GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Are you now, or have you ever been, a Zionist?

That, today, would be the most likely form of that “infamous” inquisitorial query—there are many situations today in which very few people would be comfortable identifying themselves as Zionists. I certainly consider myself one, but have always had a problem with Zionism, so much so that my own willingness to affirm my Zionism has been as much due to the need to contest those who would demonize Zionism as to assert a belief in any particular theory of Jewish national liberation. In fact, intellectually speaking, Zionism is quite a mess—there’s nothing like a shared, coherent version of it, like we would find with “Marxism,” “liberalism,” or even “nationalism.” The idea that Jews scattered throughout the world constitute a single “nation” in anything like the modern sense is a stretch, to say the least; the idea, further, that they should all pick themselves up and move to Israel is arbitrary and ridiculous to the vast majority of Jews; and the assumption that the gathering of all these Jews should take place in the ancient land of Israel splices religious messianism with modern political notions of self-determination in a way it would be hard to justify within any theoretical framework. Add onto this the assumption that Jews from the “Galut” needed to be transformed into “new Jews” (on the model of the Socialist “New Man”), which presupposes a kind of virulent self-hatred behind the entire enterprise, the very scant consideration given to the existing inhabitants of the land where this national project was to take root, and the impossibility of resolving the problem of non-Jewish citizens of a Jewish state other than through formulaic references to “equal rights” and feeble relativizing allusions to the by now mainly vestigial remnants of ethnic privileging in some other countries, and we have a mode of political thought someone with intellectual integrity can hardly feel comfortable with.

But here is Benjamin Netanyahu visiting the sites of vicious antisemitic attacks in Europe, attacks that are merely the tip of a cresting wave of hostility toward the beleaguered Jewish minority in the countries that not that long ago (with very few honorable exceptions) gave them up for slaughter, calling on the Jews to “come home” to Israel. And he’s getting a response from European leaders—grudging, resentful responses, but the leaders of countries like France, Germany and Denmark feel compelled to reiterate (unconvincingly) their commitment to making their countries safe for Jews. This actually points to another problematic element of Zionism (noted, like all the problems I mentioned above, long ago, most of them soon after the initial formulation of Zionism, and in internal Zionist debates)—the appearance of an interest, on the part of Zionism, in diminished safety for Jews in the Diaspora (those who wish can find some confirmation in the infamous “Transfer Agreement” between the Zionist leadership in Palestine and the Nazis, or in the charges, the truth of which I cannot assess, that Zionist agents in Iraq exacerbated the perceived peril Jews of that country were in following the founding of Israel by planting bombs in synagogues). The worse things are for Jews elsewhere the better for Zionism and, its successful institutionalization, the State of Israel. I don’t say this is true—just that it’s consistent with Zionist theory. But this particular double bind (the movement to make Jews safe depends upon increased dangers for Jews) also gets us to the heart of Zionism which, in fact only makes sense on the worst case scenario constructed by the more fatalistic of the Zionists—that, ultimately, antisemitism is so deeply rooted, or will take such deep roots, wherever Jews are going to be, that Jews will in the long run never be safe anywhere but in their own homeland (but if they are so hated everywhere, won’t they be just as hated all gathered together in one place—and, in an age of weapons of mass destruction, much easier to finish up once and for all? Hence the “normalization” theory, which inflects the antisemitic claim that Jews don’t fit in anywhere by explaining this misfit in terms of historical distortions in Jewish life that a Jewish state will rectify. But what can more inescapably mark one as abnormal than striving for normality?).

If that claim is true, none of the inconsistencies, contradictions and absurdities matter all that much—on the most basic level, as the Revisionist (the trend embodied in Netanyahu’s Likud Party), and most minimalist version of Zionism has it, Zionism is ultimately a life raft, albeit an armed one. In a sense, while being the most embattled, even paranoid version of Zionism, it is also the most open one: Zionism is not to transform the Jews, create a utopian society, or usher in the Messianic Age, it is just to keep the Jews out of the grasp of their executioners (even if we acknowledge that this can only ever be a deferral). All the problems created by Zionism, most obviously the displacement of the Palestinians and enmity with the Arab and Muslim worlds, can be addressed provisionally and pragmatically, within that broader framework. The same with relations with the Diaspora, with which a fairly traditional relation, going back to antiquity, whereby Jews in Israel represent an eternal Jewish possibility while Jews elsewhere lend support, can be maintained, while Israel remains ready to transform that relationship into a rescue mission at any time. Questions of political and economic institutions—socialism or capitalism, parliamentary democracy or some kind of Presidential system—can be debated on their own merits; the crucial and ultimately unresolvable secular/religious question can likewise be left to the ongoing cultural push and shove and demographic transformations.

