Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • The Sacred and the Sense of Place

    In a recent article from the Jewish News Syndicate, “The Great Divide” by Malka Eisenberg (https://www.jns.org/the-great-divide-2/), the author insists, in contradiction to those who claim that the ICJ’s rulings against Israel explain the hostility of Israel’s legal system and left-wing politicians to the religious and “right-leaning” supporters of the current government led by Netanyahu, that “the animosity from the minority anti-right, fervently secular population [of Israel] is focused on dividing the nation of Israel.”

    Indeed it is obvious that the Israeli left, which has opposed—so far, successfully—this government’s attempts to rein in what has amounted to a judicial dictatorship over the (unwritten) constitution, and as a consequence, over all legislation passed by the Knesset and all administrative decisions to enforce it, is also the source of the more recent demonstrations insisting on bringing home the remaining hostages at any cost, with the inevitable result of abandoning the Gaza war’s key goal of permanently destroying Hamas’ military capacity by retaining Israeli control of its external supply lines, particularly the Philadelphi Corridor connecting Gaza with Egypt.

    But Ms. Eisenberg’s real point is not political but religious. The focus of her polemic is the “fervently secular” attitude typical of many of the original settlers from Europe and their descendants, whose Jewishness was in many cases more imposed on them by the Nazis and their allies than embedded in their lives through religious practice. And indeed, this division has become exacerbated in recent years, now that this originally dominant group is outnumbered by Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East, most of whom are more observant than their Ashkenazi predecessors, and whose natural allies in this latter group are the communities of traditional Jews like the Chassidim, those who wear religious garb and strictly observe the principles laid down in the Shulchan Aruch, the Orthodox code of Jewish law.

    Yet Ms. Eisenberg’s essay is not an expression of despair. On the contrary, its uplifting theme is given in these paragraphs:

    The heart and soul of the Jews—the coalesced nation of Israel—are held together and sustained by adherence to belief in God, Torah and the centrality of the Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.

    Despite the left’s strenuous battle to remove much of Judaism from Israel’s secular schools, many secularists have been turning to Judaism to add meaning and focus to their lives. As Rabbi Berel Wein, a scholar and lecturer, stated: “As Jews, we have to know where we come from to know where we are going.”

    In other words, the current conflict is bringing Israelis back to their original Jewish roots, not just ethnically but religiously. Times of crisis do have such effects, and to this extent the Gaza war is from this author’s perspective a near-providential event, reminding Israelis before it is too late that the destiny of Israel is not to provide Jews with the opportunity to live as Americans still imagine themselves, in a comfortable and generally peaceful “global” world, but to let them, or make them, live as Jews, no longer dispersed as they were over the millennia of the Galut, but as a people defending itself resolutely from its enemies—and in that role, relying on faith in the providential divinity who has kept them going through all the horrors that have marked their history.

    The real Jew, in other words, is not the demonstrator for the left-secular Ashkenazi legal dictatorship that the pre-Netanyahu government was able to impose, and that the current majority has still not fully thrown off, but one who, whether or not observant of every detail of his religious tradition, is guided by a linked sense of place and divine purpose to help carry out his people’s mission in the world.

    In 2024 one might question what new lesson can be learned from this exhortation to return to a religious as opposed to a secular perspective. Certainly one cannot speak of this return as embodying a new understanding; it is rather a reaffirmation of geographically grounded sectarian values in a world that most hope to see evolving toward universal, “humanistic” ones. Yet I believe nonetheless that at its core, generative anthropology is engaged by this reaffirmation.

    For GA’s conception of the sacred, understood from an anthropological perspective, must not be seen as a transcendental or theological “construct,” but as in the first place derived directly from the originary shared intuition that individual desire must be deferred in deference to the needs of the community. The secret of this intuition’s success is that it is in principle neither selfish nor self-sacrificing. There may be times when one must sacrifice one’s own pleasures, or even one’s life, for the community, but that cannot be the normal outcome, as Girard’s emissary murder anticipating the Crucifixion would suggest. The originary event’s fundamental point is that the survival of each individual human depends on that of the community of which he is a part; any exception to this rule is temporary and for the most part accidental.

    Why then make this point in particular with respect to the Jews of Israel? Because Hebrew religion is the source of Western monotheism, and its ability to survive when exiled from its original homeland has been the most striking demonstration that, just as the root of the sacred lies in the originary scene, the root of the Abrahamic religions lies in the scenic locus from which they emerged. The Old Testament tells the story of the establishment of Jerusalem and the two temples, and it is the tension between the specificity of this locus and the universality of the One God that is unique to Western religion.

    Whence the retention of the sacred status of Jerusalem in all three Abrahamic religions—and the Muslim insistence that it was originally made sacred by them and not the Jews, as though to emphasize the necessity of memory even as a falsehood. The entire history of the West may best be understood as the struggle to absorb this sacral intuition of the Hebrews, that is, to realize in a potentially universal community an intuition of the sacred that was originally that of one people among others, whose worship of the One God of course welcomed new believers, but who understood its essential role in the wider world as an example rather than a universal norm. Not that Hebrew religion was tribal in essence, but it had emerged as the religion of a people whose self-definition under HaShem marked its liberation from the world of archaic empire, rather than, like Christianity and Islam, in competition with the ecumenical religions of the Axial era.

    Or to put it more simply, the Hebrew religion emerged as the religion defined by monotheism, in which the “personality” of God could simply be understood as providentiality, concern for the survival and success of his people and on their example, the human race. The power of this example brought the West to dominance and thence to the conquests of modernity that has, or had, inspired its population with the hubris that they no longer need the sacred.

    We have only been witnessing the most serious consequences of this illusion of desacralization since 9/11/2001, and particularly since 10/7/2023, when we discovered, much to our amazement, the powerful appeal of the most barbaric form of sacrality in our “atheistic” social order. Whence the significance of Ms Eisenberg’s point: crises like that caused by 10/7 and the ensuing war remind us that the sacred is not just a “humanist” abstraction, that concern for the human community is never just abstract care for “the human race,” but that it depends on the realization of a scene, and that the Jews are privileged to have established the prototype of that scene for Western civilization.

    The broader point that this helps us to make is that the sacred is misunderstood when it is simply equated with “belief in God.” The sacred is our conscience, our “superego” if one likes, but not as some kind of impersonal structure in the brain, rather as the persistent remnant of the originary scene of human communality. Once one grasps this, the question of “belief” is in the most profound sense a secondary matter; we are the heirs to that scene and to the conscience that it first inspired in our ancestors.

    I think that Jews are privileged in this respect, in that as a result of their “seniority,” they of all religious communities are the least obliged to focus on an “act of faith.” To be Jewish is in the first place to be part of the Jewish community and to share its long history, in which the sacred is so embedded that whether a Jew obeys every rule in the Shulchan Aruch or eats bacon and never sees the inside of a synagogue, he bears enough traces of his people’s memory to maintain a sense of the sacred’s communal nature. Whence the lack of any real barrier between Jews in their relationship to their common historical origin (which can be adopted as well as inherited), and in consequence, the point Ms. Eisenberg makes in the second quoted paragraph: we have to know where we come from to know where we are going. Indeed, all of us would do well to meditate on the wisdom of this objurgation: it embodies the truth of generative anthropology.

    Coda

    As a warning against the opposite view, I need only mention General Moshe Dayan’s deeply regrettable error in 1967, in the aftermath of Israel’s great victory, in leaving the Temple Mount entirely in the hands of the Muslim Waqf. (See for example https://jcpa.org/al-aksa-is-in-danger-libel/al-aksa-is-in-danger-libel-temple-mount/ .) Ever since, Jews have not been allowed to pray on what was the site of both their Temples; yet even without praying, the fact that they are “soiling with their filthy feet” the terrain of Al Aqsa has provided constant grounds for retaliatory violence, most horribly in the “Al-Aqsa Flood” massacre of October 7, 2023.

    As Sun Tsu well knew, the first principle of war is to know (first) your enemy and (then) yourself. Thus even if Jews had truly become indifferent to the Temple Mount, their enemies had not. But the more profound lesson is that on this point, it is the enemy who had the right perspective. Holy places are not just important to the “observant,” but to all members of a community. This is something that Hamas’ supporters have shown they well understand when they burn America’s flag and deface its national monuments. It is well past the time when the Jews as well should have learned this truth.

  • The Abrahamic World: Three Reflections

    I

    In the previous Chronicle, I pointed out the curious fact that in the upcoming presidential election, respectability,” as represented, say, by the Swifties, would definitely choose Harris over Trump. Such respectability as remains today is far indeed from Burkean respect for tradition. Yet it is accompanied by the same serene self-confidence. The Swifties, after all, are unspoiled young girls who look up to Taylor as a model of decent behavior. They have almost nothing in common with antisemitic or anti-Western demonstrators, let alone with Hamas terrorists. Yet they undoubtedly see Harris not merely as more respectable than Trump, but as a role-model, whereas he, associated with “deplorables,” is anything but. Little care they about Kamala’s past adventures with Willie Brown or her far-left stands on nearly all issues.

    For between the Left and the “Joy” overflowing at last month’s DNC, there has emerged a natural bond that allows left-wing politicians to see themselves, like Nancy Pelosi kneeling to the ghost of George Floyd, as good Christians—not in the stuffy old Puritan sense, but as postmodern embodiments of Christianity’s essence. Indeed, the attachment of these self-styled liberals to the Palestinians, however murderous, is for them the highest expression of Christianity’s ideal: care for victims that sets them above their powerful oppressors.

    How could this apparently Christian ideal draw the respectable to the genocidal torturers and rapists who invaded Israel last October?

    It is easy enough to put the blame on the murderous culprits, the Palestinians who refuse to accept the existence of a Jewish state on “their” Waqf, indeed insisting retrospectively that no Jewish temples or other marks of possession had ever existed in Jerusalem, and whose terrorist organizations such as Hamas seek to enforce their will even at the sacrifice of their own (but preferably other) lives. But if the values evoked to defend these actions did not have their roots in the ultimate sources of our “respectable” traditions, they could not be used to justify them—or at least to justify the principle behind them, so that the details could be swept under the carpet.

    Anthropologists have studied the variety of moral systems that human societies have edified over the millennia to the end of preserving themselves through the generations, and there seems little use in seeking to conceive abstractly an ideal system that will bring happiness to all, or even a maximal quantity of it. We have all seen how successful Marxism has been in creating “communism” as Marx himself conceived it—as the “realm of freedom.” At best, we can forgive Marx for conceiving “scientific socialism” without realizing what Marxists would call its “internal contradictions.”

    The fact is that the West is still dominated by the three Abrahamic religions, of which the two most numerous are spin-offs of the Hebrew religion now called Judaism.

    I have often referred to the text in Matthew 20:16, “So the last shall be first, and the first last…” as a prophecy that, if taken as an expression of desire, would be an expression of the “last’s” resentment. Certainly this is not a faithful Christian interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, which leaves it to HaShem to chastise the Pharisees and other “hypocrites,” but one cannot deny that it sounds suspiciously like the war-cry of the sans-culottes on 14 July 1789.

    Might we then find in this resentment, transfigured in theory but not necessarily in practice, the Achilles’ heel of the whole Judeo-Christian system? We could certainly make this claim about militant “Islamism,” which takes the Koran’s promise at its word in an unrelenting drive to convert the entire world to Islam and punish refusal or backsliding by death; but how could we get the Muslim faithful to agree? They are offering what they see as the true faith with its promise of eternal bliss; those who reject it, whether they live on in error or die, have already lost their chance. And if last year’s Hamas massacre may have gone beyond Islamic severity into sadism and mayhem, we could not say the same of the orderly ceremonies of throat-cutting carried out a few years previously by the Islamic State.

    But in the Westphalian world of nation-states, this is precisely not the role of religion, and that world—the Western world—would never have arrived at its present level of development had we remained in thrall to wars of religion.

    The Westphalian system of nation-states that has conquered the world was inaugurated in 1648 by Christians who had split into rivalrous Catholic and Protestant families that were not, like Roman and Orthodox Catholics, geographically separated, and consequently needed to establish a modus vivendi. Which was so successful that the consequent Western hegemony generalized its pattern to the entire world, regardless of religion or political system. In principle, the world could live in peace if each nation took care of its own, including its religious preferences, and chose diplomacy over war to settle international disputes.

