GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

From status to contract, from tribe or family to individual, from established hierarchies and dependencies to unrestricted movement—that’s the trajectory of modernity. The logic of this transformation whittles away at all inherited norms and virtues—loyalty, honor, courage, faith—leaving all value distilled to a single one: consent. To do something to someone without their consent is evil; to prevent someone from doing what they want to do is evil. Relationships are valid insofar as they are founded on mutual consent, and wrongs within a relationship involve acting in ways not originally consented to by all involved. You can easily develop a theory of historical progress based on consent, as reliance on consent forces individuals to develop their own judgments based on the consequences of their actions thereby making consent increasingly well informed, and contemporary libertarians have developed a sophisticated theory of ethics predicated upon the “no harm” principle—i.e., that everyone has a right to do anything that does not involve the initiation of physical force upon another’s person or property—i.e., complete freedom, limited only by the consent of others (with the same freedom) where required..

We are in the process of learning, though, that nothing can be more insane than a social order founded on consent. Ground zero here is, of course, contemporary sexual relations. More and more states are now passing “affirmative consent” laws, replacing the original anti-“rape culture” epithet “no means no” with “yes means yes.” “No means no” has its problems (what if the man persists after the first “no” and the woman does not repeat the objection, etc.), but it can be negotiated reasonably—one can analyze an encounter and determine the extent of resistance and coercion. “Yes means yes,” though, is crazy—bound up with unsolvable metaphysical paradoxes, each with enormous potential for manipulation and harm. The absurdity of “yes means yes” is widely recognized, as how could it not be?—and, yet, this doesn’t seem to deter its advocates in the slightest. Indeed, this punitive and vengeful empowerment of a protected victim group and, needless to say, their political and ideological proxies, seems rather explicitly to be part of the point.

Regardless of the maliciousness of contemporary radicalizations of “consent,” that radicalization is inherent in the concept of “consent” unmoored from any other moral or ethical terms. In the first instance, arguments in favor of consent are arguments in favor of specific freedoms from specific restrictions: first of all, regarding the disposal or property and choice in sexual partners. Two people want to engage in an exchange prohibited under current guild or religious law; two people wish to get married regardless of the interests of their respective families. In such cases, the existence of consent is not in question, because if they weren’t already consenting they would not be pushing to have the restrictions lifted. Consent has an immaculate birth, and can stand as a pristine alternative to the complicated and corrupt machinations of established institutions ruling through force in accord with dynastic and more shameful material considerations. Even a couple of centuries of exposure of the implications of this romantic notion of consent doesn’t seem to have damaged its prestige—perhaps because of a belief that we are learning from these exposures and will not continue to allow our desires to lead us into the same disasters; perhaps because no alternative post-consent norm is thinkable; perhaps because there are always more “arbitrary” restrictions for the new generation of lovers to rebel against, even if just the institutionalization and rationalization of the results of the previous generation’s rebellion.

“Yes means yes” really brings us to the limits of this development, though. Not only the encounter itself, but every “move” in the encounter needs to be assented to explicitly. Can I touch you here? Can I stroke you here? Can I kiss you here? Etc. Leave aside intuitive revolt against this attempt to bureaucratize romantic encounters—in truth, just about anything can be erotized. The problem here is that there is no way of measuring the consent given against the action then taken—not only is there always something in the action that could not have been anticipated or included in the consent (what if while partner A is touching partner B in location X but at the same time moving somewhat on the bed so as to facilitate said touching—was that movement consented to?) but language can never be made “particulate” enough to ensure continued agreement on the relation between sign and referent. It is a parodic nightmare of empiricism, of the idea that all of reality must be grasped, down to the tiniest details (but there are always details within details, ad infinitum).

Beyond even these intrinsic impossibilities (although also included in them) is the fact that agreements always need to be assessed post facto, and in subsequent reflections upon any event, elements and conditions of the event that were not evident at the time become so. Perfect consent can never, in fact, be ascertained. What kind of pressure did one party bring upon the other—moral pressure (he paid for dinner), emotional blackmail (if you want us to keep going out…), environmental pressure (he brought me to a party where everyone was drinking and making out), and so on. Introduce into that the new bureaucratic and financial incentives created by the law itself to discover new forms of “sexual assault,” and sexual intercourse becomes as impossible as under the most extreme Puritanical regime—and, at least, the Puritans allow for mostly unhindered marital sex, while the standard of “consent” can ultimately maintain no coherent distinction between the marital and non-marital. People, we can assume, will continue to have sex but only insofar as they set aside, i.e., rebel against, the entire regime of “consensuality”—genuine consent will involve overthrowing the entire apparatus of consent. No doubt sci-fi thrillers of young lovers escaping the totalitarian consensual sexual regime are in the making—but this new romanticism will be liable to the possibility of bringing that entire regime down upon an even momentarily disappointing lover.

Many have already noticed the irony of this post-sexual liberation tendency to install a sexual regime that resembles nothing so much as the most clichéd caricature of “Victorian morality.” (Referring to the “legs” of a table was “triggering” for Victorian maidens.) It thereby helps us to understand where such regimes come from—there must be some mighty compulsion to bring the sexual rebels this long way around back to the very thing they were rebelling against. At root is what cannot be discussed openly—the complementary relations between men and women and the asymmetry of the sexual relation. At least the Puritans and Victorians were well aware of such things. Since we refuse to be, we can expect all kinds of further haphazardly generated excrescences upon personal interactions, no doubt with the aid of social media—apps for registering consent in advance, filming of encounters, release forms required by universities, rules about parties and other social events, perhaps new kinds of sex segregation, and who knows what else.

The alternative to the political theory of consent, then, is a political anthropology of competing imperatives (and not just in the sexual realm). The hypergamic female imperative; the polygamic male imperative; the female imperative to have her children protected; the male imperative to know that he is protecting his own children. And implicit anthropology, that now needs to be made explicit, has through trial and error arrived at monogamy as the best sexual regime for negotiating these imperatives. It was, in fact, through monogamy that the passage from obligation and coercion to consent in sexual matters was navigated—from the “fake” marriages of familial alliances to the “real” marriages based on the mutual love of the partners. There is already, of course, an entire therapeutic industry devoted to helping individuals maintain and improve their marriages; there is some, but not much, discussion of the relation between monogamy as an institution and the whole panoply of rights and entitlements that now frame our interactions. Even conservative politicians hardly ever ask anymore, when reviewing a policy proposal, whether it will strengthen or weaken the institution of marriage. The institution itself must be consented to, and can no longer be taken for granted. The imperatives all go underground, and scandalize us when they rear their untutored heads.

