GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

A semiotic history of the world would trace the gradual process of distancing from the ostensive and imperative via the declarative, along with the efforts, within new forms of declarative culture, to re-embed ostensives and imperatives. Insofar as we are humans, all signs must point the way to an eventual ostensive, but the pathways are continually elongated and intersected. If the first declarative was a negative ostensive, both interlocutors would presumably be a turn or a glance away from the demanded object. The “statement” that one hasn’t the object could hardly be sustained or remembered unless an alternate route to its procurement (and hence the completion of the imperative that initiated the sequence) was readily accessible. The development of the declarative through discourse would involve a gradual shift from conceptual scenes anchored in a setting of familiar material objects to conceptual scenes strung through other possible conceptual scenes to conditional ostensives of varying degrees of probability of realization. To understand a sentence is to understand the probability of one possible world amongst a range of other possible worlds, and to be capable of identifying sufficient distinctive features of that world. In other words, a space within other spaces where we could imagine pointing at something along with others, whether these spaces are fictional worlds or carefully constructed laboratory settings. Even if all we are dealing with are numbers generated by instruments registering the slightest movements of the tiniest particles, that data is something we can point to so as to distinguish between more and less expected outcomes of the experiment. Even the densest, most allusive poetry presupposes a reader who once spent time in front of the same page of obscure poetry as the writer, and can be startled into a shared recognition (or illusion thereof) of the experience of immersion in that page and the way that experience might be displaced if set next to another, equally distant page that we some sense might look at together.

We could see digital civilization as a qualitative shift in our relations to ostensivity. Vast swathes of social interaction that, within living memory, required sustained manipulation of objects or interpersonal (F2F) interactions, have been brought online. This is not just an advance in automation, although it is that as well. We will soon have driverless cars, and in a generation people will be astonished that fallible people (who drink, get distracted by music and conversation, suffer erosion of their eyesight and reflexes—and are vain about such things) were once allowed to operate these primitive, dangerous machines. The government doesn’t need wiretaps on specific people’s phones, and grizzled detectives sitting in a room across the street with headphones on eating pastrami sandwiches and drinking coffee all night—all you need is universal phone records and an algorithm to search for relevant patterns. The implications, to take one of many examples, for traditional notions of justice, are clear: if we once moved from barbaric means of determining guilt by “trial by ordeal” to the method we have now, the flaws of which are becoming increasing evident and intolerable, of collecting and weighing “evidence,” presenting that evidence before an ‘impartial” jury, with both “sides” represented by an attorney, we are now likely to move to the use of algorithms to search and analyze the official records of anyone you are considering hiring, selling a home to, letting into your place of business, etc.—who cares about such arcana as guilt and innocence if we can know, within “reasonable” limits, that the gentleman looking around the store is 8x more likely than average to commit some violent act? But such developments coincide with our increasing ability to decide on questions of fact, through DNA testing, omnipresent cameras, etc.—but if the basic facts will be so readily available, wouldn’t the whole rigmarole of arguments, legitimizing evidence, cross-examining witnesses, etc., along with philosophical considerations regarding just punishments just get replaced by the attempt to figure out either the best medical and therapeutic way of “curing” the criminals or the least repugnant ways of removing them from our sight? Just as the development of exotic new digital currencies might bring to the fore our continuing ultimate dependence on the precious metals. The ostensive can’t just be deferred and distanced—it must be resituated, bracketed, distributed.

If the history of your actions cannot bear algorithmic scrutiny you will be excluded from digital civilization—not necessarily convicted, but exiled. We couldn’t predict how sharp this dividing line will turn out to be—we don’t have the algorithms to do so yet. What roles will forgiveness and the notion of second chances have in digital civilization? Perhaps there will be algorithms for them. So far, we can see some perhaps minor paradoxes. For example, there is an increase in rigor within the more disciplined digital arenas (real R & D), along with an informality of dress and speech—as if, once we all know what we’re doing, and it’s not stuff that any literate person could do with a little training and supervision, the various proxies of “professionalism” (suit and tie, titles) can be dispensed with. Digital civilization will be far more enveloping than the industrial one preceding it—individuals within digital culture will be carefully shepherded from institution to institution, and the enhanced means and protocols for reducing dangers along the way will be vigorously implemented. Freedom and privacy, we could assume, will take on very different meanings (much less physical, which is to say, ostensive, and much more “semiotic”—or, perhaps, not so much there, either—the days where anything can be done anonymously may be over, except for those willing to break radically with the grid, and can survive that break, but that doesn’t exhaust the meaning of freedom), and personal responsibility will be enforced much more comprehensively (we won’t need debt collectors and repo men chasing deadbeats around if their appliances and cars can simply be disabled and located remotely, or bank accounts accessed when they swipe a debit or credit card). The need for all kinds of direct human contact will be minimized considerably, which in turn makes all kinds of human contact newly uncertain and risky, inspiring new protective counter-measures—this is already well under way. All this distancing and compartmentalizing and concealment of what disgusts and frightens us is well within the broad mainstream of civilization; indeed, it’s almost constitutive of it. But will there also be, drawn to those exiled to the margins of civilization (earthy, sensuous “primitives” like in Huxley’s Brave New World, and in some many sci-fi dystopias? Nomads, scavengers, raiders, more or less violent? Intrepid hackers? Sanctuary cities? Vast masses or manageable few?), some from among the civilized who will take up slumming with them, so as to distinguish themselves from their straightjacketed peers? Perhaps flouting civilization by disrupting its boundaries is equally constitutive of civilization.