    One might say that the 20th century’s two world wars were the first major failures of this system. And although the first led to the founding of the League of Nations as a supranational agent of world peace, it failed to prevent the second. Nor has the postwar United Nations been much more successful. Its main accomplishment since 1948 seems to be denouncing Israel, a nation-state created in compensation for the genocide of nearly half the world’s Jewish population.

    Nor are the consequences of the Hamas invasion and pogrom of October 7, 2023 anywhere near having worked themselves out. The “Red-Green” alliance of the Western Left with the Islamists that had remained largely implicit before that date has erupted into the open, and is far from subsiding. The old Left built on class resentment has transformed itself into a (New) New Left that identifies victimhood with “race”—but whose exemplary case of racial oppression is no longer American whites over blacks, but Jews over Palestinians, whose pseudo-ethnicity is a pretext for their shameless repetition of the word “genocide” in mockery of the Holocaust.

    It is indeed something of a revelation that, although officially antisemitism is condemned by all but a neo-Nazi fringe, it is perfectly respectable to bewail (without citing the numbers’ real source) the thousands of casualties that Hamas tells us the Jews have inflicted on the Palestinians. The model for this was established at the beginning of the war. Although it soon became clear that it wasn’t Israel that bombed that Gaza hospital on October 17, which was barely touched in any case, no one offered excuses to Israel for the calumny—which, I remind the reader, included a deliberately misleading picture of some other bombed-out building at the top of the front page of the New York Times. As Daniel Pipes pointed out recently, Hamas is the first insurrectionary power that takes advantage of its dogmatically asserted victimary non-agency to starve its own people, knowing that any such suffering will be blamed on the Jews.

    One can’t help seeing this extreme sympathy for the Palestinians as the victims of the Jews as just one more variant in the age-old history of antisemitism, which has always accused the Jews of poisoning wells, bleeding little children… Except that today, such antithetical sympathy is accompanied by a vehement denial of Jew-hatred; how indeed can viewing with horror the devastating Palestinian suffering at the hands of the powerful Jews be compared to antisemitism? Or to put it differently, after centuries of attributing to the Jews all kinds of powers they lacked to the end of justifying Jew-hatred, how can it possibly be inferred, now that their restored homeland indeed possesses real power, that current Jew-hatred is still based on prejudice? If the Nazis attributed to the Jews secret powers that impeded the triumph of the Aryan and other races, should we not rather say that they have proven prophetic?

    Yet the strength of this argument lies in its remaining implicit. That Jew-hatred is a foregone conclusion whose justifications are merely a posteriori confirmations cannot be thought, let alone enunciated. Thus if the UN condemns Israel far more than all the other nations of the world together, this can only demonstrate that no other nation so consistently violates the principles of international law.

    Or else, as old Jean de La Fontaine put it: Qui veut noyer son chien, l’accuse de la rage—He who would drown his dog, accuses it of rabies.

    II

    Is then Judeo-Christian religion, and at its root, Judaism itself, complicit in the sacralization of resentment that the post-revolutionary Left has made its watchword? Given that the root of human culture is the preservation, not of the “species,” but of the community assembled on the scene, we can say that there is no originary cultural drive to preserve anything more than this minimal community, and that the hope for the evolution of the sacred—as intuited by one’s “conscience”—from the participants in the originary scene to include all of humanity cannot simply be deduced from the originary hypothesis, but reflects the interactions of the diverse communities that descend from it. In particular, to reach the point at which a religion such as Judaism can emerge, we must follow the course of human history, but without abandoning GA’s originary insight into its roots.

    How does this insight help us to understand Judaism, in both its “firstness” and its unique scapegoat role? Why is this small minority, which from the Roman transmutation of Judea into “Palestine” in the first century AD to the creation of Israel in the twentieth never possessed a home territory, so disquieting to the peoples that have hosted its members that they have not ceased for any length of time to persecute it? History has demonstrated the “stubborn” refusal of the Jews as a people to abandon their culture; the defection of many individual Jews has never sufficed to break the continuity that links those of today to their pre-Axial ancestors. The Jews refuse to disappear; Hitler’s “final solution” was the logical end of these persecutions, but also the ultimate demonstration of the Jews’ ability to survive quand même.

    Unlike Christians and Muslims, the Jews have never sought to become the world’s sole religion. Judaism accepts converts, but never seeks them out, and instead remains focused on its own community, whose creedal destiny to serve as an example to the world makes it concerned solely with survival rather than conquest. Which sets up between the Jews and their persecutors the classical opposition between the irresistible force and the immovable object, which might seem comical if it did not involve millions of deaths.

    Let us recall once more the line from the Sermon on the Mount: the last will be  first and the first, last. Chronologically, and for the Christians, spiritually as well, the Jews are “the first” Western religion; nor is it an accident that (with all due respect to the New Testament and the Koran, the Zoroastrian Avesta, the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata, Confucius’ Analects and the Buddhist Sutras…), the Old Testament, with the five Books of Moses at its core, remains the world’s most significant religious document.

    The Jews have plenty to resent; but it never seems to their enemies as significant as what they resent in the Jews.

    Of course we cannot conceive of Christianity or Islam in the absence of Judaism; that Islam’s fanatics are willing to do so is just one more sign of their shameless barbarity. But can we not say that the Hebrew religion had all this implicit in it from the beginning? that its “chosenness” was destined from the outset to be viewed by outsiders as the most insufferable arrogance?

    It is that which makes antisemitism so irresistible. Forgetting Islamism’s indifference to facts, in today’s world made by Christianity—even as Buddhism is showing itself to be perhaps a wiser alternative—the Jews are the only people that can claim seniority. Which is why I believe that John Paul II’s wise conception of the Jews as the “elder brothers” of Christians points to a possible happy ending to Western antisemitism. Yet the history of the past 75 years or so, and all the more that of this past year, has shown that the return of the Jews to Israel, far from making them just one among the world’s many peoples, has brought new inspiration to those who remain faithful to the final solution; Israel, as the Iranians like to point out, is a one-bomb country.

    Ironically, however historically justified, granting Middle-Eastern territory to the Jews just at the moment when Europe was liberating its colonies was bound to provoke a new surge of hostility in the surrounding Muslim population habituated to seeing the Jews as a subject (dhimmi) people. And over a half-century later, at a moment when Israel seemed at last to be gaining grudging acceptance in the Arab world, Obama’s perverse coddling of the Iranian regime turned the whole area into a powder-keg. As might have been expected of the USA’s first post-colonial president.

    III

    Concerning the question of Jewish “firstness,” one should not forget that two of the most significant stories in Genesis concern the usurpation of primogeniture. Cain was the older brother whose vegetal sacrifices were rejected by God as inferior to his younger brother Abel’s carnal ones; the latter’s murder was a response to what the elder experienced as usurpation. Cain’s anger may have been inevitable, but it could do no more for him than make him a holy sinner who bore “the mark of Cain” and could not be killed, a counter-example for all.

    In contrast, Jacob’s obtaining the elder’s birthright from the hungry Esau in Genesis 25 is meant to demonstrate the superiority of ambition to mere seniority. Jacob’s willingness to work fourteen years for Laban’s daughter Rachel and his ability to successfully wrestle with God’s representative in Genesis 32, resulting in his renaming as Israel (meaning “I have struggled”), are what define his role as the last of the three classic patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) in the transition from Abraham to Jacob’s son Joseph and the sojourn of his people in Egypt that leads to the Exodus and the founding of the Kingdom.

    And while there was no possible positive outcome from Cain’s murder, whose entire world was ultimately destroyed in the Flood, Jacob’s ruse was justified a posteriori by his recognition of his debt to his brother and the respect that he pays him. It is only after Jacob had made his fortune by working for Laban and marrying his daughters that he receives the name of Israel, followed in Genesis 33 by his long-delayed reunion with Esau, to whom he shows deference and brings gifts, so that the brothers are happily reconciled.

    This tells us that the values of Judaism are the effects not of its “firstness” but of its ability to interpret and implement its history as the working-out of a divine plan, an imperative that follows an intermingled series of legendary and real events to an depth unparalleled in any other religion, setting an example for the world of the human effort needed not merely to compose this narrative but to endlessly refine its interpretation in an unceasing effort to make divine providence coincide with reality.

    It is this integration of intellectual and worldly energy that, combined with the more theoretical bent of the Greeks, gave rise over the centuries to the modern world. But the spiritual drive, rooted in self-conscious providentiality, that the Jews added to Greek rationality, their sense of their God-chosen duty to set an example for humanity, continues to arouse the jealousy of all but the strongest souls.

  • Celebrity and Resentment

    The phenomenon of celebrity as a modern version of charisma is experienced as a transcendental intrusion into daily life, a kind of dubious sacrality. Encountering HaShem at the burning bush poses no ontological problem, since the One God is not subject to the limitations of our world. But a celebrity is only another human being, and the fact that his/her name and face are quasi-universally known is an artifact of sources of publicity and the general public’s reaction to their output, similar to that of brand names and images in the overall marketplace. Celebrities, like brand names, are designed to guarantee certain products, be they songs, books, films… or just “publicity,” for those who are “famous for being famous.”

    That the level of media penetration in today’s screenic age, when everyone is accompanied in permanence by a smartphone, goes well beyond that of previous times, is reflected by the term mega-celebrity, exemplified above all by Taylor Swift.

    The Swift phenomenon may well be the acme of celebritism, given that at a certain point the social benefit of the phenomenon may no longer justify the expense of its continued maintenance. As I pointed out in Chronicle 783, Swift’s symbolic role embodies American culture’s maximal effort to bridge the gap between its overall trend toward foul language, obsessive sexual references, and often extreme left-wing politics, and the traditional virtues of the sort that she encourages the “Swifties” to practice: ladylike neatness, service to others: all in all, being “nice girls” in contrast to the multi-pierced blue-haired morphs active on TikTok. We may well see Swift as the ultimate “great white hope,” whose combination of an attractive face and figure with an absence of open seductiveness makes her, as I previously suggested, America’s cheerleader rather than its sex symbol.

    Can this last indefinitely? Swift will turn 35 this year, and it’s hard to imagine that any woman, however gifted or attractive, could take over the unique role she has cut out for herself. But variants are certainly conceivable.

    Meanwhile, in the less glamorous field of what used to be called academe, the very notion of celebrity has all but lost its luster. From the French Theory era, René Girard’s is about the only name that has survived among the general public (e.g., being named last year in a NYT crossword puzzle), although the Girardian Colloquium on Violence and Religion is at least as much a personality cult as an intellectually serious operation. (Indeed, it was COV&R members’ dissatisfaction with that organization that inspired the founding of the GASC.) There remain a few “star” academic intellectuals, but they have little of the intellectual significance of those of the French Theory era; Judith Butler or Giorgio Agamben cannot be compared with Derrida or Foucault.

    But I cannot imagine that a charismatic figure would be likely to create such a theory as GA, which minimizes rather than maximizes the excitement of the thinker’s own language at the expense of the worldly reality he is describing. Words like “sign” and “scene” don’t have the publicity value of “deconstruction” or différance, or even “violence,” and a scenario that ends with a peaceful communal meal is far less salient than the “emissary murder” of a scapegoat.

    I would not accuse the creators of these ideas of deliberate sensationalism, but the fact is that philosophy always foregrounds the language of the philosopher, presumed to have recovered traces of the prophets’ revelatory power (think of Heidegger and das Sein), whereas from the first sentence of TOOL, my idea has been that “mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” Laboratory scientists win their renown without rhetorical gimmicks, and the same should hold true of all thinkers, above all of anthropological humanists,** whose task is to demystify their subject.

    Indeed, as Parmenides insisted, we must remain aware of the dangerous tension between rationality and charisma, or what he called the way of truth and the way of opinion. The sacred that charisma usurps is necessary to humanity, but it can easily be turned to less than noble ends. Whence the need to avoid letting our thinking be dominated by spokespeople for Wokism, whose charisma distills the anti-sacred of resentment.

