GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

without the sparkling clean conscience. I certainly agree with Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle that the emergent post-victimary tendencies, indeed, any post-victimary tendency, would have to re-privilege “performative criteria” over “ascriptive” ones. Indeed, that is the point of Vox Day’s, in my view irrefutable, axiom: “The more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function.” But what I am seeing, and what I think we must expect to see, is quite a bit rougher, and more raw, than the hopefulness with which Martin Luther King Jr. asked for us all to be judged on the “content of our character.”

For those urging the meritocracy in the emergent post-WW II American order, the argument for meritocracy was completely consistent with the argument against using ascriptive categories to judge people. It was possible to believe (bliss it was to be alive in that dawn, but to be young was very heaven!) that once all the legal restrictions and inherited prejudices were eliminated, everyone would, indeed, be judged on the content of their character and—most importantly—everyone would be happy with the results. Good intentions seemed perfectly aligned with good outcomes—and with historical “momentum.”

We can no longer hold to such naïve Enlightenment blank slatism. We know to a logical certainty, that even in a completely free system, with no external restrictions on anyone’s mobility, we will not have an equal mixture of all ethnic and sex groups in all occupations. Some ethnicities will be more heavily represented in brain surgery, others in street cleaning, still others in organized crime. And we already have a pretty good empirical sense of how the proportions fall out. It matters very little whether the asymmetries are the result of biological or cultural differences, as cultural differences are equally beyond the power of government to transform. We can even say that the more free the social order, the more those differences will increase the asymmetrical outcomes of different groups. Even more: these differences will be transmitted from generation to generation: on average, it will be easier for a child of a doctor to become a doctor than it will be for the child of a janitor, no matter how many medical school scholarships we set up for children of janitors.

Now, if we add to all this the greater comfort people have with others of the same group, and their greater ability to notice merit in those more similar and familiar to themselves, and, finally, add in the inevitable nepotism that would ensure that certain professions are, if not dominated by, weighted heavily in favor of, some groups over others, we can conclude that two things. First, that a free society is a highly stratified one; second, it is impossible to prove that a society is really free. The very disproportions that must emerge provide prima facie evidence for the belief (and it will be a very comforting belief for many) that the “so-called” meritocracy in fact veils the domination of society by privileged minorities. Even more: disproportion in the professions in a modern society means more than some groups benefiting more than others, or at the expense of others—it gives the appearance (irrefutable, even if false) of disproportionate influence, control and domination by those groups over others. And, of course, this means more in some areas than others. Can anyone really believe that a particular minority could represent, say, 60% of the teaching profession and professoriate, the entertainment industry, and the financial sector, without distorting those institutions so as to serve their own interests?

I repeat: when someone comes along and does the math (and livens it up with a vivid collection of anecdotes and stereotypes) and accuses groups a, b, and c of using their controlling share of crucial institutions to screw over, economically, culturally and even spiritually, groups x, y and z, there will be no way of proving them wrong—not to the satisfaction of an objective observer, much less to the satisfaction of members of groups x, y, and z. And the same will be true of members of groups a, b, and c telling the others to stop whining, get off their fat posteriors, and engage in some self-reliance—or speculating on the bad habits, cultural backwardness or deficient gene pools of x, y, and z. The greatest attractive force holding people within the gravitational sphere of the victimocracy is precisely the intuition that this stratification and the consequent acrimony would be the result of its abolition, and we can’t be sure that things won’t be much worse.

That’s why another faith will have to replace the cult of the victim. There’s no way to predict the details of this faith—most likely, it will be a convergence of several, old and new—much less “produce” it. But of one thing we can certain: for this faith to be genuinely post-victimary, it must be centered on a belief in the possibility of what I have elsewhere called the “third person,” i.e., the person who can set aside his own interests and decide impartially between contending positions. Regardless of how we see the reality, a large majority would have to believe that it is possible for a boss to promote the best person, for a university to hire the most promising researcher, for a Hollywood studio to “green light” the best movie, etc. In other words, that all these figures are capable of acting in the best interests of the institutions they are responsible for. I think this faith has declined dramatically in the West, so much so that it has become impossible to say what the “best” is, or that there is a “best.” Still, anyone who is good at anything must have such a faith, otherwise how could they practice and hone their skills? But the victimocracy has successfully squeezed this faith out of the public arena. As with any faith, there is always counter-evidence for the faithless to draw upon in the indictment they draw up.