How much freedom digital civilization allows and provides for and, indeed, how functional and enduring it will be, will depend heavily upon whether the victimary vendetta makes the transition and manages to install itself within the digital, or is kept out. So, far, the victimocracy is very much at home in the digital—the most cutting edge companies are the most insistently pro-gay (which, of course, helps to explain how gay rights, of direct concern to maybe 3% of the population, has shot to the top of the victimary agenda), victimary activists (I’ll use “SJW,” now that I know what it stands for) are extremely skilled in organizing online lynch mobs and manipulating the new media and, most importantly, much of the victimary agenda depends upon the continual distancing of the declarative from the ostensive that characterizes each new gradation in civilization. The struggle against oppression used to be richly ostensive, as the exclusion of and violence against blacks, the backbreaking conditions of workers, the seclusion and limitation of women, were all obvious for all to see. One could rationalize them, or counsel patience, or compare existing conditions to less plausible alternatives, but one couldn’t deny them. Today, claims that these groups are oppressed require sophisticated legal theories and the manipulation of data—of course, the victimocrats can’t resist the occasional (or more than occasional) hoax, but the real strength of the victimocracy is the ability to argue that barely detectable attitudes and actions and unseen biases within complex institutions generate devastating, widely dispersed and somehow measurable effects. But this strength is balanced by the fact that, ultimately, the ostensive can be delayed but not denied: the left still relies upon standard and fairly crude notions of “justice” that really only make sense in pre-digital terms where specific actions by people in authority could be observed having direct effects upon the victimized (a lynching, a strike crushed, etc.). If blacks, on average, earn 75% of what whites earn and have 35% of the property whites own, but also commit more violent crimes and engage in more behaviors that can be statistically correlated with lower earnings and savings, then one might accept responsibility and see a problem worth addressing but hardly an obvious injustice calling for outrage and immediate action. Which is why, perhaps, the hoaxes are necessary after all.

There is an extremely intense mode of ostensivity constitutive of the victimocracy, but it is also a very fragile one. It is commonly noted how uninterested in, and even hostile to, debate, the contemporary left is. The left of the 60s and even through the 80s loved to argue—they felt they had the facts, i.e., the ostensives, on their side. Today’s left sees ostensive truths that are made available, vivid and undeniable by the participants in their own self-created “disciplinary” spaces where they teach each other how to “see” what remains invisible to the naked eyes of the oppressor majority (the brief flourishing of a more traditional anti-war movement in reaction to the post-9/11 wars was an exception). They can only bring over converts through the perpetual generation of events made of simulated outrage and involving intoxicating feelings of generational solidarity and individual moral courage—this is basis of both the “Occupy” movement and the recent race rioting over police killings. They are able to present those ostensives to those, like, journalists, Democrat politicians and university faculty and administrators, who already define themselves in opposition to the presumably less civilized pragmatic majority and delight in having ready made voter blocs and rabble rousers delivered to them. But while those outside of these circles can be caught off guard and made defensive, or have their desire for peace exploited, they can’t really believe. The Austrian economists (intellectual descendants of von Mises) speak of how the introduction of fiat money into circulation benefits those who receive the money first, because they can spend it at its previous, unadulterated value; the same is true here: those who identify a new form of injustice modeled on and seemingly supporting more familiar ones have a form of moral currency that passes for valid. But like the bad money, the bad morality goes through a boom and bust period.

But where are the constituencies of the SJWs and the body of the victimocracy in relation to the digital? And where are the “normals,” or those satisfied with small, gradual and widely shared gradations in civilization, but repelled by attempts at great leaps? The major media and the universities (very much in that order) are in real danger of being swept away in the digital flood. Even now, who reads newspapers or watches the evening news? Efficient on-line educational “delivery systems” can’t be too far away either (anyone at a small, private university can smell the desperation). We are the repealing of a few licensing laws and noxious regulatory obstacles away (and in some cases not even that) from opening up whole new mini-industries in the fields of health, computer technology, beer brewing, education, home design, etc. All people who won’t want to pay high taxes or be forced to provide their employees with expensive health insurance or exorbitant minimum wages. None of whom need to be particularly skilled in the use of computers—the digital in fact lowers the threshold of knowledge needed to use the latest technology. You don’t need to be a computer genius to set up a functioning, attractive, interactive website. But, also, none of whom have the slightest political representation, or immediate chance of getting it. The real political scandal is the union of the victimocracy and the corporate oligarchy, of the bio-politics of immigration (in the broadest sense of bringing to bear the needs and resentments of the Third World upon the politics of the First) with the digital politics of cool (the ever more granulated set of possible self-distinctions from the awkward, the stupid, the brute, the literalistic, the outdated, etc.). The Democratic Party relies upon this (very much transnational) union, and the Republicans, with very few exceptions, just want a piece of the action.