Zionism, then, is utterly unlike other political theories, and all of its contradictions and confusions come from attempts to model it on those theories (socialism and national liberation in particular). Maybe it’s not even a theory, but rather more of an mood that accompanies one at times (for some, very often, enough to institutionalize it). You are a Zionist insofar as you support the efforts of those Jews operating under the assumption that Jews can rely on no safe haven other than what they can create for and defend by themselves. I call this a “mood” because there’s no provable or falsifiable proposition here: we can’t know whether Jews will, in fact, always be driven, sooner or later, out of any place they have made their home as a vulnerable minority. It’s also a mood insofar as it has a kind of “shading” to it—dark. Zionism is a depressive mood, a paranoid one—it leads one to see duplicity in Gentiles even when there are no signs of it, it gives weight to the burdens of the past over the possibilities of the future. It is therefore a mood that long predates the founding of Zionism as a political movement, and extends beyond its explicit adherents. Above all, it’s a desperate mood, one that spurs to action—it has glimmers of hopefulness, but those never encroach upon the alertness to impending catastrophe. It is a profoundly ironic mood, because it must occur to the thoughtful Zionist that thus prejudging the possibilities of Jewish-Gentile relations might very well, by generating mutual distrust, contribute to the feared result. Part of this irony (and, in fact, part of the longstanding bill of indictments against Zionism) is that, from a sheer propositional standpoint, there is no one with whom the Zionist agrees more than the anti-Semite, who also believes that Jews can never live peacefully among non-Jews. Only mood really separates the Zionist from the anti-Semite, as a very different range of feelings would naturally associate themselves for each regarding their shared diagnosis of the “Jewish Question.” (I say only mood, because even the ethical distinctions can be blurred—it is hard to imagine an emergency for the sake of which Zionism exists in which the possibility of collaborating with anti-Semites wouldn’t have to be seriously considered.) Insofar as Zionism is a mood rather than a theory, it need not be pervasive—it is perfectly reasonable that comfortable American Jews will feel Zionism only weakly, perhaps punctuated by sharper pangs in response to troubling events and evocations of communal memory.

Israel must be Zionist, but insofar as it is Zionist it is dangerous (its enemies must know it to be dangerous). Insofar as it is nationalist (“Israeli”), or liberal, or democratic, or Jewish, the danger is mitigated. This interplay of the Zionist mood with more familiar political ideas and feelings should be kept in mind in assessing the aspect of Zionism that most blackens its reputation in world opinion: the settlements in the territories captured in the 1967 war. Certainly the settler movement, like the Zionist movement in general, bears a strong family resemblance to Western colonialism and perhaps especially the settlement of North America by Europeans, and this accounts for a great deal of the hysterical hostility to them. But we can go deeper than that, and to do so I would like to draw upon a perhaps unlikely source: the political theorist, and one time Nazi political theorist, Carl Schmitt.

Schmitt, in his Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, argues that the Greek word “nomos,” often translated as “law,” really denotes a way of social life grounded in an originary land division, out of which, and for the preservation of which, political and legal institutions emerge. Indeed, Schmitt gives the Biblical account of the division of the land of Canaan amongst the Israelite tribes as an example of such a founding nomos. Schmitt’s account is long, penetrating and rich (and no doubt contestable), and includes an account of America’s role in modern history that is not relevant here but well worth familiarizing oneself with. What is important for my purposes is Schmitt’s articulation of the originary land division as a source of nomos with the other contributory elements of political life he considers essential: production and distribution (which comes down to the economy, and politics in its more familiar, mundane operations). For Schmitt, the modern world was founded on a new nomos created by the discovery and division of the New World among the European nations: by placing the settlement and exploitation of the New World (including all the associated violence, against the natives and between the European competitors) beyond the civilized pale, the European countries could “bracket” war amongst themselves on their own continent in order to subject it to rules and prevent it from becoming total in a way that the religious wars consequent upon the Protestant break had been. This new nomos, which maintained relative peace from the 18th century to the first World War, began to collapse in the late 19th century, as the boundaries between metropole and periphery became confused. Be that as it may, the point is that following the European catastrophe of the first half of the 20th century, the European powers (brought to this point, according to Schmitt by American priorities and principles) renounced nomos as a basis for political order and sought to found political order on production and distribution alone.