If we are to be avatars of such a faith, we must be prepared to make a case for the “better,” if not the “best.” But I don’t think we can rely on inherited judgments here—it’s not a question of defending the classics, because if it was, there would still be better and worse defenses of the classics, and most of those defenses that take received cultural hierarchies for granted are pretty feeble. Even if Shakespeare is the best, the one injecting Shakespeare into the cultural bloodstream has to be better than the one doing the same for Jay-Z. In the sciences and technological fields, hierarchies of value are still preserved, if for no other reason than that poor countries like China and India are in such a rush to exploit them. But in the moral, esthetic and political spheres, the ability to reason is in free fall (try sometime to get a 20-something “marriage equality” fanatic to explain why there should be an institution like marriage in the first place and you’ll see what I mean), and those arguments (through environmentalism, in particular) impinge directly and disastrously upon the science and technological institutions.

This is where I think originary thinking can make an unparalleled contribution to human flourishing. Originary thinkers are the only ones who can know that what is really the “better” is whatever defers the most immediate threat of violence (or violence indicating disruption) while preserving and enhancing our capacity for deferring potentially greater violence in the future. Appeasing those who threaten violence now may work, for now, but makes things worse by depleting our “stock” of discipline; retreating into the certainty of “eternal” principles may preserve a cultural heritage but only until the violence overwhelms the few who still remember it. Deferring violence now while/by enhancing disciplinary reserves is the source of cultural creativity and civilization. There’s no formula for doing this, but thinking of how to do it is what will actualize our commitment to and manifest our faith in the better.

From the Reason website (https://reason.com/blog/2015/09/08/the-rise-of-the-culture-of-victimhood-ex):

Over at the Righteous Mind blog, New York University moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt is signposting a fascinating article, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures,” by two sociologists in the journal Comparative Sociology. The argument in the article is that U.S. society is in the midst of a large-scale moral change in which we are experiencing the emergence of a victimhood culture that is distinct from the honor cultures and dignity cultures of the past. If true, this bodes really bad for future social and political peace.
In honor cultures, people (men) maintained their honor by responding to insults, slights, violations of rights by self-help violence. Generally honor cultures exist where the rule of law is weak. In honor cultures, people protected themselves, their families, and property through having a reputation for swift violence. During the 19th century, most Western societies began the moral transition toward dignity cultures in which all citizens were legally endowed with equal rights. In such societies, persons, property, and rights are defended by recourse to third parties, usually courts, police, and so forth, that, if necessary, wield violence on their behalf. Dignity cultures practice tolerance and are much more peaceful than honor cultures.
Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning are arguing that the U.S. is now transitioning to a victimhood culture that combines both the honor culture’s quickness to take offense with the dignity culture’s use of third parties to police and punish transgressions. The result is people are encouraged to think of themselves as weak, marginalized, and oppressed. This is nothing less than demoralizing and polarizing as everybody seeks to become a “victim.”

There’s nothing all that new here for GAnicks, even though it’s good to see such discussions become more “mainstream.” We can add to and clarify the above in a few ways (perhaps Campbell and Manning do so in their essay). First of all, there is such a thing as “honor” for women, which involves preserving their chastity (and all external “signs” of chastity) until marriage (and fidelity to husband thereafter). More importantly, we can clarify the continuity, and not just breaks, between honor, dignity and victimhood cultures that the final paragraph seems to presuppose. “Dignity” is a reciprocal granting of presumptive honor, or a universalization of the right to be free of insults and to have offenses against oneself avenged. The dignity culture delegates the responsibility of avenging insults to a third party, endowed with “impartiality” (something unthinkable in honor cultures, but ultimately predicated on something like the honor of God and a state stronger than the contending Big Men). So, the dignity culture is really an objectified or formalized form of the honor culture, with the new ingredient being the crucial but inherently vague notion of “impartiality” or “justice.” But the transition from dignity to victimhood is most interesting for us. To prove that one has indeed been offended before an impartial arbiter is to be compelled to construct a convincing case that one is a victim. Participating in the dignity culture is, then, already sustained training in victimhood—you learn to present yourself as having been helpless in the face of some malicious attack, which ultimately involves really becoming helpless. All this, so that, like in an honor culture, the offense to one can be unmistakable, and can be given unqualified recognition. (It’s interesting that representatives of honor cultures, like the Greek heroes in the Illiad, always seem to be moaning and whining about the pettiest slights, just like today’s victims, even if they are prepared to commit violence in their name.) We can see the Holocaust as the trigger for the rapid acceleration of the development of the victimhood culture, and as providing its particularly melodramatic and hysterical forms, but the dignity culture (which is to say, civilization) is just a way station to victimhood. All that has to happen to tip the dignity culture over into victimhood is for “impartiality” and “justice” to be debunked as disguised forms of victimization—this is not that hard, as the standards of judgment necessarily rely upon common sense notions of “reasonableness” which support those closer to the normative center. The excerpts from the article included at the link suggest that the “benefits” of victimhood include “raising their moral status”, but we can flesh that out as well: victimhood generates a therapeutic culture in which we are all victims of repressive social norms (even the oppressors, ultimately), and within a therapeutic culture, victimhood is redemptive insofar as naming your victimization is the first step towards reclaiming whatever in one’s identity has been dishonored. One can thereby present oneself publicly as (in another Holocaust reference) a “survivor.”