Any enthusiasm for the emergent entrepreneurs enabled by the digital should be tempered, of course. Part of the reason for their political impotence is the fact that they are a tiny minority who generate resentment when they achieve a certain level of success, join the victimocracy/oligarchy axis when they achieve yet more success and, anyway, are resented simply for receiving political attention when that actually happens. There are the other victims of the victimocracy/oligarchy: the privately employed, Church-going, married-with-children “middle class.” They have nominal political representation, since the Republicans depend on their votes, but no real representation. They are not obvious allies of the entrepreneurs, so the two groups can be kept marginalized. They rely on inherited pathways back and forth between the ostensive and declarative, and are alienated by the enveloping algorithms of the digital world, which are hard to process through traditional notions of Constitutional order and liberty, much less Christian notions of goodness. But they are certainly online, and informed, and despite their being caricatured as bumpkins, the Tea Partiers have generated and inspired some savvy political and media entrepreneurs—which explains the Republican takeover of local politics throughout the country. We will find out soon enough how civil warfare is waged with digital weapons. But bio-politics, the battle of demographics, the nomos of the earth, will also have its say—the digital brings this huge arena of ostensivity (masses of bodies, swarms of nanobots, universes of DNA) into micro and macro view for the first time. A decentered, de-escalated, horizontally and vertically differentiated digital civilization with some margin for error, fences but also doors and a secure place for the pleasures of ostensive discovery will be the stake.

Let’s stipulate that the kind of thinking representing in the letter below (in response to an article critical of “safe spaces” on college campuses), which I found on Mark Steyn’s website, is an “emergent” mode of thinking—that is, growing and capable of finding institutional and conceptual support in the broader culture. How many young people today think in terms of this treacly mixture of therapeutic and victimary categories? 10%? 50%? It’s always hard to answer such questions, and it depends upon your standards of measurement. What we can see is how seamlessly it intersects with a wide range of contemporary assumptions and postures. And we can also see how radically unlike any way that any people has ever thought or spoken before it is—a veritable sea change in language, morality, manners and psychology. Let’s take a look.

To the Editor:

Judith Shulevitz’s article about safe spaces on college campuses is a direct assault on my generation and what we find important. My generation has embraced the ideas of safe spaces and safe language. Without these, many victims of trauma or discrimination would be excluded from campus discussions that seek to cultivate and strengthen campus intellectual life. Truly open-minded intellectual growth desperately needs the participation of these groups.

Not all ideas are created equal. Some ought to be unreservedly condemned; consideration of such ideas is not at all helpful in bolstering campus intellectual life. The current generation of college students has denied validity to the failed ideas of the past. We have embraced the knowledge and empathy of the present. We are shaping the wisdom of the future.

ANDREW MEERWARTH
Stony Brook, N.Y.

The writer is a senior at Stony Brook University.

Let’s first note that someone capable of writing this letter would be incapable of using words like “truth,” “justice” and “freedom” competently. You can’t make sense of the notion of truth if you divide the world into ideas that have been “embraced” and those that have been “denied validity,” much less if you think it is a “generation” that has done these things. Instead of “truth,” we have “open-minded intellectual growth,” which is here virtually defined by the extent to which “victims” (the most unstable among us) are protected from any ideas that would re-traumatize them. This “open-minded intellectual growth,” therefore, would also be impossible without those ideas it “unreservedly condemn[s]”—it is the refusal to consider such ideas, which is to say their constant ritual denunciation, that protects the victims. Instead of “freedom” we have “safety,” with an extremely low (and constantly lowered) threshold for what counts as a threat. Instead of “justice,” which requires a kind of abstraction from the concrete features of contending parties to focus on their deserts under a shared standard, we have “empathy” and, even though the word is not used here, the ubiquitous “inclusion.” There is the same kind of double talk here, insofar as including some implies excluding others—in this case, at the very least, those who “assault” the new “generation” with the “failed ideas of the past.”

