GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The alt-right is, as much as it is anything, a call to arms in defense of nationalism against globalism—or, more specifically, the “global elite,” the network of corporate executives, media owners, bankers, politicians, and others who form consensus and strategize through Davos and other formal and informal global institutions. The globalists seek to reduce the world to a single economic and political unit, and whatever their own country of origin, citizenship or residency, refuse to privilege the interests of one nation over any other. If this is indeed the aim and outlook of the global elites, it’s easy to see that, barring a rather extraordinary, even miraculous, success in creating a harmonic convergence of some very divergent interests, such a project dooms the elite to, in the end, become the enemy of all nations. A very formidable enemy, to be sure.

A degree of commitment to supra-national order is inevitable once there are enduring international relations and institutions. One could easily imagine that the diplomatic corps of the absolutist monarchs of early modern Europe felt a kind of comradely solidarity with one another regarding the peaceful relations they sought to construct and, even more, felt they had a broader and more insightful view of the demands of keeping the peace than those whose viewpoint was constrained by their narrow, national perspective. And they would certainly have been right, to some extent. The same is undoubtedly true of those scientists and scholars who forge international connections within a “republic of letters,” a tenuous construct continually under threat from the irrational passions of national publics and politicians. Businesses and corporations that do business in China, India, Ghana and Chile must take an interest in the internal politics within those sometimes unstable polities; and, insofar as these businesses and corporations are fortunate enough to originate in countries powerful enough to take an interest as well, they will endeavor to ensure that that is the case. It is easy to see why the President and Congress of the United States might take a greater interest in the domestic stability of some faraway country than in the suffering of some relatively marginal domestic constituency. And it is also easy to see how easily they will convince themselves that this set of priorities will ultimately benefit those domestic constituencies as well. And sometimes, according to some measures, they will be right.

Just as any nation has a kind of “core,” a particular group or set of groups with which the national impetus originated and which still holds most tightly to strictly national loyalties and values, any nation will have a kind of “epidermis,” an outer layer mediating its relations to the rest of the world. In a nationalist order, this outer layer is rooted in the nation through the perpetual competition among the most talented of the nation to enter the intellectual and political elites, and through the national pride invested in the triumphs of those elites on the global stage. The globalized outer layer of the nation will certainly have attenuated loyalties compared to the core, but something else seems necessary for a genuine global elite, at odds with the nation, to emerge. That something else is imperial responsibility for a global order, which the US undertook following World War II. A kind of national pride can be sustained in such imperial projects insofar as the imperial reach seems necessary to combat some clearly dangerous foe, such as the USSR, derives from military victories over despised enemies, or provides new outlets for domestic energies and constituencies. In the case of the Cold War, which itself resulted from American inheritance of a world broken by two world wars, symmetrical rivalry silenced questions regarding what was essentially US governance of Western Europe and much of East Asia. Nor is there any point to condemning imperialism as such—in any case, the question would have to be whether there was a better viable alternative to imperial rule.

Once the Soviet Union fell, though, the imperial architecture became pointless. The U.S. should really have dissolved NATO, withdrawn all troops from Europe and Southeast Asia, and renormalized itself as a nation. But what national leadership could possibly give up all that power and influence, especially given all the private interests invested in the global U.S. protectorate, and the linking of the U.S. economy to the advantages accruing to the role of the dollar as global currency? Only a crisis could precipitate such a change of course. In the meantime, profits for US multinationals, cheap goods for U.S. consumers, and cheap labor for domestic American employers are intertwined with the gradual liberalization of China and maintaining the stability of Mexico as purposes of U.S. policy. The crisis of the world today is the crisis of the informal U.S. empire, whose fall would have devastating, if also liberating, but above all incalculable effects throughout the world. If we want to grasp the terror of U.S. elites at the rise of Donald Trump, it may very well lie in the possibility that he will bring this crisis to a head, and make clear what has already been the case for some time: that the global elites organized under the increasingly pathetic leadership of the U.S. has completely lost control of developments.