Of course, civilization may be a way station to cultural forms other than victimhood. Or, at least, we must assume, if civilization is to have a future (and if we don’t assume that, there’s no point to writing this post, or doing much of what any of us does). But that’s the question, and simply tearing down victimary thinking and institutions (the focus of my last two posts), however necessary, won’t supply an answer. The centrality of nationalism to the post-victimary discourses I have been looking at is suggestive, though. Nationalism emerges within the nation-state form, first of all under the absolutist monarchies (and then in rebellion against the monarchies, in which the “true” nation threw off the shackles of their own representative of a continent-wide ruling elite). It is therefore post-tribal (the monarchs broke up the great families, i.e., tribes, of Europe) and post-honor. But the nation defends its honor on the international stage, so even while extirpating the honor culture within its own borders it must promote the values that add to national strength, such as wealth creation, martial valor and physical vigor, fertility and scientific and technological prowess. The lessons of the phantasmal character of nationalism will presumably have to be learned again—the nation, as that which is denied by today’s transnational elites, national minorities and victimhood culture, is one thing; the nation as a real actor with a determinate ethnic content is something else entirely. Nations are always defined by their external and internal others who are always imagined others—none of which means that nations and nationalisms aren’t real, just that they’re constituted by fantasies in a variable relation to the reality principle. In particular, the dangerous mimetic modeling that leads to international antagonisms is difficult to control without some shared sacrality (like “Christendom”)—for a while, the nationalisms of the anti-immigrant European parties and a possible American variant would be united in their shared resistance to the global “ruling class,” but what if they win? And any American white nationalism will be even more phantasmal—where is the cut off date for real Americans: the 1960s, when Mexicans started to come? The early 1900s when Jews and Italians were arriving? Why not the 1840s, with the Irish? When were “whites” ever a “nation” in the first place, if not through resentment towards some minority aggression? What about all the people with mixed heritage? Etc. White nationalism might provide a focal point of resentments that need expression and resolution, without necessarily providing a program for that resolution.

The problem is that the victimhood culture prevents us from discussing the most basic and urgent issues of civic and political life: immigration, crime, war and terrorism, to name a few. We are completely paralyzed in these areas, so the victimary position becomes the default one. To talk about crime is to talk about blacks; to talk about immigration is to talk about Mexicans; to talk about war and terrorism is to talk about Muslims; and once we start talking about blacks, Mexicans and Muslims you can be sure that we will end up talking about Jews. This is necessarily the case because the advocates of victimhood culture will give us no choice by demonizing open discussions on crime, war and terrorism, and immigration as racist. The demonization works, because everyone is terrified by even tiptoeing up to the line of violating deeply embedded norms against racism. We will only start speaking out once the alternative, our current paralysis and delusion, becomes even scarier to more people.

In other words, the method of keeping peace in the modern, post-World War II, rights based nation-state has been for the Lilliputian minorities to tie up the majority Gullivers in a pre-emptive manner. Certainly, in a post-victimary order, the actual power differentials among groups would have to be expressed and negotiated openly (what those power differentials are, and even which groups might emerge, may very well surprise us). Doing so peacefully and even productively would have to involve prioritizing neither honor nor dignity, although both motivations will surely continue to be important. We need a political thought and practice aimed at institution preservation over individual rights—as Vox Day says, “The more an institution converges towards the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, the less it is able to perform its primary function.” We need to recommit to “primary functions”—but what modern political theory comes anywhere near doing so—other, perhaps, than Foucauldians, negatively? It’s remarkable how uninteresting the question of the construction of massive institutions of health, education, policing, the military, etc., has been to political theorists of the 19th and 20th centuries, who have focused mostly on petty questions of satisfying increasingly implausible grievances. What must be more important than the fragility of the individual and her grievances must be discipline, the ability and readiness to place yet another mediation between one’s desire and its realization. This also means the consecration of desire, and the building of a world in time—a kind of temporal canopy, we might say. A culture of discipline would defend the honor of “impartiality,” but without the support of God or State, by introducing mediations based on the study of the relative danger of different resentments. But there must be some truth in the name of which one defers, some possible ostensive—otherwise, one ends up like the officer in Kafka’s “The Penal Colony.” Let’s not make things easy by imagining the deus ex machina of a Christian revival. The civilizing process must be seen to lead back to, to be a gift from, an origin, an origin that is further revealed in disciplinary increments. In pointing to what one is not appropriating, one points to the possibility of a shared non-appropriation, a possibility that is a source of dialogue. Even a nihilist or psychopath cannot deny desires that have been deferred, and so this is something we can all talk about at any time. Cultural practices that foreground such discipline, that enact, maneuver us into, mimic, even mock, novel acts of non-appropriation, would be the acts of faith a post-victimary order needs. In the past, discipline cultures relied on traditional faiths and modern, scientistic assumptions about progress. Today, I think it would entail a more demanding faith in one’s unseen future fellow sign users—a faith that, while the signs anyone puts forth will unfold in ways that could not have been foreseen, and therefore cannot be controlled, at least some of those successor signs will register the peace giving intentions of their originator. The increased margin of discipline one signifies is a needed gift, even if you can’t know what the gift actually is, who will receive it, or what use they will make of it. Faith, in the end, must involve sharing in the immortality of the sign.