The gnostic, self-righteous deification of the new generation and complementary demonization of the old is familiar to us from the 1960s, but it’s interesting that Meerwarth refers so vaguely and blandly to those “failed ideas of the past.” Presumably he could name some of those ideas, but which ones? Racism, sexism, homophobia? But are those really “ideas”? For the victimary thinker, they are more inbred, ontological features of the inherited social landscape—the possibility that there were ever ideas there, that there were ever arguments in favor of the social arrangements now described in these terms, cannot even be imagined. The 60s radical would do much better here: he would mention capitalism, militarism, imperialism and even liberalism, and would at least be able to lampoon the defenders of these views. And the 60s radical, while certainly capable of complacent paeans to “my generation,” also knew that there were conflicts within the generation, that the emergence of the generation was marked by events (the Beatles, Vietnam, Selma, etc.), and didn’t just embrace things spontaneously experienced to be revelatory break from everything humans had previously believed. What are the events to which this new generation could refer? Who are the thinkers who created and disseminated these salvific new ideas of “safe spaces and safe language”? There’s no Marx, or C. Wright Mills, or Herbert Marcuse here—these ideas seems have been secreted out of the very institutions now incapable of thinking outside of their miasmic fog.

All of which means it’s very difficult to imagine initiating a conversation with Mr. Meerwarth and his cohorts. There are no canonical texts to argue about. The “events” one might refer to are marginal, mass-produced, hysterical hoaxes, designed precisely so as to make conversation impossible: Ferguson, Eric Garner, the girl with the bed strapped to her back, now Indiana, in the misty past the legend of Matthew Sheppard (reenacted on campuses throughout the country in “The Laramie Project”). Aside from being frauds, these are all stories of pure villains and victims (degraded, unsalvageable past, untainted future), without the kind of rational, if rejected, motivations of, and differentiations within, both that the opponent of segregation and the Vietnam War could still acknowledge. We seem to be witnessing a thoroughly self-contained, self-referential, self-inoculating, self-healing mode of being. Maybe we are headed toward a future in which the civilized world is comprised of competing cults, like Scientology. Certainly the current generation of 20-somethings has a lot more than the Meerwarths, despite his imperial claims, but there are a lot of Meerwarths as well, they will be moving into a lot of influential positions (the State Department comedy team of Jen Psaki and Melanie Harf are a couple of Meerwarths), and when war, depression or serious civil unrest comes their crack up will produce devastating secondary tremors throughout the culture.

As are all victimary movements. The articulation of hyper-civilized sensibilities and the barbaric lust for vengeance could not be made more evident than in a comment on a column by relatively conservative NYT columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat raises the following questions in the wake of the victimary temper tantrum over Indiana’s new Religious Freedom law:

1) Should religious colleges whose rules or honor codes or covenants explicitly ask students and/or teachers to refrain from sex outside of heterosexual wedlock eventually lose their accreditation unless they change the policy to accommodate gay relationships? At the very least, should they lose their tax-exempt status, as Bob Jones University did over its ban on interracial dating?
2) What about the status of religious colleges and schools or non-profits that don’t have such official rules about student or teacher conduct, but nonetheless somehow instantiate or at least nod to a traditional view of marriage at some level — in the content of their curricula, the design of their benefit package, the rules for their wedding venues, their denominational affiliation? Should their tax-exempt status be reconsidered? Absent a change in their respective faith’s stance on homosexuality, for instance, should Catholic high schools or Classical Christian academies or Orthodox Jewish schools be eligible for 501(c)3 status at all?
3) Have the various colleges and universities that have done so been correct to withdraw recognition from religious student groups that require their leaders to be chaste until (heterosexual) marriage? Should all of secular higher education take the same approach to religious conservatives? And then further, irrespective of leadership policies, do religious bodies that publicly endorse a traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic view of sexual ethics deserve a place on secular campuses at all? Should the Harvard chaplaincy, for instance, admit ministers to its ranks whose churches or faiths do not allow them to perform same-sex marriages? Should the chaplaincy of a public university?
4.) In the longer term, is there a place for anyone associated with the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic view of sexuality in our society’s elite level institutions? Was Mozilla correct in its handling of the Brendan Eich case? Is California correct to forbid its judges from participating in the Boy Scouts? What are the implications for other institutions? To return to the academic example: Should Princeton find a way to strip Robert George of his tenure over his public stances and activities? Would a public university be justified in denying tenure to a Orthodox Jewish religious studies professor who had stated support for Orthodox Judaism’s views on marriage?
5) Should the state continue to recognize marriages performed by ministers, priests, rabbis, etc. who do not marry same-sex couples? Or should couples who marry before such a minister also be required to repeat the ceremony in front of a civil official who does not discriminate?
6) Should churches that decline to bless same-sex unions have their tax-exempt status withdrawn? Note that I’m not asking if it would be politically or constitutionally possible: If it were possible, should it be done?
7) In the light of contemporary debates about religious parenting and gay or transgender teenagers, should Wisconsin v. Yoder be revisited? What about Pierce v.Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary?