    The one deadly sin

    The point of calling these web essays “Chronicles of Love and Resentment” is that if love sums up all virtues, in that the love for one’s fellows ensures our contribution to our species’ survival, resentment includes all sins, even if most of those on the official list: gluttony, sloth, lust, avarice… are more its passive consequences than direct expressions. And if love is a necessarily conscious drive to affirm the value of one’s fellows even at the expense of one’s own safety, resentment is less a “drive” than a rejection of love, however assiduously its current avatar may disguise itself as seeking benefits for those one presents as victims of privileged others.

    The line between defending real victims of injustice and virtue-signaling in the cause of so-called victims as a weapon against one’s fellows is not easy to draw without seeing into others’ souls, and we should be grateful to the ugly tactics of so many of our latter-day defenders of virtue for making transparent their real motivations. They are as they describe their enemies, motivated not by love but by hate, and this distinction is easy enough to detect behind its mimetic disguises. To love one’s enemy in the Christian sense is not to be the dupe of his pretensions, but to deal with his hostility and even, if necessary, his evil, while never losing sight of one’s common humanity.

    Resentment is a reversion to a state of mimetic desire from which the sacred force of love/peace has been deliberately expunged; the “man of resentment” rejects human morality in a semiconscious effort to deny his humanity. All genuine religions know this. Which, in the case of Islam, should lead its believers to reject the extremes of jihad, which views those who refuse Islam as subhuman, “sons of apes and pigs.”

    It is notable that in today’s political context dominated by rival resentments, where there is no love lost between rivals, the celebrity’s charisma is by and large a force of love rather than resentment. There are to be sure charismatic haters, but the biggest stars remain those on the side of love. Taylor Swift has deliberately cultivated this aspect of her image, and however much profit it may bring her, it is hard to believe that is not a reflection of real affection for her fellow humans. But the same is true of all true celebrities, including pretend-misanthropes like Rodney Dangerfield—as opposed to truly hateful personalities like David Duke or Louis Farrakhan.

    But if this is true, why is it that in the domain of politics negativity reigns, certainly more today than in the recent past? Can this be merely a swing of the pendulum from the calm after the storm of WWII—and the entire first half of the 20th century—as if, as with antisemitism, the politics of resentment had merely paused to catch its breath?

    If this is indeed the case, we must trace the path opened up by this politics in taking advantage of the Western hegemony established with the fall of the USSR to define its target and unite in opposition the postcolonial forces of the “South” with those of the not-quite-former Communist bloc. For if China has remained Communist while Russia is so no longer, Putin and Xi see eye to eye in their common desire to overthrow the centuries-long Western domination.

    Clearly the 1991 “end of history” was wildly premature; the powers it briefly reconciled were both Western: the West as such, and the rebellious Bolsheviks, the sans-culottes’ far more violent and cynical heirs. Is there any hope of reconciling the North with the South, Western Civilization and its Eastern emulators (Japan, South Korea, Singapore…) with Africa, the South Asian and South American countries, and the ever-more-insistent Islamists who have renewed the jihad originally defeated by the Industrial Revolution, to bring about the real “end of history” and the establishment of a peaceful world? Hardly, but so long as we avoid major catastrophes and the use of nuclear and other hyperdestructive weapons, we may at least hope that humanity will survive the 21st century. The temptation to risk the limit (monter à l’extrême) that Girard refers to in his Achever Clausewitz remains very much alive in Islamism, but even there one wonders if the religious fervor of the leaders of the Islamic powers makes them truly willing to risk widespread destruction and death. A question whose answer we would not like to have to discover in practice.

    In a world where it seems that an increasing percentage of the population depends on politically expressed resentment to maintain its sense of self-worth, it becomes increasingly difficult to find political positions that can bring diverse factions together in a common cause. Already the sans-culottes’ revolt depended on their having surpassed the degree of poverty where the will to action is drained of energy, while inhabiting a partially urbanized environment where common resentments could combine in strength. In today’s world, the internet connects people without need for proximity, and dozens of resentful subcultures exist beside one another, in many cases “intersectionally” stoking each other’s flame.

    There has been suspiciously little publicly available analysis of the functioning of the Antifa, BLM, and other shadowy extremist groups on the left, which are funded with impunity by billionaires such as George Soros through “charitable” organizations that receive tax write-offs, as though supplying an antisocial militia should be seen as a rewardable mode of action. That one couldn’t dream of getting away with such activities in China or Russia can only be viewed as a sign of their superior cohesion. And in this world where, increasingly, autocracies alone keep order, the West’s increasingly feckless democracies not only let disorder reign but come down far harder on the Burkean citizenry who stand on the side of tradition than on the radical thugs whose pretension of representing society’s victims allows them free rein. Surely the time has come to forbid the public burning of America’s national flag as an encouragement to disrespect our laws, as we see when public monuments are defaced in association with the burning—almost always equally without penalty.

    The fact is that today the world’s real political energy is on the side of resentment, both in the South and in the West, while the opposition to it yet remains inchoate. Vast sums of money are being funneled to anti-“Zionist” street and campus demonstrations, including no doubt some from enemy powers such as Iran (which Democratic administrations have financed since Obama without ever taking the least serious counteraction). Obama’s Iran policy may have been presented as an attempt to create equilibrium in the Middle East, but it is all too clear that it embodies a postcolonial ideology ultimately hostile to the maintenance of American power either in the Middle East or elsewhere. We talk today as if the “red-green” alliance were a recent development, but its roots are easily visible in the policies of the last three Democratic administrations.

    In this context, the positive model of Taylor Swift serves as a near-pathetic agent of nostalgia for a once harmonious polity. A society where ordinary individuals pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars—often on top of travel and hotel expenses—to hear the mega-star perform a few musically unremarkable songs shows how highly it values a few hours’ illusion of the normality it has lost the will to enforce.

    And a not unexpected indication of its illusory nature is the fact that there is already a “Swifties for Kamala” organization, but surely will never be a “Swifties for Trump.” For what remains of “respectability” in American society is still on the side of the Democrats, certainly not the Trump Republicans, whose voters, as we know, are clingers and deplorables, even fascists—albeit strangely more supportive of Israel than their opponents.

    **I think that the practitioner of a humanist anthropology such as GA should be called an anthropological humanist rather than, inelegantly, a humanist anthropologist.

  • GA as Humanist Anthropology

    Generative Anthropology (GA) emerged from a lively intellectual universe, now largely dissipated, involving the interaction of “post-metaphysical” philosophers and miscellaneous intellectuals, mostly from literary fields, including semiologists and linguists, along with psychoanalysts and intellectual historians, that in its heyday was known under the name of French Theory. This “meta-field” was the result of a blending of postwar French (and some other European) literary and linguistic scholars with the faculty and students of American universities. Calling it “humanist” is a way of distinguishing it from both empirical science on the one hand and philosophy on the other, but it never acquired the Ockham-like rigor that GA seeks to attain.

    In contrast, the point of Generative Anthropology (GA) as a humanist anthropology is to understand the specificity of the human in minimal terms, that is, exclusively with respect to the sign/scene-based culture of language and sacrality that distinguishes humans from other living creatures. Thus GA’s “originary hypothesis” follows the conviction of Roy Rappaport in his Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: 1999), that at the origin of the human, language and the sacred were “coeval,” born at the same moment.

    The usual way of marking French Theory’s point of departure was with the conference on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” that took place at Johns Hopkins University in October, 1966. The conference was organized by René Girard, at the time, chairman of the Romance Languages Department at Hopkins, and Richard Macksey, a literary scholar, and brought to the United States a number of French thinkers, among whom were Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Hyppolite. Another name inseparable from French Theory is that of Paul de Man, at the time Chairman of the French Department at Yale, who also attended the  conference. Throughout the next decades, French scholars regularly visited at American universities such as Hopkins, Yale, or UC Irvine, along with many others.

    Girard’s relationship to French Theory was always problematic. Although the conference he chaired can be said to be its point of departure, his lack of interest in semiology and structuralism in contrast to literary psychology and religion made his concerns somewhat marginal in relation to most of the major French thinkers of the time. It was only with the decline of French Theory in the last decades of the 20th century that Girard’s understanding of human desire has shown itself to be of more lasting significance, unfortunately in an intellectual context that lacks the excitement of the former era. And in this context, I would claim that GA is the only way of thinking that gives Girard’s key concept of mimetic desire its rightful place in the anthropological spectrum. It is this source of potential conflict whose growing intensity in step with protohumans’ increasing intelligence arguably led to the origin of language and the sacred—and thereby humanity.

    Why do we need “humanist anthropology”?

    Anthropology as a social science did not await the creation of GA’s originary hypothesis, nor is GA designed to compete with it in the empirical study of human behavior. In the past, one might have considered GA a branch of philosophy, but the world of French Theory blended the sciences with speculative thinking in a way that makes this designation misleading. Thus to call GA “humanist anthropology” is in effect to create a new category of thought, neither science nor religion nor philosophy, but one that, as I believe to have shown, deserves it own place in the intellectual world—the proof being that a comparable originary hypothesis could not have been conceived within any of the others.

    In contrast with empirical science, which must be tested by data, preferably under laboratory conditions, and philosophy, whose propositions are ideally derived from “first principles,” GA begins with the problem of constructing a minimal scene of language and the sacred based on our general knowledge of our primate ancestors and a definition of human language as distinct from animal signaling systems.

    It is no accident that all other attempts I have seen to depict a scene of language origin, some of which even posit its “discovery” by an isolated individual, begin with language’s most salient contrast with animal “languages”: its more effective communication of information. The implication is that we would at some point in our evolution find such effectiveness beneficial: how useful it would be to be able to tell my fellow creatures: “The food is over the hill”! Whereas the originary hypothesis, following the rule of thumb that necessity is the mother of invention, assumes that language was not just a welcome supplement to prehuman means of communication but that it emerged because it had become necessary in order to maintain order in hominin society.

    Very simply, an important component of human intelligence is mimetic, that is, we learn by imitating others, by taking them as models. But although Aristotle had already called man “the most mimetic animal” in the Poetics, Girard was the first to designate mimetic desire as the critical problem of human existence, and by extension, an insoluble problem for intelligent pre-human life. For in imitating another’s behavior with respect to a desirable object, one becomes attracted to that same object, which necessarily risks leading to conflict. We thus may assume that as a consequence of pre-human increase in mimetic intelligence, the old serial distribution system would have become increasingly problematic and finally ineffective; members of a hominin group would no longer stand by passively while the successive Alpha, Beta, Gamma… animals each took full possession of the prey to be divided, detached their portion, and passed the rest down the chain.

    Hence GA’s originary hypothesis presumes a group of proto-humans surrounding a desirable object—say, an edible animal hunted or scavenged by a hunting party—and discovering/inventing language as a means to divide the prey among themselves without arousing conflict.

    We imagine this group of hominins, each tentatively seeking to appropriate the object for itself. But in the face of the appropriative gestures of the others, each would abort his own (think of party guests hesitating to take the last canapé on the serving dish), and these aborted gestures of appropriation, eventually shared in common by all members of the group, would come to be interpreted as acts of pointing. In the terms of the hypothesis, these attempts to possess the object would come to be experienced as interdicted by an external force that would be the first manifestation of conscience, or what Freud called the superego, derived from the collective egos of the group, and which GA views as the first experience of the sacred.

    The pointing gesture naturally focuses the attention of all on the central object, such that the gesture comes to be interpreted as an ostensive sign. In this context it is of the greatest significance that even higher apes such as chimpanzees do not point in the human sense. That is, they do not practice what Tomasello and others have defined as “joint shared attention,” drawing the attention of another by means of a sign: in the terms of a famous Zen koan , the participant must interpret his fellow’s pointing gesture as demanding: “look at the moon, not at my finger.” For GA this emission of the first linguistic sign crosses the Rubicon separating animals from humans.

    The complementary element of this situation is what we define as the (linguistic and subsequently, cultural) scene of representation. Animals do not have a sense of a scene or sacred space on which they communicate collectively; that is why they cannot follow the plot of a play or movie. The scenic relationship can establish itself among any number of humans: there can be conversations with one or two or ten speakers, formal situations such as lectures and debates, or dramas and films, where there is a passive audience… but in each case, the prior possibilities of using language are well-enough defined so that each person normally has a good idea of when if at all he can speak and to whom. As I have pointed out elsewhere (see “The Screenic Age,” Mimetic Theory and Film. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019:109-21), the mysterious power of smartphones is that their screen, evolved from that of cinema, gives the user the unprecedented power of “possessing” the human scene in a portable device he can transform at will.