We can’t imagine an entire social order recovering or “rehearing” (reheeding) those imperatives. The scenario I sketched incidentally before, of “new romantics” who must pledge not so much undying love as to refrain from reporting the other to the sex police, provides us with a model for reflection. The discipline of these young lovers, who must learn how to mediate their own desires and resentment unaided by institutions that would love nothing more than to entangle them in its own legal, bureaucratic and therapeutic snares, would then have to be institutionalized, in ad hoc, local, secessionist forms, in communities committed (consenting) to the eternal institution of marriage, subordinating all rights to the preservation of that institution. Given the asymmetry of the sex regime, this would depend upon highly virtuous young women, although perhaps less so as the sex police come to impinge more and more upon the normal desires of normal people, and women come to regret the damage calling upon them to settle their scores has done to them and their own prospects. Such secessionist communities would have to reorder “consent” all along the line, openly and systematically embedding it in institutions that, paradoxically, both precede and are consented to by the participating parties. Refusing to allow oneself to be grinded up in the gears of the sex police machinery would require choosing other friends, those would respect one’s choice and, above all, not report you. It would require establishing alternative media so that arguments in favor of one’s secession (“sexcession”?) can be made publicly. No doubt a new legal and political subculture will be needed to protect the sexcessionists from the intrusions of an increasingly totalitarian order which can brook no concessions to outmoded norms of tacit mutual respect.

To consent is to put forth a sign matching another sign already put forth. The “proof” that the signs match each other can only be in future signs iterating the original ones. That’s why an email sent the morning after a sexual encounter can be used as evidence that the encounter was consensual. The signs given by the consenting parties become public, and thereby institutionalized, as norms inevitably emerge. Radicalized consent seeks to undermine the validity of those future signs because its advocates can sense the limitations on consent once a succession of signs solidifies into something like an institution. The left, in other words, as always, wants to keep all its options open: as long as consent can be questioned, accusations of domination and violence can be made. As always, the left provides those of us who would like to be in the social and cultural reconstruction business with a template to work against. It is precisely in these relations between practices and discourses, events and events that reflect upon the previous event, that the intimations of institutionalized consent can be found. You are responsible for your actions on the night of the encounter just as and because you are responsible for your actions when you send that email the next day just as and because you are responsible for your actions when you tell a story to the campus police that contradicts what you wrote in the email, etc. In the end, you mark yourself as either someone who wants the institution to do your dirty work (provide formal warrants for your resentments) or someone who defers the siren call of the resentment enforcement mechanisms because you want to sustain a space of consent that leaves open the possibility of desirable modes of personal and social interaction. We are at the point, though, where such deferrals cannot rely upon commonsense—to resist the siren one must be a bit of an anthropologist, at least in the sense of being able to inspect one’s resentments (and resist those seeking to inflame and manipulate them). It’s not easy to be an anthropologist of your own life—one might discover all kinds of motivations, or “revealed preferences” that contradict one’s “declared preferences.” One must have faith that the process of revelation (reading the “declared” in relation to the “revealed”), i.e., of a kind of living in truth, will generate the norms that make future successions of signs possible. But once mastered, such acts of deferral create new realities, including new kinds of romance and new kinds of community. It is very interesting that the most dangerous temptation, at least for women, the one most likely to cause you to lose your soul, is to surrender your ability to consent in the name of a utopia of absolute consent.

The reason why there is such a thing as politics, which we might define as “consequential disagreements” (that is, disagreements whose settlement is imposed on all parties), is uncertainty about property. There must be some certainty about property for there to be politics, which means that politics is only possible at a certain level of civilization; but there is not complete certainty, which means that politics indicates a still “civilizing” community. Property simply means recognized physical control over things that only one person could control, starting with one’s body. A completely ritual order, which sets rules concerning the use of all things, bodies included, has no property, even if it must have, here and there, elements of property (in shared tasks each person must have some specialized delegation, implying relative control over objects; the food one is placing in one’s mouth, the space one takes up, etc.).

There is uncertainty over property because the various property owners must acknowledge one another’s property—if I don’t accept where you have drawn your property line, or don’t think you should be allowed to do things I don’t approve of in your home, then I don’t acknowledge your property; or, at least, I only do so within limits; hence the uncertainty. The greater consensus there is within the community regarding the terms under which each acknowledges the property rights of the other, the less uncertainty and the less politics, because what, then, would there be to consequentially disagree about?

The traditional solution to uncertainty regarding property is the state—the state settles the uncertainty, in a more or less rule governed and orderly manner. The state, though emerges out of the monarchy, which itself capped perhaps the most certain property regime imaginable: the king owned either more land than everyone else, or owned everything; in the latter case there is no uncertainty, and in the former the king’s own power depends upon a high level of certainty, which protects his property above all. But the monarchy left too many without property, and when the various pre-property “elements” were sufficiently distributed among the propertyless, the system of property became too uncertain. The monarchy, in a more or less revolutionary manner, transitioned into what we now know as the state, in which the lesser propertied must acknowledge the property of others, most of whom have more, some of whom have much more, than themselves, in order for property to attain the needed degree of certainty. In modern society and democracy in particular, property is held at the pleasure of the lesser propertied.

Modern politics, then, is about what concessions must be extracted from the more propertied in order to persuade the lesser propertied to buy in. These categories don’t remain static—it is in the nature of the private property system to generate wealth, and hence more property, so that the lesser propertied often become more propertied and the more even more, sometimes much more. These changes affect the negotiations over the buy in of the less propertied. The state mediates these negotiations, and brokers compromises that erode property in various ways: employers, for example, can be forced to pay their employees specified amounts; employees, on the other hand, are forced to allow the state to extract a portion of their wages for broader social insurance purposes. This eats into the property rights of both, but facilitates reciprocal recognition of the other’s property. Political struggles then become concerned with the terms of those compromises, which keeps property uncertain, but, as long as the system works, not uncertain enough to lead any significant party to withdraw recognition.