One can point to the fascist (“blood and soil”) implications of the “nomos of the earth,” but Schmitt is very clear that each new age, at a new level of civilization and technological development, will require a new nomos—the modern nomos included the sea, and the new one Schmitt wonders about in the book would of course include the air (and perhaps one day space—or, for that matter, DNA, or gigabytes). In any case, though, any enduring political order must be founded on a concrete division of finite, zero-sum property, both within and between nations. Only a political and legal order that can be traced back to such an originary division can claim legitimacy—in particular because the inevitable transgressions (invasions, revolts, secessions, etc.) will need to be framed in terms of such an order, baptized within it, so to speak. The marginalization of nomos in the name of production and distribution is predicated on the fantasy that no originary division, even as a distant reference point, is needed, because actual property—that which cannot be used by one without withdrawing it from the use of another—is part of a global process of production in which any particular property is a manipulable part. (Modern rights, which make the basis of social order the isolated individual that is actually the result of a centuries long civilizing process, is a transitional step towards the integration of humans as elements into the global production and distribution process.)

The Jews never became part of the nomos of Europe—its constitution could not accommodate them, which is another way of saying there was no room for them—and their only hope for freedom and safety lay with the displacement of nomos by production and distribution, which Jews overwhelmingly and enthusiastically supported. (That there could be no room for a particular people makes perfect sense if we are thinking in terms of a nomos; it is utterly mystifying if we are thinking in terms of production/distribution because, after all, couldn’t any human capital be put to some use?) But the loss of the nomos of “European civilization” made Europe mad and the Jews were held responsible. Zionism is the attempt of Jews to found a nomos for themselves that would enable them to fit into the nomos of the world constituted by nation-states and the emergent post-Nuremberg international law. But that nomos has turned out to be a pseudo-nomos, held together for a time by the stabilizing enmities of the Cold War, but ultimately failing at its main imperative: to integrate as equal nations the postcolonial world. Into the void has rushed a vitalized Islam and the victimary.

Israel relied upon the post-Nuremberg order that shared with Zionism a sense of the vulnerability of the Jews as a hinge of social order, but that can no longer be relied upon. The internal nomos of Israel society will probably become central, as in fact it was before the founding of the state and for its first few decades. That internal nomos is what Zionism has always called “facts on the ground,” perhaps the concept most diametrically opposed to the production and distribution networks that can be imagined. Controlling land, building on land, using land to continually reshape borders with the other, to implicate the less committed in the nomos of the social order by requiring shared defense of land acquisitions and construction—this is what Zionism needs now more than anything else. Of course, this—settlement activities—is the most pressing source of friction between Israel and the post-European world order, but friction is necessary for the foundation of a new nomos. And that friction might take less hysterical forms as the world order becomes increasingly post-American, with China, Russia and India competing to fill the many vacuums American leaves behind. Only an Israel firmly grounded in the Zionist nomos will be prepared for the emergent Islamic nomos (or failure to establish such) of the Middle East

Leftists and liberals (including libertarians), then, are right to feel uneasy, at least, about Zionism. Israel is a mostly liberal society (in some ways as liberal as any place on earth), but Zionism is illiberal. Of course, the foundations of any social order are illiberal—liberalism can never be anything more than the ripest fruit of an order that has already been highly civilized and by other than liberal means: liberalism is constituted by a carefully cultivated capacity to ignore that. But Zionism cannot be kept out of sight—it has perpetual, and urgent, imperatives to press upon us. Your ability to resist the power of the civilized, liberal impulse to turn away is an index of your immunity to the metastasizing victimocracy.

The recent dust-up between transgender activists and what I suppose we would have to call “paleo-feminists” (who are retrograde enough to believe that to be a woman is to have a vagina) brings to the fore, in real time, the question of hierarchies in victimage. Is it a question of who is more “oppressed” (according to what measure)? Is it a question of who is able to leverage some blind spot in another’s victimary claim (so, to the extent that an anti-Islamophobia activist could point out that a black American really, in his defense of the primacy of race, shares assumptions with straight white Christian males devoid of all victimary credentials, Muslim would trump black in that case)? Is it a question of sheer political utility, on the part of leftist political groups (from the Democratic party all the way down through the splinter queer groups on a college campus)? Is it a question of being the latest on the scene? The most aggressive, or pathologically uninhibited? Surely the answer is “yes” to all of these questions, so we have not yet succeeded in putting order into the current victimary scene.

