Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • Our Neo-Victimary Era

    I have, as they say, a visceral dislike of victimary rhetoric, the sanctimonious denunciation of white guilt in others, or in “ourselves–as I, if not you, have acknowledged.” One cannot ignore one’s viscera; yet, in human relations, at least, they provide no peremptory justification. There have been plenty of visceral anti-Semites. No mode of human interaction is so natural as to escape the mediation of the cultural scene of representation.

    Readers of these Chronicles know that I have been trying for some time to situate victimary rhetoric in history; this quest has led me to the notion, discussed more insistently since September 11, of the post-millennial. Before WWII, it was taken for granted that Others, as we call them nowadays, were welcome in some, but not all conversations, and certainly not as a matter of course. After Auschwitz, overt exclusion has become unacceptable. The proliferation of victimary thinking, inspired by the Nazi-Jew model of unequivocal persecution, has led to the elimination of the most glaring institutional or de jure inequalities: colonialism, Jim Crow, and so on. Their disappearance has coincided with the discrediting of what was less than two decades ago the world’s most powerful victimary ideology (“Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!”). September 11, with its demonstration of the horrors that such ideologies can be made to justify, is icing on the cake. We are now entering a post-millennial era in which the oppressor-victim model is increasingly less viable; inequality in a global exchange system is a problem to be rectified, not evidence of oppression.

    Although there is more than a grain of truth in this position, some wishful thinking remains to be squeezed out of it before these seeds can take root. The benefits generated by the rationalization of the global economy are differentially distributed across racial, ethnic, and sexual groups. Since the defining ideal of global society is universal reciprocity, the less favored groups have an arguable claim of exclusion from this reciprocity and, consequently, an arguable legitimacy in playing the victim card to bring about greater equality of results. Thus, in the US, and increasingly in other advanced countries, the attack on discriminatory procedures has given way to a critique of unequal outcomes.

    As a case in point, in recent years, following a period in which affirmative action programs seemed to be on the wane, American universities have experienced a growing pressure for “diversity” at every level. In 1995, the University of California Board of Regents passed a “Policy Ensuring Equal Treatment Admissions” (SP-1) eliminating racial criteria in admissions; in 2001, it rescinded this policy after hearing testimony that it made “underrepresented minorities” feel “unwelcome.”

    No doubt there is a political dimension to this change. California, after a series of Republican governors, has become sharply Democratic in recent years, particularly since Governor Wilson’s politically disastrous support for Proposition 187, which refused admission to state-funded schools and hospitals to illegal (“undocumented”) immigrants. After the passage of SP-1, representatives of the former beneficiaries of affirmative action rallied their troops to put pressure on the Regents. Yet I think there is a real evolution in attitudes about affirmative action that is not reducible to a mere swing of the political pendulum. The old affirmative action was part of the victimary era, and declined along with it. But–here I diverge from some of my previous statements–the end of this era does not spell the demise of victimary thinking, but its mutation. Affirmative action and the like have not simply survived, they have returned in a new guise.

    Whereas the early supporters of affirmative action sought to provoke the strong form of white guilt that was a reaction to de jure discrimination, accusations of racism and sexism are counterproductive in promoting the positive goals of “diversity” and “gender equity.” Neo-victimary thinking is aware of the difference between the guilt aroused by a priori and a posteriori status hierarchies. The enemy is no longer Governor Wallace in the schoolhouse door, but the inertia of our collective subconscious. And to counter this less blatant, more insidious adversary, open admissions of guilt like those that put an end to colonialism and segregation cannot suffice. The neo-victimary tone is milder, but its demands are considerably greater.

    Fairness is no longer defined as the absence of institutional barriers but as the achievement of “equitable” results; the target is not discrimination but underrepresentation. If a given minority is not proportionally represented in the distribution of a privileged status, particularly one, such as college admission, that is granted according to a well-defined procedure, then, all explanations aside, corrective measures must be taken. The supporter of diversity is merely reminding us of what we are already presumed to know–a reminder all the more powerful for its presupposition of unanimity. Although race/gender quotas, seen as leftovers from the previous era, are generally condemned, there is no respectable way to oppose them when they come packaged under the less aggressive label of diversity.

    The lack of any viable opposition to diversity policies reflects more than the left-wing politics that prevail in universities and other large bureaucratic institutions. Or rather, the difficulty of opposing diversity is an effect of the same socio-economic trends that generate this politics. Neo-victimary discourse is asymmetrical; only certain groups are considered to be victims. But, unlike postmodern victimary discourse, which conceived its aim as the abolition of difference in seamless integration, the new variety is concerned with the preservation of difference. Its utopia is not uniformity but proportionality, a state as a general rule unattainable, and unstable even if momentarily attained. At any given moment, ascriptive groups (races, genders, ethnicities) will differ in interests and abilities; there is no reason to assume that at some future date all these groups will fall on the same normal curve. Hence neo-victimary discourse is apt to perpetuate itself indefinitely, changing camps as some groups become overrepresented (e.g., Asians in the University of California, women in language departments). The equilibrium point toward which this discourse tends is not a static peace but a dynamic balance of resentments–a succinct description of political democracy. The peaceful exchange of resentments, now as at our origin, is the prerequisite for the peaceful exchange of everything else. The modern liberal-democratic polity extends without limit the deferred gift-exchange of Hubert and Mauss, expressing the awareness that the market makes us all both victims and persecutors, but not at the same place and time. Hence “diversity” at this place and time must be defined by the inclusion of those who are underrepresented here.

    When I find neo-victimary discourse hard on my viscera, the pain subsides when I attend to its implicit reciprocity rather than its explicit demand for privilege. As I said in Chronicle 219 in reference to “gender equity,” the important thing in the long run is to even out resentments enough to permit everyone to participate in the dialogue. As a means to this end, diversity policy has clear advantages over flying planes into buildings.

     

  • René Girard and the Overcoming of Metaphysics

    As I attempted to show in a recent article, René Girard is Durkheim’s true successor in the anthropology of the sacred. Durkheim was the first to understand the function of the sacred-bearing institution of religion in maintaining the social order; Girard provided a generative model of the sacred as the solution to the problem posed to humanity by mimetic desire. Sacred ritual, which for Durkheim merely reinforces the attachment of the individual to his society, is for Girard a reenactment of the proto-sacrificial mechanism that generates the sacred/profane dichotomy by discharging and expelling sacred violence and partitioning the profane world into differential roles. Improving on the daring but anachronistic example of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Girard conceives a generative scene of the resolution of mimetic crisis through “emissary murder” as the minimal kernel of the human.

    Although higher animals imitate one another’s appetitive actions, both positive and negative, in the search for food or in flight from predators, in designating a particular object, the mediating animal does not modify its intrinsic value; this designation neither arouses desire for a previously undesired object nor privileges its specific object over the general category of which it is a member. Consequently, it can modify the appetitive value of the object only in the long-term context of Baldwinian (behavior-driven) evolution. Human mimesis does not need to change the genetic code to influence behavior, or desire itself, because relationships between human beings are mediated by the scene of representation. The disciple does not imitate the master’s desire as one imitates a physical gesture; this desire functions to sacralize its object.

    The fact that Girard has never considered himself a philosopher makes all the more significant his qualification of mimetic desire in his early (1961) work Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque as “metaphysical.” Aristotle’s term, taken near-literally, designates the sign in a human system of representation, which stands “beside” (meta) physical reality. Thus the metaphysical world is ultimately the world of human language, but alienated from its human origin and set in the heaven of the Ideas. Metaphysics grants reality to the symbolic world of ideas, concepts–ultimately, words–independently of the world they represent; it is a secondary matter whether this reality be explored in itself (idealism) or as a model of the represented world (rationalism). We remain within the domain of metaphysics so long as we ignore the filiation of the word/concept/idea/signified with the ostensive event from which it derives, just as, when we understand desire as a binary relation between subject and object, we ignore the ostensive event by which this object was designated to us. Ignorance of the ostensive origin of the “context-free” concepts of metaphysics is the cognitive analog of the romantic lie (mensonge romantique) of unmediated desire.

    The scenic imagination of the Enlightenment constructs an anthropological genesis for the ancients’ timeless conceptions of the social order, but remains on the level of politics, the interaction of represented desires. The language by which we represent these desires does not appear to require a collective scene of origin; it is conceived either as emerging from the indexical signs of natural appetite (Condillac) or as the product of a unique faculty of free contemplation (Herder). The Romantics abandoned generative hypotheses for representations of the nature we all presumably share beneath the divisive mediations of bourgeois exchange, and which hold out the promise of the universal harmony that Romantic poets seek to incarnate in images. Romantic politics, exemplified in France by the most illustrious of these poets–both Hugo and Lamartine sat in the legislature of the July Monarchy and were active in the abortive Second Republic, the latter as its first provisional president–equated shared ideas and images with shared feelings, or, in political terms, with shared interests. In conceiving these representations as a source of harmony, the Romantic confuses their deferral of mimetic conflict with the final transcendence of mimetic desire.