And here is the comment:

Religious views about sexuality are inconsistent with the reality that gay people are human beings who deserve the same rights and privileges as other people. The fact that they are sexually attracted to their own gender is clearly biologically based. Gay people have been abused for centuries because of ignorance of biology, and because the majority of straight people, unable to imagine not being straight, assumed that the gay minority was in diabolical cahoots with the prince of darkness, or some other such theological nonsense.

When the religious view of the world congealed centuries ago, it did so based on many wrong assumptions that were the result of profound ignorance of the true origin and nature of human beings. We now know better, and a tipping point has been reached in which people suddenly realized that gay people were not perversions, but were our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and our families.

The answer to every question that Mr. Douthat asks is the same. No person, no gay person, no black person, no female person should be treated with disdain because of their biology. Those who might do so are acting out of ignorance. They will now have to experience the social pain and rejection they they’ve inflicted with impunity on others. They will lose their relevance, their dignity and their tax exemptions. They will become what they have abused and hated. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I will enjoy their pain. But I’ll get over it.

The comment is interesting in several ways. It begins with an attack on “religious views about sexuality,” which quickly becomes an attack on religion itself: “when the religious view of the world congealed centuries ago, it did so based on many wrong assumptions that were the result of profound ignorance of the true origin and nature of human beings.” There is nothing inevitable in this leap: the religious view of sexuality could have been wrong, but correctable through a further elaboration of the founding event constitutive of the “religious view.” Presumably for this writer, that would be impossible, or would just lead to more error, because the correct view of sexuality requires knowledge of biology, which religion could never provide. But it is not knowledge of biology that discloses “the reality that gay people are human beings who deserve the same rights and privileges as other people.” Sorting out deserts and rights requires a different kind of knowledge, and we might agree with this writer that this knowledge would be of “the true origin and nature of human beings.” But the true origin and nature of human beings seems to be biological here, to be acquired by a rejection of “theological nonsense” and I suppose some form of biological inquiry. But wouldn’t biological inquiry keep disclosing new knowledge as it proceeds? And how could that accumulating knowledge include knowledge of who should be treated with disdain, and who should not be? (Isn’t the fact that the human race, or any community, could only be propagated through sex between males and females a kind of biological knowledge? Why shouldn’t that have consequences for social arrangements?) Indeed, it is the writer’s final lines that reveals the source of such, genuinely humanistic, knowledge: it is our resentments towards those who have kept us (or those we identify with) from access to the center, our desire to make them experience exactly that same marginalization and the consequent suffering, that can give us access to the knowledge of who should be disdained and who should not be. Only, though, on the condition that it becomes self-knowledge. The embarrassment the writer admits to anticipating while enjoying his revenge simulates such self-knowledge, but his own (why am I certain that this is not only a man, but a heterosexual man?) overwhelming disdain for those he knows deserve nothing but reflects the choice to reject such self-knowledge. Perhaps it would anyway only yield a map of the sector of neurons that fire when experiencing the pleasures of revenge.

Pursuing my distinction between hostage-taking, as the form of politics characteristic of barbarism (or the gift economy, or honor society), on the one hand, and submitting to the third party, as the form of civilized politics, I note an imbalance. Hostage-taking absorbs whatever form of “political” interaction that we can imagine having preceded it amongst “savages,” or “primitive” cultures, or “hunter-gather” communities (characterized by egalitarianism, insufficient accumulation to introduce hierarchies, and intermittent violence due to naked resentments controlled through communal mechanisms and references to a local sacrality)—by deterring in advance and punishing overwhelmingly spontaneous expressions of desire and resentment. Civilization, I have hypothesized, meanwhile, can never do away with barbarism once and for all—it marginalizes it, represses it, simulates it, neutralizes it, but never eliminates it. The formulation I have proposed would explain why: if the civilized individual is willing to submit his resentments to a presumably, hopefully, impartial arbiter, what, exactly, is he willing to submit? Surely those very resentments that, under barbaric conditions, he would have settled himself, or through his protector. Someone has taken hostages at my expense—violated my property, my freedom of movement, some agreement to which we have “sworn” more or less formally and solemnly—or is charging me with same, and we follow the monumentally world transforming path of letting someone obligated to neither of us decide whether a violation has taken place, and if so, what the remedy is to be. To put it simply, the civilized justice system still exists to prevent private revenge from plunging society into chaos—if you doubt that, transform the legal system in accord with the therapeutic assumption that rapists, muggers and murderers are merely acting out some former trauma and need treatment rather than punishment, and see how their victims respond. Civilized self-restraint runs deep, and most civilized people are ill-equipped to plot and execute revenge successfully, so we might see nothing more than some angry political rhetoric for a while; and, who knows, maybe in some places (Scandinavia? The UK?) civilization has been so thorough that the population would be too enfeebled to rouse themselves to self-defense against an emboldened criminal and terrorist class—but wouldn’t that prove, even better than the more predictable emergence of Charles Bronsons and Clint Eastwoods the dependence of civilization upon barbaric impulses? Only people who want revenge can defer it through provisional trust in a justice system that will supply a more legitimate and effective equivalent. (This is all so obvious that I feel silly laying it out, but we have constructed an entire political world predicated on the denial of everything I have said.)