I’d like to bring to bear my recent inquiries into “civilization” and see if that can help. Part of being civilized is being tacitly aware of the fragility of the boundaries protecting civilization, and therefore being trained in the detection of transgressions of those boundaries. The boundaries are fluid because in distinguishing our own level of civilization from that of others (whether to learn from or elevate ourselves above them), we introduce new gradations (I think most college instructors can point to a process of learning how to point to student errors or deficiencies over time, as we come to feel the barbarism implicit in criticisms that emphasize the institutional rather than functional authority of the teacher. To learn how to say something like, “let’s try another way of looking at this” instead of “no, you’re misreading it,” is to introduce a civilizational gradation—even while “no, you’re misreading it” introduces a civilization gradation from a rap on the knuckles.).

But this means that one can always find something barbarous in what passes as civilized behavior, and that this capacity will be subject to (barbaric) mimetic law, i.e., competition. It’s not so hard to look around at what people do and imagine there’s no way anyone will still be doing that 20 years from now. The policing of civilized behavior contains the elements of new forms of barbarism, in the form of competitive displays of moral exhibitionism (a form of conspicuous consumption). To one caught up in such competitive displays, what is to be avoided at all costs (what makes one a loser) is to be exposed as naively accepting some civilized norm as unproblematically present. Think of the liabilities one opens oneself up to with a naïve outburst like “We treat women pretty well in this society—look at what things are like for them in the Islamic world!” One includes oneself in a “we” that presumably has the prerogative to treat women well or not, one claims, complacently, to be overlooking all of “us,” as if mistreatment of women in many places may not be much worse than one thought, one scores points for oneself through an invidious contrast with an other (and how did they come to be “other”?) rather than looking to better oneself, etc., etc. Anyone involved in the oneupsmanship of moral exhibitionism instantly sees someone resting on the laurels of civilizational gradations others have introduced, rather than introducing a new one himself.

This game is a source of endless conflict because in order to introduce a new civilizational gradation one must take for granted the whole mass of gradations already sedimented within our civilized way of life—we are all, at some point, like that guy who says “We treat women pretty damn well!”; and there will always be someone who can acquire moral capital for himself by locating that vulnerable spot. What, most fundamentally, one accepts tacitly, and can never completely root out, is the basic premise of civilization, one embraced by the most radical academic, with the lifelong marriage, single child brought painstakingly from elite daycare through the Ivy League so as to acquire the cultural capital of the 1%, a nest egg to last decades of austere retirement: deferral and discipline, in particular self-restraint regarding being a judge in one’s own cause, brings prosperity. This is both the most fundamental and the most vulnerable claim of the civilized order, because in actual fact it is very often false; it may even be false more often than not. Plenty of people work hard, play by the rules, and fail; plenty of times they never really had much of a chance in the first place. Indeed, civilization could only have been installed under conditions where its premise could only be true for a small minority. And yet the bearers of civilization (parents, teachers, rulers, thinkers, professionals, etc.) must insist that everyone act as if it’s true—even if, in their own individual case, it wasn’t.

This is where civilization, at its most basic, qua civilization, produces its victims. The roots of victimary thinking lie not just in the Shoah, but in an appropriation of that event as the irrefutable demonstration of the reversibility of all civilized norms in the name of exceptions licensed by the norms themselves. The victimary claim, in other words, is that the extreme barbarism of the Nazis was carried out in the name of the precepts of civilization, reduced to their essence: the white, heterosexual, Western, bourgeois, etc., man’s “burden” to civilize the world. The Nazis just saw this required measures more extreme then, but not conceptually incompatible with, European imperialism, or the American conquest of North America. What rouses the victimary ire, then, most elementally, is the demand by one party claiming to have achieved the discipline of civilization that another take that discipline upon him or herself. References, even when mediated through impersonal, institutionalized practices, to the “irrationality” of women, the promiscuity of gays, the higher crime rates among blacks, and so on, are advanced from the position of one demanding that another submit to the discipline whose acquisition is, tautologically, demonstrated by one’s demand that the other submit to it.

So, I can now propose the following hypothesis: any victimary position will be accorded greater protection to the extent that counter-attacking on its behalf exposes the vulnerability of the civilizational demand for discipline to further civilizational gradations that defer that very demand for discipline. This hypothesis accounts for the vulnerability of normal, civilized, people to those more skilled at creating civilizational gradations, i.e., to the white guilt purveyed by the competitive moral exhibitionists, and the receptivity of the hyper-civilized White Guiltists to the actual (if often self-appointed) victim groups, who intuit that the former have no source for their civilizational gradations other than their grievances. It also accounts for the paradox of a cultural development that on one level loads us up with deferral, the material of civilization (more refined “rules of engagement” in everyday life), while more fundamentally releasing the most destructive desires and resentments. Once the demand for discipline is seen as the source of violence (once the civilizing process has been completely forgotten), there is no way out of this paradox. The ultimately, largely unacknowledged, goal of the victimary revolution is the totally therapeutic order, in which all desires and resentments undergo an incessant process of absolute exposure, universal recognition and reciprocal adjustment. The fantasy is that the results of civilization can be preserved without the discipline.