    The first linguistic communication, which I have assumed was a pointing gesture, one that may well have been accompanied by a vocalization, would presumably be copied and repeated by all the members of the group surrounding the object of interest until the gesture came to be understood as designating this object as something no individual should attempt to possess—but that should ultimately be divided up and shared by all. Aside from the inclusion in this scenario of the element of the sacred, understood as first manifested by the conscious sense of interdiction in each participant regarding his attempt to possess the object, this scenario was already described in its essence in the original statement of the hypothesis in The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (California 1981; henceforth TOOL). This first instance of language would also be the originary example of human ritual: collective activity subsequently recalled and repeated as a sacred configuration.

    In TOOL I also hypothesized how the original ostensive sign might through usage evolve into an imperative, where the sign is used in the absence of its referent as a command to make it present, and the imperative subsequently give rise to a declarative, the form that defines “mature” language, which would emerge in an attempt to respond to an imperative that cannot be obeyed, presumably because the demanded object is not immediately available.

    In subsequent publications, I have tried to demonstrate the historical evolution of the scene of representation as depicted in drama and other literary works (Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford, 1993), the applicability of these ideas to the early history of philosophy (A New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art. Davies, 2011), and to the emergence of the “social contract” and other initiatory scenes in the early modern era (The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. Stanford, 2007), and, more briefly, to the study of religion (“In the beginning was the word: Generative Anthropology as a religious anthropology.” Generative Anthropology as Transdisciplinary Inquiry: Religion, Science, Language & Culture. Warsaw, 2018: 21-34.)

    The online Chronicles of Love and Resentment (https://anthropoetics.org/views), begun in 1995 and now numbering over 800, have among other things sought to analyze what appears to be the unstoppable decline of the institutional sacred in the modern era and its replacement by a return to the “pre-cultural” pseudo-sacred defined by what I have called the epistemology of resentment, a phenomenon that began in earnest with the French Revolution—and whose power has most recently acquired considerable destructive energy through its joining with militant Islam in the “Red-Green” Alliance.

    At this point, we must pose an academic question: how can GA be made to constitute a genuine field of study? If indeed the originary hypothesis offers a new understanding of the human and its culture, scholars and their public should have the opportunity to apply it to all the elements of human culture. Yet in their present state, American universities are hardly open to the ideas of GA.

    As a preliminary consideration, I believe we must do our best to prevent the existing fields of study in the domain of human self-understanding from being deformed and finally undone by the unrecognized tension between the agora and the laboratory that I discussed in Chronicle 815. Departments of humanities and social science must be persuaded to restore a role for a humanist anthropology that will maintain something of the intellectual freedom of the era of French Theory, during which GA was able to emerge and find collaborators and adherents.

    The point of that Chronicle was to defend Descartes’ apparent solipsism by pointing out that the Cogito—as demonstrated by all the subsequent discussions in and surrounding his Discours de la méthode—was not meant to define a new point of departure for philosophy, but for natural science. Descartes’ certitude concerning his own “being” was in fact the minimal form of what Bachelard would later theorize as the laboratory: a place from which all elements other than those involved in scientific observation and experimentation were excluded. In the laboratory, we eliminate distracting forces such as externally induced vibrations; similarly, in the mental laboratory Descartes establishes, he eliminates the influence of external judgments by focusing his reasoning powers on the experimental material in question independently of what he had previously been taught or told about it.

    Whatever problems arise in the laboratory sciences today—fraudulent experimental data, insufficient verification…—these sciences are clearly producing important results. Whereas the social sciences, as reflected by the political views of the vast majority of their practitioners, are increasingly dominated by the epistemology of resentment, which has produced such dysfunctional dogmas as “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) and the related “critical race theory.” And the worldwide outbreak of “anti-Zionist” ideas and movements resulting from the pogrom of last October 7 has revealed the unexpected vulnerability of nearly the entire academic world to what can only be described as antisemitism.

    This is a measure of the progress of Wokism in American universities since around 1980. The decline of French Theory was accompanied by the rise of a “new new left” whose Marcuse-inflected neo-Marxism drove out the more philosophically sophisticated leftism of the previous generation. The latter’s Achilles’ heel was indeed its ultimate failure to transcend the epistemology of resentment—perhaps most sadly illustrated by Sartre in his later years distributing Chinese Communist tracts. As a result, today’s English and Comp Lit departments continue to turn out—along with much useful traditional scholarship—dogmatic analyses illustrating the truths of “Critical” Race/Gender Theory.

    Why has the elaboration of GA’s originary hypothesis taken place paradoxically in an era when French Theory thinking as a whole has become “passé”? A younger colleague at a recent conference attributed my advocacy of a hypothetical scene of the origin of language to my belonging to “an earlier generation”—as though others of my generation had developed similar ideas. For the real, if no doubt unconscious thrust of his remark was to assimilate my thinking, as Girard dismissively did in Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (Continuum, 2007), to “social contract theory,” that is, to the intellectual universe of the Early Modern era.

    In my judgment, what was lacking in French Theory to make it truly compatible with humanist anthropology was that in its battle with metaphysics it never dealt directly with the field’s fundamental problem, which is its need to define the human as essentially fallen, not through “original sin,” but through its division between masters and slaves. Its authors were generally too invested in the politics of the Left to understand the need to thoroughly reject the epistemology of resentment—which for example influenced Derrida to suggest (in De la grammatologie) that language was from the outset a means of central control, that its “presence” was in effect the illusory mesmerization of its audience.

    Derrida’s notion of différance was a brilliant condensation (difference and deferral; in French, defer and differ are both différer) but instead of applying it to the very origin of language—deferring acquisition in favor of the differential relation of reference—he saw it only as the source of the differential multiplicity of linguistic paradigms.

    The End of Metaphysics?

    As I pointed out at the 2024 Tokyo GASC (see Chronicle 806), there is a fascinating connection between Sartre’s néant or “nothingness” and the nirvana of Buddhism, resulting from his series of conversations with the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shuzo in Paris in 1928. Sartre situates this nothingness within the human pour-soi or for–oneself, that is, a subjectivity that stands back from its objects and contemplates them, in contrast to what he defines as the en-soi or being-in-itself, in which he includes not only lifeless matter but non-human creatures, who lack the mental “space” to take a detached view of their environment.

    The broader significance of this connection is that the néant in Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant can easily be identified with the “mental space” between the user of language and his referent, the result of the prior deferral of the original attempt at possession. Yet, sadly, Sartre utterly failed to see the source of the pour-soi in the subject-referent relation of human language; indeed, he barely mentions language at all in the 600-odd pages of L’être et le néant. Clearly this failure to note the essential connection of human language with the human self stems from what we have seen as the original “sin” of metaphysics which, while seeking to understand language in the agora, nonetheless attributes its component Ideas—its words, its signs—to a transcendent divinity who in the Republic projects their shadows on the wall of the Cave.

    Given that this refusal to understand language’s human origin defines philosophy/metaphysics, why then is it only now that we can see beyond metaphysics? Although Western philosophy has struggled with the need to “transcend” it since the time of Hegel, the domain of philosophy remains implicitly dependent on the notion that language, like mathematics, is somehow independent in its foundation from the humans who so to speak download it from its transcendental source. But mathematics itself is but a human system whose rigor is simply the product of the definitions that we give to its operations. That this system allows us to calculate real-world realities is not a proof that mathematics is “embodied” in nature, merely that the operations of the real world, whatever “laws” they follow, cannot “disobey” mathematics because it is we who assign mathematical values to these operations. Just as we hardly need a transcendental subject to tell us that two eggs plus two eggs equals four eggs, the same is true of the most complex operations of topology or matrix algebra.

    Fortunately, anthropology has no need for any of this. As the originary hypothesis attempts to demonstrate, it suffices to distinguish between the pre-human and the human by the latter’s establishment of a scene on which humans communicate through signs that represent their objects rather than manipulating them directly.

    To conclude, that GA’s simple scheme has been greeted so far neither by praise nor condemnation but by indifference, as if the question it seeks to answer were one that only the naïve would ask, demonstrates to my mind the immaturity of the present state of human self-understanding, but not its fundamental incapacity to overcome it.

  • The Secular Sacred and the Epistemology of Resentment

    In Chronicle 816, reflecting on the complaint of a religious thinker that in today’s world religious thought is no longer taken seriously led me to consider the connection between the dismissal of traditional religious revelation and what I have been calling the epistemology of resentment, which provides the foundation for what is in effect a new-old form of sacred: a “social conscience” whose revelation is rooted no longer in the mediating deferral of conflict imposed by the originary scene of language and its religious derivatives, but in the visceral or pre-cultural sense of injustice provoked in the human subject by what is experienced as unequal treatment. This sense can also be aroused on behalf of other individuals and groups with whom one comes to identify in a sympathetic mimetic reaction.

    As I have previously observed, as a more than sporadic social phenomenon, the sacralization of resentment is a product of the French Revolution, as marked by the origin of the “Left” in the 1789 French National Assembly. Variants are also found on the modern “Right,” that of the Fascists and Nazis of the 20th century, and in dictatorial regimes and démocratures like Venezuela. Their source lies in popular resentments of a not strictly anti-hierarchical nature, but rather expressing a massified form of what the word “resentment” meant in aristocratic society: lèse-majesté, failure to honor one’s privileges, be they as mythical as that of “Aryans” under Nazism—or as understandable as the birthright of the native population of many European countries in contrast with the generous advantages accorded recent immigrants.

    The historically most significant theoretical justification of this phenomenon was Marx’s description of the modern world as “class society” in which the owners of capital exploit the “labor power” of the working class, which alone creates value.

    That the inequalities generated by our “post-industrial” society are comparable if not greater than those of the past is made tolerable by the vast improvements in overall prosperity and living conditions. As a result, even if we can generally be expected to accept John Rawls’ justification for these differences on the ground that they are conducive to greater prosperity for all, their acceptance by the individual is understood less as fundamental moral issue than as a personal coming-to-terms (“adjustment”). As a result, the society remains permanently at the mercy of perturbations which, by making such adjustment problematic, provoke open expressions of resentment that present themselves as appeals for justice. Of which the most recent is what we experience today as “Wokeness.”

    This form of sacred unmediated by religion deserves further examination. The conscience through which we learn to distinguish right from wrong is no more infallible than any other source of intuition. Whether or not the sacred be attributed to God, its specific reality for a member of a given community is a function of his interactive experience and his reactions to it, beginning in earliest childhood along with his apprenticeship in language.

    Although we normally assume that political and/or religious tyrannies impose their will by force as opposed to inspiring faith, the boundary between the two is far from stable. Thus throughout the convulsions of the Soviet Union, the early Bolsheviks, and even many of Stalin’s later victims, retained faith in communism and in Stalin himself, which dissipated gradually over the decades as the USSR/Russia passed from Khrushchev to Gorbachev to Putin. Nor is it clear that even the quasi-deification of autocratic rulers, for example, the Kims in North Korea, is without effect on the consciences of some or most of its citizens. We must always distinguish between what is publicly affirmed as sacred in a given society, or even in a given family, and what an individual accepts as sacred at a given moment—without ever presuming that a person’s conscience is a stable entity that achieves its final state through a profession of faith.

    Were we to attempt a history of the latter-day form of sacrality based on the epistemology of resentment, it would seem that Christianity must be seen as its distant ancestor. In contrast with Buddhism and the other Eastern religions from Hinduism to Confucianism, Christianity insists on the reconception of the One God in Trinitarian terms, most importantly, his fusion with human mortality. And whatever the aberrations of Wokism as the most recent stage of this epistemology, it is easy to see its roots in Christianity’s denunciation of the powers of the “world” and its message that “the last will be first, and the first, last” (Matthew 20:16). That Christianity teaches that the resentment implicit in these denunciations is transcended by Jesus’ sacrifice is an additional commandment that many secular Westerners interpret today as obliging them to grant compensatory privileges to those who can claim the status of victims.

