew sacralization of the universe as a whole.

Indeed, what the Hebrew-Greek tension reveals is the relative weakness of the Greek sense of the sacred. Polytheism, which we see today as more a literary than a religious mode, was by the time of the “Greek miracle” already moving in this direction. Polytheistic systems originated through syncretism, whose point was to reconcile the gods of different social groups—the primitive form of which was the totem feast in which the tribe as a whole would partake of the totem animals of its various clans. Such Pantheons could not be maintained in a world in which written communications had become sharable among different societies. Socrates was put to death for violating the Athenians’ sense of religious propriety, in effect, for blasphemy, but it was already clear by his time, for example from the plays of Aristophanes, that the gods had become figures more literary than sacral.

In contrast, Hebrew monotheism solved the problem of the multiplication of the gods by denying multiplicity altogether: the sacred was one, for all humanity, and must be understood as embodied in One God. That many passages of the Torah use the plural Elohim rather than YHVH should not be taken as a sign of confusion or tension, but rather as proof that the plural term had already been assimilated to the singular one; the older texts were retained out of respect for their original composers rather than as a sign of hesitation between God’s plurality or singularity.

The whole point of monotheism is not choosing between many gods or one god, but realizing that the sacred, in however many different ways it may manifest itself, is essentially one thing: the sense that there are certain potentially pleasurable acts that are forbidden, are wrong not just because I feel they are, but because my human community realizes they are wrong, which is to say, are incompatible with the welfare and survival of this community.

Attributing these moral sentiments to the dictates of different gods in different branches of life is mistaking the need for different rules in different circumstances for a demonstration that these rules are the products of different legislators. Hillel’s golden rule:

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow! That is the whole Torah; the rest is interpretation.

is the ultimate distillation of monotheism. God is not telling you mysterious truths that you could never fathom by yourself; God is conceived as telling us these things because they are the substance of the sacred that permitted us to conceive him in the first place.

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The foregoing suggests that the greatness of Western civilization has lain in its superior grasp of the distinction between the spiritual-human and natural worlds: the latter, to be understood through empirical openness to our observations and the cultivation of the tools, logical and mathematical, for dealing with them, without naïve presuppositions of analogies with human behavior and thought; and the former, to be understood as the domain of the sacred, which we must understand in the perspective of the One God, that is, of the moral identity of every human being, his duty, as figuratively embodied in his conscience or soul, to insure the flourishing of the human community.

Hillel’s golden rule says nothing about rank, it is simply reciprocal, and gives each individual credit for understanding in what sense we can apply to our fellows our sense of sacred rightness, the judgment of our conscience that we apply to ourselves. It is significant that this is a Jewish and not a Christian document. Not that Christians are blind to the reciprocity that underlies it, but they differ from Jews insofar as they stand as witnesses of what they judge to be God’s necessary incarnation as the Son in order to save the world from its sinfulness. Could Hillel’s morality have sufficed, the One God would presumably not have needed the Trinity. And this is the substance of Christianity’s claim of supersession.

The success of Christianity was certainly a historical demonstration that Judaism, however universal its ethic—can an ethic be expressed more minimally than in Hillel’s rule?—having emerged as a “tribal” religion in a polytheistic world, was not suitable for transmitting the monotheistic credo to the “pagans” that surrounded them. Although no religion is in principle more universalist than Hillel’s, the mechanisms of the sacred are of necessity communal, and that his affirmation that in principle every human is capable of ruling himself through this universal intuition coexisted with a religious practice that in its traditional form was and is dominated by obedience to hundreds of mitzvot (rules/blessings)—613 in the official count—is a sign of the unsuitability of Judaism for transmitting the simple basis of its understanding of the sacred to the pagan multitudes.

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Yet the survival of the Jews as Jews, in spite of endless efforts to convert and/or annihilate them, has remained an essential catalyst of Western history, and arguably in its absence the birth of modernity would have been inconceivable. The very persistence of the Jews, whose “remnant” refused to follow the path of conversion to Christianity (leaving for the moment Islam out of the equation, given its failed efforts to conquer the West that ended, hardly coincidentally, just at the moment of the rise of modernity in the 17^th century), was a scandal to the Christians, but also a demonstration that, however much the Jews needed their 613 mitzvot as a bulwark against the religions of the goyim, the complexity of their customs did not contradict the ultimate simplicity of their Hillelian credo.