The more certain property, the more disciplined the community—this is a maxim that implies reciprocal causality. The more certain property is, the more discipline will be a means of acquiring more of it and holding it more securely; the more disciplined members of the community become, the more they will insist on enhanced certainty. This “conservative” politics emerges in response to the leftist politics that finds it advantageous to keep unsettling property, to make the uses and distribution of property more and more open to debate and state intervention, and does so by denying the connection between discipline and property. This is an extremely reliable marker of the left: they will always want to make some use of property which is presently certain less certain, and they will do so by attacking the assumption that the certainty of use corresponds to the consensual interactions of a disciplined, civilized community. No, the left insists—some property owner, no matter how marginal, does not recognize others’ property in their current form on the fraudulent grounds of being less disciplined, and this insistence entails a more or less successful attempt to hold the entire community hostage to that one hold-out, or group of hold-outs.

The persistence of the left in leveraging the need for property recognition inevitably leads to the question, on the part of the majority of more or less contented property owners, of whose recognition we need, and why? In other words, hostage taking in the name of some minority who rejects not only the current uses of property but the very terms on which our respective uses of our own property are negotiated, must lead to questions regarding the boundaries of the community. Would it be more or less costly to simply cut the complainants loose? Since the state is predicated upon the inclusion of all present members and upon preserving the rules of future inclusion, and benefits from these ongoing negotiations, especially the intractable ones (because only the state could hold together these incompatibles, making it indispensable), the state makes such cutting loose prohibitively expensive. But this just raises the possibility of a cost-benefit analysis of the state, at least in its current form. That also raises the stakes, so such considerations only emerge if the pirateering of the left becomes intolerable. Obviously, the whole point of this discussion is to consider what happens if that is the case.

A substantial portion of the community—it need not be a majority, just enough so that the current community would no longer, in any meaningful sense, exist without it—must decide that its relation to the state must be dramatically reformed because the state no longer guarantees the needed degree of property certainty. The state, this one or some replacement, must lower the threshold for allowing complaints over the use of one’s property. Property must be made more certain. There will be disagreements—and therefore politics—amongst this portion regarding how certain is certain enough, how much short-term uncertainty is to be accepted in exchange for what probability of longer-term certainty. This portion must start to define itself as a community in terms underived from those given by the state: its members must carry on their politics “realistically,” rather than “nominally,” to reference the medieval epistemological dispute, which is to say no longer as citizens of the state but as… what, exactly?

The question is, once the process of recognition intrinsic to certainty in property can no longer be fobbed off onto legal procedures and political machinations, what means of ensuring such certainty can be invented or restored? The answer seems to me obvious: markers of trust and respect that had become secondary to or even prohibited by state enforcement of a kind of simulated trust and respect must be put in place. These will be markers of similarity in forms of discipline, which means similarity in family forms, in forms of shared decision making, in language, in manners, in criteria of “politeness,” in assumptions about rights to self-defense, and so on. The more acute the crisis the more markers will be multiplied: if you really need to trust others a lot, a couple of these markers will not be enough: you might insist on all of them. This means that those who have only a few or a couple of such markers will be excluded, and will either join with the state or splinter off into other groups—there may be attempts to retain them, simply in order to find strength in numbers, but with the kind of strength we are talking about here—sustained, civilization preserving strength—numbers become less important. The more markers are insisted upon, the more you can rely on meta-markers, i.e., markers that indicate that a particular person is highly likely to share your assumptions regarding work, property, sexual values, means of social interaction, education, and so one, and can hence be relied upon to engage with you in reciprocal recognition, ensuring the certainty, of, your property.

The conclusion is clear: as long as the left continues (and why shouldn’t they?) to double down on taking civilizational prerequisites hostage in the name of continually unsettling property so as to increase the value of its hostages and thereby further unsettle property… opposition to the left on the part of the dwindling majority will tend to take ethnic and racial forms—i.e., white solidarity. There are a lot of ways in which that could play out, prior to and following reconstruction of state/society relations, and various ways in which inclusion and exclusion in whiteness can be defined, various ways in which non-whites could ally with and/or co-exist peacefully with whites, but the basic tendency is, I think, indisputable, and we should all be prepared to develop terms of engagement with it. It may be possible to imagine resisting the left on the terms of the existing state-property configuration, but the fact that only those already transitioning to a race realist position seem at all inclined to refuse the left’s ransoms makes this more of a fantasy—indeed, the conservatives have responded to the alt-right anti-victimary race realists as leftists, i.e., by pointing and shrieking. Those who take the war against the SJWs as the primary political task, then, will find it necessary to expose, systematically, the gap between nominal citizenship (and the legal and political apparatuses defining it) and real markers of civilizational reliability. It is a primary strategy of the left to exacerbate that gap, because the formal criteria for ascertaining rights can be enforced by the state in the face of markers of reliability; the counter-strategy is to expose the resulting entitlements as deliberate repudiations of even gestures of reliability.

The 2016 American Presidential election is shaping up to be a remarkable, entirely unanticipated event: it is possible that we will see a direct, sustained and escalating confrontation between the victimary socio-political forces, on one side, and the alt-right, or anti-victimary forces, on the other. They may despise Hillary Clinton, but the victimocrat masses are already treating Trump, not just as your run-of-the-mill despicable Republican, but as the hugest “trigger” in history, who should not be treated as a normal politician who is allowed to make speeches, have rallies, etc., but rather as a conservative speaker invited to a college campus. Meanwhile, regardless of Trump’s own intentions, he has summoned into existence the disparate elements of what has come to be called (largely as a result of the Trump campaign, which has actually led to communication between strands of the right that were previously unaware of each other) the “alt-right.” Regardless of who wins this election, this confrontation will no doubt shape American, and perhaps Western, politics for the foreseeable future. We are going to be talking about this a lot, so we might as well get started.