    The attack on metaphysics begins in earnest after 1848 with the fall of the French Second Republic, the last creation of the Enlightenment bourgeois-revolutionary ethos. On December 2, 1851, Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état dealt the death-blow to romantic politics and the human ontology that lay behind it. Here was a seemingly definitive demonstration that harmonious representations did not produce harmony among human beings, but merely deferred for a time their propensity for conflict. Marx, Nietzsche, and their successors see the pacific conceptual system of metaphysics as an ideology to unmask, or, more prudently, to deconstruct. Where the Enlightenment had thought it sufficed to eliminate the historical arbitrariness of the sacred for universal reason to take its place, Marx saw bourgeois universalism as a mask for exploitative production relations. Philosophy/metaphysics does no more than transmogrify the time- and class-bound reason of the current ruling class into universal truths; changing the world begins by demystifying these “truths.” Marx was nonetheless a believer in reason–the reason of history, which “scientific socialism” demonstrated to be that of the proletariat. Nietzsche replaces the triumph of historical reason with the triumph of the individual will over the imprisoning force of falsely universal truth. This paradoxical struggle of the Nietzschean self with its “own” representations has been the obsession of philosophy ever since, even of analytic philosophy, haunted by the same paradoxes in a drier, logical form.

    The postwar, postmodern world marked by Hiroshima and the Holocaust inspired a new radicalization of the scenic imagination. A world where the deferral of violence would henceforth be “forever” the most crucial preoccupation saw every context-free Idea as potentially a mask of violence. The most common recourse was to confess this violence at the outset; this avowal of “white guilt” was the chief power-source of the post-war victimary revolution that ended colonialism and so many other formal inequalities. But victimary thinking, whatever its efficacy in the political sphere, is a flight from metaphysics rather than an overcoming of it. The unending task of this overcoming can be carried out only by moving “outside” metaphysics to imagine, on the scene of representation, the birth of the scene itself–by replacing originary philosophy with originary anthropology. This Girardian transformation, the expressed aim of Violence and the Sacred, is already implicit in the analysis of “triangular” desire in Mensonge. Although the prestige of each fictional mediator exists within a specific interpersonal relationship, Girard’s analysis makes clear that the mediator exercises his power on the communal scene of representation internalized by the disciple. The collective nature of mediation will later be made explicit, but the triangle of desire is already a minimal model of the community in which the reduction of the triangle to a simple subject-object relationship defines metaphysical desire. This model refutes the pessimistic claim that we are imprisoned within the metaphysical; mediation can be known and rejected, if only for a more distant, more explicitly communal mediation.

    To seek to remedy this ignorance of the mediations that direct our desire is less a cognitive than an ethical act, designed to free our desire from the confines of a specific triangle to let it circulate within society as a whole. For Girard, our choice is between a worldly idol and the true sacred, whose truth is understandable in Durkheimian terms as correspondence to the most universal values of society/humanity. This choice cannot be made once and for all; it is an unending process. The same is true in the cognitive domain; as we elaborate models of the human world, we must continually reconnect them to their origin in the deferral of violence. Metaphysics is the instrument of our conquest of nature, but, in the human sphere, we must move toward its overcoming, as we seek to overcome the resentments of mimetic desire. The fact that we communicate in context-free declarative sentences does not absolve us from the task of hypothetically reconstructing the scenic context within which our shared concepts are generated.

    Metaphysical desire, like metaphysical thought, assimilates culture to nature. We can only think, or desire, a “natural” object that we apprehend from without; but the source of both desire and thought lies in human representation, which can be understood only from within. The overcoming of metaphysical thought is originary thinking; the overcoming of metaphysical desire is love: this is the double transcendence of Girard’s Christian anthropology.

  • The Scenic Imagination: Modern Times

    Speculation on the origin of humanity and its institutions does not begin in the Enlightenment; it is at the heart of all culture. But in the Enlightenment, for the first time, this speculation acquires the status of a more or less rigorous anthropological thought-experiment, no longer concerned with what the gods have given humanity, but with what it has generated on its own. Such thinking may not propose verifiable/falsifiable theses, but it rises to the level of an anthropological hypothesis in a domain where verification/falsification is an ethical rather than simply logical operation. The human scene as event exceeds the scope of any empirical model based on repeatable phenomena: a scene exists only insofar as it is memorable, and what is memorable is not deducible from what is or might be observed. Enlightenment models of the origin of fundamental human institutions mark a new use of the scenic imagination as the basis for what we may call the science of origins.

    Rousseau, the “first anthropologist” (Lévi-Strauss), used the sparse ethnological data available to him in the construction of originary models whose radicalism was sufficiently revealed in the famous phrase, “Commençons donc par écarter tous les faits,” [Let us begin by putting all facts aside] from the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité. Rousseau’s nineteenth-century heirs would accumulate increasingly precise and objective data at the price of abandoning the construction of originary models. The specificity of customs and beliefs not only appeared to point up the inadequacy of such constructions–an appearance that remains unchanged today–but, by revealing the gap between the primitive and the originary, suggested that the human can only be understood through the former, attested by observable data, rather than the latter, which is not. This empiricist position, clearly articulated by Durkheim at the end of the century, was tacitly held throughout. On this score, even the most radical romantics were closer to Burke than to Robespierre. Their affection for the primitive was homologous to Burke’s preference for tradition; they merely displaced humanity’s Fall into the hubris of self-generation from the French to the Neolithic Revolution.

    This development is not simply as a disillusioned retreat from the anthropological optimism of the Enlightenment; empirical reality aside, it is, from a purely theoretical standpoint, a needed correction. It is no accident that the generation of the scenic center from the periphery that flourished in the Enlightenment was epitomized in the “social contract,” generative of political institutions rather than of the human in general. The center for Hobbes or Rousseau was a horizontal concentration of human appetite, not a locus of transcendence; the “sovereign” is not, as it would be for Durkheim, equated with the sacred. The Romantic retreat from Enlightenment originary thinking is the effect of the reintroduction of the transcendental element of the sacred into the human scene. This development, prefigured in the reality, if not the theory, of Enlightenment politics in such phenomena as the Revolutionary cult of the Etre suprême [supreme being], was thematized in the Restoration, most significantly by Joseph de Maistre, whose conception of the centrality of sacrifice is closer to René Girard’s than to that of Durkheim’s students, Hubert and Mauss.

    Another by-product of the Romantic distrust of originary models was the emergence, in the first half of the nineteenth century, of the notion of biological evolution, including that of humanity. Darwin’s conception of evolution, infinitesimally gradual and “uniformitarian,” stood in obvious contrast to the dominant religious model of divine creation. Creationism is a latter-day rear-guard defense against this “scientific” denial of the eventfulness of human origin. The following passage presents a far earlier, but, in a very different way, equally naïve defense of this eventfulness:

    It is very hard for us to realize the feelings with which the first dwellers on the earth looked upon the sun . . . But think of man at the very dawn of time: forget for a moment, if you can, after having read the fascinating pages of Mr. Darwin, forget what man is supposed to have been before he was man; forget it, because it does not concern us here whether his bodily form and frame were developed once for all in the mind of a Creator, or gradually in the creation itself . . . think of him only as man (and man means the thinker), with his mind yet lying fallow . . . think of the Sun awakening the eyes of man from sleep, and his mind from slumber! . . .
    Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion(London, 1871)

    Max Müller, whose reflections on language and religion antedate the publication of The Origin of Species, locates the origin of religion in the encounter of “the first [human] dwellers on the earth” with the, so to speak, naturally transcendent spectacle of the sun, an encounter that provides Müller with an originary model, indifferently solitary and collective, of the scene of representation. “Man” encounters the sun as an individual, yet his awe is the source of the collective phenomenon of myth, deprecated in Müller’s most memorable phrase as a “youthful disease of language.” Müller’s Condillac-like restriction of scenic interaction to sensation and cognition (“think of the Sun awakening the eyes of man from sleep, and his mind from slumber!”) ignores the social dynamic within which language and religion are generated. Although Müller deserves praise as the only nineteenth-century thinker to directly link the origin of these central cultural phenomena, his work illustrates his century’s difficulty in integrating the sacred into the collective scene of the “social contract.” In the relation between humanity and a transcendent Other, a scene with only two characters, a single human being and the sun, appears more parsimonious to a liberal Protestant scholar such as Müller than one that views the scene of the sacred as a locus of collective interaction.

    The generative use of the scenic imagination, increasingly moribund throughout the nineteenth century (one recalls the Société linguistique de Paris‘ famous 1866 ban on theories of language origin), was revived through an infusion of scenic data from ethnology. Fleeing from the scenic imagination into the empirical study of the primitive, the ethnologist discovers the centrality of this imagination in primitive culture itself, which is dominated by ritual models of the originary scene.

    Because human time, made up of events and not simply of phenomena, is not merely evolutionary but historical, any description of our activities is undecidably both particular and universal. Each human culture–indeed, each human representation–is both a specific example and a model of the human-in-general. The quest for the most fundamental forms of social organization that drives ethnological research cannot avoid this ambivalence, however much its deniers describe with loving care the “thick” specificity of each culture while attributing to humanity itself no specificity other than biological. In contrast, at the time of the early systematization of data on primitive religion by such scholars as Morgan and Tylor, generality bore no stigma; the difficulty lay rather in including in one’s model the eventfulness that separates the human world from the natural. Durkheim, although he fails to make eventfulness into a generative principle, criticizes both Müller’s “naturism” and Tylor’s “animism” for neglecting the essentially social character of the religious event. For Durkheim, it is the sacred that distinguishes human society from its animal counterparts; semiosis–human language–begins with the binary distinction between sacred and profane. Durkheim was the first anthropological thinker to understand the sacred as constituted by interaction among human beings rather than by either their collective or individual awe before the spectacle of nature, or their collective or individual communion with gods or “spirits,” whose apparent immortality reflects that of the already-existing sacred sign.