Those who subvert the nation from above will do it from below, as well. There are good reasons, beyond a fear of bad publicity, why most major corporations participate vigorously in victimary politics. It’s easy to think of victimary politics in very local terms, but ultimately victimary politics is, in Carl Schmitt’s terms, “planetary”: international human rights, rules for a global social justice convergence, demolish democracy, privacy, property and all forms of local autonomy. Failure to convincingly repudiate your whiteness makes you an enemy of humanity, anytime, anywhere: the very model of the unprotected class, or what Agamben calls homo sacer, upon whom it is always open season. It is a levying of the mob for imperial ends, and a very effective way of creating a terrorized, and therefore pliable, workforce. Even more than the rapidly accumulating economic and safety regulations, “anti-discrimination” (i.e., victimary) rules make it extremely difficult for small businesses and individual contractors to survive on the market: a single lawsuit can destroy years of work. All this means that anti-victimary and anti-imperial politics are one and the same now.

The Journal of American Greatness, an online journal dedicated to developing the parameters of what we might call a kind of ideal Trumpism, capable of surviving Trump’s candidacy, has drawn upon James Burnham’s notion of the “managerial class” in order to account for specifically globalized interests. The managerial class would coincide with what, drawing upon the blogger “Archdruid,” I called the “salaried” class in an earlier post. Of course, the global ruling class would draw primarily upon the upper layers of the salaried, but making the point that global power derives from knowledge and expertise, in navigating the terms of global power if nothing else, makes the question an especially difficult one (as the writers at JAG are aware). Such power can’t simply be seized like land or other “means of production.” The only way to break up the global managerial class and repatriate its various national sections would be to break up the empire. So, how to do that?

Well, first of all direct opposition at all the international organizations—fire away indiscriminately at NATO, the UN, the EU, SEATO, the World Bank, the IMF, plus a half a dozen others that must be out there that I know nothing about. Oppose, unconditionally, all trade agreements, which are nothing more than a slicing up of the world for the benefits of the corporations. It would be better to just have tariffs tied directly to the tariffs other countries set for us. Start with 10% tariffs for all, and if a country sets a 15% tariff for us, raise it for them; if a country sets its tariff at 5%, lower it. At least everything will be transparent that way, which at this point is more important than efficiencies (not that I concede that the current approach maximizes efficiencies). If all these institutions and arrangements are abolished, tens of thousands of ruling class managers will have no choice but to find some gainful employment in their home countries. Oppose all military interventions that don’t explicitly have victory (i.e., surrender of the enemy, along with reparations for any injuries suffered in whatever violation led us to go to war in the first place—and if we can’t clearly state such an injury, perhaps we shouldn’t be at war) as its one and only goal. Start developing a discourse of resistance and disobedience to all interpretations of anti-discrimination law aside from the most commonsensical (i.e., I’m not hiring you because you’re black, give me oral sex for a promotion, etc.). Point out that these, by now insane, laws serve no purpose but to divide us a hundred different ways.

The truest resistance, though, is “spiritual,” or self-disciplining—or, to put it in grammatical terms, imperative, located in the sphere of habits. To be a true American (or Canadian, or Brit, etc.) to demonstrate what it means to be an American (or…) in the workplace, in family life, in addressing friends and enemies in the world, and so on. To embody and project national honor, in short. Both the Tea Party and Trump supporters have exhibited such a sense of honor, however limitedly (in different ways, for different reasons, in each case). Maybe that smarmy piety, “who we are,” can be retrieved: we are slow to start wars, but quick to finish them; we treat all nations fairly, exactly as they treat us; we look out for common interests and enterprises, but for ourselves and each other first of all; the more you respect our borders and sovereignty, the more welcome you will be. Etc. For Americans this will really be “nation building,” as it has been a long time since we have just been a nation among others, with our own borders, our own currency, our own classes, our own universities, and so on—not to serve the world, not to convert the world, just to co-exist with them like everyone else.

It might be helpful to keep in mind that the empire is collapsing anyway—US reliability was already questionable, going back to Vietnam, but Obama’s presidency has thoroughly demolished it. Simply ask yourself: as a leader of another country, would you trust any commitments made by the leaders of a nation capable of electing and re-electing Barack Obama? I can’t believe many will answer yes (and those who would answer yes may be too stupid or irresponsible to make agreements with).