Let’s start with the obvious observation that the struggle is highly asymmetrical. The victimocracy unites the high and the low, the corporate and professional elite, what the Journal of American Greatness (ultimately going back to James Burnham) calls the “administrative state” and the blogger ArchDruid calls the “investment” and “salaried” classes, on the one hand, and the (ArchDruid again) “welfare class,” to which we should add the illegal aliens and even most recent immigrants and all the political and bureaucratic interests clustered around them. Why the ruling class or oligarchy should have settled upon the victimary as their guiding ideology or, as I prefer, “imperative,” is an interesting question. On the other side is a fairly small band of banished thinkers and activists who can only be mentioned in mainstream culture (very much including the conservative media), or what Mencius Moldbug (I’ve been intensifying my explorations in the vast expanses of the non-liberal democratic rightosphere) calls the “Cathedral” along with some invidious epithet that ultimately translates into “racist.” (The entire faith of the mainstream culture, again very much including conservatism, is that “racist” will forever remain a magic word that makes all badthoughts and badthinkers go away. The most obvious strategy of the alt-right, then, is to make a mockery of this faith.) The short-term gambit of the alt-right is that they can rally a sufficient number of those in the middle (most of the wage earners and least many in the lower strata of the salaried) to resist the victimocracy in the name of normalcy. If so, the alt-right will at least get their foot in the door, i.e., become an inescapable part of the “conversation,” with a sizable audience capable of steady growth. Of course, the long-term goals of the alt-right involve much higher stakes, but no particular end game has yet come into focus (we can be sure that it will involve the destruction of the SJWs, though). The diverse array of projects and proposals is dizzying and fascinating. We’ll certainly be talking a lot about all that as well.

The alt-right, and in particular the up-and-comers among them, adhere to an ethics of “ZFG,” an initialism which, this being a family blog, I cannot clarify (but the reader is encouraged to perform a simple google search). They will gleefully and ruthlessly take what Daniel Greenfield considers the “low road” in combatting political correctness: directly turning every victimary accusation into scandal implicating the victimary utterance itself. Trump seems to find this approach congenial, taking Hillary’s “woman’s card” and throwing it back at her by accusing her of complicity after the fact in her husband’s serial sexual assaults. A deeper insight into feminism is implicit here, and whether or not Trump pursues it his alt-right shadow army no doubt will: any woman who interferes with the victimary narrative (in which feminism functions, essentially, as a kind of ladies auxiliary), must be expelled from womanhood and degraded with all means available, traditional (“slut shaming,” etc.) and progressive.

According to Austrian economics, the production and dissemination of fiat money benefits those who receive the money first, before it has been devalued; we can observe something similar within the victimary economy: after all, once we accept “racism,” “sexism,” “homo- and transphobia,” etc., as the only sins of the modern world, immense power flows to whoever is granted the informal copyrights to these terms. That power is generated and sustained by continually identifying new forms of these “isms”—if you adhere to anti-racist norms circa 2010, then, you are irredeemably racist in terms coined in 2016. Your very attempt to present your anti-racist bona fides is proof of your racism. At an earlier point in the emergence of victimary politics, the shepherds of major institutions (corporations, universities, the military, etc.) must have resisted this new, destabilizing political agenda. At some point, though, they realized they could harness it for their own purposes, as a way of waging war against the middle, atomizing them, terrorizing them, devaluing them, reducing them to replaceable parts in a global economic machine. It was probably at that point that the coinage of new terms for anathematizing the normal began to accelerate. It is much easier for the “high” to manage a world of “lows” without a middle, as a flourishing middle class is always a problem for tyrannical governments.

But there is a structure deeper than all this, and one that only the originary hypothesis enables us to elucidate. I have spoken recently of Eric Gans’s distinction, in The End of Culture, between “producer’s desire” and “consumer’s satisfaction,” and I will return now (and no doubt more in the future, as this distinction looms ever larger in my thinking) to that extraordinarly rich distinction, handled by Gans with extreme rigor and power but, as I hope to show, with a blind spot on one critical point. Let’s begin with a recent blog post with one of the luminaries of the alt-right, Mike Cernovich. Cernovich is the author of two books, which I have not read, but which belong to a new genre of self-help books from an overtly androcentric standpoint. Cernovich wants to teach us how to become better, more valued, more positive and more powerful men. Much of this involves forms of self-discipline with ancient pedigrees: learning to control one’s thoughts, emotions and untutored spontaneous reactions. He has cultivated a public persona modeled on these modes of discipline, a kind of calculated minor celebrity that allows him to be heard without trapping him in the need to shape his self-representations to cater to a mass audience.

In a recent blog post, Cernovich declares that “Your Imagination is Your Reality.” He continues:

Years ago I saw a guy on YouTube and thought, “He’s cool. I’m going to meet that guy one day.” Now Nic Gabriel is among my closest friends.
I imagined myself living off of a laptop. I didn’t know how it would happen. Last year I saw 14 or so countries. I lost count. I did ayahuasca on a farm in South Africa and swam in the Dead Sea.
I never wrote a book. I imagined myself becoming an author. Gorilla Mindset has now sold so many copies that people accuse me of lying about it, as first-time independent authors never have my level of success.
I imagined myself becoming the hottest journalist breaking the biggest stories. Then I went to Hungary to expose the media lies about “refugees.” I busted hoaxes, and then I faced down an angry mob of hundreds of people.
I imagined myself changing the culture through the power of my mind. Now I’m making films and my Twitter receives over 30 million views a month, and multiple stories have gone viral.

You imagine yourself in a situation (on a scene, we might say), and you determine what stands between you and being on that scene: what skills do you need to develop or hone, which bad habits do you need to eliminate? Then you proceed to construct the exercises and take the risks that you need to develop and hone those skills and erode those habits. In that way your imagination becomes your reality. You begin with a model—and you can see in each of Cernovich’s examples, he imagines himself doing something others have done, and you can identify very specific people and follow them, “imagine” how they did it—and you end up by becoming a model to others. We can get even more precise: you throw yourself into one crisis after another, some public, some private, some actual, some simulated, and you force yourself to devise a disposition, an equipoise, that would defer any fear or self-doubt that would cause you to succumb to that crisis.

This, I would say, is producer’s desire, and the alt-right is replete with it—just about all of the participants in the alt-right “proper” (that is, leaving aside those, like the “immigration patriots” at VDare and the “race realists” elsewhere, who have been around for awhile and are adopting the alt-right) talk like Cernovich. Don’t complain—identify what you can do to address a problem or combat an enemy and do it. Treat obstacles and limitations as levers for elevating new practices. It is a very imperative mode of being. What, then, is “producer’s desire” in terms of originary thinking? I’m going to summarize, as best I can (and, inevitably, with some of my own way of making sense of it all mixed in), Gans’s discussion from The End of Culture—approaching this in a scholarly way, with extensive quoting and commentary, seems to me far too unwieldy for a post. That will be for an essay in Anthropoetics at some point, but I’ll leave open the possibility for doing some reading together if anyone would like to respond to this post.