So, we can see the various victimary grievances orbiting a single center of imperious commands to submit to discipline, and each becoming, under specific conditions, the center or periphery of the constellation of victimary grievances mobilized to counter-attack—grievances that are potentially unlimited if not necessarily practically so. (I wonder, in fact, if the heavy investment in the Pickett’s Charge of the transgender movement—which cannot really get much popular traction, being so obviously marginal and idiosyncratic—won’t turn into a kind of Waterloo—to mix military metaphors. Certainly not a fatal defeat, but perhaps a debacle sufficient to slow the momentum and dent the perception of inevitability—not coincidentally, the same thing we are waiting for with the Islamic State.) Insofar as this constellation coalesces and acquires some stability, it take the form of a kind of fluctuating early feudalism, with everyone scrambling around to see which of the lords of victimage can actually grant the protection one needs to navigate daily life. As with any system of fealty, it is essential that you ostentatiously attribute all your successes to the grace conferred by your victimary protector. Whatever one has been able to do is due to the courage of those victimary revolutionaries who have broken this or that boundary. Perhaps we will find out next year if victimary feudalism has thoroughly infested the American political system as well.

It is becoming clear that a country can have Muslims, or it can have Jews, but it can’t have both. It may be when Muslims reach a certain percentage of the population, or when the Jewish/Muslim ratio hits a certain point, but (my hypothesis would be) every country does get to the point where, along with the virulent antisemitism imported by Muslims, the host population finds it too annoying, exhausting, and/or dangerous to bother defending the Jews against them. Indeed, when it gets to that point, it becomes convenient, and even obvious, to blame the Jews for the Muslims’ hatred towards them, and other, sedimented forms of antisemitism re-emerge. This is distressing, of course, but what is interesting is that such a hypothesis is unthinkable in liberal (in the broader sense) terms. To imagine that different categories of citizen, different “demographics,” are simply incompatible within a given national society, is confess the failure of multiculturalism (of course) but also the notion of a modern political order as such. Which would leave us without the barest beginnings of a shared political vocabulary and grammar.

Many American blacks will long remember that, not only did a majority of American whites vote against the Obama (a substantial majority the second time around), but they voted in a Republican congress capable of frustrating Obama, and turning the first black President into the abject failure he will surely be seen as. Many American whites, meanwhile, will long remember that we would not have been saddled with the most destructive President in American history without the virtually unanimous support of African-Americans. How many? Enough to show Abraham Lincoln to be the greatest political prophet in history?:

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Lincoln, of course, is referring to the war itself, but perhaps it has never really ended, however much the sides, and their respective moral stature may have changed, perhaps that 250 years of ill-gotten wealth has not yet been sunk, or perhaps we have to account for all the wealth made possible by that piled by the bondsman; perhaps the blood drawn by the lashes must be paid by that drawn from guns and bombs and who knows what else—but it is perhaps fitting that an idiotic attempt at racial redemption on the cheap should re-activate the sinking and drawing.

The idea behind the sexual revolution was that once fear of pregnancy and all the surrounding social norms and moral rules tying sexuality to marriage and procreation were overthrown, the pleasure taken in sex would be uninhibited, unobstructed and frequent. But maybe, as reported declines in sexual interest in Japan (for example) suggest, that’s not the case at all. If there’s no desire to have children, there’s no inclination to get married; if there’s no inclination to get married, dating seems pointless; if dating is pointless, all the preparatory activity (flirting, gossiping, going to parties and bars, shopping, attending to personal appearance, etc.) becomes uninteresting. There will always be the random hook-up, but once you get past the point where lots of young and men and women are in close and constant contact with each other (i.e., college), that probably becomes too much trouble to be worth it as well. So, while Heather MacDonald has made a plausible case that the draconian new sex codes on college campuses represent a roundabout, if unconscious, way of restoring a workable sexual morality, it might just as well be the case that these codes are a way of making sex high-stakes once again, and therefore dramatic and interesting. At least for a certain segment of the younger “demographic,” sexual enjoyment relies upon the thrill of creating a new sexual morality—more explicit, micro-consensual, mappable in all of its moves and experiences. In that case, these rules would be nothing more than an attempt to impose a single, fairly idiosyncratic sexual fantasy on everyone else—a particularly noxious form of tyranny.