    Thus the image from June 2020 of Democratic leaders adorned with Ashanti scarves kneeling in homage to George Floyd is not a mere caricature of ceremonies such as the Pope’s washing the feet of beggars on Holy Thursday. It extends the notion of the holiness of the poor to their presumed equivalents in modern society, just as Alvin Bragg’s refusal to indict New York City’s turnstile-jumpers and shoplifters is an updated version of Victor Hugo’s sympathetic portrayal of Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread in Les misérables. Although true believers of Woke ideology tend to have contempt for believing Christians, taken as the primary basis for public morality, the above phrase from the Sermon on the Mount—which is by no means unanticipated in the Hebrew prophetic tradition—is at the root of all “progressive” or “revolutionary” thought, marked by the presumption that “the powers of this world” are by their very nature satanic.

    Not that we should blame Christianity, or Judaism, for this prophetic slogan. In Jesus’ mouth, these words must be seen as a denunciation of a corrupt world that needs to return to its originary divine inspiration. But to know when the prophecy applies, as a Christian must presume it does when we encounter it in the New Testament, that is the real question, just as knowing which changes really improve the human condition and which do not is not something that one’s conscience can foretell in advance.

    Nor can the epistemology of resentment, however disciplined by a communal sense of the sacred, be simply ignored. How else would we become aware of real injustice, however defined? The one thing we can be sure of is that what makes us human is our capacity for deferral, for exercising judgment, such that formulas like “the first shall be last” must be applied with discretion. All the more so in our “postcolonial” era, when many have been led to view the “Northern” Jews as ipso facto the oppressors of the Palestinians, paradoxically all the more so when the latter have dared to rebel by torturing and massacring unarmed Israeli civilians.

    Which brings us back to the question of how we are to distinguish between an authentic sacred and its resentful caricatures. The difficulties raised by this question might well lead us to the conclusion that, in times like ours in which millennial inequalities must be negotiated, the first duty of our conscience must be to put our always potentially resentful desire away from us, following the Buddhist path of accepting to define it as what Girard called a mensonge romantique. And indeed, the popularity of Buddhist-inspired spiritual techniques in the West attests to what is ultimately the advantage of this attitude for one’s personal “adjustment.”

    No doubt the defeat of fascism in WWII followed by the collapse of Bolshevism in 1989-91, while hardly being equivalent to “the end of history,” did seem for a while to have settled the global issue in favor of Western civilization, with its social sacred largely inspired by Judeo-Christianity. Yet it was surely this very sense that the world order had been stabilized in favor of the West under American hegemony that revived the somnolent forces of “third-world” resentment—and eventually of antisemitism—first in the 1960s, and then with far greater force after 9/11/2001, when the West responded to this unexpected humiliation from its recently decolonized South by seeking maladroitly to “spread democracy” to the Middle East, thereby activating “post-colonial” resentments, echoed in the West itself by the oikophobic condemnations of such as Noam Chomsky in defense of the al Qaeda martyrs.

    One thing at least is clear: Whether the epistemology of resentment be applied directly in political revolutions or, as currently in the Western world, indirectly through mechanisms like Wokeness, it is hard to think of a single case where it has improved the ability of a population to solve the eternal problem of reconciling its citizens’ sense of moral equality with their respective benefit to society. The natural preference of the many who would choose a new land to inhabit remains overwhelmingly for those nations that practice some form of Western-style liberal democracy—what Churchill called the worst system except for all the others. In contrast, the new societies founded on the epistemology of resentment have been uniformly judged by all but militant jihadists or their equivalent as less attractive than those they have displaced. Even where these societies are relatively successful, as in mainland China, it is hard to imagine anyone choosing it over the freer society of Taiwan, and this is all the more the case for the far less successful majority of these nations, from North Korea to Cuba and Venezuela. Nor would anyone claim that the Muslim revolution in Iran and its extensions in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen… have improved the daily lives of their inhabitants.

    As a consequence, the West’s need to maintain the public order that we associate with “civil society,” now that it can no longer depend on a set of religious values such as the “Judeo-Christian” United States implicitly shared not long ago, has become all the more urgent, in the interest of maintaining not only social harmony but above all, the economic and military strength to resist the increasingly powerful forces that oppose it. It is in this regard that the need to reinforce what we may call the societal sacred  becomes crucial.

    The degree to which Western societies generally have demonstrated their inability to deal with the low-level violence and disorder that has made our large cities increasingly dangerous and disorderly has become a farcical parallel to the real danger inherent in the West’s decreasing readiness to defend itself militarily, a critical problem if we would avoid catastrophic conflict in the coming decades. In particular, our scandalous vulnerability to the violent rhetoric and actions of radical Islamism cannot be allowed to persist. Neither the US nor its allies can tolerate in the long term the formation of mobs of organized agitators who can with virtually total impunity call for the death of Jews and the end of Israel, deface public monuments, and burn our flag.

    Coda: Re-integrating Western Culture?

    France is still today Europe’s, and the world’s, most culturally marked country. And although neither France’s economy nor its cultural creativity have retained anything like the importance they had at the time of the preceding 1924 Paris Olympics (depicted in the film Chariots of Fire), still today no city is comparable to Paris in the worldwide familiarity of its monuments and the prestige accorded to its fashions, cuisine, and lifestyle. Thus these Games were an exemplary attempt to celebrate the whole world’s unity in the cultural capital of the West.

    In this regard, the recent controversy over the Dionysus-drag-queen Last Supper segment of the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris is in my judgment less a symptom of the West’s current cultural malaise than, on the contrary, what strikes me as a good-faith if somewhat awkward attempt to integrate its traditional values with those of the radically permissive culture of today’s avant-garde, as exemplified by its perhaps most characteristic element of gay liberation.**

    Although many found this production offensive, I am willing to accept the creators’ assertions that the program was not intended to scandalize its audience, but rather to make them smile at its no-longer-forbidden-or-even-daringness. That is, to put the best face on it, as a celebration of the freedom of 21st century Western culture to include both the Last Supper and drag queens—and a near-naked Bacchus—without really offending anyone. And for many if not most members of this society, that was certainly true.

    That this effort would predictably be greeted with hostility by traditional religious believers was a consequence the organizers evidently assumed would not prevent it from being enjoyed or at least tolerated by most of its audience. This could only be ascertained by a statistically controlled survey. And it is at least a notable indication that in the conservative Le Figaro‘s daily readers’ poll of July 29, in answer to the question: Did you appreciate the opening ceremony of the J.O.?, 62% voted yes and 38% no. No doubt the ceremony included many other elements, but one would assume that anyone truly offended by the parody—as its news coverage on all the networks I have seen made clear by the reactions of their respective pundits—would have voted no.

    But rather than arguing over whether this sequence was or was not offensive, it is more important to see it as an attempt to unify the contemporary world’s heterogeneous popular culture—an attempt such as could not have been conceived, let alone attempted, until very recently. And we cannot deny that—in contrast with holding drag queen readings in elementary school libraries—including this sequence in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is not without legitimacy as a gesture of lighthearted cultural synthesis.

    As for those who point out that no one would have dared to deal in an analogous manner with the sacred material of Muslim culture, we might respond that, precisely, the fact that Western Judeo-Christian culture has traditionally had a freer attitude toward its own sacred material is not a sign of religious inferiority, but of its more sophisticated integration into daily life. Indeed, the West, as Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out some time ago, and as readers of Boccaccio or Rabelais should recall, has a particularly rich carnivalesque tradition. (See in particular Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.) Which is not to say that this episode is a fortiori worthy of their example, but merely that its “shockingness” is far from a sign of the decadence of our cultural tradition. And whereas the issues raised by what are best called marked sexual attitudes will always provoke controversy, the larger society, as in the case of gay marriage, often adapts to them surprisingly quickly, so that a modus vivendi appears much faster than one would have imagined—even as it continues to treat other forms of the “marked” less acceptingly.

    If such kerfuffles were all contemporary Western culture had to worry about, we would be blessed indeed. Our societies should rather concentrate on eradicating real disorder and violence and creating an atmosphere of mutual tolerance and respect. This seems indeed to have been accomplished quite successfully for the duration of the Games—with the result that when Le Figaro asked on August 10, their penultimate day, whether the Paris JO was a success, a full 88% answered Oui!

    **Unfortunately all videos showing this sequence without commentary have been removed from YouTube and no doubt from other internet sources. I was only able to watch a few minutes of this spectacle, and so regrettably cannot analyze it in detail.

  • Science and Faith: Anthropology of the Sacred

    … the secular is not merely the indifferent site of human flourishing imagined by the prevailing liberal order. It is a metaphysical construct that defines our “social imaginary,” offering a total interpretation of reality that systematically excludes the apprehension of God from our operative notions of being, nature, knowledge, and truth. . . . “The secular” is not an argument against the rationality of belief. It is a comprehensive conception of reality devoid of God. This conception of reality dominates the modern world, and thus influences all of us . . . not at the level of argument, but as an axiomatic, unconscious, and therefore unquestioned assumption permeating our apprehension of everything. (Michael Hanby, “The Church of the Secular West”, p 24, First Things #345, August-September 2024)

    I think that this passage well expresses the frustration of persons of faith in today’s intellectual world. Whereas in the days of Descartes, and even in those of Kant, the idea of God, however interrogated, was not questioned in itself. Today, believers face an intellectual community many or most of whose members simply consider God, and articles of faith in general, as unworthy of serious consideration, on the example of Creationists who affirm that the Darwinian conception of evolution is fallacious and that creation can only be understood as the product of a self-conscious creator. Such people can only be seen as misunderstanding the very principles of empirical science: once one proposes a transcendental will as an “explanation,” one has simply abandoned the realm of scientific discourse.

    Attempting to affirm religious values in a world that simply has no place for faith comes to seem an impossible task. Yet, as I have tried to show in proposing a minimal hypothesis for the origin of the human scene, I consider Roy Rappaport’s intuition that religion and language are born in the same moment as certainly correct: we cannot conceive the origin of language and of all it implies without at the same time conceiving what Rappaport called the origin of religion, which is more rigorously stated as the origin of the sacred. The first sign must be understood as the product of the renunciation of appropriation, not as the result of an “inhibition,” but of a conscious decision, an act of conscience in response to a sense of external interdiction that acts upon the humans within the scene on which it occurs, and by which we define the sacred. Accordingly, when in Genesis God commands Adam not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, although all-powerful, he does not enforce his commandment (i.e., as an “inhibition”), but transmits it to Adam as an obligation to obey, leaving as always possible his failure to carry it out, while nonetheless recognizing it as his sacred duty. Or to put this more succinctly: at the moment of human origin, the sacred and the significant are the same.

    If we retain this minimal characterization of the sacred, it becomes possible to avoid the evacuation of God that the above-quoted passage describes. No doubt “the sacred” is a much more flexible category than “God,” but what cannot be denied is that throughout history, the sacred has been associated with diverse real and conceptual entities, yet has never simply been absent from any human community of whatever dimension, even our own. An atheist who refuses to recognize an incarnate god however defined cannot deny the presence of the sacred in any human culture as the originary basis of its ethic, since it was experienced as an alien will before it could conceivably be associated with a nameable persona. We can theorize that the sacred embodies the collective will of the community as minimally defined by the scene on which it is experienced, but a “collective will” is a theoretical construct of the kind elaborated by philosophers who are reflecting on the phenomenon that in the first place is simply experienced as an external force that we feel obliged to accept, even if we do not honor this obligation. And those most hostile to religious ideas of any kind tend to treat as sacred the convictions of their conscience which, however aberrant, share the same imperative force.

    Needless to say, offering this anthropological guarantee of the sacred is not the equivalent of making a profession of faith in a given religion. But what it does is to make clear that the sacred is at the foundation of the human community and cannot be understood as a mere fiction created by this community. The sense of interdiction/obligation inherent in the sacred and in our “conscience” that is aware of its command cannot be understood as the result of a decision by either an individual or the community of individuals present at the scene, but as a collective consequence of each individual’s desire to avoid conflict. This is not to say that we can claim that this conscience appears in all members of the group at the same time, merely that once this scene becomes the model for future scenes as a ritual of distribution, the sacred is shared unanimously, with whatever degree of self-consciousness suffices to bring about a common suspension of gestures of appropriation and their conversion into signs designating the desired object. We may say that only when this symmetry has become universally accepted can we speak of the birth of the human community.