    Yet the most spectacular scenic imagination of the early twentieth century belonged, not to Durkheim, but to Sigmund Freud. For Freud, human life was a series of scenes of which the first, consciously repressed but perpetually reenacted in the unconscious, were the most determinant. Freud’s early notion of the “primal scene” is akin in significance if not in content to the originary hypothesis–it is, indeed, an originary hypothesis scaled to the life of the individual. The family drama of the bourgeois child is an allegory of the genesis of humanity itself.

    Time has revealed the weaknesses of Freud’s ahistorical model of the human psyche as well as of his curative technique. What remains of value is his scenic intuition of the human. The same may even be said for Jacques Lacan, whose refinements transform Freud’s physiologically defined “stages” into developmental phases of the scene of representation (“imaginary,” “symbolic”), beginning with the Ur-scene of the “mirror stage.” Unfortunately, this process, in conformity with Lacan’s structuralist fetishizing of the semiotic, detaches the psychoanalytic model of the human psyche yet more completely from its grounding in history.

    Yet Freud himself made one major attempt to ground his key psychic model of the “Oedipus complex” in a hypothetical scenic event. In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud attempts to link the ontogenetic scene to its phylogenetic original through a renewed exercise of the scenic imagination, now nourished with ethnological data.

    Freud’s originary scene, the most scandalously audacious speculative model of early ethnology, is rejected by even the most devout Freudians–especially by the most devout Freudians. This return from Durkheim’s prudent empiricism to the speculative mentality of the Enlightenment is not merely isolated; it serves as a caution even today to anyone tempted to follow in the master’s footsteps. Freud’s scene of the collective murder of the “father” by his “sons,” a throwback to a distant era in the eyes of mainstream social science, is prophetic from the perspective of generative anthropology. Seen more broadly, Freud’s model of the origin of internalized interdiction or guilt is a model of the origin of representation in general. The sons, no longer dominated “instinctively” by the father, must consciously reconstruct a social order. Dividing the women among them requires a system of classification, the origin of which is the sacred significance attributed to the father, whose posthumous influence makes him immortal like a god–or a sign. Although the Oedipus complex appears to give desire for the mother priority over mimetic rivalry with the father, in Freud’s description of the originary murder scene, the “mothers” are forgotten. The modern family drama to which Freud’s scene serves as prologue does not obscure its value as a model of the origin of representation whose crucial operation is the generation of a new set of ethical relations, guaranteed and memorialized by a shared representation.

    * * *

    Ideas, the signifieds of the signs of language, do not die, but live on in latency until they are thought once more. Combine Durkheim’s concept of the sacred with Freud’s scenic violence, add a dash of de Maistre’s theory of sacrifice, and you arrive at Girard’s originary scene, the beginning of a new chapter in the story of the scenic imagination.

  • More on the Scenic Imagination: The Enlightenment

    If we seek the one word that insists most sharply on the contrast between the human and the non-human, that word would be scenic. The human is the scenic animal; everything that uniquely distinguishes us takes place on a scene. Yet skene is the Greek word not for the stage but for the hut or tent or storeroom into which the actor retired to change his costume. Giving the name of this interior scene to the public scene reflects a profound intuition that the private imagination and the public scene are internal and external versions of the same locus: the empty space or néant in which representations appear, the “scene of representation.”

    The minimal core of our minimalist anthropology is the hypothesis that language originates on a scene, defined by the fact that each participant understands himself to be participating in it along with the others. The forms of ritual, including the secular rituals of art, make scenicity explicit. All of what we call “culture” derives from the imagination that first manifests itself in the originary scene and presides over its repetition in ritual. The human imagination is not a “faculty” but a mode of interaction, a mise-en-scène before an implicit audience. As such, the form and content of what appears on the scene of representation has a history that may be epitomized in the history of the “scenic imagination”: the imagination of the scene itself.

    The scene is, in the first place, the locus of the sacred, and it is of the essence of the sacred as an active force (as opposed to the concept of the sacred) that it cannot be conceived as a form independent of its content. Originary culture is sacred culture; the profane exists within it only as sacrilege. The appearance of secular literature, in the West, the invention of the Greeks, corresponds to an emergent awareness of the independence of the scene from its content. The scene generates atemporal sacred meaning from human mortality. Myths are centered on “immortals” who incarnate the atemporality of the sign. Literature begins with the return of meaning to mortality; its substance is the dangerous experience of being en scène. Although classical tragedy generally (but definitely not always) takes its material from myth, it views myth not from the point of view of the gods, but from that of mortals engaged in the tragic agon.

    The classical mind understands the scene as a place of significance independently of its content, but never as constituted by the mortal protagonists who enter upon it. The scene is given to or imposed on us by the gods, as the locus of our limited contact with sacred meaning. Ancient philosophy never evolves a critical epistemology because it never conceives the scene on which it views reality as originally constituted by human reflection. The cogito is a strictly modern phenomenon.

    The classical imagination is aware of the scene’s formal independence, but awareness of its anthropological constitution is unique, I believe, to the Christian modernity of the Renaissance. Of all religions, Christianity, for which the unique God is also a man, most radically understands that the human and the sacred have the same fundamental ontology. Throughout the Middle Ages, this understanding was used to explain the human on the basis of the divine; St. Augustine’s City of God exemplifies medieval reflection on social organization in an era that conceives the aim of human order as abolishing itself in divine order rather than attempting to emulate it. Yet the kernel of Christian anthropology is mutual love, reciprocal recognition among all human beings, founded on our common possession of an immortal essence. This vision presides over the collapse of the ancient economy based on slave labor, and slowly generates, in the margin of the Middle Ages, the means to reestablish a society of reciprocal exchange. Once this possibility becomes practically conceivable, the Kingdom of God, from a transcendental vision that turns us away from the world, becomes an ideal that defines action within it.

    The Enlightenment is the moment of Western history when it first becomes possible to conceive of the human as self-generating. Some associate the beginning of the Enlightenment with the experimental rationalism of Francis Bacon, who theorizes a scene of objective empirical knowledge protected from the “idols” of collective mimesis, but I think the critical moment is Hobbes’ scenic conception of the “social contract.” For the first time in history, the genesis and function of human social organization is understood in purely anthropological terms–which is not to say that Hobbes’ anthropology can do entirely without the sacred.

    The Enlightenment is born with the English revolution–and will die with the French. This first revolution to set as its goal something like what would later be called “liberal democracy” was the proximate cause of Hobbes’ revolutionary but quite illiberal heuristic. Before conceiving social order in general as generated by human beings in the “state of nature,” Hobbes had witnessed an abortive attempt to generate a new social order that seemed only to lead back to this state. At the same time, the Puritan revolution demonstrated for Hobbes the bankruptcy of medieval, transcendental justifications for central authority; his anthropological model would supply a justification that was wholly immanent.

    Anthropology is an experimental science, but its experiments are found, and lived through, in history. Nor is it sufficient to say that thinkers only draw the lessons of history, as though human action and thought were separate realms. What Cromwell and his followers discovered was already thought, and what Hobbes thought was already enacted. To envision a parliamentary republic in a Christian context is to go beyond the conceptions of slave-based ancient democracy to conceive an all-inclusive community. But utopian thought sees in the past only an Eden to be reconstituted; it is rather its adversary who is driven to reflect critically on origins. Where the Puritans sought to establish a theocentric Calvinist republic, Hobbes reminds us that the human scene derives its order from the institution of an earthly center. The lesson that humans choose their own form of social organization is transformed into a demonstration that their choice is dictated by necessity; the only way to escape the nightmare of the “state of nature” is freely to alienate one’s sovereign freedom to the central Leviathan.

    In reaction to the violence of civil war, Hobbes demonstrates that the self-generated center of the scene of human interaction is the only possible constraint on violence–which is, for Hobbes, an unambiguously human, “semiotic” phenomenon. But, by a paradox that should be familiar to us, once the center is presented as the necessary resultant of the interactions of the human periphery, the permanence and scope of its authority, having renounced its sacred guarantee, is no longer unconditionally legitimate. (Whence Hobbes’ difficulties with the royalists.) Despite Hobbes’ own arguments to the contrary, to relinquish one’s sovereignty is not to renounce the freedom that founds the capacity for sovereignty. Hobbes’ prejudices were conservative, but the scenic imagination is inherently liberal. If it is we who create the center, then we have the power, and the right, to replace or even abolish it.

    The Enlightenment liberation of the scenic imagination runs aground on Edmund Burke’s reflections on the Revolution that was the Enlightenment’s ultimate fulfillment. Unlike Hobbes, Burke did not found his post-revolutionary conservatism on an originary anthropological model; rather than justifying parliamentary monarchy on originary grounds, Burke’s argument justified any social order whatever, provided it had evolved over time rather than being imposed all at once by a group of revolutionaries. Where Hobbes returns to the originary deferral of violence as the remedy for the chaos brought about by political revolt, Burke opposes to a revolution inspired by a radical version of Enlightenment anthropology–which, ironically, can trace its ancestry to Hobbes–yesterday’s presumably organically evolved political forms. The danger of the scenic imagination, whether progressive or reactionary, is that it claims to deduce such forms from an anthropological model; the remedy is to renew our respect for history–history, that is, up to but not including the French Revolution. Burke’s notion of the historical process denies the validity of Enlightenment anthropological speculation, yet it is within this process that the speculation was generated. The paradoxality of this position sets the tone for the post-Enlightenment reaction that seeks in history protection against the aberrations of history.