The civilized world mediates the myriad, if more metaphorical, acts of hostage taking we all engage in regularly. Relations between men and women, and between parents and children, are certainly far better described in terms of more and less subtle instances of hostage-taking, which laws against domestic violence and, more broadly, moral and therapeutic vocabularies of reciprocal understanding keep within bounds. Barbarism simply involves a more “gripping” economy of attention than does civilization. To take a hostage effectively (especially when we get to the more sophisticated and metaphorical forms, like White Guilt) requires that you have paid very close attention to what is most dear to your victim. A lot of things matter to us—material things, spiritual things, mental, emotional, etc. But what matters most, and how can you get a hold of it so as to compel the victim’s complete attention to you, and what you want? Within such an attentional economy, one’s attention is always trained on one’s own and other vulnerabilities (which, furthermore, shift around, become “available” in different ways, etc.), which is very riveting—look away for a moment and all might be lost, because you will have lost track of what the score is. Paying attention to a third party—whether an actual one, like a judge, teacher, supervisor, etc., or the internalized voice within, our conscience—validating their credentials, following the logic of their judgments, weighing that against any escape routes we have semi- or unconsciously prepared for ourselves from said judgments, etc. is only possible once the hostage-taking attentional economy has been interrupted and we have been wrenched out of its grip—most likely because its dense richness of motivations and possibilities has, at a certain point revealed an abyss (some consuming physical or psychic violence) to which our own actions are leading us. If the abyss is wide enough, which is to say if the consequences of not only actions undertaken or planned, but of the very inclinations and most distant desires we are capable of representing to ourselves, reveal trails leading to that abyss, then one might come to enter the world of third parties more permanently, and to discipline oneself according to the terms of that world.

There are gradations, minute degrees of civilization, each one of which reiterates the distinction between civilization and barbarism. For most of us, most of the time, eating cooked meat with silverware is enough to draw the line, but if you are at a party with three different forks, each one for a different dish, using the wrong one marks you, ever so slightly, as barbaric. The same holds for things like grammatical errors, working class and ethnic accents, and much else of daily life: pretty much all resentments in the modern world can be framed in terms of someone being less civilized, or trying to pretend to a civilized condition they haven’t earned. This might be a good time to acknowledge that I am, of course, aware, how unlikely is my attempt to retrieve the concept of “civilization,” one of the most white guilty of all social theoretical concepts: the term has been stained irremediably by its use in the justification of Western imperialism. But maybe there’s another reason for the implicit ban on the term—its use presupposed a very broad consensus among Westerners regarding the vast gulf between their own social order and those of other peoples, along with a casual and unapologetic acceptance of social hierarchies within that social order. Given our far thinner skins regarding internal hierarchies, simply using the concept of civilization, refining it, clarifying it, testing and applying it, arguing over it, perhaps even quantifying it, but at any rate accepting its legitimacy, would likely make us far more aware of distinctions among us that could be and perhaps are leveraged in various ways than we could be comfortable with. We can’t talk about civilization because we can’t bear being exposed to judgments of where we are on the scale. But if we see civilization as an experiment, as it surely is, one we are working on together, we can perhaps defer the resentments that would flow from an attempt to impose a particular civilizational content. In other words, we could accept that, for the most part, we are all distributed differently across a wide range of civilizational registers in ways that could never really add up to judgments on specific individuals or groups.

“Grammar” emerges as a category and marker of social distinction within a civilized, which means literate, order. The power of correct grammar as such a marker continues unabated, regardless of the complaints (repeated in each generation) regarding the new generation’s deficiencies—students note each others’ grammatical mistakes (granted, not always correctly) and usually respond with a mixture of (feigned?) horror and self-satisfaction. The terms they tend to use to describe writing marked with pervasive error is “unprofessional,” which is a near enough synonym for “uncivilized.” If “good grammar” is needed for acceptance within a literate community, a grammar of civilization, more broadly conceived, is necessary to participate in a civilized order—and, even more, to commence the necessary thinking of that order.