    Needless to say, this originary scene is the beginning of a long history branching into many different distributional and other practices. But we can affirm that at the origin, cultural stability can only be attained through the establishment of a universally accepted procedure that may be called a ritual since it involves coordination among all members of the community, such that obeying the command of the sacred permits the successful distribution of the potentially rivalry-inducing item(s) at the center of the group’s common concern. This is the prehistoric point of departure for ritual in general, and the participants’ common consciousness/conscience of the sacred is the inspiration for the religious beliefs that allow them to share their memories of a given ritual, which can then become subjects of discourse leading to supplementary religious conceptions and practices.

    Thus “the secular” that rejects all religious behavior, while justified in the context of the laboratory, is by no means incompatible with the acknowledgement of the sacred in everyday life, nor are one’s beliefs and religious practices, however irrelevant to empirical science, devoid of utility to the human community that profits from the laboratory’s discoveries.

    With this anthropological context as our point of departure, it is then possible to understand the ensemble of our religious practices from a non-fideistic perspective that at the same time does not deny their validity by obliging them to meet the test of the scientific laboratory. The separation first theorized by Descartes (see Chronicle 815) between the agora and the laboratory should not be taken to imply that the latter’s criteria must or even can be imposed on the totality of human thought processes. Declaring faith-based thought, or theology, “illegitimate” is itself only legitimate in contexts where laboratory criteria are applicable.

    For we should not forget that the origin of language and “thinking” derive not from an obligation to subject all aspects of human life to the scientific method, but from our need to overcome the dangers aroused by the intensified mimetic rivalry that is the inevitable consequence of our ancestors’ increasing intelligence. The bottom line of human thought, as of all human activities, is the preservation and flourishing of our species. No doubt the claim of the faithful that their faith provides a superior guarantee of human flourishing than a way of thinking that actively denies that faith, that is, atheism as a belief-system rather than a mere attitude, cannot be said to have been demonstrated by the role of religion in history, but it certainly cannot be said to have been disproved. Faith and non-fideistic thought need only come into conflict if one of the two seeks to impose its perspective on the other.

    There is no point in my attempting to propose practical solutions for, e.g., the question of public prayer. The point of this as of all the Chronicles is to define an anthropological perspective, that is, one that recognizes above all the human need for self-preservation under the circumstances that provoked the emergence of humanity in the first place, that is, the need for a “conscience” in which the sacredness of the need to preserve the human community is affirmed.

    And the proof that the introduction of the principles of GA is not in conflict with this overall criterion is simply that, as anthropology has always done, it recognizes that its place is not to impose on religious or cultural practices of any kind the criteria of the scientific laboratory. The fact that when we watch a play or a movie we do not impose such criteria is taken for granted; but the same incompatibility exists in the practice of religion. No doubt religion is not a “fiction”; its different forms all affirm the reality of their object(s) of faith, indeed to the point of insisting that this is a higher reality than that of worldly objects. But once again, this is not a thesis that can be refuted by reference to scientific method. No doubt the tension between religious and scientific truth is felt more strongly in our era than it was by Descartes and most of his successors. But with the exception of religious movements that insist that religious affirmations are not simply “higher” than worldly ones but exist in the same domain and can therefore be used to contradict them, there is no need for these two forms of assertion to come into conflict.

    Indeed, claiming that “God does not exist” is not truly a well-formed statement; the “existence” of God is not subject to the criteria of the laboratory. In the agora, where Socrates was condemned for having violated the religious duties of Athens, his acceptance of the hemlock should be seen not as an ironic or scornful gesture, but as a sign of his acceptance that in the last resort, and independently of the ultimate value of his philosophical ideas for the polis, the human community that it defines has the right to decide what activities are compatible with it. While at the same time, Plato’s subsequent (and permitted) activity affirms that in the Academy, in the margin of the agora, philosophizing would indeed find its place within Athenian society. The fact that this is the true point of departure for what we can call classical philosophy implies that his master’s death functioned as a quasi-religious revelation, that is, as something of broader social impact than the cogito .

    No doubt discussion on this level does not begin to answer the practical questions of how to conduct a dialogue between anthropology and theology, or even whether such a dialogue can reach any useful conclusions. But given that faith, like language, is an anthropological phenomenon, rejecting it as “illegitimate” is hardly appropriate scientific behavior. Just as the contents of our conscience cannot be demonstrated to be true in the way that we can prove a mathematical theorem, neither can assertions within religious traditions. But we must remember that ultimately, all useful human activities must be conducive to the same results: the thriving of the human community however defined.

    As for the question posed by, on the one hand, the apparent decline of religious practice in the West, and on the other, religion’s encouragement of resentment and its expression through barbaric violence in “postcolonial” contexts, these phenomena reflect the simple fact that, to put it in Judeo-Christian terms, the human world is not Paradise. The point of GA is not to promulgate a set of rules by which humanity can be assured of living in peace; but its overall purpose of seeking to understand the human is to aid us in judging the best course to preserve our species and the persons who compose it. To this end, the originary hypothesis as the model of all human behavior exemplifies the presence at the foundation of humanity of the sacred as the imperative deferral of violence.

  • Form the agora to the poêle: Descartes’Cogito and Modern Thought

    Modern philosophy begins, one might say, with Descartes’ self-centered syllogism, “I think, therefore I am”; cogito ergo sum; je pense, donc je suis.

    The idea that my existence must be confirmed by a syllogism can be seen as a symptom of metaphysics that must be put to rest. Descartes begins by doubting anything he might be able to doubt, the enabling of doubt with respect to a given proposition being defined by the mere possibility of asserting the contrary without self-contradiction. But saying “I do not exist” is clearly incompatible with non-existence.

    With this gesture we take final leave of the philosophical agora of the ancients for the confines of the individual mind, empowering the intellectual adventures of modern idealism, culminating in Kant and Hegel—and leading subsequently to the two-century battle with metaphysics as “the prison-house of language,” ending with deconstruction, French Theory… and the birth of GA.

    Je pense donc je suis cannot “prove” Descartes’ existence to any but himself. Only he knows he is thinking, but to say this demonstrates his “being” is to suggest that the sense that one exists depends on reasoning. He cannot say “I eat, therefore I am” because one can eat without thinking and therefore without being aware of existing. But what is then the status of existing, or simply, “being”? What is key here is that the self needs to establish its existence independently of “the world,” of which it can always “doubt,” a world which at the limit includes my own body, all but my “thinking.” By thus affirming my mind’s existence as more certain than that of the rest of the universe, I effectively deny the necessity of the polis and its god(s) to my existence. Thinking is understood on the model of mathematics, as the elaboration of a system of ideas independent of the (human) scene, wholly predefined by a set of axioms.

    But what must not be forgotten in this transition is the trans-individual, communal reason behind Descartes’ “method” of doubt. His final purpose is not philosophical but proto-scientific. As opposed to the Greek philosophers, his isolation in a poêle or heated room in Germany is a precondition of modern scientific activity; this figurative laboratory serves as a model for a real one. And accordingly, Descartes’s Discours de la méthode was written so to speak as a preface for his essays on Dioptrics, the study of light and its refraction through lenses, and The Meteors, which also touches on a variety of other atmospheric phenomena. Previous works (Le Monde [The World] and L’Homme [Man], published only posthumously) offered what might be called proto-scientific descriptions of the physical world, including a lengthy disquisition on the circulation of blood in the human body through the heart and the circulatory system, as first described by Harvey.

    Descartes’ move from the agora to the poêle should thus be understood primarily as a step toward making philosophy the helpmate of mathematics and physical science, and his Discourse as providing a basis for their necessarily rigorous theorizing. Which is to say that the roots of modern philosophy were created in response to a new configuration that has remained at the root of modern society, one dependent, as ancient society was not, on ever-evolving science and technology.

    Unlike the world of the polis that could serve Plato as a substitute for the originary scene of language, the modern sciences required to be isolated from human interaction in order that the scientist focus his efforts not on refining our understanding of the Ideas that regulate society, but on making empirical observations and deducing from them laws that would allow him to manipulate the material world to practical effect. That this led philosophy to separate metaphysics from its roots in the human scene and focus on the material world can hardly be viewed in itself as detrimental; yet it concomitantly inspired a focus on the individual mind as if detached from its roots in the community, leaving it to religion to supply the providential foundation of the latter’s existence in the world.

    No doubt early modern philosophers such as Kant and Hegel were concerned with matters involving this community, but the direct connection between the world of ideas and this community was lost, with the result that the world of the agora was no longer congruent with the cogito-bred mind of the modern thinker. The resulting disconnect between the political order and the scientific one, what Parmenides had called the path of truth and the path of opinion, was not just problematic, as in the Athens that condemned Socrates, but understood as a reflection of their different natures.

    Whereas the Ideas of classical philosophy were the norms that presumably or ideally governed the polis, those of modern philosophy have no obligation other than to logical consistency. The early modern philosopher makes of his mind a laboratory like that of the proto-scientist of his era, but unlike the latter, applies logic as if it could conjure up reality, constrained only by the consistency of his propositions. Such is the universe of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant, and even Hegel, in whose thought we must take the concepts of history, art, religion, etc., as in the first place not real-world phenomena but conceptual entities whose consistency is determined wholly in the dialectical realm of ideas. That Hegel’s concepts are also understood as embodied in worldly institutions presumably demonstrates that the play of concepts as a priori determined through Hegelian “logic” was the template upon which the historical human world was constructed.

    Yet, as Marx most famously emphasized, the Hegelian dialectic of ideas was in fact realized in the real world of human society by the “dialectic” of social groups each promoting their own interests. The source of this insight, which has defined the modern political world, was the French Revolution, which dared to extend the Christian equality of all souls before God into a demand for political and economic equality of earthly conditions: liberté, égalité, fraternité!

    With the birth in the 1789 National Assembly of the enduring political categories of Right and Left, the latter of which denied the authority of the King, there emerged what I have called the epistemology of resentment, a mode of ethical thought that refuses to conceive the polis as naturally harmonious but rather as—until the “final conflict” that would bring about the earthly paradise of socialism/communism—a structure of inequality and oppression, ultimately, of masters and slaves. Henceforth political debate could lead to compromise but never to a stable synthesis—whence the disappointments that have followed ever since upon the apparent moments of harmony, from the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 to the postwar founding of the United Nations to Fukuyama’s 1989 “End of History.”

    And whence the need to found a new minimal understanding of humanity, a new anthropology, with its point of departure in a hypothesis of origin on an originary scene of human interaction on which emerge the minimal human attributes of language and the sacred.

    Why has this not been recognized? Here we meet the crux of humanistic thought in the contemporary, always-not-quite-postmodern human world. And, given that modernity in the sense of movement toward ever-more-efficient techniques has been since the beginning, at first unconsciously and then deliberately, the telos of human activity, as each modernizing revolution creates a new metaphysical prison escaping which will be yet more challenging… the history of humanity, its institutions and ideas, can be understood as a single whole.

    In this context, rather than a new version of the “final conflict,” a positive or negative apocalypse that promises to end the beginning and begin the end, GA puts an end to “ends of history.”  Practitioners of humanistic thought, anthropology with a small ‘a’, must return to philosophy’s original inspiration of perfecting the polis, which has begun what is likely to be a never-ending process of transforming itself into a post-national world community.

    The great political question of today is whether there is indeed a stable alternative—I would not presume to suggest a synthesis—to the models currently being offered to the world, let us say, by the USA, the European Union, China, Russia, and Iran with its jihadist dependencies. Can humanity’s ever-present temptation to mimetic conflict be kept at a manageable level—for the moment defined by the non-use of nuclear weapons—while the “historical dialectic” proceeds toward, not utopia or Armageddon, but an incomplete yet tolerable version of Kant’s “perpetual peace”?

    Dare I say it, but is it perhaps a sign of “progress” that the antisemitism of Hitler has been replaced by that of Yahya Sinwar? One thing we know about Hamas is that, unlike Nazi Germany, it contains no minds on the level of Werner Heisenberg or Martin Heidegger. In its wake, there will be no new science designated, like our number system, as Arabic; no new Alhambras, only an Al-Aqsa built on the site of the Hebrew Temple. Yet Islam surely deserves a more noble destiny than to become the final repository of world resentment.