  • Post-Millennial Thoughts

    The sign designates what is there in such a way that it is no longer necessary for it to be present. The linguistic sign has vanishingly little substance; it is part of a system within which even “motivated” (generally, indexical) signs become arbitrary. When, on the contrary, the sign possesses a substance that makes us return to it rather than traverse it toward its meaning/signified, we speak of it as esthetic. All signs may be said to possess an esthetic component or potential. In language, poetry famously exploits this potential; to affirm with Vico that the earliest language is poetry is to affirm the esthetic character of all language. Yet although all representation is esthetic, we should not neglect the fact that certain works are esthetic not merely intentionally but institutionally. Just as La Rochefoucauld remarked that few people would fall in love if they hadn’t heard about loving, few people would appreciate beauty–even sexual beauty–had they never heard of art.

    It follows from the originary hypothesis that the ethical is the primary dimension in human affairs: the esthetic modalities of a given period extrapolate from (rather than merely “reflecting”) the modes of human interaction in the society as a whole. The primacy of the ethical over the esthetic is not akin to the rigid Marxist determinism of cultural “superstructure” by economic “base.” Although exchanges within the economic system (“production relations”) arguably lend themselves more easily to modeling than those of society at large, from the outset, economic exchange presupposes the exchange of representations, whether between participants in tribal ritual, imperial officials and subjects, lords and vassals, or the free agents of bourgeois civil society, whose different roles in the production process are secondary to their de jure equality as citizens.

    Great ethical changes lead to new esthetics. Perhaps the most significant such change, the rise of Christianity, divides the esthetic of modernity from that of the classical era. The more tentative watershed that we are experiencing today is that between the postmodern and a new post-millennial era whose esthetic Raoul Eshelman calls performative. Because this transition involves historical events fresh in our memories, defining our models of these periods can serve as an exemplary exploration of the relationship between art and history.

    The years following WWII witnessed the birth of a new ethical epistemology, informed by the post-Holocaust revelation not simply that all deviations from the moral model of symmetrical relations are evil, but that these relations may be assimilated to the persecutor-victim relationship. This transformation, which put an end to colonialism, segregation, and apartheid, is also a revolution in fundamental anthropology. The center-periphery distinction that structures the scene of representation is revealed as posing an ineluctable quandary to the moral model of universal human reciprocity. Unlike Rousseau‘s social contract, which transforms the entire group into a spectacle for itself on the model of God whose center is everywhere and periphery nowhere, the victimary model affirms the dependency of the peaceful relations of the “first world” of whites, males, straights, and so on, on the exclusion of its “third world,” non-white, female, gay Other.

    The political implications of the postmodern vision explain the extreme antinomianism of intellectual life during this period. The political stance of the postmodern intelligentsia has moved ever farther from the norm in European countries, and still farther in the United States, famously indifferent to socialist rhetoric. Whatever the intellectual powers of Noam Chomsky or Jacques Derrida, Susan Sontag or Fredric Jameson, their model of “late capitalism” in which a greedy, unscrupulous elite rules multitudes numbed into submission by mass culture and the spoils of imperialism has little explicative value. This Procrustean application of victimary epistemology to democratic market society reflects the difficulty of assimilating the Holocaust within the historical dialectic.

    At its crudest, the art that corresponds to this victimary vision merely inverts the direction of violence, whether the new scapegoats be the Nazis themselves, the demonic nazifiers of Ludlum-variety novel and cinema, or, a bit more subversively, everyday authority-figures who, at the height of the postmodern era in the late sixties, were commonly assimilated to sacrificial animals (“off the pigs!”) or violators of our deepest taboo (“up against the wall, m…”).

    But there is a genuine postmodern esthetic. While Samuel Beckett avoids victimage par en bas by offering an unworthy target–proud Pozzo declines, but Godot ‘s humble clowns go on–Marguerite Duras, more subtly, discovers the power of the victim’s position. After Hiroshima mon amour (1961) transforms the losers of WWII into victims (the only casualties are those of Hiroshima and the German soldier loved by the heroine), Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) radicalizes Proust’s lesson of the de-realizing effect of desire through the intuition that the most stable and therefore most powerful vertex of the triangle of desire is that occupied by the defeated rival. Postmodern history has amply demonstrated Lol’s truth in both the political and the intellectual spheres.

    The best-known theoretical counterpart to the victimary esthetic is deconstruction, the creation of Jacques Derrida, who theorizes in infinite detail the sacrificial structure of the scene of representation while ignoring its anthropological etiology. But the postmodern era is also that of René Girard, whose discovery of the “triangular” structure of mimetic desire that defines humanity both individually and collectively makes him the most powerful thinker of the age–demonstrated if only by the fact that its intelligentsia, unable to refute his ideas, has done its best to ignore them. Girard is to thought what Duras and a few others are to fiction: a revealer of the power of the victimary, which is also (but not entirely) the rediscovery of the original intuition of Christianity.

    In the victim-persecutor relation, the persecutor gains only what the victim loses. Thus the victimary conception of justice is redistributive: inequalities, whether of wealth or opportunity, must be evened out as much as possible. John Rawls ingeniously conceived his “original position” to determine the redistributive optimum. Unlike Marxism, which sees the motivating force of economic productivity driving social evolution toward eventual equality, victimary thinking is ahistorical, condemning inequalities without explaining them. Effective in eliminating institutions such as slavery or racial segregation where historical explanations only confuse the issue, it is unhelpful in dealing with the de facto economic asymmetries of market society.

    The victimary system has depended since the beginning on the white guilt of the purported victimizer, whose encounter with the Other’s resentment, whether directly, or, more commonly, as interpreted by a sympathizer, forces him to see his relationship to this Other as a violation of the moral principle of reciprocity. The subaltern status of the colonized generates white guilt, if not in the colonist himself, then certainly in his countrymen at home. The colonist may claim to be acting in his charges’ best interest, and perhaps he is, but this does not invalidate the assimilation of their relationship to the persecutor-victim model. White guilt, far more than the revolutionary power of the oppressed, has been the motor of historical change throughout the postmodern era. In the absence of such guilt, the motor stalls.

    Victimary thinking fails to understand that, in principle, even asymmetric exchange within a market system is profitable to both parties. The key expression here, of course, is in principle. But rejecting victimary thinking does not imply denying the existence of injustice. (The Milosevic trial illustrates the growing international intolerance for “crimes against humanity.”) What it does imply is that, in the present state of world history, the most effective solution to all but the most unambiguous complaints of injustice lies in considering them not as proofs of victimage but as claims to be negotiated.

    We are now, I believe, entering a new historical phase; the new millennium coincides with the discrediting of the great twentieth-century prophecies of the “final conflict” that would do away with conflict itself, where the sacrificial structure of the scene of representation would apocalyptically sacrifice its very sacrificiality. To the postmodern esthetic, serious or ludic, that deconstructs the “phallogocentric” scene of representation while recognizing that it cannot for all that be abolished, the post-millennial era opposes its “performatist” affirmation of the scene, warts and all, as the instrument of human historicity. Instead of Beckett’s ironic conception of desire as a zero-sum game whose stakes we can at best try to minimize, the new perspective sees the desiring imagination as continually creative of value, both cultural and economic.

    Perhaps the most significant sign of the wane of the victimary is the increasing “global reach” (to use President Bush’s term) of terrorism, in conjunction with its replacement of specific political aims with a wholesale rejection of modernity. Terrorism is the most extreme form of victimary behavior; it is predicated on the confidence that even the most heinous crime is justifiable because its random victims were all at least passive accomplices in victimization. As the negative of white guilt, terrorism is exacerbated by its failure to inspire it.

    Hindsight leads us to reproach previous US administrations with insufficient attention to the terrorist threat. But one need not be a defender of Clinton’s generally feckless foreign policy to note that, before September 11, terrorism was broadly understood in terms of the victimary paradigm, as an unpleasant but understandable product of the frustrations of real victims. The pontifications of those who continue to insist on this paradigm now appear in such places as the “Idiocy Watch” of the moderate-liberal New Republic.

    The only real novelty is the scale of the attacks–or rather, of their success, for similar mayhem had been planned before. Several thousand deaths concentrate the mind by providing a warning call that global terrorism is not restrained by the prospect of Mutually Assured Destruction. The fact that terrorism, the ultimate expression of the victimary, has become a danger to humanity that can no longer be tolerated, casts discredit on the victimary paradigm itself.

    It is worth recalling the guarantee that terrorism found in the total war against the forces that produced the Holocaust and the Nanking massacre. The loss of civilian life in the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Japanese cities was felt to be nugatory in the effort to rid the world of German and Japanese racism; it aroused little indignation in wartime. That, after the war, such as Duras and Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, could provoke in its winners white guilt toward its losers was a clear sign of the dawning of the victimary era.