Grammar most immediately refers to the maintenance of the boundaries of the declarative sentence. Organized around the basic subject-predicate articulation, every word in a grammatical sentence is related to another word (or element) in the sentence. The sentence as a whole can be denied or affirmed, which also means it can be turned into a question that can be answered either “yes” or “no.” Maintaining sentence boundaries requires that the speaker or writer can distinguish consistently between declaratives, imperatives and ostensives (grammatically speaking, exclamations). Any speaker can do this for simple sentences, requiring the provision of basic information about location, presence or absence, opinion, feelings, etc. It gets more complicated when the results of a dialogue or conversation need to be represented, and even more complicated when concepts or judgments, which is to say, re-engineered words, that have been established within a given community are implicit in sentences. At a certain point, for most writers, grammar breaks down, and the writer latches onto isolated words as clues to what kind of response (something to agree or disagree with) to the sentence might pass muster—those more familiar pieces of the sentence are then copied and pasted into simpler sentence templates. The amount of “slack” one’s grammatical capacity has marks civilizational gradations, one’s ability to participate in the “general intellect” of civilization.

What happens when one’s grammar reaches its breaking point is that one no longer knows what question a sentence might be answering, and, therefore, what imperative the sentence is deferring (by deflecting that imperative onto a reality resistant to the imperative), and what ostensive, or, we might say, “revelation” or constitutive insight, generated the imperatives. To use a simple example, a new concept of God will generate demands that “God” solve certain problems, and then questions as to the conditions under which we might make such demands upon God and then, finally, alternative answers to those questions. One will not be able to “read” a sentence presenting one such alternative answer, or distinguishing one from another, without sufficient immersion in the concept of God in question. Such a reader will be able to use and rearrange the words in these sentences, but will bring them into reference to some other concept of God, and some “wrenching” of the words out of their relationships within the sentence is bound to occur.

According to Elizabeth Bates (a precursor to and collaborator with Michael Tomasello’s “usage-based” understanding of language), in her Language and Context: The Acquisition of Pragmatics, the traditional tripartite division of language into “semantics,” “pragmatics” and “grammar” entails grammar articulating semantics (the meaning/use of words) with pragmatics (the speech situation and the effects one aims at within it). Grammatical conventions, the ways words work in sentences, provide an economic mechanism for articulating words scenically. Her analysis lines up very well with the progression of speech acts analyzed by Eric Gans in The Origin of Language: grammar (the declarative sentence) articulates ostensives (semantics, or words understood as embodying the possibility of some joint attention) and imperatives (what we want others to do, what they want us to do, what we want regarding what they want, etc.—all the demands, commands, requests, pleading, suggestions, hints, etc. which we use to get people to join us on a scene). Indeed, Bates goes so far as to treat the early declaratives of children as a kind of imperative, as those early sentences are not interested so much in conveying information or gaining assent as in directing attention to a particular claim about the world. Moreover, such an originary grammar finds support from Terrence Deacon’s perfectly parallel use of Peircean semiotic concepts to account for the emergence and maintenance of the “symbolic”: for Deacon, indexes are means of aligning and rearranging icons, while symbols are means of aligning and rearranging indexes. What a sentence does, then, is present a world in which imperatives, of various urgencies, intensities, and probabilities of being obeyed, and which, in turn, are formed out of desires consequent upon novel revelations (sites of joint attention), are “poised” in relation to each other. When one is in an intellectual space where one doesn’t know what would count as doing this, then one’s grammar, in the more conventional sense, meets its limits.

So, what are the most insistent imperatives the civilized order needs to defer? Most directly and commonly, the desire to take hostages in one’s relations with others—here, furthermore, there are gradations from literal hostage taking (e.g., gang warfare, or even the desire for revenge of a crime victim) to more figurative varieties (e.g., passive aggressive forms of manipulation, harping on the faults of others, etc.—much better than honor killings, of course, but not as civilized as we can be). Even more important, though, if far less common, is the imperative to become, or to submit to, the biggest man imaginable. The servility indistinguishable from early forms of civility imposed by the all-powerful monarch upon hostage taking subjects is tightly bound up with the boundless forms of ambition some men and women feel licensed to indulge and imposes a limit on the civilizing process that it nevertheless made possible. In other words, the fervor with which one might struggle to overturn the entire social order (something only imaginable in the highly artificial civilized world) is the flip side of the desire to have a more perfect, encompassing order imposed upon one and all. These are imperatives in the most literal sense: one feels compelled to resist this or that injustice uncompromisingly, or to throw oneself at the feet of the hero who promises to destroy it once and for all. (Moreover, these imperatives exacerbate more common revenge fantasies by providing them with a global arena.) The difficulty of deferring them, and disciplining oneself so as to remain bound to that deferral, cannot be overestimated. (The abstract notion of “equality” is the consequence, or dim reflection, or forgetting of the immense energy put into these deferrals—Freud’s remark on the primary resentment of the child provides a helpful formulation: if I cannot be the favorite, there shall be no favorite. Someone with an unstrained “democratic disposition” is someone who has inoculated him or herself against the desire for victory in the “final battle.”)