    The difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of GA’s “originary thinking” is the very difficulty that philosophy was from the beginning created to solve. Socrates-Plato would not have needed to find “all the answers” had these “answers” not been contested by the powers who put the former to death.

    Descartes’ discipline indeed helped to construct the foundation for modern science, with its ever-growing potential for enriching and improving human life. Yet science’s immense self-confidence today strikes me as naïve in the face of the continual expansion of the universe of the unknown at the expense of the known—for example, of “dark” matter and energy at that of the matter and energy we can describe. How far are we from Pope’s Enlightenment optimism:

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

    Yet the human itself has not changed its essence. It is time that we recognized the need to describe it in a minimally mystified form—which is to say, as Generative Anthropology strives to present it. Our uneven yet unending progress toward modernization, hopefully continuing to follow what Churchill called “the worst system, except for all the others…,” must accept what Hegel’s dialectic truly implies, its pursuance to the end of human time.

  • Why this is a good time for the minimal hypothesis of the origin of language **

    Calling this a “good time” for anything might appear facetious. But the old saw about the “ill wind” has often been more relevant than would be expected. Perhaps GA’s hypothesis remains all but invisible, but that only means that its likely long-term effects will remain invisible to all but those able to detach themselves from the clichés of the moment. That people are arguing over the rights of trans-men to compete in women’s sports may simply be said to reflect a high level of confusion over basic issues that should “normally” be settled, but whose opening up to question reflects less a new problem to be solved than a new need to affirm one’s resentment of what had been normal reality.

    That in 1981 I proposed a preliminary version of GA’s basic thesis in a less than minimal context, making my book unlikely to be read in its entirety by those who might have found its basic thesis of interest, is one of those “ironies of history” that can be appreciated only après coup. The distinction I attempted to draw between a formal and an institutional theory of representation was meant to forestall criticism from followers of Girard who understood the beginnings of humanity to emerge from a meurtre émissaire, the killing of a “scapegoat” arbitrarily chosen from the group as concentrating the aggressivity of the surrounding community to which his death and sparagmos would bring peace, following which, presumably, the possibility of scenic communication as it exists within all human communities would emerge. But continued reflection on the moment of emergence of the sign as preliminary to that of mature language’s basic syntactic forms has made clear that what had appeared to me at the time a significant categorical distinction was in fact without interest. What was essential was to define the minimal requirements for the emergence of a sign that was consciously, or we might say, conscientiously produced, in the sense that the substitution of the sign for the original gesture of appropriation was of necessity an act of conscience, the deliberate renouncement of a “natural” gesture under the influence of a will in the service of the community, the original manifestation of the sacred.

    This might be said to be the last question on peoples’ minds in our time of emergent conflict that has brought the world arguably to its most troubled state since the end of WWII. But without seeking historical parallels, it seems to me that it is precisely at such times that radically new ideas, precisely because they go all but unnoticed, are most “naturally” generated. The traditional rules of academic judgment having been suspended in all but the most strictly empirical fields, there is no longer any pressure to adhere to the clichés of the moment, which have become infested with popular resentments that seek power rather than understanding.

    Although the focus of The Origin of Language was the emergence of the syntactic structures of fundamental utterance-forms, from the elementary ostensive to the declarative sentence, from which emerges a notion of truth-value, in retrospect, the most important element introduced into what would become human culture was not the sign itself and its future evolution, but rather the scene of representation on which it appeared, or rather which the sign simultaneously evoked. In pointing to the producer(s) of the first sign, one would do the same for the scene on which the sign brought together the participants of this first “conversation.”

    The scene is the implicit backdrop of all cultural communication. This means, as is still not generally recognized, that not only do animals not have signs in the semiotic sense, but above all, they do not have scenes. I have made this point many times, and note that in most cases this appears as a new idea for my audience, although it is just as obvious that the scene of communication/representation is a purely human configuration as that the sign itself is a purely human creation. The newness of this idea, however obvious in retrospect, is brought home by an example I have previously cited: Frisch’s famous bee-dance that informs other bees of the hive of the position of new sources of pollen is not communicated by the returning bee, as we tend to imagine it, in the center of a circle surrounded by an audience as in a theater, but through its physically transmitting a chemical signal to each of the several bees who needs to know the location of these sources.

    It is curious in a different sense that Jean-Paul Sartre, the Western philosopher who can be said to have theorized the notion of the scene in his magnum opus L’Etre et le néant (1943), never thought to associate it with language, although he insisted on limiting it to the human. Indeed, the most striking revelation of the parallel discovered between Sartre’s néant and the “nothingness” referred to by Nishida and other Japanese-Buddhist philosophers is that in neither case was any connection made between the notion of “empty space” as constitutive of a “realm of freedom” and the scene of language, although a minimum of reflection makes obvious the relation between Sartre’s description of the pour-soi as the human mind characterized by this space and the nature of the scene on which humans exchange signs, whether visual or vocal. Why indeed would Sartre insist that the pour-soi applied only to humanity? Here we observe the limitations of metaphysics at the historical moment when it is about to be transcended; for Existentialism is at its root a critique of metaphysics, of the notion of Ideas as receptacles of truth.

    But it is useless to seek to explain the defects in Sartre’s (or Nishida’s) notion of nothingness once we understand the fundamental source of this concept in the minimal ontology of the originary hypothesis. Nor is what is lacking simply the word/idea “scene.” The reason why Sartre never saw the relationship between human language and the pour-soi is that this term was translated from Hegel without seeking to penetrate beneath its quasi-logical terminology, which remains confined to the mind of the isolated individual. The for in the for-itself implies a whole different ontology from the “in” in the in-itself (en-soi); in the latter there is indeed no “self” at all, merely the potential referent of an “idea,” or more simply, a sign. The self with for attached is truly a self simply by that very fact, so that the soi/itself/sich is wholly different in the two cases, but no thought is given to its dependence on the protohuman community from which it emerges. It is here that metaphysics prolonged itself for another generation in the language of Existenzphilosophie.

    Is this dependence an “exciting” idea? For the reader who takes it seriously it marks the birth of what I have called “a new way of thinking.” But the reader must first accept that no “authority” was needed to make this claim, only its reasonableness with respect to the facts of the human situation—the human scene. To situate this scene in the first place in the individual mind is a metaphysical gesture that even the following generation, that of Derrida, was unable to transcend. It is only once one understands the human as defined by the scene on which its representations are shared that a rational ontology of the human can be constructed, one which also allows for the sense of the sacred or conscience that accompanies the deferral of the act of possession, and makes it, or rather, allows it to become, a sign.

    Only once this is accepted can we seek to explain why this self-evidence was so long deliberately ignored. Why even the theorizers of “joint shared attention” who pointed out that pointing in the human sense is not done by chimpanzees et al, why Derrida who spoke of différance as allowing for the differentiation of signs never realized that the first difference/deferral is not between sign a and sign b, but between the sign and the appropriative gesture that it forecloses.

    Why were these questions not asked? The rule in philosophical discussions is to focus on logical consistency, while judging assertions in their own terms. It would not be proper, for example, to make the point I made above that Sartre’s néant is only understandable in anthropological terms as in the first place a space of communication where objects are represented rather than accessed directly. The real-world basis of the pour-soi “at a distance” from “its” object is the separation of the user of language from the object/being to which he refers, rather than, as with all prehuman animals, seeks to possess or to flee or even to observe. Sartre rightly intuits that an animal’s observation still belongs to the en-soi, the world without “free space,” because it is not a scene of representation, a mental “space” in which the object is not simply observed but contemplated as belonging to a human, and in principle communal, context.

    To say such things today is not simply to criticize Sartre as would another philosopher; it is to impose on philosophy an anthropological context that its very essence denies, a context in which language is not a given but an invention of the human community in its effort to minimize the conflicts that at a certain point could no longer be resolved by animal reflexive mechanisms, thereby giving rise to the sense of sacred interdiction/conscience that obliged the proto-human to defer his individual attempts at appropriation to allow for the sharing of, e.g., a supply of food, among the members of the community.

    None of these originary details were part of philosophical discourse as it first emerged in Greece in an attempt to understand the polis through the analysis of the Ideas that constitute its operative principles. The classical philosophers had no idea of biological evolution and could not have conceived of a historical moment of the origin of language as the origin of our species. The polis was the first self-conscious model of the human community, and the persistent relevance of classical philosophy depends upon the fact that it still remains an approximate model of a self-contained society today. But we cannot expect to find in the works of the philosophers a pre-philosophical understanding of language as the foundation of human society in the absence of an understanding of the emergence of our species from that of non-speaking animals.

    Indeed, it is far from accidental that classical Greek philosophy, as opposed to the speculations of the pre-Socratics, begins precisely in the context of the scene of human representation, that is, as a series of dialogues in the agora. This is the real source of philosophy and its “Ideas,” not the “Cave” in which we see their shadows on the walls. Plato/Socrates seeks the origin of the human community via the conversations the agora permits, through which Socrates’ wisdom can presumably extract the “essence” of terms like courage or piety and convey these truths to his fellow Athenians. That he was forced to drink the hemlock creates a prima facie opposition between the world of everyday politics, with its imperfect grasp of the “Ideas” by which the polis should be ruled, and that of the political/philosophical ideal, which Socrates is depicted as embodying.

    But this dialectical method is not that of empirical science in that it does not see the human itself as an object of inquiry whose emergence from the prehuman must be defined. Only after Darwin could we begin to reflect on the human in its minimal distinction from the prehuman, and this understanding would necessarily come into conflict with the philosophical tradition that had been based on the existence of “mature” humanity as its point of departure.

    Which explains why Sartre could understand the pour-soi, which is so obviously based on the scene of human communication, as a metaphysical construct within the individual’s mind that guarantees his “freedom” independently of the human community. The idea that such a construct must exist in the real world and must therefore itself have an etiological history is altogether outside consideration.

    Which tells us a great deal about why the era of metaphysics is coming to an end. Plato-Socrates’ agora was a reasonable empirical point of departure for human reflection on the human mind in the context of the polis; but once abstracted from any notion of a human collectivity, the pour-soi is an artificial construct whose key element, the néant, is a mere abstraction that cannot be situated in a (pre-) history of the human scene, as it must in order to figure in a generative anthropology.

    What this analysis implies is the necessity for a wholesale rereading of the Western philosophical tradition in the light of the originary hypothesis. Not that rival hypotheses need be excluded; but what is essential is that any such hypotheses take into account the real-world emergence of the human from the prehuman world through the discovery of the scene and the sign, or their equivalents.

    **This Chronicle was written before the Trump assassination attempt that has left so many questions unanswered. Whatever the future of our troubled civilization, it is reassuring to know that at least these fundamental questions can finally be given reasonable answers.

  • The end of history and the beginning of ….

    A mere generation ago, the victory of the West in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the “scientific socialism” it purported to embody provoked a revival of optimistic secular apocalypticism, on which Francis Fukuyama pasted the label “the end of history.” With a semi-naïve confidence in this Hegelian slogan as updated by Alexandre Kojève, Fukuyama sketched a futurist idyll, suggesting that although humanity would continue to exist, henceforth we would have to content ourselves with tweaking petty details in the knowledge that the “final conflict” predicted by the Internationale was now behind us.

    To the extent that the minimal formulation of Generative Anthropology’s originary hypothesis is analogous in its own terms to an “end of (pre)history,”  the minimality of the hypothesis must be prolonged indefinitely, which is to say that it must be understood as affirming the impossibility of defining a priori any parameters that might limit the future development of our species—including of course that its survival cannot be definitively assured. The absurdity of the very idea of an “end of history” as a benign steady state from which all excesses have by nature been excluded makes vain any attempt to speculate on its details.

    But antisemitism…?

    When in 2015 Adam Katz and I published The First Shall Be The Last: Rethinking Antisemitism (Brill), this was far from a hot topic. No doubt there has been a constant flow of studies concerned with Jew-hatred, focused rather less on its underlying reasons than on its specific manifestations. But the parallel between the “taboo” on GA’s originary hypothesis and that on seeking the explanation for antisemitism not as an arbitrary “scapegoating” phenomenon but rather, as we put it, the impossible Western rejection of the “firstness” of the Jews/Hebrews as those who defined the historical roots of the sacred in the West and thereby, in a fashion that has no obvious parallel in Asian cultures, made it impossible for the Christians and Muslims who became the West’s dominant religious populations simply to ignore as “transcended” the originary role of the Jews.