    The increasingly apocalyptic tenor of terrorism today reflects the fact that white guilt is no longer the force it was in the days of Gandhi and M. L. King. Conversely, the unqualified condemnation of terrorism has become a criterion of minimal unity among all organized polities–and, as Saddam’s example illustrates, a simple test of what constitutes a “rogue state.” This is the grain of truth in the idea, discussed in a previous Chronicle, that we are “scapegoating” bin Laden. But the unanimous rejection of terrorism need not imply an obsession with punishing its perpetrators. It can become the basis for a genuine, if minimal, global fraternity based on the understanding, at last realized explicitly in the public sphere, that the basic function of the exchange of representations that is human culture is the deferral of violence. The abandonment of victimary thinking is the universal commitment to abide peacefully within not only egalitarian but also asymmetric relationships, in the faith that even the latter are preferable to violence–and that, in a world of market exchange, they will tend in the long run to mitigate the asymmetry.

    The scene of representation creates the means for both the peaceful deferral of resentment and its manifestation as violence. Historical circumstance obliges our generation to make a Pascalian wager on one of the two. Unless we support the aims of al Qaeda, we must bet on the ability of modern civilization and of our species to defer its destruction by the violence whose preconditions it inevitably generates. Under these conditions, optimism is, in a quite literal sense, our categorical imperative.

  • The Scenic Imagination: I — Before and after Christianity

    In Originary Thinking, I distinguished the neo-classical esthetic, covering the period following the institution of Christianity (what Hegel called the “Romantic” era), from the classical esthetic by its scenicity, its awareness of the scene on which the action takes place, which becomes thereby a place either to enter or to avoid. The Greeks take the scene as a given; the arts from the Middle Ages on are aware of the difference between just being and being en scène. By placing the individual human being in the center of the scene of representation–the Cross is nothing else–Christianity constitutes the first total anthropology. The scene no longer operates beyond human control. If Jesus suffers the sacrificial punishment meted out to the occupant of the center, his mock coronation points to the ambivalence of this role, which is that of victim but also of king.

    Roland’s argument with Olivier in the Chanson de Roland about blowing the horn is inconceivable in a classical epic. Roland sees himself as if on stage; to blow the horn would be to admit failure to play his role. Both Roland’s self-consciousness and the configuration in which he realizes his destiny reflect this scenic awareness: his death, surrounded by Saracens, takes on the structure of ritual murder. Similarly, Hamlet’s “play within a play” is more than a theatrical ploy; his famous hesitation to act thematizes the boundary between the profane and the sacred, the stage and the world outside it. The consciousness of the stage as a locus of sacrifice is a constant of European theater from Marlowe to Beckett, nowhere more intensely than in the theater of Racine.

    Yet the difference wrought by the Christian revelation is still more spectacular in theoria than in theater. Esthetic forms have always been products of a scenic consciousness even when the anthropology of the scene remained obscure; the same is not true of the forms of thought, where the conscious use of scenicity, the “scenic imagination,” brings about an epistemological revolution.

    The thematization of a higher level of scenic self-consciousness within the artwork becomes, in the theoretical domain, the direct exercise of this consciousness itself. The scenic imagination is not a mere form, but the mode whereby we become able to think the originary emergence of form–a process that the esthetic neither need nor can carry through, since esthetic form by its very nature reproduces the scene of its own emergence. Not only do all modes of post-classical thought reflect the scenic consciousness implicit in the Christian revelation, but, with the reemergence of secular, non-exegetic thought in the Renaissance, it becomes possible to make explicit use of the scene as a heuristic device.

    A comparison of ancient and modern philosophical “scenes” makes clear this revolutionary effect of the scenic imagination. Here is the beginning of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (Republic, Book VII):

    (Socrates, Glaucon) And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open toward the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

    I see.

    And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

    You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

    Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

    True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

    And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?

    Yes, he said.

    And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?

    Very true.

    And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passersby spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?

    No question, he replied.

    To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

    Compare this excerpt from the first great Enlightenment text, Hobbes’ Leviathan (II, xvi):

    The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry and by the fruits of the earth they may nourish themselves and live contentedly, is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person; and every one to own and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their judgements to his judgement. This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner as if every man should say to every man: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that, by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the Commonwealth; which, to define it, is: one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all as he shall think expedient for their peace and common defence.

    And he that carryeth this person is called sovereign, and said to have sovereign power; and every one besides, his subject.

    In Plato, an undefined power, tantamount to a sacrificial divinity, controls the scene on which we, its prisoners, view the shadows of the Ideas. The men who carry the figures along the wall are agents of this power. The structure of Plato’s scene is an object lesson in the disdain of Greek philosophy for critical epistemology: the connection between the human prisoners within the scene and the human who describes it from without is beneath consideration. This reflects Athenian social relations: the dichotomy of jailer and prisoner being homologous with the institution of slavery, no concern need be shown for the passage from one state to the other because it is clear that humans are equally able to occupy either one.

    The non-reciprocal nature of the Athenian anthropology precludes the radical imaginary return to a state in which reciprocity itself may be seen to generate the social order, including the forms of representation that preserve this order by deferring the revelation of its basis in reciprocity. Nothing in Plato’s world corresponds to Hobbes’ “covenant of every man with every man,” which requires a collective and reciprocal conversation. Hobbes models the genesis of political order, and of human order tout court, as an exclusively human scene. His reference to “that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence” is a nearly explicit secularization of the Christian revelation that the minimal constitution of God and man are the same. The scene of generalized reciprocal exchange has become a functional heuristic, a discovery procedure for the lines of force that guarantee communal order. The “authority, given him by every particular man in the Commonwealth” that enables the sovereign to “form the wills of them all” is the conservative, centralist, realist version of Rousseau’s radical, collectivist, utopian “general will,” which miraculously manifests itself on the periphery of a circle without a center.

    Hobbes does not note, but it is implicit in his formulation, that the “wills of them all” described as “formed” by the sovereign were what established him as sovereign in the first place. More precisely, he cannot note this, because these individual wills are what is relinquished in order to establish the power of the center. As in an earlier passage (I, 3-4; see Chronicles 176 and 215) where Hobbes first analyzes “God” as a linguistic gesture toward infinite power rather than a name, then proceeds to affirm that God gave man language, Hobbes deals with both the before and after of the originary scene without yet perceiving their symmetry and therefore without being tempted, as Rousseau would be, to bring them together in a single scenic event. Nevertheless, the major revolution in thought has already been accomplished; the heuristic of the generative event is already pregnant with the revelation of this symmetry that is finally made fully explicit in the originary hypothesis of Generative Anthropology.

  • Scapegoating after September 11

    Scapegoating or “emissary victimage” is the defining operation of René Girard’s originary scene. The proto-human group, caught up in the violent chaos of “mimetic crisis,” finds unanimity by directing its aggression against a single, marginal individual; his death ends the crisis and he is subsequently venerated as the bringer of peace.

    Although my own thinking is greatly in debt to this model, I do not think it can serve as the originary scene of human culture. The emissary murder does not constitute a true scene; it is all aggression and no contemplation. What corresponds more closely to GA’s notion of the scene of representation is rather the moment following the murder, when the members of the community, their aggression discharged against the victim, experience peace and solidarity as they contemplate his remains. But if the affect that inspired the murder has indeed been discharged, there is no clear motivation for collective veneration or, more crucially, for representation. Nothing at this moment would motivate the production of a sign, much less a minimal, linguistic sign.

    The inadequacy of this model of human culture extends to its application to historical events. Scapegoating may be understood as a derivative of scenic activity, but to reduce the mediating locus of human communication to a lynching party is to deny the freedom acquired through representation that is the most important product of the scene. Humans may discharge their aggression in lynchings, but they also defer this aggression through the exchange of signs. If no ethical truth emerges from the scene of representation, then our ethical thought can only be that of Hegel’s schöne Seele who is somehow able to transcend–with or without divine intervention–the violence of our fallen human condition. Which leads us to the events of September 11.

    Here is an excerpt from a recent email from a correspondent, whom I shall leave anonymous, who claims to be “applying Girard’s theory of the scapegoat to George W. Bush’s construction of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden”:

    My thesis is that President Bush is creating a person whom he has named “Osama bin Laden”–a person that bares [sic] only minimal resemblance to the actual person Osama bin Laden.  If one looks at the things that bin Laden has said in the past, President Bush’s words do not make sense; Bush says that bin Laden wants to take over the world, etc.  Essentially, Bush has constructed a person who can be hated and eventually murdered in order to atone for mistakes in American foreign policy.

    . . . before the tragedy Bush expressed concern over a “divided” America; a place where some citizens were not convinced of the “good” of America. Now, however, we are “united” and “one people” who represent “good” (as opposed to bin Laden representing “evil”).

    These statements, which nowhere mention the September 11 attacks, are Chomskian in their demonization–dare I say scapegoating?–of the United States. Here is Chomsky’s own take on September 11: “The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people . . .” But Chomsky, at least, does not pretend to be a disciple of Girard. Although he believes world affairs to be a zero-sum game in which American prosperity can come only at the expense of other people’s sufferings, he does not add the Girardian refinement that we inflict these sufferings not simply out of greed but in order to project our own violence onto a surrogate victim.