In my previous post, I discussed two forms of rebellion against the victimocracy: the anti-SJW strategy of the blog Vox Populi (by Vox Day) and American white nationalists. I thought afterward that I might be giving the impression, without intending to, that Vox Day was himself a white nationalist. So, then I got curious—aside from his asymmetrical anti-SJW warfare, what does Vox Day think of nationalism, white nationalism, and, of course (where all such questions lead), the Jews?

He is a realist on all such questions—nationalism is on the rise, which means that multiculturalism is a failure, which further means the Jews, who were the first beneficiaries of the loosening of the insistence upon ethnic homogeneity in European cultures, and then (a disproportionate number, acting explicitly as Jews) agents advancing an ever more thorough loosening, will have no place in national communities that will with good reason blame them for undermining their national cohesion and culture (and will, furthermore, be filled with brand new minorities who hate the Jews far more than, at least in America and the UK, the Anglo majority ever did—minorities whose immigration, once again, Jewish political activism was instrumental in accelerating). This process is well underway in Europe, where it is already widely conceded that the Jews have no future, but Vox thinks it is happening more slowly in the US as well. Vox declares himself pro-Jew and pro-Israel, and by his lights (and my own) I grant that—he is telling Jews the truth, including the truth that demonizing all critical comments about Jews and Israel as “antisemitic” long ago entered the time of diminishing returns. He admires Israel, its self-reliance and unapologetic self-defense, and strongly encourages Jews to move there. He is a libertarian, which also means that his discussion of social groups is generally qualified phrases like “a large majority of Americans will reasonably, if not completely accurately, see…”—that is, he tends to speak through large scale probabilities and decisions made through mimetic contagion in the heat of events, rather than of Jews, Europeans, Muslims, or anyone else as “objective” groups with “essences.” His discourse is, as one would expect, cleansed of victimary hand-wringing—if you (a Jew or anyone else) don’t like what people say about you here, then leave—it’s insane to think you can regulate the speech and thought of others. That will just make them hate you more (people have a right to hate, and to say they hate, whomever they like). He’s no Holocaust denier, but he also gives the Holocaust no weight in considering ethical questions of contemporary politics. He assumes it is obvious that people would prefer to live amongst people who look, believe, speak, and act more or less like themselves, and can be expected to be welcoming to others only under very limited conditions. (I should also say he doesn’t pay any particular attention to Jews—I had to do a search on the blog to gather together his scattered posts discussing Jews, Israel and antisemitism.) I suspect he would qualify as a white nationalist, but I don’t recall him adopting the label—at the very least, he must accept them as fellow fighters against the SJWs.

All this confirms my conclusions in the previous post: this is what genuinely post-victimary discourse looks like. If you don’t like it, you’re better off making your peace with the victimary. I like it, so it presents no difficulties for me. It is a language that draws upon evolutionary thought, von Mises’s “praxeology” (simplistically put, the application of free market principles to all human activity), game theory and military strategy. The abstract principles of liberalism and democracy and Judeo-Christian morality barely figure at all. Of course all this misses something, including the reason why Western society has installed the incredibly dysfunctional victimary software in the first place. (It’s not because of the diabolical cleverness of the Jews.) Mainstream Western society has lived in terror of antisemitism for 70 years because antisemitism was projected back to the origin of a war of such cataclysmic dimensions that we would not (so we assume) survive another like it. Of course, this means that the fear of antisemitism, and victimary thinking far more so, is essentially a cargo cult. We really have no reason to believe that more frank discussions of racial differences and hostilities, or freer expression of preferences for one group over others, would lead to some terrible global catastrophe. But human culture as a whole is a bit of a cargo cult—the communal destruction envisaged in the mimetic crisis we hypothesize at the origin of humanity wasn’t going to happen either. But some cargo cults are better than others—more generative of lasting peace (perhaps the crisis they imagine is more plausible). Vox Day refers regularly to (and prides himself on his mastery of) “logic” and “dialectic,” which seem to be foundations for him—a guarantee of social order. He would include, I assume, the libertarian insistence on reciprocal respect for private property. Of course, such things are part of any civilized order, but by themselves they generate hierarchies that the less logical and less or unpropertied will feel no obligation to respect. Nor are they much of a basis for the nationalism that Vox seems to consider intrinsic to human nature. It may be less multiculturalism than democracy and popular rule that must deemed a failure.