So, the civilized sentence will defer these imperatives. But clichés and canned sentiments about democracy, equality, fraternity, liberty, etc., don’t do it. To defer a desire or imperative requires that the thing to be deferred be made present, that its power be felt, its more insidious operations registered, the limits of any provisional constraints on it gestured towards, the fragility of one’s own discipline in resisting it acknowledged, and that it therefore be deferred in full awareness of what is entailed in doing so. We could say that a well formed, or “grammatical” (in the originary sense) sentence is a kind of invented or improvised ritual, in its enactment of the desire and fear to be warded off. But, of course, we couldn’t ask every sentence to do all of these things at once—quite often one of them is enough, as long the possibility of performing the others in another sentence is not impaired. But, at the very least, we should have a suitable measure for a civilized sentence (and one thing that characterizes civilization is that it is overwhelmingly about how we are able to speak with each other in various ways, on various levels, moving from irony to literalism, implicit to explicit, etc.): what dangerous imperative does it place in equipoise with the civilizational imperative to be worthy of the judgment of the third party?

47 US Senators just did something unthinkable: they sent an open letter to Iran’s Ayatollah-led government pointing out that the agreement said Ayatollahs are (apparently) about to conclude with the American President will be meaningless without Senate approval (which Obama has shown no signs of seeking). (The Ayatollahs wrote back, purporting to tutor the Senators in the “nuances” of the US Constitution and, more importantly, the overriding importance of international law in determining the obligations of nations. That part of the story is tangential to my interests here, but this is undeniably fascinating stuff.) But, of course, the President forging ahead, mostly in secret (with the occasional lie), in such negotiations without any consultation with the Senate, even Senators of his own party, despite widespread skepticism (to put it mildly) about the details of the agreement as they have become publically available, is also unthinkable. But that’s the funny thing about the unthinkable—it’s unthinkable until someone does it, and then it becomes eminently and irresistibly thinkable.

The rules of American political order are fracturing. No one who is at all familiar with my thinking will be surprised that I hold the Left, and more directly, Obama, responsible for this breakdown, but that doesn’t matter any more. The question is, what now? The Left has tried to keep the game going by applying the rules with increasing rigor and Jesuitical zeal to their political enemies, while holding themselves, in victimocratic fashion, exempt from those same rules (which would unjustly constrain them in their attempts to hold the “privileged” accountable). But that’s obviously not sustainable—the Republican party can play along in the hopes of maintaining their share of political power without having to pay close attention to the people who vote for them, but no one outside of government has any incentive other than sheer fear to do so—and, as this letter demonstrates, there are now quite a few Republicans who don’t want to play anymore, at least when the stakes are high enough.

When the rules break down, we have resort to the tried and true method of tit-for-tat. Tit-for-tat is essentially hostage taking, and hence barbaric, but there are rules and rules: these are still second or third order rules that are breaking down, and tit-for-tat is not about to spread to all of our social practices. That is, we are not on the brink of a hot civil war, but we are in the middle of the beginning of a cold one, with unforeseeable consequences. Tit-for-tat is kept within civilized bounds according to Kant’s maxim that wars should be fought in such a way as to make peace possible afterward, which in this case means gesturing to the meta-rules as possible means of adjudication when the daily rules break down. So, senators interpose themselves prominently in the middle of head of state to head of state negotiations in such a way as to essentially promise the nullity of the results of those negotiations, but they do so by simply reminding the other side’s negotiators of the Constitutional provisions for treaty-making that, by implication, our own negotiator seems to have forgotten. The bankruptcy of the administration’s position here, as in the wake of Netanyahu’s speech, is evident in its response and that of its allies, which is to accuse the senators of breaking the meta-rules, i.e., calling them traitors—which thereby proves the viability of this method.

We are sure to see new forms of tit-for-tat emerge across the broad as social rules break down under the pressure of victimary obsessions. This is the way front lines in cultural (and other) wars take shape. Most immediately, though, this Gang of 47 has provided an opening to the Republican candidates for President, none of whom so far give the impression that they really want to win. Rather than go dutifully down the checklist of “positions” one needs to affirm in order to satisfy the “base,” telling fairy tells of restoring the American Dream and complaining that the media isn’t interested in the “real issues” of economic growth and whatever, the candidate who wants to break out should make a list of actions carried out by Obama that only Presidents can carry out (executive orders, “prosecutorial discretion,” etc.), starting with the blatantly illegal and proceeding to the merely harmful and promise to undo each and every one immediately upon taking office. At the same time, promise a series of previously unthinkable, but now quite thinkable, actions that would match Obama’s egregious rampage through our economic and political order. And from then on, stalk the President—remind others of the list as new events bring reminders of his actions, and add new ones when necessary. The media will pay attention to that, and whoever takes this approach will take all the other candidates hostage, forcing them to affirm or add to the list, ultimately producing a united front among the serious candidates, giving the voters the opportunity to dismantle the entire Obama regime, declaring before the world the anomalous nature of the that regime, and forcing the Democratic candidate to defend each and every piece of it. Even better, such an approach could turn into a genuinely public way of thinking through all these questions.