    In 2015, these parallel taboos, if noted at all, could be dismissed as a curious coincidence. Antisemitism, although it had never disappeared, no longer seemed a dominant concern in Western nations, and Israel’s role in the Middle East seemed to be gradually reaching a tacit modus vivendi with the surrounding Muslim population.

    On October 7, 2023, the situation radically changed. However shocking were the depravities not merely carried out but proudly affirmed by the members of Hamas and their hangers-on among the Gazan population, the global reaction—in retrospect wholly predictable, but highly surprising at the moment—was not one of horror and disbelief at the barbarity of these acts, but on the contrary, a largely favorable outpouring of support for the “oppressed” Palestinians, the very excesses of whose actions were felt to excuse them as giving proof by their violence of the horror of their oppression by the Israelis.

    With the result that suddenly, nearly 80 years after the end of WWII, antisemitism had become a “controversial” subject. And as I pointed out in Chronicle 786, the New York Times plastered on its front page on October 18, 2023 the photograph of a ruined building purported to be the image of a hospital destroyed by an Israeli bomb, save that (1) the image was of another building, since the hospital was only superficially damaged, and (2) the damage was caused not by an Israeli missile but by a misfired rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The really horrible images that the Palestinians were showing off to their supporters were nowhere in sight, but the Times felt obliged to fabricate a false image on the unverified reception of a false report that Israel had bombed a Gaza hospital.

    Which is to say that there is something more to antisemitism than an “irrational hatred of Jews.” Ever since last October 7, the Palestinians, who carried out this savage and unprovoked act of mayhem and slaughter, have been all but universally accorded the status of a martyr-people whose crimes, like those of street criminals in the world of Soros-financed district attorneys, are wholly excusable due to their oppression—oppression of which the crimes themselves are taken as the most obvious demonstration. If shoplifting or even armed robbery is scarcely comparable to raping and torturing to death innocent human beings, the horror of the latter behaviors is understood as all the more a demonstration of the inhuman oppression under which their perpetrators had presumably been suffering.

    It is easy enough to understand why I cannot let go of the feeling that the coincidence between the quasi-finalization of the originary hypothesis and the return in force of antisemitism holds an important historical lesson for humanity, in conjunction with the discovery that Sartre’s néant and the “nothingness” of Buddhist thought as represented by Nishida Kitaro should both be seen as visions of the new freedom inherent in the scene of human communication. And we must note that, whatever its problems and/or limitations, Eastern thought does not share the history-denying obsession ingrained in the second-tier Abrahamic religions that currently inspires the crude apocalypticism of the “red-green” Left-Islamic alliance.

    The most likely version of the conflict provoked by the Judeo-Christian West’s decadence would be a battle for supremacy between, on the one hand, militant Islam, having outlasted the West by dint of its fanatical religious faith, which so far seems to persist in its preference for death over life (as the Islamists put it) in defiance of the temptations of the modern world, making use of the latter’s technology as a source of weaponry but not succumbing to its seductions; and on the other, the Chinese version of Marxism, which adapts its national-egocentric vision of “the Middle Empire” to an ideology that, unlike Islam, takes seriously the promises of modern technology—and would seem the obvious favorite to come out on top.

    The Western Achilles’ Heel, patched over but not healed by the defeat of Nazism, is its addiction to the epistemology of resentment and its privileged manifestation in the death-wish for the Jews, which, while lending fanatical energy to the Islamists, hardly makes them competent to deal with modern technology as other than external exploiters. The high point of Islamic military creativity so far was the 9/11/2001 attacks whose near-total success so undermined the morale of the Judeo-Christian West; but learning to fly planes into buildings hardly offers a model for military victory in a full-scale conflict with the latest materiel.

    Are such speculations of any real use? Only if the West can awaken from its self-destructive torpor and find anew in its Judeo-Christian principles a genuine source of self-affirmation. Indeed, the surprising ease with which in the wake of 10/7/23 the discontented of Christian societies have found the response to their self-resentful Wokeness in Islamist terrorism suggests that the entire edifice of Western moral values will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Yet there is little reason to believe this reconstruction possible in the face of well-armed enemies hungry for conquest rather than anxious to maintain the pleasant life-styles to which Western societies, far more than theirs, have become addicted.

    One point seems clear: for so long as the West tolerates, let alone encourages as at present the Woke philosophy of oikophobic resentment, it is preparing itself for annihilation. The success of the pseudo-Christian value-system embodied in DEI is all too clearly incompatible with the maintenance of Western power. In this respect, the looming failure of Ukraine, supported by NATO, to defeat the Russian military is an ominous sign.

    Let us hope that we can avoid the far more ominous consequences that would follow Israel’s failure to defeat the Iranian proxies that surround it in the face of the near-worldwide hostility that its efforts at self-defense have provoked. When pressed, the West, now as ever, still prefers to hate the Jews as the alternative to reforming itself.

    The human scene is never neutral toward the content of the messages that traverse it. One need not be a connoisseur of paradox to appreciate the self-negating element that preserves for the moment this present writing. Although ostensibly public and available to all, what permits these words to exist is their quasi-invisibility. How much longer this paradox will retain its force is something that cannot be known in advance.

    In a word, as with all the “discoveries” of what I have been calling generative anthropology, their presence on the intellectual scene is premised on their inconsequentiality. Which makes them at the same time a highly privileged and an extremely fragile mode of communication.

    So that to the extent that these warnings have a purpose, it is dependent on their near-total inefficacy, save in an undecidable margin where some at first small effect may be launched toward success despite the anticipation of its probable future annihilation.

    Or as they say, a word to the wise is sufficient.

  • The Rubicon

    “The Rubicon” inevitably comes up when one thinks about the origin of human language. However many similarities we can find between our language and those of other species, it cannot be doubted that human language belongs to a different category. Human semantic communication is of a crucially different nature from animal signaling, even if a combination of such signals may be said to have a “syntax.”

    The significant difference between human language and the “languages” of animals is that human language alone is conscious of the difference between a sign and its referent. I have explained this consciousness as derived from the différance by which a gesture of appropriation, which is not a signal in any sense, is converted into a sign by the fact of being aborted, that is, of not reaching its goal. Whereas we can affirm without fear of contradiction that no case of animal signaling can be similarly interpreted as an “aborted gesture” originally intended to acquire rather than refer to its referent. It is this insertion of conscious différance into an originally appetitive gesture that constitutes it as a sign of human language in distinction from all actions of non-human animals. Humans too make signaling gestures, but as Terrence Deacon pointed out in The Symbolic Species, these gestures are handled by an entirely different area of the brain than those of human language.

    The refusal of linguists and anthropologists to consider these points reflects what I have called the taboo on a hypothesis such as that of GA that purports to advance beyond the speculations of Condillac et al. about language origin and consequently the origin of the human. For this subject remains in an important sense sacred, and the reluctance either to consider it at all (e.g., “human language is just a more elaborate form of animal language”) or as explicable (“human language is indeed ‘different,’ but attempts to explain it are always inadequate”) is a demonstration of the refusal to disturb its sacred status.

    So then the question becomes: in an era that no longer takes seriously the sacred taboos of the past, why is this one so resistant? It cannot be attributed to a desire to preserve the undefinable ontological distinction between man and all other beings, including the animals, since that is precisely what both the rejectors of GA and the creators of the more modest gradualist hypotheses of language origin would like to deny. Why then is a hypothesis that purports to offer a behavioral definition of the Rubicon, that is, one that avoids any reference to supernatural forces, somehow more dangerous than that of Genesis?

    But the answer is obvious; Genesis simply translates human agency into that of God, whereas GA gives power to a protohuman agency that allows man to create himself. Rather than seeing this as a victory for “secular” thought, the scientific world realizes that the danger of the minimal hypothesis is that it in effect gives “secular” legitimacy to the notion of the sacred. Girard is acceptable, because while explaining human behavior in terms of mimesis he never faces up to the most significant consequence of this mimesis, which is language. Not because imitating others of one’s species necessarily leads to language, but because the desire that is the product of the enhancement of appetite by mimesis can ultimately only be prevented from undoing a social order whose restraints on appetite are limited to those of “conditioned reflexes” by supplementing these reflexes with the conscious deferral of appetite, leading to a sense of sacred interdiction and thence to language.

    Are there other possibilities? Perhaps, but the Sartrean pour-soi that separates the appetitive/desiring self from its object by the néant of scenic freedom, which is to say, by human consciousness as conceiving its object through contemplation rather than instinctively as a source of appetite, and intuiting via this contemplation that the desire inspired by the object is a “sacred” or interdicted impulse, can have no simpler explanation.

    In his desire to defend his theory that the Rubicon was crossed not by the invention of language but by “emissary murder” as the inspiration for a language-less deferral, Girard dismissed the originary hypothesis as just another “social contract” scenario, as if the originary function of representation as a substitute for appropriation was decided upon as a result of… a prior exchange of representations. (See Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture; Continuum International, 2007:122ff.) Girard’s genius was that of one wisely suspicious of the empty abstractions of metaphysics, but he failed to understand that the originary hypothesis is precisely a theory that explains both the origin and the necessity of representations/signs in order to accomplish the deferral that he hypothesized was obtained only through the exhaustion of communal violence—so to speak on the anachronistic example of the centurion converted to Christianity by the example of Christ’s suffering on the Cross.

    Where the proto-centurions would have found the sign to represent the object of their worship or why they would have needed a sign at all is left to the discretion of the reader. What would define the arbitrary victim as the necessary and unique victim in the absence of an “aborted gesture of representation” is a question never asked or answered. Why we have this culture of representations if peace could (only) be obtained through violence is another unanswered question. That only the historical Jesus could inspire Girard’s hypothesis of emissary murder implies rather that, beyond the originary breakdown of animal means of controlling appetite through inhibition, all the millennia of human history whose later years were dominated by highly differentiated hierarchies were indeed necessary to reveal the truth embodied in Jesus’ singular incarnation of self-sacrificing divinity.

    GA’s minimal hypothesis of the origin of human language cannot be reduced any farther; it turns on a single bit of information, the “conversion” of the aborted gesture of appropriation into the designation of its renounced object. Nor need we consider this renunciation as spontaneously unanimous among the group of proto-humans in which it originated. It suffices that the hesitation of one inspire that of the others, that the attempts at immediate possession be withdrawn, and that as a result Sartre’s néant, the space between the subject and the object of his contemplation, be established only for so long as to inspire in the other members of the group the realization that such a renunciation of possession resolves the tension that pursuing conflicting attempts at possession would occasion. The resulting configuration already has the form of a ritual focused on a center; this is the first instance of the human scene, the origin of the scenicity within which humans have evolved ever since, as they normally communicate, and distribute collective goods, through the mediation of signs.

    I need not reproduce here the alternative hypotheses found in books dealing with this question, none of which make any detailed attempt at explaining, e.g., how the language originated that reached the point of (1) permitting a marriage ceremony (Terrence Deacon); (2) allowing for a coalition to be formed to eliminate particularly aggressive members of the group (Richard Wrangham); (3) preventing the breakdown of the social group threatened by the use of deadly weapons . . . All that is necessary is that the animal reflex of the possessive gesture be negated, not by an inhibitory reflex, but by a conscious renunciation of the appropriative act as an act of conscience. The two guests reaching for the last canapé provide a minimal model that cannot be further simplified.

    I submit that this minimal hypothesis provides a definitive model of the Rubicon that separates human from animal language, and what Sartre called the human pour-soi from the minds of other creatures. It is as a result of this hypothetical deferral that the human acquires a scene of interaction in which our shared desires can be controlled—even if sometimes this control fails—and that means will be found to prolong the scenic stasis so as to permit the expansion of the creativity of our species over the centuries, albeit always with the danger that the inventions the scene makes possible may one day lead to our species’ destruction.

    One final word: animals do not have scenes; neither do they practice shared joint attention, as in pointing.