There’s no need to pronounce or speculate on any of that, or to expect this or that pioneer into the thickets of the post-victimary to have all the answers. Insofar as we (that is, myself, and anyone else who wants to join in) consider the victimocracy a suicidal cargo cult, we must roll the dice. We can’t imagine that the post-victimary will be a restoration. We can’t yet imagine what open discussion of inter- and intra-group differences will look like, with all the biological, anthropological and historical knowledge now in, and with all the interventionist political and therapeutic technologies coming into, our possession. But I, at least, prefer finding out to the alternative.

Here’s the trick: you need a term of anathematization, like “racism.” You start with some act, group or individual that is rejected virtually unanimously (like the Holocaust and Nazis, or lynching and the KKK) and you attach the term to that. Once the anathematizing term is in place, you turn it into a shell game: “racism” becomes the shell that we keep finding the pea under, with the pea being some act, group or individual that was never considered racist before, but can be by analogy to what we have all already agreed to call “racist.” Convincing people of the analogy might seem difficult, but it really isn’t if we consider the long term. Of course there will be many failures—analogical constructions will be rejected, ignored, and ridiculed. But things can only move in one direction. Insofar as our common rejection of “racism” has elevated us morally and protected us from some violent cataclysm (like a civil war) we can never raise the threshold for “racism”—we can only lower it, as new antagonisms that are “like” the ones we have transcended will generate the needed analogies.

In that case, it is clear that the only way of breaking up the victimocratic order is by neutralizing the power of anathematization at its root. It is impossible to argue about what should really count as “racism,” as if we were establishing a proper system of weights and measures—each participant in the argument can only locate a moment in history where his preferred definition was prevalent. The term itself is tied to whatever danger it warded off, and its use will continue to correspond to whatever danger is felt, or simulated. Many people on the right wish to polarize the term and throw it back in the face of the victimary left, e.g., by referring to blacks as being on the Democratic “plantation,” or to the left’s atrocious treatment of “dissidents” from victimary groups. It’s worthwhile trying all kinds of things, but that approach seems to me more likely to entrench the term of anathematization that, as I have pointed out, is unidirectional. To put it bluntly, the victimary will not be destroyed until the response of the vast majority of people to charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., is, simply: “I don’t care.” The way there will not be comfortable to people whose cut off date for the use of “racism” and related terms falls somewhere between 1960-1984 (the latter date marking the birth of the Rainbow Coalition and a new racialization of politics).

It’s worth considering these matters now because resistance to the victimary is starting to take shape. Quite a few contemporary pundits, of varying ideological affiliations, have attributed Donald Trump’s popularity to the emergence of a white nationalism in American politics (modeled on anti-immigrant political parties in Europe), even while acknowledging that this is not Trump’s intention. There is a fairly intellectually powerful white nationalist politics that I do think is starting to take a more public form, in part in response to Trump’s very explicit and forceful repudiation of our bipartisan pieties about immigration. You can find this politics in places like the VDARE website and the online magazine Taki’s, and elsewhere, no doubt. A white nationalist position, or, at least, a white privileging position, is articulated very forcefully by writers like Steven Sailer, John Derbyshire and, most prominently, Ann Coulter. Their arguments for privileging a white America are, in fact, far more thought out than the arguments for continued high immigration levels and, more generally, “diversity.” They have been displaying (and far more lucidly) a Trump-like bluntness on questions of ethnic group interests, race and crime, race and intelligence, and much else, for many years now. There is no doubt that their response to being called “racist” would be “I don’t care.” And, after years of attacks on normal Americans (attacks that have intensified throughout the Obama administration, at an increasing rate) simply for being white, it seems to me inevitable that people will feel they have no choice but to counter-attack on the same basis. The logic will be that your attack on me just for my whiteness exposes you as a loser, parasite, terrorist, and so on. A very simple and easily learned and sustained logic.