It is very possible to reduce politics to the conflict between those who save and those who borrow. Those who borrow have an interest in inflation, money printing, government growth, and bailouts, while those who save have an interest in more minimal institutions that do little more than protect people and property and stable currency. Beyond these direct conflicts, borrowers are likely to be more libertine or “socially liberal,” savers more continent and “hung up.” The two, moreover, are interdependent—from whom else are borrowers to borrow, if not savers? At the most minimal level, savers are not necessarily dependent upon borrowers, but the greater the discrepancy between savers and borrowers the greater the interest (literally) the savers have in lending—this is what has been known as “usury,” like “price gouging,” a concept completely devoid of all content aside from resentment toward its referent. But lenders must rely upon some agent of force to collect from their debtors, and unless they are to rely upon private security forces (which they do, of course, to some extent), that means the state—at the very least, they rely upon laws that allow for coercion to be used in the collection of debts. Savers had the upper hand politically for quite a while, playing a central role in the emergence and consolidation of civilization: for quite a while debtors were imprisoned, and countries with debts to civilized countries and banks occupied. Saving money, after all, is a most basic form of deferral, and one from which many others flow. Today, lenders are deeply plugged into the circuits of power, but that’s not the same thing as a politics favoring savers: now, those who lend money function as distribution and redistribution mechanisms of the state, getting the new money before anyone else does and when it is worth a bit more. They are the conduits of a political order, one that draws wide support across all classes, aimed at increasing borrowing and keeping later borrowers sufficiently afloat to generate enough money for the earlier borrowers and their political facilitators. The contemporary left struggles mightily to frame politics in terms of the struggle between lenders and borrowers, but are themselves part of the postmodern politics aimed at mocking, demonizing, subverting, and ultimately fleecing savers. The notion of “pump priming,” used to describe Keynesian spending measures aimed at goosing the economy, really better describes the production and reproduction of the borrower class, which comprises a set of historically new psychological types: worshipful of celebrity, resentful of limitations and therefore contemptuous of externally imposed norms, entitled, conspiratorial, terrified of being out of step. When there is a flood, they will loot the store owned by the guy who had the foresight to buy and stock lots of water pumps, their political representatives will denounce him as a price gouger, and their flatterers in the media will immortalize their fist-pumping as they splash through the broken glass. Saving provides the ballast of civilization—how much of it do we still have in the bank?

Foreign policy bureaucrats, and the pundits who feed them their lines, like to say that we should only go to war “in defense of a vital US interest,” or something along those lines. But they never say what we are supposedly interested in, much less vitally, and why. You could make a list: maintaining global free trade, sustaining the flow of relatively safe energy, protecting democracy, etc. But on what grounds could one ever say that some other country’s participation in trade, or accessibility as a source of oil, or another country’s freedom, is a vital interest? Approaching things in this positivistic, ultimately nihilistic, way is incoherent and destructive. We are interested in supporting our allies and weakening or destroying our enemies. (We are all hostage to each other.) How vital the interest depends upon how much that ally can help us fight our enemies, and how much it is willing to risk to do so, and how much harm the enemy can do us or our web of alliances. How do we choose our enemies; or, how do they choose us? That’s another way of asking who we are, which is in turn defined by who is attracted and repelled by us. But, of course, our allies and enemies are always already given (however we might trace back their conditions of possibility), revealing us to ourselves, and we can always start by simply cultivating those alliances and, in confronting those openly committed to doing us harm, clarifying which alliances are worth cultivating. The really difficult question is when to treat non-state actors—private citizens and associations—as allies or enemies. We can answer that question only when we have answered a previous one: do we want to destroy our enemies (and take responsibility for the resulting systemic confusion) or weaken then but keep them in the game. How good a game is it?

One can always deal with evildoers, and sometimes one must. It should be possible to deal with evildoers while continuing to be honest about them—we would only deal with them out of some very compelling interest and we can assume they must see us similarly to how we see them and therefore only deal with us out some compelling interest of their own—an interest that would override any insult our honesty might occasion. In other words, we should be able to say, “you’re a bunch of thieving, murdering, raping SOBs, but we’ve got to go through that pass and if you let us do so we’ll send you enough food to tide you over this famine”—and they would presumably respond in kind, if they really don’t want to starve. We become abject when we assume that dealing with evildoers requires that we not call them what they are—first of all because we thereby communicate that dealing with them must be of greater value to us than dealing with us is to them. We are further compelled to treat as a “problem” anyone who exposes the lie we tell to cover our cravenness—and that means not only anyone who speaks honestly about the evildoers but, even more and especially, their victims, whom we must then discredit, slander, and trivialize. But the first lie is the one we tell ourselves, that there is not so much difference between us and the evildoer. But once we tell that lie it becomes true, and thus easier to believe.