On the originary scene, putting forth the gesture of aborted appropriation creates the divinity informing the central object—that is producer’s desire. It is a god-making gesture. Then, the object is consumed in common, with resentful vengeance visited upon the object in the process. That is “consumer’s satisfaction.” The originary scene is iterated as ritual in the common memory of the group, “triggered,” we might say, by the imminent conflict that becomes possible whenever the conditions that generated the originary scene are reproduced. At the earliest period of human history, ritual creates a kind of ostensive ethics: everyone behaves as they are supposed to behave on the simulation of the originary scene. All members of the group participate equally in producer’s desire and consumer’s satisfaction.

Ritual is modified with the emergence of the imperative out of the ostensive. The imperative emerges from an “inappropriate ostensive,” i.e., an ostensive sign made when the object is not available. The interlocutor fetches the object, thereby retroactively turning the ostensive sign into an imperative that can now be repeated in new situations. The imperative introduces a kind of “magic” into the community: rather than being the happening itself, the sign can now make things happen—it can make the imagination reality. The existence of the imperative creates the imagined possibility of issuing requests to the deity—Gans associates the famous cave paintings discovered in France with an imperative ritual culture: the images are meant to make the desired animal appear, to make itself available. At the same time, it becomes possible to imagine commands coming from the deity—implicit here is the assumption of a reciprocal relation between the subject and object: the more humans imagine themselves sending requests to their gods, the more they can imagine receiving commands from them.

Imperatives are also asymmetrical, unlike ostensives, which reinforce shared presence. No social hierarchy is implied by the existence of imperatives themselves—we can issue imperatives to each other in turn, and many imperatives, like requests, not to say begging, imply the inferiority of the person issuing the imperative. Nevertheless, the emergence of social hierarchies in the form of the “Big Man” (who must have had myriad precursors—every group must have the best hunter, the most powerful warrior, the most desired mate, etc.) will lead to an asymmetry in the issuance of imperatives: the Bigger Men will issue more and obey fewer. As the Big Man acquires divine status and thereby becomes a center through which imperatives circulate with the accumulation of property, more and more intentions can be attributed to him. The attribution of intentions is mediated through the development of myths, which Gans explains as the explanations of rituals: when the members of the group wonder why this figure in the ritual acts this way, the explanations become increasingly sophisticated, suffused with more complex intentions, because what is ultimately being explained are the changing relations within the group itself. In other words, imperatives are sometimes obeyed and sometimes refused, and the reasons why are always being refined.

As the polarity between the Big Man and the rest of the group intensifies, two things happen: first, more extensive, more hopeful and more frightening intentions can be attributed to the Big Man, who can do all kinds of things no one else can, which means that no one else can really know what he is capable of—he thus becomes a repository of hopes and fears, rational and irrational. Second, other, relatively bigger men can imagine themselves in the position of Big Men, and can—and no doubt often do—plot against him, no doubt often successfully. As the community becomes wealthier, these conflicts would be increasingly dangerous for the community as a whole, and resistance to the Big Man would be proscribed with ever more vigor. The desire to be a Big Man would have to be the one desire against which the community is most unanimously ranged. But this desire and its concomitant resentments must still be represented and deferred, and this is done in the form of human sacrifice: the divine becomes more human as a single human become more divine, and only this ultimate sacrifice can satisfy the god.

The anthropomorphization of the divine is, that is, paradoxically, the anthropomorphization of the human. We are all filled with the desire to usurp, not only the place of the emperor, but also of all of our fellows—we covet the other’s wife, oxen, home, etc., and we are well aware that we do. At the same time, with the rise of empires, it can be observed that empires and emperors do, in fact fall—the most apparently powerful and arrogant rulers are swallowed up by yet more powerful ones, or swept away by invasions from the surrounding, savage plains. A form of holiness that can defer increasingly rich and symmetrical desires and in a durable way becomes an urgent necessity. Judaic “narrative monotheism,” the Jewish God whose name is the declarative sentence, is invented/discovered in response to this necessity. Human sacrifice can be abolished because there is no man-god, whom we resent, envy and hope for succor from to demand it: a “portable,” invisible God, who gives a law under which we can control all of our now evident “sinful” desires replaces all that barbaric carnage.

The installation of this new mode of holiness requires that producer’s desire, even in its earliest emergence, be unanimously resented and thoroughly proscribed. There is no place for it: God provides, humans are grateful recipients. The desire to see oneself as a creator, as a God-maker, must be extirpated. Monotheism is utterly hostile to producer’s desire, and replaces it with an all-encompassing and more realistic hope for consumer’s satisfaction. We can see how the modern market system ultimately inherits this valuation, while finding a way to incorporate the rather titanic producer’s desires required to bring capitalism into being: producer’s desire can be sanctioned as long as, and only to the extent that, it serves consumer’s satisfaction. Even the most pro-capitalist libertarians, with very few exceptions, sell capitalism as a social order in which the consumer rules—even though it is patently obvious that no consumer has ever the faintest idea of the object of his satisfaction until some producer imagined and then brought it into being. Now, throughout his account, Gans consistently refers to producer’s desire as “fantasy,” “wishful thinking,” “impotent,” and so on, clearly adopting the judgment he has been analyzing, coming from monotheism and ultimately market society. “Consumerism is humanism” he declares at one point (in French, ironically contesting, I assume, Sartre’s parallel assertion regarding existentialism). So, it is on this one point that I differ from Gans: the demonization (a very literal application of the term, in this case) of producer’s desire is not warranted by an originary account of the dialectic of producer’s desire and consumer satisfaction. We need no longer accede to the desperate dogmatism of “declarative culture” on this issue; we can reintegrate the “magical” imperative into our social thinking and our social ethics.

We shouldn’t do so lightly, however—I hope that my account has made it clear that there were, and are, very compelling reasons for keeping a tight lid on producer’s desire, on insisting that it at least serve the community. The producer, though, knows what will serve the community before the community does. And the community has been usurped by a form of consumer’s desire that has eschewed all reciprocity, with either God, some authoritative representative of the community, or the producers who must, after, provide what the consumer beyond consumption demands, and has become pure and insatiable entitlement. (And, for that matter, even ordinary, non-pathological consumerism doesn’t produce the people who could defend consumerism.) The resurgence of producer’s desire is first of all a refusal to be bound by the demands of that voracious maw.