    Yet the author of the quoted text can claim in his defense that he is scrupulously following Girard’s model, of which designation of a victim and the consequent achievement of communal solidarity are indeed the primary components–even if, after the Christian revelation, the subsequent conversion of the victim into a god is presumably no longer a viable option. Thus the passages above point out (1) that President Bush has “arbitrarily” designated OBL as bearing primary responsibility for the terrorist attacks and consequently as the chief target of US efforts at retaliation, and (2) that this “scapegoating” operation has brought about a large degree of national unanimity and solidarity. Poor Osama is only the latest in a long line of arbitrarily designated victims, stretching back to the Athenian pharmakos and beyond, who have been sacrificed on the bloody altar of Durkheimian solidarity. That, to quote a recent newsmagazine, “Bin Laden’s . . . is the first truly global terror operation,” that OBL has overtly claimed to be actively seeking the wherewithal to destroy the United States, that, as Tony Blair put it, no one can seriously maintain that on September 11 he would have hesitated to kill ten times, or, indeed, a thousand times as many Americans–these undisputed facts have no place in the epistemology of the scapegoat, where they are mere pretexts for the universally human, or, at any rate, American, need to commit emissary murder.

    What is it in “mimetic theory” that lends itself to this folie épistémologique? The problem, it seems to me, is that the scapegoating model operates simultaneously on two incompatible planes.

    On the one hand, as the description of an ethical act, “scapegoating” is a pejorative term. As Girard notes, implicit in this term is the revelation of the arbitrariness of the sacrificial act. To scapegoat is to do violence to someone who is, if not innocent, at any rate no guiltier than his fellows. More precisely, it is to treat someone whose guilt is at most quantitatively greater than the others’ as though it were transcendentally greater, so that the violence that had been diffused over the entire community comes to be unanimously directed from the innocent collectivity to the one guilty victim. Such an act violates the moral model of universal reciprocity that is inherent in language and therefore in humanity itself. The Gospel demystifies and rejects the utilitarianism of High Priest Caiaphas’ declaration that “it is better for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed” (John 11.50).

    But, on the other hand, as an epistemological operation, scapegoating is the originary model of selection in general. Just as Durkheim posited a bit hastily, but with a profound anthropological intuition, that even categories like right and left were derived from systems of religious/social classification, in Girard’s system–although he never goes into detail on this point–scapegoating is the source of the scene of representation. The unconscious choice of the emissary victim as a solution to mimetic crisis is the source of all choices and designations, including the “choice” of the referent by the sign that creates the signifier-signified structure uniquely characteristic of human language. To decide, as Girard likes to remind us, comes from decido, to deal the death-blow to the sacrificial victim.

    To deny to the first users of representation any awareness of the nature of what they are representing guarantees that any such awareness must be of miraculous origin. But inversely proportional to our originary ignorance is the Gnostic thrill of liberation from it. Girard’s claim to be only reiterating Jesus’ own understanding, both simply human and incomprehensibly divine, of the scapegoat mechanism at the basis of all human knowledge is put in doubt by the ease with which this reiteration is taken by some simples d’esprit as a new mimetic Gospel granting a transcendent understanding of violent humanity. This phenomenon, a minor annoyance in normal times, reveals its full potential for perversity in moments such as the current crisis, when the voice of mimetic wisdom affirms in tones worthy of the God of wrath that “we” are no better, and perhaps far worse, than those who fly planes into skyscrapers. It is no trivial matter whether we define the human by an act of violent appropriation or by a minimal hesitation before it, whether humanity begins with a glimmer of ethical awareness or an act of original sin.

    To this ethical difficulty corresponds the epistemological one of determining criteria by which to judge selection of any kind. In Girard’s anthropology, any “arbitrary” selection of an object of transcendental significance–kingship, election, designation for a suicide mission, winning the lottery–are all derivatives of scapegoating. Yet it is not the originary designation itself, but the freedom it provides by deferring mimetic violence that permits the emergence of human consciousness. By separating designation (of the scapegoat) from deferral of violence (following his collective murder), Girard separates the content of this consciousness from the sign that brings it into being. And thus, ironically enough, Girard’s mimetic anthropology, by appearing to justify the Derridean critique of representation as violence, becomes involuntarily what deconstruction is deliberately: the foundation of a victimary politics.

    To defer, however briefly, the gesture of appropriation is to open up a space for the facility language offers us for “off-line processing” (Bickerton). As Vico saw, the fear of the sacred center is the beginning of wisdom. It is this deferral that grounds Durkheim’s claim: animals can perceive regularities and act on them, but only creatures who have substituted signification for appropriation have the wherewithal to create systems of classification. By the same token, our capacity for moral stupidity derives from the misguided fetishism that seeks in signs themselves the knowledge that these signs allow us to achieve and preserve. Like the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the term “scapegoat” is merely a sign of wisdom, not wisdom itself; we can no more acquire the knowledge of good and evil through pronouncing the one than through ingesting the other. That Girard’s scene of emissary murder provides such good shelter for the Gnostic snake only demonstrates all the more the necessity of a minimalist model of humanity’s originary scene.

  • More on negotiational Justice

    A recent email from Marina Ludwigs raises two significant objections to the reflections on “negotiational” justice developed in last week’s Chronicle:

    First, Marina points out that, in the area of class relations, negotiation has long ago replaced the victimary rhetoric about the laboring masses common in the 19th century; the rise of labor unions and collective bargaining led to the elimination of the image of the worker as “wage slave.” (Today, as Marina also points out, workers are seen as victims almost exclusively in a racial or ethnic context, where we react to them as victims of discrimination rather than exploitation.)

    These observations are well-taken; negotiation, even between unequal parties, didn’t begin in 2001. Negotiations between labor and management were facilitated by labor legislation (e.g., the 1935 Wagner Act), which in turn reflected the workers’ electoral clout. The tendency of the democratic political process, in labor relations as in the judicial system, is to facilitate the regulation of asymmetrical relations through symmetrical negotiations.

    Just as the capitalist-communist Cold War has become in hindsight a family quarrel, so has the domestic class struggle. The innovation of the postwar era is the universal application of the victimary model (as opposed to that of “exploitation”) to unequal social relations. In this regard, there is an important difference between labor-management negotiation and the model of negotiational justice conceived as the successor of the victimary model. Workers and capitalists are participants in the same productive operation with divergent economic interests; negotiation between them is a local matter indifferent to broader questions of social justice. Indeed, Marxist revolutionaries condemned “trade-unionism” as a betrayal of proletarian consciousness purchased by the surpluses obtained through imperialist exploitation overseas.

    In contrast, in the race-gender-ethnicity case, nothing essential can be negotiated on the local level; the question is not one of divergent interests but of victimage. Negotiation takes place on a higher plane, in the legislative-judiciary system where laws are created and enforced. Here the replacement of the victimary model by the negotiational is signaled by recent debates concerning welfare and affirmative action programs that not long ago could not be questioned without arousing accusations of racism or sexism. Negotiations on these issues put into question, as labor-management negotiations do only implicitly, the overall usefulness of the victimary model. When, instead of as persecutor and victim, we see the parties as social groups with divergent interests, specific remedies can be found for specific inequities without invoking universal guilt.

    Marina’s second objection questions the very idea of a negotiational concept of justice:

    I am not sure how to apply the negotiation model to cases where both parties feel wronged . . .  To take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Many Israelis feel (and with good reason) that it is they who are the victims in this conflict, historically cheated by the British vitiation of the Palestine Mandate, targeted by terrorism, demographically disadvantaged, and scapegoated by Western countries and the Arab world. . . . Aren’t most ethnic conflicts within and between nation states of this undecidable or contested nature? (See, for another example, the Serbian-Albanian conflict, where, although Western countries sided with the Albanians, the Serbs also had strong justification for claiming the status of the wronged party). [text slightly edited]

    My presentation of negotiational in contrast to victimary justice assumed that there would be no difficulty in identifying the privileged party in asymmetrical conflicts. (I refer to conflicts that are genuine social phenomena rather than the work of fanatical gangs without real support in the population, such as the ETA in Basque Spain or the Shining Path guerillas in Peru.) Yet, virtually by definition, this identification is not agreed upon by the parties themselves. The anti-Semite, for example, considers himself an injured party who is merely defending himself against The Jew. In the specific cases Marina cites, Israelis and Serbs certainly do have a claim that they rather than their opponents are the disadvantaged party. This problem is not merely practical but theoretical: if we reject victimary epistemology, on what basis can we assign the stigma of privilege? Isn’t the very fact of saying that one side is more privileged than the other the product of victimary thinking?

    Response:

    On the practical side: in each of the cases Marina adduces, as well as in virtually all the others she might have cited (Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Kurds in Turkey, Chechens in Russia…), the broad consensus as to which side is stronger includes most of those who favor the stronger party. However sympathetic one is to Israel, one can hardly deny that the Israelis–like the Serbs, the British, the Singhalese, the Greeks…–hold the stronger hand.

    On the theoretical plane: A synthesis, in Hegelian terms, is not the abolition but the “sublation” of the lower-level opposition it succeeds. What determines the asymmetry of such conflicts and the relative position of the parties is indeed the same old victimary epistemology whose criterion is resentment. To abandon the victimary model is not simply to reject this resentment but to “raise it up” to another level where it is understood as the sign of a problem to be solved rather than of a crime to be punished. In all these conflicts where one side is more convinced than the other of being the victims, it is up to the other side to take the lead in finding means to mitigate this resentment.