Meanwhile, I have just come across a science fiction writer and blogger called “Vox Day” (his blog is Vox Populi) who has written a war manual for combatants in the victimary wars, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. From what I’ve seen (for example, The SJW Attack Survival Guide, an excerpt from the book, available on the website), it is very good. He outlines the stages of the SJW attack, and lays out a plan of defense. If you are subject to a SJW attack, don’t apologize and don’t resign. Force them, whenever possible, into a prolonged administrative and/or legal process to purge you and don’t give them any ammunition. Find ways to expose and undermine your attackers. All excellent advice, sure to be put to use more and more often. And there is a simple principle to base such counter-attacks on (this is me, but it seems to me that both Vox Day and the white nationalists make similar assumptions): the principle of difference. There are differences between social groups, including racial ones; there are differences between men and women; there are differences between same sex attraction and opposite sex attraction; there are myriad individual and group differences in terms of capability and effort. We cannot know in advance what ramifications these differences should have when it comes to ethics, politics, esthetics, and social and economic institutions. The victimary antagonist (the SJW) must deny all these differences, or at least their relevance (other than as signs of victimization) and attack any expression of them; they must be forced to issue this denial explicitly and repeatedly, in the face of the most recalcitrant evidence and the most disturbing events; if they concede difference, one must pursue them through all the consequences of that concession. The counter-attacks should be personalized: how would you advise your daughter to behave at a frat party? Which neighborhoods would you prefer to live in, or walk through on a pleasant evening? Etc.

Of course, though, the first term of anathematization, in the history of the victimary, was not “racism”—it was “antisemitism.” Certainly there are vast reservoirs of anti-Jewish resentment among the white nationalists, much of which (how much is hard to tell) veers into blatant, occasionally Nazi-style antisemitism. But I will reiterate my previous assertion in this new context: the response to being called an anti-Semite will have to be “I don’t care” (and, of course, many of the anti-Semites one routinely sees on, for example, articles on Yahoo, are already there—indeed, already back in the 80s it was already fairly easy to repel, as crude pro-Israel politics, accusations of antisemitism). This will clearly be a very new terrain, but we sworn enemies of the victimocracy must accept it. Jews are different as well, and so is Israel, and we will not be able to guarantee (why would anyone want to?) that those differences are always “celebrated.” (If I’m wrong about the Jews, show me how—if all you can do is call me antisemitic, I have to assume you can’t…”)

But we hardly know how to think any more outside of a post-Holocaust, civil rights, which is to say an emergent victimary, framework. What is good and what is evil if “racism” is no longer assumed to be the evil pole? I have my answers. Civilization is good, barbarism—well, if not necessarily evil (barbarians have their virtues, there are rules of the game), then to be fought. Discipline and disciplines are good; bureaucracy is, if not evil, then an evil. Converting violent antagonisms into legally adjudicated ones is good—reducing the legal realm to an arena of group vendettas is evil. Converting legally adjudicated antagonisms into economic competition, artistic exploration and leisurely engaged in arguments is good; allowing the legal sphere to colonize public discourse by using it to shut up or coerce your political enemies is evil. That’s for starters, anyway. Perhaps there will be some other answers. At any rate, our terror at any sign of “racism” reflects a primitive state of public life—it operates on the assumption that the only response to noticeable group disparities will be violence. But from whom do we expect that violence, and why? There are group differences, and plenty of differences within groups—there are plenty of ways of blocking scapegoating and demonization without a priori anathematization. The reliance upon anathematization leads to atrophy in our signifying and ethical capacities, which must be regularly refreshed. I certainly see no problem engaging with Steve Sailer who asks why American Jews are so pro-immigration when it comes to America while, as Zionists, supporting Israel’s rather… miserly immigration policy. A very good question! And very answerable—yes, there’s some hypocrisy and group narcissism here, along with some over-reaction to historical traumas resulting from the nativism of the 1920s and the exclusion of refugees from the Holocaust; still America’s dilemmas are not quite Israel’s; but perhaps America’s immigration dilemma is graver than we realized, maybe some reconsideration is in order; maybe even Israel is a model for a new approach to immigration in the US (as Sailer himself, I can’t tell how ironically, sometimes suggests). The question is often posed in a very leading, hostile way (not so much with Sailer, it seems to me), but so what? We’ll find out soon enough if the interlocutor is interested in real answers (and if we are!); if not, if some violence is intended toward us, well, we prepare for that, then, by strengthening the supports of civilization. But we desperately need to widen the sphere of possible discussion, regardless of the risks. The liberal democratic order has become like one of those crab shells taken over by secondary user, so we’re going to need to go shell-less for a while.

Why did Bernie Sanders acquiesce in the commandeering of his recent speech in Seattle by a few Black Lives Matter brats? The BLM actions were clearly unpopular with the crowd, and from the commentary I’ve read since, with otherwise sympathetic leftists reflecting on the event. And yet Sanders surrendered completely and unconditionally, while incorporating BLM rhetoric and personnel into his campaign. It’s hard to see what kind of hard-headed electoral or fundraising calculations could have gone into these decisions; we’re dealing more with the spontaneous obedience to the voice of the sacred.