Civilization represents a break from the hostage-taking mode of agreement constitutive of barbarism. Not necessarily a complete break, and never a permanent break, but “enough” of a break. Enough for what? For other forms of agreement to germinate. What other forms of agreement? Those you are ready to let a third party adjudicate. Hostage-taking is radically one-on-one—something dear to you (a loved one, your peaceful existence, your peace of mind) is held by the other, who is ready to destroy it. The threat of hostage-taking must be as terrible as it is if that threat is to keep the peace (indeed, you must be ready to pre-emptively take your own people hostage in order to prevent “rogue” players from implicating you)—but the problem is that the point will come when one side feels strong enough to blackmail the other with impunity (and if they are wrong it is even worse than if they are right).

To acknowledge the authority of a third party, both sides must agree that there is some shared “substance” and shared space—there is room for both sides, and a roughly equal allocation of goods that exists “objectively,” beyond the desire and will of either side, is imaginable. Such a possibility is already implicit on the originary scene, but actualizing that possibility in relations between closely related groups, rather than individuals within a single group, poses new historical problems. The actual third party will probably emerge from the party that rightly feels strong enough to blackmail others with impunity, and who can therefore impose his will on all concerned. Once this party has established pre-eminence by suppressing all rivals, he will want order, which means he will want resentment toward himself and amongst his newly acquired subjects neutralized (since recourse to simple repression risks disorder). Such neutralization requires procedures, and once such procedures start to work, we have the makings of civilization.

But what makes the procedures work? From what I have said so far, all we have is the fear of the subjects toward the hostage-taking power of the sovereign (and fear of each other, if the sovereign were to fall). But that wouldn’t be genuine neutralization (even if we have never yet had a civilization without that fear lurking somewhere in the background–ultimately, all we ever do is defer the order of hostage-taking)—everyone would still be looking for that next chance to re-arrange things more favorably. That the procedures are “fair”? That begs the question of how the subjects arrive at a sense of fairness. Only obedience to a sacred imperative, to a divine interdiction on hostage-taking, can account for that sense of fairness. Something like the monotheistic revelation, or a philosophical disclosure (more or less widely spread among the communities involved, or the elites of those communities), is needed. Possible resentment toward the sovereign is then recouped within a measure of the sovereign, and each subject carries around a “third person” (what Adam Smith called an “impartial spectator”) rather than a set of commands backed by terror. Such an interdiction on hostage-taking is wide ranging from the start, bearing on ritual practice, political order, and family life (monogamy, for example, will sooner or later be discovered to be essential), but it deepens and extends even further over time (centuries), as we discover all the ways in which we have been engaged in hostage-taking without realizing it. “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” has virtually unlimited ramifications—indeed, when this humble blogger and generative anthropologist hypothesizes the end of our (sinful?) civilization, is he really saying anything else?

Some vanguard of the new sacred, then, sets out to propagate and enforce the interdiction against hostage-taking. What uprootings of traditional practices must this involve! And only those whose communities are already embroiled in some crisis of their own sacred order will be open to the new order. Far more than persuasion will be required—only civilizational fanatics will have the stomach for it. At a certain point, they will find themselves taking hostages themselves, or getting the sovereign to do it for them. It’s not quite a return to the “old ways” (although according to some measures it might be “worse”), but it will generate resentments that take the form of a “heresy” (or that accuse the propagators of heresy), re-activating the need for a third party. Eventually a period of relaxation sets in—the diastole to the systole of civilizational fanaticism. The interdiction is loosened, reinterpreted—“remissions,” to use Phillip Rieff’s term, are introduced.