A final word. The end of empire would mean the end of political universalism. Universalism is really the imagining of the world under a single empire—not necessarily under the rule of a single individual or institution (but maybe that as well), but certainly all subject to the same regime of rights and their enforcement. To contend for universalism is to make war on the particulars—that is, everyone less universal than you take yourself to be. There can be no value or, as I would prefer, imperative, that can be equally urgent, legitimate and viable for all people at the same time. To be a universalist is simply to insist that others determine urgency, legitimacy and viability as you have. Instead of the tiresome debate over “universalism vs. particularism” we could speak of various degrees and modalities of civilization. We could speak more simply about what makes any social order a model others might emulate or from which others might recoil. The civilizing forces within an order are those who defend those shared habits worthy of emulation, or constructed out of emulation of another order, and look for new habits worthy of emulation; at the same time, those civilizing forces will look suspiciously and even hostilely at those orders containing little or nothing worthy of emulation—nothing we would have to elevate ourselves in order to adopt. All of these judgments are, of course, debatable, and a civilized order is one in which they are freely debated and acted upon.

Are there differences between human groups? A moment’s reflection leads to the conclusion that the question can never be definitively answered in the negative: even if contemporary research showed there to be no differences (assuming it could really show that if we kept adding—so to speak—more decimals), we couldn’t exclude the possibility that some differences would be uncovered by future research. The same is true if we add “genetic” or “biological” to the sentence, to modify “differences,” as it will never be possible to show that whatever differences we do find, and however many cultural and historical causes we can supply for them, there is absolutely nothing irreducible to those causes and that must therefore be deemed of biological or genetic origin. The intrinsic openness of the question confronts us with a choice: either insist that no one inquire into such differences, or that no one discuss or draw conclusions from them if some are imprudent enough to inquire, on the one hand; or, find ways to incorporate the findings into our ongoing social dialogues. For about 70 years we in the West have chosen the first option, for understandable social and ethical reasons, but ultimately at great cognitive cost. And even the social and ethical reasons have been exhausted: if the purpose of suppressing discussions of human bio-diversity (from now on HBD, as one now finds it in the blogosphere) is to prevent genocidal designs of some people on others, we can now see that the conflicts engendered by the need to suppress discussions of HBD might have equally explosive outcomes—outcomes which, at this point, are far more real than the merely speculative ones imagined on the Nazi model.

Of course, a more mundane purpose for suppressing HBD inquires (and open discussions thereof) is to smooth out the daily interactions in a diverse social order. In so many cases we need to treat each other in terms of our behavior in specific settings, making the necessary generous assumptions, and coming to social interactions filled with awareness of differences regarding average IQ scores, or propensity to violence, or disinclination to control appetitive or sexual desires, or paranoid fear of persecution, or any number of things we are likely to discover about one group or another, can only make such disinterested openness to the other more difficult. It would certainly be unpleasant to work and socialize with people who you know think that the ethnic, religious, or racial group they take you to belong to represents a net minus in terms of their social utility, even if they treat you with perfect civility. But is it really better to imagine that others are approaching you with all kinds of invidious assumptions but are simply afraid to state them? If inquiries into HBD continue and expand, and the results become more broadly known, but prohibitions on public discussions of these results remain in place, that will surely be the situation we face. The pressure will build either to have the discussions, or to suppress even the inquiries. If we are to live with each other, eventually we will have to do so with the growing knowledge of all that we are.

Maybe we will find that the differences between social groups are not great—much less, maybe, than differences within groups. Maybe we will find that most of the differences are cultural and historical, and hence can be eliminated (although that “hence” may be a leap of faith), rather than biological and permanent. Maybe we will find that the differences are not very significant, entail no real conflicts of interest, and pose no real obstacle to living together as citizens within a modern state. But we can’t count on any of this, and for the reason I gave above, we could never simply arrive at such conclusions once and for all. We will, eventually, need to find some way of speaking openly about HBD, wherever such discussions lead. Whether we can have such discussions without tearing apart the fabric of civil society will be a test of our moral, ethical and cognitive maturity.