Why has no conservative politician commented on the utterly disgraceful fact that George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson will obviously never be allowed to return to normal life? It is shameful that two innocent individuals, who did nothing more than defend themselves successfully against criminal assailants, having been vindicated by lengthy and highly publicized judicial processes, are nevertheless treated like internal exiles, condemned to a virtual Siberia. This indicates a deep corruption of political life—a preference for lies over truth. Isn’t it clear that a “rogue” conservative exposing the systematic and specific lies on display in the Zimmerman and Wilson cases would generate the same thrill among tens of millions of Americans as Donald Trump’s unadorned references to the illegal alien crime wave? Yet not a single Republican will expose the racially targeted incitement to riot and attack police officers from the White House on down, and throughout the entire media.

Public opinion and electoral advantage clearly cede to victimary imperatives. But there is still the relation between the two. The Leftist agrees with the goals of BLM but still believes that if you go to see a speaker you should be allowed to see the speaker (he rejects some of the “means” of BLM); the conservative politician knows very well the fraud attempted in the Zimmerman and Wilson cases and knows that there is near unanimity on the right to defend oneself, but on some level feels he doesn’t want to “touch” this. It looks like cognitive dissonance, but that’s only if we translate what is an imperative into a declarative: very few people actually believe that black bodies are maimed from birth to death, in all of their worldly relations, by white supremacy, or that being disappointed in your child’s same sex attractions makes you the moral equivalent of a member of a KKK lynch mob, and yet on a level deeper than “opinions” a substantial majority of Americans act as if they do believe such things.

As originary thinkers, we shouldn’t have any difficulty understanding this. Those who repeat the originary event through ritual don’t know and can’t say why they do so, but eventually they arrive at explanatory myths and other discourses. But the explanations don’t affect the ritual—they just reconcile two domains within the mind. And we have our hypothesis regarding what the originary event in this case is: the Holocaust. All victimary actions are ritual re-enactments of—what, exactly? The answer to this question is very difficult, because all kinds of declaratives suggest themselves, but must be wrong by virtue of being declaratives; only performatives, with a declarative component but also a promissory one, can provide adequate answers. There are so many different features of the Holocaust that might have made it the signal event it became; and there might be all kinds of other events that constellate around or are triggered by the Holocaust, thereby explaining its centrality. We have no grounds for assuming that a uniquely terrible event will have commensurate moral consequences.

My view is that we must see the effects of the Holocaust in its revelation, not in its intrinsic character (although, of course, much of its intrinsic character likely comes through in its revelation; even more, much of its intrinsic character may lie in its “revealability”). An act that we have nothing to do with does not transform us morally—a brutal murder by a psychopath confirms our moral assumptions, it does not cause us to reflect upon them. Unless something about the act renders us complicit—if that psychopath lived among us, for example, giving off signs of his psychopathy that we ignored because he was respectable and pleasant company in other respects. In that case, the discovery of the true life he led can become revelatory.

The Holocaust made its “spectators” complicit on several levels. Those who didn’t know could have and should have—the Nazis hid their crimes, but crimes so massive can only be hid from those who don’t really want to see them. Those who knew and could have helped didn’t, and for reasons that “verified” the Nazi’s own war logic: the governments of America and other countries in a position to rescue Jews or interfere with the extermination process didn’t want it to look like they were fighting a war for the Jews, thereby accepting (or assuming their populations accepted) to a great extent the Nazi’s claim that this was a Jewish-inspired war. It follows that we didn’t help the Jews because we were different from the Nazis in degree, not kind. Finally, and I think most importantly, the mobilization of the entire industrial economy in the slaughter revealed a moral bankruptcy at the heart of modernity: nothing in being a conscientious doctor, engineer, bureaucrat, worker, professor, good middle class citizen, etc., would enable one to resist recruitment into atrocities.

The victimary, then, is a pre-emptive resistance to such complicity. It is a refusal of “spectatorship,” thereby re-enacting the rare refusals to participate scattered throughout the Holocaust, embodied first of all in the always tenuous and never believed in time testimony to the ongoing event. But victimary thinking enacts this resistance and refusal as a resentment of firstness: Nazism’s extremities are just the extension of the striving for pre-eminence among nations, among firms in the economy, among ideological and religious claims, and so on. (This is the mythic, discursive, dimension of victimary thinking.) This is why victimary thinking ultimately comes full circle to antisemitism. There is a moral bankruptcy constitutive of modernity, and it is on display in the Holocaust, but this moral bankruptcy involves an abandonment of the work of differentiation in favor of the faith in generating endless equivalences. Differentiation is the work of spinning off distinctions from the fundamental sacred/profane distinction: distinctions between good and bad, noble and base, worthy and unworthy, beautiful and ugly, and so on. But just inheriting and reproducing these distinctions is itself a sign of moral exhaustion. The distinctions themselves can only be the result of new modes of deferral and discipline that generate new spaces and objects of attention. But the victimary version of events represented the democratic path of least resistance: one can always imagine resolving a conflict by making people equal in some new way.