Remissions make the subjects prey to doubt, skepticism, cynicism, exhaustion, dissolution, nihilism. If the interdiction need not be obeyed in its original, rigorous, sanctified form, then how? Why at all? The period of relaxation is one of limit testing and boundary inquiry. Assuming the elasticity of the interdiction is discovered, and the order it inaugurated not irrevocably broken, a new form of the “third person” emerges—now that the civilizational fanatic has been “exposed” as insisting upon an unnecessarily strict form of the interdiction, his desire is now included among those that lead to dangerous forms of violence. The civilizational fanatic becomes a subject of satire and is ultimately reduced to the epithet “hypocrite”—his pleasure is really in denying others theirs. The new urbanity might be historical wisdom, and it might provide a model for leaving off defense of civilized standards. Now the benefits of civilization can be reaped in earnest, and the forgetting of the civilizing process is underway. Much freer forms of speculation, inquiry, artistic experimentation—along with wealth production and power acquisition—become possible. In theory, we are now free enough, disciplined enough, and informed enough to tighten the reins where necessary, and loosen them where possible. In practice, sometimes as well. The problem is how to draw the line between loosenings and re-barbarizations, between inquiries into that boundary and attempts to subvert it, and between new forms of civilizational fanaticism and re-barbarization. The 20th century saw all kinds of grotesque articulations of hyper-civilization and the depth of barbarity. The solution to the problem lies in whether one takes those positioned as third persons hostage, or presents issues to those potential third persons to adjudicate. Perhaps that requires a discussion of the “grammar of civilization,” which I hope to get to next.

Retrieving the category of “civilization” as a central term in the human sciences provides us with a way of revisiting familiar historical periodizations and, ultimately, answering the most important question: what is happening right now? If the period known as the Renaissance involved the completion of the civilizing process that had been ongoing since Europe began to recover from the fall of the Roman Empire and the initial Islamic invasions, it also involved an awareness of what had been accomplished, a vivid remembrance of the recently suppressed barbarism, and the beginnings of the figuration of the civilization/barbarism distinction in terms of varied speculations on “Nature.” The subsequent period, known to us as “modernity,” could then be understood as a dual process in which the fruits of civilization were reaped while the civilizing process was gradually forgotten. The two sides of this development complement each other: constitutive of a fully developed civilization is the distancing of its denizens from the systematic “addiction” to violence civilization had to transcend, and the naturalizing of civilized habits. The “originary” reflections of the Enlightenment, which project the modern bourgeois citizen back to a pre-social state, provide a perfect example of this forgetting (as does the very term “modernity,” suggesting, as it does, the possibility of a new beginning ex nihilo). The final forgetting of the civilizing process is the emergence of the normalizing process in the 19th century, in which all the obstacles to civilization are internalized, made into therapeutic and educational issues rather than moral questions or problems of manners.

We can, then, shed the following light on “postmodernity”: in response to the stirrings of barbarism in class warfare in the Western world and renewed experience with it in imperialism across the globe, Westerners resistant to normalization (a very imperfect process, one must grant) cultivated the following resentments towards their civilization: first, the insistence that Western civilization was really nothing more than a disguised barbarism, a criticism that targeted (especially in the wake of World War I) the failure of the West to suppress “atavistic” forms of violence once and for all—a critique that then inevitably directs attention to a wide variety of other barbarisms hidden behind a civilized “veneer’”; and, two, an outright defense of the suppressed barbarisms and savageries as modes of freedom more worthy of preservation than the unsatisfying and “uptight” freedoms of civilization—for a while, this defense of barbarism and savagery was a kind of play (in certain kinds of Romantic and avant-garde “decadence,” in the championing of sexual liberation, the hippies of the 1960s, etc.), although even much of that took a devastating toll, but now we have the real thing with the renewed Islamic war against the West, which our rulers and elites are completely incapable of addressing. These two anti-civilizational resentments are logically contradictory but politically complementary. This analysis would explain why no one has come up with a better term than the feeble “postmodern”—these contrary impulses, which civilization has been absorbing with decreasing resistance, and which make civilization unsustainable, also make a coherent account of this historical “period” impossible. If civilization is restored and those resentments marginalized, we will have our new period; if civilization is destroyed, who will care?

So, what is happening now is the sharpening of the anti-civilizational pincer movements, which have lost their play character and the inhibitions that accompanied it; the defense of modernity, under the assumption that attacks on it are mere parasites, rather than an auto-immune breakdown; and the search, more or less conscious, for a new rhythm of civilization, in which a renewed civilizing process can simultaneously keep the perennial threats of barbarism and savagery in view. Civilization replaced hostage taking, which presupposes, like the prisoner’s dilemma, that we are locked in together, as a mode of agreement, with the protection of spaces (property) that allowed for a diversity of exchanges, or agreements. Ensuring that no individual must enter the gift circle with one, and only one, specific individual, served as an enormous lever, deferring manifold forms of violence. But this new space of property locks us in together in a new way, creating new interdependencies that make hostage taking possible again. Victimary politics is as effective as it is because a few individuals can make enough of the assumptions of civilization problematic to extract concessions in the hope of return to normalcy. We have just barely begun to get a glimpse at what forms of hostage taking politicized hackers might invent. This is the central problem of any re-civilizing process: to neutralize these proliferating new forms of hostage taking.