So, whatever any of us thinks of the racial or sexual thinking of various strands in the alt-right (Cernovich, while strongly androcentric, is completely uninterested in racial questions, explicitly welcoming all Americans into an American nationalism), I think we can better understand and even welcome it if we understand it as a necessary and inevitable resurgence of the long marginalized producer’s desire. The problem thereby posed to our social and political thinking is, what kind of order can place producer’s desire at the center? Just as the evolution of myth was an evolution of the ability to posit new intentions of the other co-participants in ritual, new thinking about the producer/consumer dialectic will involve retelling events from recent (and maybe not only recent) and contemporary history: identifying and eliciting producerist intentions (both civilizing and dyscivic) we were unprepared to notice before. (Incidentally, this might be a way of beginning to construct the terms of a shared history, and resisting what seems to be a devolution into increasingly incompatible conspiracy theories—a devolution that follows the same logic I posited at the onset of monotheistic thinking: that is, we are more and more capable of imagining each other capable of more and more, without any shared sense of the unthinkable. The possibilities of global forms of sympathy are, not surprisingly, conjoined with imaginings of unprecedented forms of social chaos.) What allows for the conversion of internal scenes to external ones? How can we train ourselves to create internal scenes free of the consumerist imperative, our own and others’, and that can concatenate into other producerist imaginaries? It is a form of originary thinking to imagine new centers, and then target and reshape all the intellectual habits that prevent us from training our attention on them. A good place to begin is by widening the circle of others one can treat as rivals one competes with, emulates, befriends, and from whose mistakes one learns; rather than as recalcitrants refusing to follow one down the rabbit hole of one’s own perceived entitlement. Discipline itself creates the new reality, possibilities that didn’t previously exist but will have always already existed.

An uncharacteristically ambivalent article by Daniel Greenfield on David Horowitz’s FrontPage website today: usually, Greenfield charges straight ahead, target always in his sights, exposing contradictions and mercilessly mocking the evasions of his victimary opponent. Today, while openly asserting the need to fight Political Correctness, he proceeds to, rather than commence the fight, distinguish between more and less acceptable modes of struggle. While contending that Republicans need to fight PC on causes that might be uncomfortable for many conservatives, like the right to display the Confederate flag and resisting the replacement of Andrew Jackson by Harriet Tubman on the currency, Greenfield adds the following:

There are two ways to fight political correctness. There is the low road of populist vulgarity, of political incorrectness for the sake of political incorrectness, mocking and demeaning cultural scolds to make them seem ridiculous. And then there is the high road of challenging them as privileged demagogues who attack civil rights in the name of civil rights, who are not victims but witch hunters aided and abetted by powerful media interests, and whose tactics represent a grave threat to individual freedom.

The low road is enjoyable, but plays into the portrayal of politically correct activists as victims. The high road exposes them for the totalitarian bullies that they truly are. But it requires fighting for the rights of the politically incorrect people that you may disagree with. And when conservatives fail to fight for fairness and due process, they cede the fight to a class of politically incorrect activists who have no conservative principles and who stand for nothing except egging on the other side to extremes.

I am almost certain that this is an oblique attack on Breitbart, and in particular provocateurs like Milo Yiannopolis closely associated with it and, probably, the alt-right in general. Greenfield is being, again uncharacteristically, but perhaps wisely, cautious here. Greenfield surely shares much of the alt-right’s critique of mainstream conservatism, especially on the point he is addressing here—the seemingly congenital inability of those conservatives to resist the victimary onslaught. At the same time he is no doubt aware that much of the alt-right transgresses the boundaries Greenfield himself observes regarding the norms of liberal democratic political culture, especially regarding issues of race and antisemitism. Greenfield, I assume, wants to distinguish himself from without entering into open combat with, the alt-right. I think Greenfield’s attempt here exposes the limitations of his approach, but I’m not interested in taking sides—I’m far more interested in observing the tiny shoots of new discourses and new conversations on the non-obsolete right.

Greenfield’s caution makes it difficult to tell exactly what he is against, and why. I suppose vulgarity and populism are by definition “low,” but does Greenfield want to withdraw entirely from the “low” field? Should that be left to the left? I suppose political incorrectness for the sake of political incorrectness leaves us no way of distinguishing more and less effective manifestations of un-PCness—but in the very same sentence Greenfield provides the point: making the cultural scolds seem ridiculous. Surely Greenfield is not opposed to the time-honored political activity of demeaning and ridiculing one’s opponents—the truth is, Greenfield himself does this kind of thing all the time, often brilliantly and highly entertainingly. Maybe he prefers his own brand of cutting word-play to the more physical forms of confrontation evidenced, for example, at Yiannopolis’s, Stephen Crowder’s and Christine Huff Sommer’s recent appearance at the U of Amherst, where they (Crowder and Yiannopolis, anyway) exchanged insult for insult, rant for rant, middle finger for middle finger. But why exclude the latter? Clearly, a key part of fighting the SJWs is being able to confront them on whatever level they choose to attack, giving no quarter. If the more responsible rightist Greenfield wants to be here can defend the Confederate nostalgiacs, on the ground of “process” (as liberals used to, as Greenfield himself notes, used to defend the Communists), surely that same procedural defense can be extended to the more rambunctious anti-PC warriors.

The “low road,” Greenfield claims, while “enjoyable” (is fun to be completely discounted as an element of politics?), “plays into the portrayal of political correct activists as victims.” Does it, though? When you strike back at the SJWs in such events, they seem to invariably return fire—rather than presenting them as victims, one draws them into an arena of combat, which knocks them of the high road they claim to be on. There are two ways of exposing the SJWs as totalitarian bullies: defend their victims, or bait them into acting on their worst impulses. As far as I can tell, Greenfield wants us to restrict ourselves to the first approach, but that means being always on the defensive, whereas the “low road” suggests all kinds of innovative ways of going on the offensive—for example, I’ve been wondering what would stop whites from simply checking off the “African American” box in their college and other applications, thereby forcing those institutions to account for the way they enforce their racial classifications. Regarding the current bathroom wars, why not march into a Target, or some other PC-friendly corporate coward’s premises, with a group of men and a group of women, clearly “normal,” with each proclaiming that they feel like a man/woman right here and now, and going into the “wrong” bathroom? Again, you would be forcing them to enforce their own incoherent categories. Why should we wait until some poor woman complains about a man in the bathroom along with her and her daughter, and is subjected to a Twitterstorm, loses her job, etc.?