The most important sign of such maturity would be an ability to think probabilistically. If we are frank, we will admit that the real reason for the prohibition on “generalizations” regarding groups is that we assume (not without reason!) that most people are too stupid to refrain from applying generalizations directly to each individual. Real probability theory is advanced mathematics, beyond most of our comprehension, and it’s mathematics, so not directly translatable into language or ethics. But we all work continually with tacit algorithms that do probability calculations in real time in everyday situations: it is practice in this that needs to be encouraged, and the best practice is non-acrimonious discussions of various probabilities. No one is always and everywhere afraid of all members of a particular group; or finds it necessary to mistrust every member of a particular group; or excludes a priori a particular group from everything. One fears, mistrusts and excludes, more or less justifiably, under specific conditions. More obvious markers, like those of race, matter, but so do dress, manner of speech, time of day, etc. If we are not to destroy each other, we must be capable of exploring these boundaries, where due to reasonable causes fear and mistrust spike, openly. The discussions will not always be pleasant, but it’s worth keeping in mind that if we don’t know the proportion played by culture and individual discipline in determining habits, we can at least be sure that it’s more than zero, and so efforts to transform oneself and reassure others are not necessarily in vain.

The real problem with racialized thinking is that it is intrinsically totalitarian—Hannah Arendt was right, in this regard, about the parallel between “race” and “class” as governing concepts of political order. Just as the Bolshevik must always distinguish between the true revolutionary and those who are in some way compromised by or implicated in the class enemy, so the racialist must always find a distinction between the more and less racially pure, and seek to expel or destroy the latter. If we take “white” as a racial category, we will find those who are more and those who are less white—with no real way of settling the question other than war. But this very fact makes HBD more worth engaging—the answer to invidious distinctions along race lines is to introduce another search term, to generate a new “sample” to measure against a new “whole.” White vs. black IQ—alright, that’s interesting; what about French vs. Russian? Spanish vs. Lithuanian? English vs. Welsh? No field of inquiry can be restricted to the most immediate and hotly contested political issues. Is IQ the only issue worth inquiring into? Or body size and shape? What is measurable and what is not? What differences between the relative contributions of genes and environment will we find in the various fields of human endeavor? Of course, none of this means that certain prevalent distinctions (like white/black) won’t have a rough accuracy to them, or be more salient to more people in more situations—the point is how to incorporate these distinctions into social dialogue once their mention can no longer be punished.

Charles Sanders Peirce considered genuine knowledge the knowledge of the relation between proportions within a sample and proportions within the whole. He took the simple example of a bucket filled with white balls and black balls. Let’s say I take 10 balls out of the bucket. There are 7 white and 3 black. The proportion in the bucket as a whole is either different or the same (probably at least slightly different). How can I tell? (Let’s say the bucket has too many balls in it to simply count them all.) I keep taking more samples and I start averaging them out. I start considering factors that might bias the samples, and compensate for them (perhaps, for reasons I don’t or can’t know, the black balls tend to cluster to one side of the bucket). Things are obviously far more complex in social matters: there can always be different ways of identifying a “whole” and different ways of selecting “samples.” We could say that all of our arguments are about what we consider relevant sample/whole relations—in which case, it would be good if they were more explicitly about this. When we present ourselves to each other, we always present ourselves as a “sample” of some implicit whole to be construed by other participants on the scene. Several samples, of several (overlapping) wholes, in fact. The way to counter stereotyping (the insistence that samples are identical in their proportions to the whole) is to be a sample that differentiates itself in some way from expectations of the whole. In this way, HBD inquiries become more productive than frightening.

The sample/whole relation translates into the rhetorical trope of synecdoche: taking a part for the whole. This is actually the normal mode of human engagement, where we take a particular statement, gesture, or aspect of the person’s appearance as a proxy for the person as a whole, at least for the purposes of that engagement. If the engagement or person is important enough, we keep selecting different proxies until we imaginatively reconstruct a more complex, fairer “profile” of that individual. What we always do tacitly we may have to do more explicitly, insofar as HBD inquiry will increasingly become central to anthropological understandings—and, as I have argued, that development is the only alternative to the perpetual cultural terrorism of the SJWs. What it means in practical terms is people moving past what I think is the default modern desire to be judged “as an individual,” to an awareness that, in ways we like and in ways we don’t, we are each of us an assemblage of “samplings,” which we manipulate within limits. (It might be that leftist identity politics has helped paved the way towards this mode of social being.) The pervasiveness of social media, which label us and force us to label ourselves in myriad ways and, of course, is central to the emergent algorithmic culture, will probably make such self-understandings matter of fact. Making us all conscious participants in and subjects of the ongoing HBD inquiries that will comprise any post-victimary social order. If we’re going to have biopolitics, it might as well be explicit and informed biopolitics.