The Jewish idea of the mitzvot, in a word, is not that obedience to them is the heart of the law. On the contrary, their purpose is to make us aware that the sacred, the One God, is always with us, that in our household and similar activities, we should never forget what is in fact Hillel’s rule, not seeing it as a constraint but as a “second nature,” and the 613 commandments, each in itself not arduous or difficult, but requiring a constant awareness of the sacred, are meant to make its obedience easier, so that it become a second nature, as obedience to the commandments is to the Orthodox Jew.

Christianity respects the “Golden Rule,” but at the same time as it liberates its believers from the mitzvot and from the 300-odd pages of the Shulchan Aruch, the Orthodox “rulebook” that spells out the details of Orthodox obedience, it obliges its believers to express faith in the Trinity, with its three-person God, Incarnation, and Resurrection. Whereas the Hebrew Shema, the credo that every Jew is to pronounce when facing death: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One; One is our God, Great is our Lord, and his Name is One,” asserts nothing but the single truth of monotheism: the uniqueness of the sacred.

In sum, where the Jewish credo is truly minimal, the Christian adds the element of trinitarian identification in the place of the “behaviorist” mitzvot. Outwardly, this is certainly more “modern”; no one in the modern world looks more out of place than an Orthodox Jew with beard, payyes (sideburns), covered head, and tzitzit or ceremonial tassels, worn at all times “as a reminder to think of God.” The Christian internalization of faith—what led Matt Schneider to point out to me that if the Jewish God cares for humanity, Jesus loves us—is indeed more modern, but it gains this modernity by a conflation of moral truth with love the necessity of whose complication of monotheistic unity in effect creates a more complex anthropology—one that assimilates the sacred to the structure of the human family in contrast to the simple dichotomy of God and man.

No doubt it is Christianity, not Judaism, that gave birth to modernity, however well the latter has adapted to it. But without contesting Christianity’s historical role, we must see it as a moment in a history begun by the Hebrews, in which their role of “older brother” cannot be denied. Sadly, in contrast to John Paul II’s fraternal gesture, Pope Francis’ recent urging of inquiry into “Gaza genocide allegations”— https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/17/pope-francis-urges-inquiry-into-gaza-genocide-allegations—is symptomatic of Western civilization’s renewed oikophobia.

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One may describe antisemitism as simply the affirmation of the necessity of supersession; that Judaism, like ancient polytheism, is no longer a viable option in the modern world and survives only through the “stubbornness” or “stiff-necked” nature of the Jews. But that this intolerance contrasts sharply with our benevolence toward the beliefs and customs of more “elementary” cultures reflects a fact that antisemitism seeks to deny; that Judaism belongs to the same family as Christianity, that its elder-brother status cannot be denied without—as does Islam—denying the sacred nature of the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament, and ultimately denying the discoverable facts of Hebraic history.

And in effect, Christianity’s insistence on the continuing interpenetration of the sacred and profane worlds, beginning with the Annunciation and extending into the present with the requirement of “miracles” for granting the status of sainthood, involves a far greater exception than Judaism to the “Greek” empiricism of natural science. Such practices demonstrate that, for the vast majority of its sects, the “absurdity” of Christianity cannot be dismissed but must be affirmed, as the Resurrection and the other New-Testament miracles are affirmed. Affirmed, we must say, as a demonstration of the ultimate truth of the quasi-Tertullian credo quia absurdum.

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To be continued…

Since 1941 I have lived through quite a few elections, but 2024’s was surely the most crucial. The defeat of the partisans of what we should call the “Iranian option” in the Middle East prevented what risked becoming the abandonment of the people whose conception of the sacred has been the foundation of the West, and that has underlain the Classical heritage of Greece and Rome. And the past year’s experience has made it clearer than ever that our implementation of this latter heritage is ultimately dependent on its Abrahamic inheritance.

Jew-hatred is the originary form of Western oikophobia, and in an era when the West is being seriously challenged, it is more crucial than ever that it be faced down and soundly rejected—not compromised with as though Israel’s war with Hamas has truly had “genocide” on both sides of the equation.

Just as the friends of Hamas accuse the IDF of “genocide,” the Democrats have had the clever idea of associating Trump with Hitler—remindful of Bushitler a few elections ago. But if our university and street rioters are massively on the side of Hamas, the American people are not.

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I wonder how anyone can pretend that endearing election gimmicks like Trump working at McDonald’s or wearing a sanitation worker’s uniform were manifestations of contempt. Trump’s trolling operations were just the opposite: expressions of respect for fellow Americans doing honest jobs—while mocking his opponents in two different ways.