I don’t believe that Greenfield is really worried about the fallout from such stunts (I use the word “stunt,” I want to be clear, in a completely non-pejorative way). He is similarly tentative in his approach to the issues he chooses to discuss: the Confederate flag and the Jackson/Tubman currency switch. What distinguishes the alt-right is its complete lack of ambivalence or hesitation in addressing these issues: I’m a Union man myself, but a direct line passes from the “Rebels” to the generations of courage and commitment that has sustained the US military to this day, and I have no problem embracing the “Lost Cause” as an integral part of America on those grounds alone (of course, I know that most of the alt-right would be much less hesitant, even, than that). Moreover, out of respect for the truth, we should vigorously oppose the conflation of the Confederacy with Nazism, which drove the recent “flag wars”—the Confederates invaded no territory, committed no genocide (as far as I know—and I think we would all know—there is no evidence of atrocities carried out against slaves or freed blacks during the Civil War, even though the assumption must have been that they sympathized with the enemy)—in sum, they defended their cause honorably. The case for Tubman, meanwhile, is completely ridiculous, and only conservative pandering to blacks makes this seem problematic. First of all, with very few and mostly failed exceptions (Susan B. Anthony, Scajawea…) the figures on our currency are all people who served in official capacity in the Federal government—indeed, unless I’m wrong, with the exception of Alexander Hamilton, all the figures who lasted on major denominations are presidents. Andrew Jackson was a heroic and transformative figure, whose deeds are public record and uncontested—and we should defend the Indian Wars, for his part in which he is currently excoriated. (Should Indian attacks on frontier settlers have gone unanswered?) Tubman’s aura, meanwhile, seems largely a product of Communist propaganda, uncritically absorbed within the public education system.

All this is debatable, of course, but the problem for Greenfield is that he can’t say any of it because he is invested in the argument that the Democrats are the real racists, so, in the end, as far as I can see, he avoids taking a position on Tubman/Jackson, and can only support the Confederate flag on the grounds that today’s Republicans represent today’s southerners, which is pretty feeble, considering that the Republicans presumably would like to represent southern blacks as well. Greenfield refrains from his usual practice of pursuing the SJWs back to their lair, which in this case would lead to the exposure of the ongoing demonization of whiteness. There is, at this point, no anti-racist position that is not also anti-White, no feminism that is not androphobic, no support of immigrant rights that is not anti-American, and so on—the old liberal consensus has shrunk so that you can’t stand on it, even on a single tippy toe. To use Greenfield’s procedural terms, there is no choice but to offer an affirmative defense of whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, Christianity and all the rest, within a comprehensive defense of civilization.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times before that one of the favorite tropes of the alt-right is the use of Israel, partly enviously, partly mocking, always with some degree of resentment, as a model for what the US should do but is not “allowed” to do. The rich argumentative possibilities of this trope make it worth returning to in more detail, while the trope itself serves as a kind of model for the comparative mode of discourse in which political discussions (maybe all discussions) seem to be trapped. Is it possible to argue, evaluate, distinguish, praise and condemn, without comparison? Maybe, but we hardly ever see it—on the left, the entire discourse of “equality” is, of course, one extended comparison: if you say men can do this, why can’t women do it; you say this about blacks, but what about when whites…; if one form of sexuality is natural, why not other forms, etc. Noam Chomsky’s entire method of political critique is based on juxtaposing a statement made endorsing some American action with a statement made by the same or similarly positioned (there’s a comparison right there, already) person and pointing out that the same values are “hypocritically” applied differently to the respective actors. “If a Soviet leader said this about the USSR’s relation to Hungary we would be disgusted,” etc. But the right, especially in fighting back against the left, has adopted the same kind of attack on “double standards” and “hypocrisy” (you call use racists but look at black communities under Democratic control; you say we wage war on women but you say nothing about Muslim misogyny, etc.), without realizing that it locks in the very discourse of equality and anti-discrimination that can, ultimately, only ratchet up one way. The arc of emergent margins of discrimination is infinite and points left.

My theorizations of discipline and civilization have been intended, in part, to forge a path out of these resentful thickets. For example, David Horowitz is currently sponsoring the display of posters on San Diego State University campus that highlight connections between BDS activists and Palestinian terrorism. I have no quarrel with that, of course—it’s a courageous and effective strategy, because it forces people who would prefer to represent themselves as human rights activists defending the powerless to explain their relation to organizations that strap explosives on desperate teenage girls and send them to self-detonate on busses filled with civilians. What I think ultimately limits the effectiveness of such moves is the use of terms like “racist” or “hate speech” or “hate group” to identify the enemy. This is a perfect example of a kind of political jiu jitsu that only flips oneself—the terms are simply not reversible. Even the charges of “antisemitism” are attempts to draw upon some latent social consensus that would automatically de-legitimate the other side. You can’t, on one side, hollow out the charges of “racism,” “hate speech,” and so one by holding up leftist abuses of these terms to obloquy and ridicule and then assume they retain their old power when using them oneself. It’s better to transform the discourse altogether. The problem with the war on Israel that BDS helps wage is not that it is racist, hateful, or antisemitic but that it is a war of barbarism and savagery against civilization, with all the lies and lowering of inhibitions such a war entails. A young person asked me a very good, and, in retrospect, very obvious question recently: is it racist if it’s true? Once one realizes that the categories of hate, racist, sexist, antisemitic, etc., are not necessarily co-extensive with the category of “false,” the entire victimary edifice collapses—what we really should be objecting to is lying, “dyscivic” categories and indiscipline. Now, much of this comes out in Horowitz’s polemics—I’m not really arguing against him in particular. My point is that any civilizational politics must be interested, above all, in a social order immune to the extent possible to the left, and recycling to exploit essentially leftist categories weakens the immune system. To put it another way, rather than competing over who has most thoroughly repudiated firstness, firstness is to be systematically promoted.