    What of the limiting case, where neither side will relinquish its victimary posture? In this case, very simply, negotiations cannot take place without the intervention of a “symmetricalizing” third party. It should not be forgotten that I am not proposing the negotiational model as a universal ideal, merely as the only viable framework I can conceive for regulating asymmetrical conflicts that cannot be assimilated unproblematically to the victimary model.

    To return again to the most urgent and resonant of these conflicts: however much the Israeli population is justifiably resentful of the violence visited upon them by Palestinian terrorists, it has been clear at least since 1967 that Israel is the more powerful party and that Palestinian resentment must be taken into account in peace negotiations. Military occupation is an unambiguously asymmetrical relationship, even if it is unfair to assimilate this particular occupation, the result of a defensive war, to persecution. The fact that Barak’s far-reaching concessions were not accepted does not prove that, in the long term, Israel cannot obtain peace by continuing to reach out to the Palestinians and to move toward a symmetrical state-to-state relationship. And this “long term” may be closer than the recent hostilities make it appear.

    * * *

    A note on periodization: To speak of postwar or post-millennial “eras” is not to deny the dynamism of historical processes. The dominant model of human relations in each era operates much like Thomas Kuhn’s scientific “paradigms”: native to one revelatory situation, as the victimary model was to the Holocaust, it is applied to others in succession until domains are reached where its application raises problems it no longer appears suited to solve. Thus the victimary model, first applied to obvious inequities, comes to be used in increasingly more controversial cases of asymmetry (gender parity, homosexual marriage, slavery reparations…). If the beginning of a new era is characterized by the emergence of a newly attractive model, its universal application is the sign that it has reached the limits of its usefulness.

    Coda: two and one-quarter stages of anti-Semitism

    The postwar transformation of anti-Semitism into anti-Zionism is not simply a change of name, even if most of the propaganda materials remain the same. The difference is not verbal but structural. Unregenerate Western anti-Semites still hate Jews rather than Zionists. They follow prewar anti-Semitism in presenting The Jew as secretly powerful yet insisting that the Aryan population, if made aware of their thralldom to the Jews, have the power to crush them. Anti-Zionism, however much it reproduces the old stereotypes, reflects a very different relationship between the parties. The center of gravity of anti-Zionism is not Europe but the Middle East. Israel, vulnerable as it may be, is more powerful than the surrounding Arab states; it offers a demonstration of Jewish power that was unavailable, and unnecessary, to prewar anti-Semites. Thus anti-Zionism follows, in its unsavory way, the victimary pattern that came into existence after WWII. The old anti-Semites hated the Jews for their suspected secret powers; the anti-Zionists’ hatred reflects the demonstration of their own material–economic and military, if not demographic–inferiority.

    This situation, however distressing, offers an opportunity to the Israelis that was not available to the Jews of Europe. Traditional anti-Semitism was a scapegoating operation against a stigmatized and essentially defenseless minority. The fact that the preponderance of resentment was on the side of the anti-Semites implied neither that they were victims deserving of compensation nor that they were, questions of blame aside, the weaker party whose resentment the Jews should attempt to defuse. But the Holocaust did away with the traditional scapegoating structure. Anti-Zionism is directed at an entity that is powerful enough to have some capacity for deferring the resentment it arouses, that is, to move the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation part-way out of the victimary and into the post-millennial era.

    Which leads us back to the Palestinian question. Until this is resolved, there is little point in Israel’s seeking better relations with the dictatorships that surround it. If, conversely, some kind of peaceful modus vivendi is established with a Palestinian state, the surrounding Arab populations might be susceptible to more moderate influences. A modernized, democratic, secular Palestine would set an example for other Arab states to follow. This may be a dream at the moment, but it is one those subjected to anti-Zionism have some hope of realizing, whereas the victims of anti-Semitism had only despair. This contrast alone is sufficient to justify Herzl’s Zionist solution for the anti-Semitism of Europe.

  • Two Concepts of Justice

    In Chronicle 248, I suggested that the newly begun “post-millennial” age requires a negotiational concept of justice to take the place of the redistributive concept that dominated the previous era. Where in the latter, the enforcer of justice subjects the present distribution of values to a “zero-based” evaluation, the former takes the given distribution as just until proven otherwise and seeks to negotiate grievances rather than enforce them.

    In the context of American political philosophy, this opposition is reminiscent of the debate between liberalism, represented by John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971) and libertarianism, championed by Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974). Very briefly, Rawls’ theory is based on the fiction of an original position in which we must approve the distribution of values within our society without knowing what place we would occupy in it. From this model, Rawls deduces that we should approve an unequal distribution only to the extent that it benefits the least fortunate members of society. Nozick’s work is an antithetical response to Rawls; his notion of the minimal state or “minarchy” allows coerced redistribution only to fund indispensable services, punish crimes, and rectify illegal usurpations. Thus Nozick argues against any governmental imposition of a “safety net,” which could be funded only by taking the property of those who would not require its benefits.

    While similarities may be found between the concepts of justice in Rawls and Nozick and the two conceptions of justice to which I refer, the notion of justice itself plays a very different role in GA than in either of their systems. GA proposes no “theory of justice”; its concern is to understand how the dominant model at a given moment is derived from humanity’s originary constitution. Rather than articulating an ideal, it attempts to make explicit by means of this analysis the concept of justice that has actually been followed in the postmodern era. Similarly, in the post-millennial age, as defined by an emergent consensus of disillusionment with victimary thinking, GA’s task is not to propose our own desiderata but to anticipate the new model of justice that this disillusionment implies. Whereas Rawls’ theory strikes me as a fairly reasonable approximation to the victimary ethic of the postwar era–the “veil of ignorance” in the original position forces us to put ourselves in the place of the disfavored and consequently to reject any institutional discrimination based on ascriptive traits–Nozick’s libertarian ideal has limited relevance to the negotiational model of justice to be outlined here.

    The models of justice to which I refer are only tangentially applicable to the internal politics of a liberal-democratic nation. The give and take between the economic and the political process in a country like the US produces outcomes that cannot be predicted in advance, although at some critical moments a new conception emerges with sufficient strength to dictate major political shifts; this was the case, for example, in the Civil Rights era. In the everyday context of national politics, “theories of justice” are essentially party ideologies: Rawls for Democrats, Nozick for (some) Republicans. Their tendentious nature makes them useful for defining policy positions, but a higher-level “meta-conception” is required to make sense of historical change.

    Although even in the postwar era that saw the demise of the chief institutions that granted explicit privileges on the basis of skin color or ethnic origin, redistributive justice was more an ideal than a reality, it inspired such things as German reparations to Jews, increased welfare and unemployment benefits, Affirmative Action programs of all kinds, and, perhaps most important in this context, political rhetoric. Even if the “victims” did not always receive the requested compensation from their “persecutors”–as witness, for example, the apparently futile efforts of American Blacks to obtain reparations for the slavery of their great-grandparents–what is significant is that the argument is made at all. The victimary-redistributive notion of justice does not sweep all before it; yet it is responsible for the most significant changes in human interaction, both domestic and international, in the postwar era.

    The Holocaust made the application of the victimary model to institutionalized inequality intuitively obvious, although it had not been so before WWII. In a brief space of time, we began to judge social institutions by the standard of the originary moral model of reciprocity, as exemplified by language. But the identification of inequality with victimization remains unproblematic only so long as the inequality can be attributed to the difference of persons before the law. The legacy of the postmodern era is (1) a democratic-liberal system for dealing with (a) essentially symmetrical relations, and (2) a victimary system for dealing with (b) essentially asymmetrical relations. The first and most critical problem of the new century is dealing with so-called asymmetrical conflicts between unequals that cannot unproblematically be assimilated to the victimary model. The dilemma of the post-millennial era is that (1) works well in its own domain, but cannot be applied directly to (b), yet (2) is no longer applicable either.

    How then can conflicts be resolved between parties in an asymmetrical relation? In the sense that negotiated solutions can be found for difficulties in and between liberal-democratic societies, or even between societies lacking political freedoms that have become successful participants in the world market, the answer is that asymmetrical conflicts cannot be resolved. The Palestinian-Israeli situation exemplifies the difficulties faced by attempts to negotiate a solution to an asymmetrical conflict, not the least of which are the false hopes such attempts raise. The negotiational conception of justice is problematic in asymmetric situations because only one of the parties accepts the status quo as a point of departure for negotiation. If you feel victimized by me, whether overtly or simply by the very fact of my superior wealth or power, the idea of our negotiating as equals will strike you as farcical. But this cannot be our final word on the subject. The inapplicability to asymmetrical negotiation of the institutions that facilitate negotiation between coequal partners does not imply that no model is conceivable.

    Within a democratic judicial system, the poor and the rich have equal standing, and the advantages of wealth may be outweighed by the fellow-feeling of the jury, or even of the judge. Consequently, such a conflict is not essentially asymmetrical. (That unfairly asymmetrical differences exist is a constant claim within democratic political systems, where these differences are judged and mitigated in a context of institutional symmetry, such as that of the representatives in a parliament.) How then are negotiations possible in the absence of any such overarching “symmetricalizing” institution?