Trump’s victory, along with a Republican Senate and House, are now assured. And the relatively gracious tone of Harris’ and Biden’s concession speeches hopefully suggests a different atmosphere, in official Washington at least, from the hostility of 2016. Although the Never-Trumpers may never change (see, for example, the December National Review, from before the votes were counted), and the university-based Jew-hating contingent will continue to make its views known, this time the public’s choice is unambiguous—as is its judgment of the Biden-Harris administration.

Empirical Science and Humanist Anthropology

There was a time when it seemed that all powerful ideas were simple. In Chronicle 815 I quoted Pope’s lines:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

as the quintessential Enlightenment expression of this view. But a more nuanced presentation would refer rather to Jansenist mathematician Blaise Pascal’s prophetic idea of nature’s “two infinities,” great and small, which ever-more-powerful instruments like the new James Webb Space Telescope continually corroborate. For Pascal, there was no contradiction in the contrast between the infinite complexity of nature and the necessity of a sacred-centered ethic; and in a very different mode, GA’s humanist anthropology makes this same affirmation.

As a 60-year subscriber to Scientific American, I have been troubled over the past decades by what can only be described as the increasingly anti-Ockhamian—and anti-Popean—complexification of physical theories purporting to describe the universe.

George Morales, my physicist colleague and neighbor, views this development in positive terms, and I can well understand that for scientists, ever-increasing complexity offers ever-expanding opportunities for research, and consequently for jobs and grant funds (in contrast to the situation in the Humanities, where UCLA’s recent consolidation of French, Italian, German, and Scandinavian in a single ELTS—European Languages and “Transcultural Studies”—Department may well be the first step toward replacing its entire faculty with a next-generation AI program).

If we accept for the sake of argument my claim that GA is the most significant result of the now-defunct “French Theory” movement, whose original focus was the application of post-metaphysical thought in linguistics, philosophy, and structural anthropology to literary analysis, we can explain GA’s relative invisibility as the counterpart to the seemingly endless expansion of natural science. If, as I attempted to show at this year’s GASC in Tokyo—see Chronicles 802 and 806—humanistic in contrast with empirical thinking inevitably leads to a simplification, in which the origins of language, the sacred, and the rest of the human cultural scene may be understood as consequences of the introduction of a single bit of différance—Derrida’s portmanteau word combining to differ and to defer (both différer in French) in reference to both the deferral of “instinctive” acquisitive behavior and the difference that this enables among the multiple signs of language—it is easy to see why those who depend on the empirical study of nature for their livelihood would be repelled by it.

The concepts of pre-GA French Theory had been applied to the world of human culture, if not to the world of human origins. Derrida’s différance, understood as the genesis of signification from the deferral of desire, was in my view the most significant of these. But GA’s revelation of the originary power of this marriage of difference and deferral coincided perhaps inevitably with the exhaustion of the original movement, and it is most unlikely that the academic world will ever permit its flame to be reignited.

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Curiously, the same problem has confronted my analysis of antisemitism. Once one points out that this curse on the “elder brother” is the product of Judaism’s Abrahamic heirs’ insistence on their own originarity, as though they could by suppressing the Jews rid themselves of their lateness, the twin taboos on these ideas appear as two versions of the same phenomenon. For both these cases refer to the sacred at what, from the Western perspective that has become the world perspective, must be seen as the two key moments of its history: first, the originary “bit” of sacrality/conscience as the motivation for the deferral of the gesture of appropriation transmuted into the first sign, and second, the origin of the spiritual foundation of the modern world in the affirmation of the One God, whose uniqueness reflects that same unique origin—which, however many times it may have been approximated and repeated in the history of our species, was in essence always the same event with the same motivation.

The genius of Christianity, as expressed in the first verse of the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the logos.

had already united these two ideas. Sacred writings are not helpful in empirical science, but that is far from the case in humanist anthropology.

What this disparity between the sacred/human and the empirical/natural demonstrates is something that we should have realized from the beginning: the human universe is not structured like the natural. It begins with the single bit of différance that marks our communal agreement on a sign, which even when multiplied by thousands and quintillions remains the heir of its point of origin. We may compare this with astrophysics’ superficially similar theory of the origin of the universe some 13 billion years ago. For the presupposition that this “creation” was ex nihilo has no other basis than… Ockham’s razor itself. If evidence emerges of other “creations,” whether previous, subsequent, or simultaneous, empirical science will simply deal with them as it has always dealt with natural phenomena. And this may perhaps include the discovery of other forms of “intelligent life,” with their own evolutionary origins. Whereas the principle of a minimal origin of human culture, whether or not it emerged independently of such extra-worldly influences, need never be renounced.