So, if my response to someone who thinks that the economy of North Carolina should be destroyed because they want to keep delusional men who think they’re women out of women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, and so on, is that you’re waging war on normal people who commonsensically and correctly believe in the irreducibility of sexual difference and that you’re doing so in the name of the principle that the abnormal should trump the normal and incontinent the self-controlled, I don’t have to worry about juxtaposing what the SJWs say about women there with what they say about women here. Indeed, since “anti-racist” politics has become little more than the defense of the right of blacks to spread violence, feminist politics little more than the defense of absolute sexual freedom for women and absolute sexual restriction for men, LGBT politics little more than the imperative to reverse every natural, biological category possible, Palestinian and, more broadly, anti-“Islamophobic” politics nothing more than a defense of the rights of jihadists to go about their business unscrutinized and unhindered, and pro-immigration politics the global entitlement of non-Western peoples to reside in and transform the US, my civilizational, disciplinary approach seems like the intuitively obvious one.

So, why not toss the “Israel as model” approach as well? I’ve spoken before about how it works: American Jews supported unlimited immigration here and tightly controlled immigration into Israel; American Jews object to an ethnically based state elsewhere but support an unqualifiedly ethnic state in Israel; Israel builds a wall to keep out terrorists but any suggestion of a wall on the Southern border to stop illegal immigration (and drug and human trafficking—and, at some point, terrorism and other forms of violence) is deemed racist and fascist. It’s easy to counter-argue—well, what about the history of the Jews and the therefore special significance of Israel, isn’t Israel far more endangered than the US or other Western countries, what about the various, albeit more subtle ways Western states maintain a basic ethnic identity (apparently Germany, as I have learned from such arguments, has its own equivalent of Israel’s Law of Return, offering expedited citizenship to ethnic Germans who are citizens of other countries—presumably enacted to facilitate the repatriation of German “colonists” in Eastern Europe and Russia), etc. But this is all so tiresome and subjectivizing—who is to say how threatened by unlimited immigration Americans (let alone Europeans) should feel; who is to say that a white or Euro-American identity can’t be as authentic and worth preserving as a Jewish (or any other) one? If you accept the basic terms of the discourse and presuppose the argumentative unacceptability of “double standards” and “hypocrisy,” then you can’t endorse when it comes to Israel what you denounce when it comes to the US. What happens, though, if we reject those terms?

I think we best find that out by pursuing, not eschewing, the Israel as model trope. The very prevalence of this trope indicates that we are not, in fact, dealing with pure equivalences. Israel seems to be an untranscendable term in contemporary political logics. I’m never more pleased and grateful when I come across someone who is simply indifferent to Israel, because it seems so unlikely. Moreover, I think it is quite likely that the secular Jews who bore the main brunt, at least ideologically, of Nazi antisemitism, are fading into irrelevance and will hardly be worth worrying about within a few decades: they really only exist in any number in the US, where they are becoming fewer, more diffuse, less powerful, and less distinct from other Americans. Such transitions contain their own dangers, of course, but no one is, or will be, speaking of American Jews as a model to be either ironically resented or emulated. Only Israel will have that privilege. The victimary era opened with the racialization and extermination of the assimilating, subversive and vulnerable Jew and has come full circle with the Nazification of the self-differentiating, self-defending, traditional-modern Jew. As with any hermeneutic circle, it is a question of entering it the right way, and ultimately abolishing it by maximizing its presuppositions.

What Israel is most fundamentally a model of is the confrontation on the borderline between civilization and its others. As I have written before (without giving due credit to Lee Harris, who slipped out of my mind, as it had been years since I had read or, indeed, heard anything of him, but was still the one who got me thinking along these lines), constitutive of civilization is a dedicated forgetting of the emergence of civilization. No civilized person wants to think of the application of commercial and technological cunning to violence (to both other and self) that enables emergent civilizations to resist and subdue the often far more numerous barbarians and savages in the midst of whom the civilized first carve out a space. But this forgetting renders civilizations helpless against both external barbarians and savages and the barbarisms initiated internally by the various forms of decadence that are inevitable concomitants of civilization. Discipline is relaxed precisely when new modes and increments are needed. Israel was long ago identified by the Left as one of the “borderline” states (along with South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea, and a couple of others) in what it considered a conflict between the colonizers and the decolonized; that analysis can be embraced wholeheartedly with completely reversed valuations, along with the “pessoptimist” (I’m referencing an old novel by an Israeli Arab, Emile Habiby) assumption that this borderline is coming soon to a country near you.

I would suggest that in its politics, economic, culture, manners, attitudes, Israel is above all a country aware of the need to construct and defend civilization continuously. Violence is ever present, and one’s own violent men must be given free, but not too free, reign to suppress it. Sentimentalities like human rights and ever expanding equality are constant temptations, but never allowed to override brute realities. Ethnic cohesion is maintained, along with respect for more traditional religious forms, even when those forms are rejected and often disdained by the majority—there is an intuitive sense that such “reversions” provide a necessary ingredient of preparedness to act in concert in times of emergency. The Left, like some kind of chronic after-effect of a childhood disease, is always there, always painful and debilitating, but it can be pointed to as such, keeping the immune system working. The Supreme Court, the media, the academy and education systems in Israel are even further left and more arrogant than our own, and even the higher levels of the military and secret police are politically corrupted—the lure of international approval and even celebrity for exhibitionist dissidents is very hard to resist. But anyone following contemporary Israeli politics knows that empowered political actors attack this corruption, unapologetically and maybe eventually effectively, in tune with majority sentiment. The possible applications to the politics of other Western countries are fairly obvious.

So, Israel is a model for us insofar as it is one or two steps ahead of where we need to be very shortly, more, perhaps, as an object of study than one of emulation (but a bit of emulation may be warranted, as well), as test case of the problematics of defending against external threats and rehabilitating from internal disorders of civilization at the same time. The model can be turned, in very different ways, toward both left and alt-right—it would be a fascinating paradox if Israel were to become the first genuinely alt-right (i.e., post-victimary) country. There would be no need to insist upon an Israeli “exceptionalism”—one could hope for the end of Israel as model once what it is modeling becomes more widely distributed, while doubting the likelihood that such dissolution is imminent. But we would have moved beyond the resentful comparative discourses of double standards and hypocrisy insofar as we proceed to do (and learn from others) what the defense of civilization requires, rather than continually asking permission from some phantom authority to do what we fantasize some privileged other is allowed to do.