In the short term, the only genuine resistance to the victimary is exposure of its Big Lies. In the long term, that resistance must entail restoring a civilization of differentiation through dialogue and performativity. The short term is part of the long term insofar as the most direct and intuitive way of exposing the Big Lies is through constant, unflappable questioning. I suggested in a recent post a line of questioning regarding the abolition of differentiations in the field of sexuality. More pertinent here is the question, what is “race”? This is surely an even less comfortable question than the ones regarding gender and sexuality; it is the ur-question of the victimary; or rather, the ur-forbidden question. But all the talk of racism and white supremacy can’t avoid attributing all kinds of characteristics to whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc., even if those characteristics are deemed to be “constructed.” The main tenet of victimary thinking on race is that the only characteristics to be attributed to whites qua whites are undesirable ones but, of course, in any attribution of the undesirable we can read the resentment towards something desired and envied. We don’t need to get into discussions of IQ scores and the relative achievements of different civilizations (although far be it from me to recommend holding back on such topics—why, indeed, must one be bothered if there do turn out to be all kinds of group differences in capabilities? What is assumed about our capacity for self-discipline here?): the differences posited within the victimary itself already give us plenty to work with. If, for example, for Ta-Nehisi Coates blackness is real, grounded in the aesthetics of the body and the ethics of solidarity, while whiteness is fake, imaginary, constructed, parasitical on blackness (I am working with Christopher Caldwell’s reading of Coates in the Weekly Standard), well, ok—but, far from this fabricated racial identity being a kind of “blood-sucking subhumanity,” isn’t the inventive transcendence of the immediate and empirical dimensions of group belonging the prime marker of an unparalleled civilization predicated upon the never certain, never completed, ever adventurous differentiation of the human from the natural? Deconstruction might be quite conservative now that it is the victimary that is most insistent upon unquestioned closure.

Anyone, even in the riskiest situations, can do at least a little of this. All that is necessary is a deferral of the Big Lie, a refusal, which can be gentle, subtle, apparently befuddled, to sign onto it. Sure, a man can really be a woman (I’ve heard about those brain scans that make the science settled), one might say, but, in that case, what does it mean to “really be a woman”? What does that man who wants it imagine it to be? Can you run down for me the different ways American blacks, Haitian blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Pakistani- Americans, Koreans, Lebanese, Palestinians, Chinese, and the Hmong are all constructed racially in America (in the South, in the Northwest…), how those constructions change, and what role the groups in question have regarding their own and each other’s construction? Let them talk about it all—all kinds of things are bound to slip outside of victimary categories. One might see this as a return to the Socratic roots of Western civilization: what do you mean by…

One final point. I have become convinced that, despite all the complications and difficulties it entails, the only anti-victimary response to same sex marriage is, indeed, the privatization of marriage. Here, of all the victimary fronts, without the givens of the state, the victimary argument collapses. For the supporter of SSM, marriage literally becomes nothing without the state. But the same holds to varying degrees across the board. Victimary thinkers are fundamentally incapable of imagining how the oppressions and, to use a term of Gans’s, “discriminatory ontologies,” they see at work would be remedied or even properly identified without assuming the state as omnipotent arbiter (this is what makes it the quintessential anti-imperial imperial mode of thought). But they must be made to imagine it. There is no more productive line of questioning at this point than to ask, let’s say everything you say about race in America is true—now, if we left these groups to their own devices, without the deux ex machine of the civil rights establishment, how would it all play out? The question—if you could get any victimocrats to play along (but, anyway, in public spaces you are never really doing any of this for the victimocrats themselves)—will utterly confound them. Would they still exist as groups? In what senses? What would sources of conflicts be, and what rules of engagement would be created? What would be sources of strength and weakness in the different groups? How would different forms of belonging criss-cross each other? How would reciprocal constructions proceed without some legally defined (and still to be redefined) concept of “equality” in the background? Victimary thinking will not be able to sustain the discussion—we would find ourselves in another place. We would weaken, even a little, the hold of one of the Big Lies. It is this persistent questioning, committed to the civilizational work of extending and deepening differentiations, that can bring an end to the victimary. Sometimes, say in confronting a twitter mob, you’ll only get one question in—best to make sure it’s a good, perplexing one. As with all things, it’s a question of practice. And, when possible, this approach can get ratcheted up into much more confrontational postures.