    The following model strikes me as plausible: The more favored party (A) listens to the claims of the less favored party (B), and attempts to reduce B’s resentment of the asymmetrical situation between them, but without accepting B’s demands at face value. Rather than compensating B for his inferior status, A’s task is to act so as to improve B’s hopes of narrowing and eventually eliminating the inferiority. This implies that A must accept the incomplete resolution of B’s resentment, and that B, despite this resentment, must be brought to accept the assistance of A. This model avoids imposing guilt on A by compensating B directly for his resentment, while offering incentives to both A and B to enter into conversation.

    How could this model be implemented? There is by definition no body with power to impose it, for if such a body existed, the parties would be symmetrically situated in relation to it. An institution such as the United Nations can certainly exercise moral suasion, but ultimately it is the more favored party who must realize that human reciprocity is best served by initiating dialogue with the less favored one. This is not an abstract moral precept; the reciprocal interaction of language is in the first place a means of preserving peace so as to permit the pursuit of materially necessary economic activity, and these same reasons preside over the choice of the stronger to engage in “symmetricalizing” dialogue with the weaker.

    Before WWII, despite the widespread existence of democratic political institutions, the dominant mode of conversation between the more and less privileged remained that of asymmetrical authority. In the manner of a Hegelian antithesis, the era that followed the war was dominated by the voices of the less privileged. The synthesis I am suggesting here begins with the two parties in their current asymmetric positions, understood not by the model of victimization but by that of negotiation as apprenticeship through dialogue. The interaction of the two parties is no longer conceived as a zero-sum game but as a productive one whose goal is the sharing by the weaker party of the privilege of the stronger.

    We should not make light of the frustrations inherent in such a dialogue; it will not always be successful, perhaps will never be fully successful. Yet if, as seems obvious, we need to go beyond the model of persecutor and victim, negotiational justice as making-symmetrical through dialogue is the only obvious alternative.

  • Window of Opportunity

    My first reaction to the September 11 attacks was to call them “nihilistic,” since they sought destruction for its own sake. On reflection, however, I think we should see these attacks as motivated by a model, however crude and “medieval,” of an ideal social order, one roughly exemplified by the Taliban and other Islamist regimes. Some readers of the preceding Chronicle, in which I presented this model as a possible alternative to the global market system, accused me of alarmism. Surely there is no way that al Qaeda, or even the whole internationale terroriste, could reduce the industrialized world to the level at which Talibans would be the universal norm.

    Perhaps this is true today. But even if anthrax scares and similar fears are nothing but symptoms of war hysteria, can we consider this truth eternal? How much would the course of current history have changed had Israel not destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981? Perhaps biological and chemical weapons are too sophisticated for terrorists to use effectively; perhaps nuclear weapons are inaccessible to them. Are these facts somehow permanently guaranteed by human ontology? Hobbes’ famous chapter (Leviathan I, 13) describing the “state of nature” begins with the observation that “the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.” Can we say that this truth of human mimesis cannot possibly apply on the state level?

    This is not to say that Islamist regimes offer a viable alternative in today’s world. They are creatures of third-world frustration whose vogue is unlikely to outlast the present generation. Even if we did nothing, eventually either the Afghans themselves would throw out the Taliban or the Taliban itself would liberalize, as is gradually happening in Iran. But that is not my point. In the one-world society of today, medievalism is reactive, dependent on the modernity it reacts against. But the terrorists’ ambition is, by destroying modernity with its own weapons, to re-medievalize whatever is left; societies like Afghanistan can be taken as preliminary models of what this re-medievalization would produce.

    Let us suppose for the sake of argument that terrorists could wipe out whole cities, or spread disease over a whole country. Whatever damage they might do would be consistent with their aims in a way that communist or even Nazi violence was not. In order to reestablish a medieval social order, one must first destroy the conditions of modernity. Even if the current jihad is incapable of destroying modern civilization, we should take it as a very serious wake-up call. Nuclear weapons technology is becoming ever easier to duplicate, and there is no reason to assume that biological and chemical weaponry will not evolve in the same direction. This had better be the last time that we face a concerted terrorist threat backed by any kind of state apparatus; next time, there may be millions of deaths rather than thousands. We have a rapidly shrinking window of opportunity in which to begin recycling the resentments generated by the global market system.

    Not long ago, I conceived the idea of a “post-millennial” era, defined by its abandonment of the victimary epistemology of the postmodern age. The defining issue seemed to be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The breakdown of the “peace process” and the renewed Intifada made it clear that the continued focus on the Palestinians as victims had become counterproductive for both sides; no real negotiations could take place when beneath all Palestinian demands was a sense of legitimized resentment on the model of the South African Blacks under apartheid. (This parallel was in fact raised at the recent Durban conference on racism.) It seemed to me that a new age had begun in which the relatively easy answers of the previous era would have to give way to market-like processes of negotiation.

    If it was not clear to everyone from the suicide bombings in Israel that resentment could no longer be legitimized within the political process, the September 11 events made this point much more decisively. Palestinian terrorism may be linked to legitimate–and, at least in principle, negotiable–grievances; bin Laden‘s cannot. Just as the Holocaust inaugurated the postmodern era by making victimary resentment the preeminent criterion of political change, September 11 ended it by demonstrating the horrors such resentment can produce. These attacks impose on us the necessity of clearly distinguishing between the deferral of resentment and the legitimation of this resentment. This distinction has never been sharper–perhaps even to the point of impinging on the awareness of that most intellectually stagnant of classes, our “progressive” intelligentsia.

    Does the end of victimary thinking mean that we should no longer seek justice? Of course not. But it does mean that justice cannot be sought simply by “taking the side of the victim.” It suggests that the redistributive model of justice, conceived as exercising absolute authority over all objects in contention between the parties, must be replaced by a less absolute, negotiational conception, where the judge is first and foremost an arbitrator. Victimary justice puts everything up for grabs; the persecutor has no rights of ownership, for all his possessions are tainted by victimization. More modestly, post-millennial justice respects the Lockean notion of property as a buffer between persons; it begins with the situation as it exists, and declares possession illegitimate only when it can be shown unambiguously to be so. Needless to say, no mere redefinition of terms will solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; but only if both parties reject the victimary mindset, as seemed to be the case after Oslo, are win-win solutions conceivable.

    Awareness of the rigor of the terrorists’ opposition to global civilization only makes clearer the impossibility of compromise or of competition in the “we will bury you” sense. It is not enough to explain the Islamists’ inflexibility by the fact that they are “religiously motivated.” As the answer to any anthropological question, religious motivation is like the turtle that holds the world on its back but needs another turtle to hold it up–”turtles all the way down.” What guarantees this “religious motivation” is a concept of human community, the Umma of all Moslems. The intense hostility that inspires many in the Moslem world to burn American flags in support of al Qaeda is fueled by the conviction that the Umma, unlike the Christian Kingdom of God, can and should be realized on this earth. There is the glorious past to recall, but there is also the less glorious but real present in which hands and heads can be chopped off and women whacked with sticks for violations of the Sharia. The law of the Prophet may be incompatible with the modern exchange system, but it is not incompatible with certain social forms that have survived under this system and can therefore be felt to offer a preferable alternative–even if, as I have noted, the universalization of the Islamist ideal would require a drastic reduction in the world’s population.

    That we all bear within our minds an originary model of reciprocity is made clear enough by the resentment we experience when we feel this model is violated; resentment is only another word for the feeling of violation. Yet reciprocity is never perfect; in every exchange-system, if not in every individual exchange, some are closer to the center of significance than others. Every social order generates resentment; a global society generates resentment on a global scale. The present conflict is not a “clash of civilizations” but a battle within world civilization between those who lead it and those whose resentment wills its destruction. We must provide means to defer this resentment at the same time as we raise the cost of expressing it through terrorism to the point of unacceptability.

    In the long term, we will be obliged to work out the political implications of the turn away from victimary thinking on a global scale. Liberal democracies provide mechanisms for mitigating economic power with political power, and, by every indication, these mechanisms, whatever their imperfections, are adaptable to the social problems of the foreseeable future. On the global level, however, differences of national wealth and productivity make direct political solutions impossible. Bringing the wealthy countries down to the level of the poor ones would be no more productive than bringing the WTC towers down to sea level. Not “world government” but a multilayered set of institutions is needed to facilitate the integration of the preindustrial world into the global economy.

    Ethics is concerned with creating practical models of human exchange against the background of the originary moral model of perfect reciprocity. Beyond this minimal configuration, there is no “just” or “good” society to serve ethics as a utopian model. No demonstration of the fairness of a given social order will persuade those who feel disfavored within it. Just as Fukuyama’s idea of the “end of history” stands in contradiction with the democratic model of decision-making by which he defines this end (see Chronicle 247), so does any ultimate notion of the good society, even “in theory.” One can minimize resentment, one can recycle it into the system; one can never simply eliminate it.

    Hence one can never wholly eliminate the source of terrorism, or, no doubt, terrorism itself. Any ethical model with a claim to practical application must allow for the existence of individuals and groups within the larger society who consider that society unjust and who ardently desire its destruction, even if they be destroyed along with it. This does not imply, however, that such individuals and groups cannot be denied the means to act on their desires. As these means become more powerful, stricter restrictions will have to be placed on them. This will inevitably lead to the diminution of what we call our “civil liberties.” I will postpone further reflection on this point to another Chronicle.