As its language implies, Pope’s Newtonian dawn assimilates the natural universe to the human, whose unique origin as figured in the Bible supplied the basis of Pope’s metaphor. Thus today, when it is considered bad form to use the sacred as the basis for any kind of scientific thought, the notion that “the human” is best understood on the basis of a conceptually unique origin is viewed as a throwback to pre-scientific thinking.

Whence this curious inversion: in today’s scientific consensus, the origin of the physical universe is conceived as singular and datable, although subject as ever to new evidence; whereas the very notion of a punctual origin of the human is dismissed as a Genesis-inspired myth conflating a complex series of developments.

A New Look at the Sacred

It is time that we rejected the current common-sense dichotomy that treats the sacred (“religious belief”) as a self-contained domain independent of objective thought. I have many times cited anthropologist Roy Rappaport’s assertion, in his Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999) of the coevality, the simultaneous origin, of language and the sacred. In GA’s originary hypothesis, the first instance of the sacred is the moral hesitation/deferral of a gesture of appropriation that transforms it into an act of pointing, the origin of the “joint mutual attention,” not available to animals, that is the basis of human language.**

Just as words, as opposed to animal signals, are each the product of a communal consensus, so the phenomena of the sacred emerge in communal contexts and embody the imperatives of communal life. Ultimately there is only one great human scene, divided into innumerable subordinate scenes of varying mutual impact, and the fact that we have attributed the moral laws that we consider sacred to a transcendental divinity, particularly since the broad acceptance of monotheism, which can be said to have defined the “proto-modern” and now the modern world, need not prevent us from understanding these moral principles in strictly human terms. Hillel’s “golden rule”:

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow! That is the whole Torah; the rest is interpretation.

sums up this position very nicely.

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The relevance of our understanding of the human to the current moment of our history has been made clear by today’s unexpected recurrence of antisemitic violence as the Ur-manifestation of Western self-rejection or oikophobia. As I pointed out in Chronicle 804, similarities to Nazi attitudes and actions should not let us forget that the Nazi ideal was the triumph of Western civilization as an “Aryan” invention uncontaminated by “Semitic” Judaism and its Christian and Muslim derivatives. Hitler’s alliance with the Muslim Mufti was a tactical one; like Stalin and Mao, he had no real use for the Abrahamic religions.

The antisemitism we see today, catalyzed by the October 7 pogrom, is at base a denial of “colonizing” Western civilization, as though once Western science produced the engines and techniques of modernity, its civilizational basis could simply be eliminated—beginning with Israel and the Jews. It is in this light that we must examine the “post-colonial” ethic that has been bringing together the “global South,” whose hostility to the West was already reflected in Obama’s turn toward Iran that still deeply influences the Democratic Party, as well as a number of European parties, as we see today in Great Britain under the Labour government.

It is the very tension and danger of these times that has made both possible and necessary GA’s new way of thinking. We need this originary framework to understand what it is that the survival of the Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, has as its duty to demonstrate to the world—which may well be the Westphalian nation-state system itself, as opposed to the centralized tyranny that is the conscious aim of both the world’s Islamist and its secular totalitarian movements.

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By now we should be aware that our knowledge of nature and nature’s laws, however great its benefits to human life in every sense, cannot resolve for us the problems of mimetic desire that only our common sense of the sacred can help us to mitigate. I trust that the second Trump administration will resume its interrupted project of seeking to bring together the Abrahamic religions in an effort to spread their unifying insights throughout the world. That our recent GASC meeting in Tokyo permitted a fruitful dialogue between GA and Buddhist thought shows that there need be no barrier between the world’s great revelations of the sacred. This is hopefully a sign that nuclear apocalypse can be avoided and the age of atomic weapons morph into a world of peaceful competition—but only insofar as this world remains for the foreseeable future respectful of the leading contributions of Western civilization.

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**I recall a discussion five years ago at UCLA on the topic of The Soul, led by Dean of Humanities Herbert Morris, who passed away in 2022. (See Chronicle 616.) None of the participants, including myself, were altogether able to assimilate the religious origin of this concept to the terms of an academic discussion. But in reality, the simplest way to understand the soul is as the seat of our conscience, our first awareness of which—as Adam and Eve would experience on eating the forbidden fruit—is our originary experience of the sacred. I regret that I arrived too late at this understanding to communicate it to Herb during his lifetime.