GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

One thing that all the American nationalists I have come across recently have in common is their insistence on non-intervention abroad. The nationalists can often sound like leftists in their denunciations of American “imperialism” and “nation building,” with the crusading neo-conservative coming in for special scorn. It is, of course, logical and Kantian that, if your fundamental political commitment is to national sovereignty, coherence and defense, you would respect with regard to others what you demand for yourself. Since nationalism is intrinsically rivalrous, though, anti-interventionism is also an illusion, one that can be indulged in by the politically marginalized, but will be abandoned quickly if the nationalists ever wield significant political power. This illusion is similar to the fantasy of an ethnically homogeneous nation, and both illusions share the same roots. To say that a political imaginary has illusions is not to discredit it—it is almost the same thing as calling it a “political imaginary,” which any political order must have. The more paradoxical and generative the illusions, the more interesting and “informative” the political order—the durability of that order, though, does depend upon managing, limiting and channeling those illusions.

To be a nationalist is to define your nation in comparison to and competition with other nations. It is to assume that there are more and less successful nations. It follows that the less successful nations will emulate and resent the more successful. This introduces divisions into the less successful nations between those who would like to transform the indigenous culture so as to approximate more closely the successful nation, and those who define national identity in terms of some resentful distinction from the more successful nation (success and failure are redefined). It also introduces a division in the more successful nation between those who would like to cultivate patronage relations and alliances with the less successful nation and those who see the less successful nation’s resentments as harbingers of future hostility, and counsel distance and preparedness. This dialectic inevitably takes on geographic and demographic forms. The emulative members of the LSN will often take up residence in the MSN, and the welcoming members of the MSN will promote such a development; patronizing members of the MSN will move to the LSN, taking advantage of whatever advantages have made them more successful. And even the more resentful members of the LSN will feel compelled to move to the MSN to have access to economic, educational and other opportunities which members of the MSN who no longer wish to carry out less desirable functions will consent to yield to the LSN immigrants.

Moreover, since nations never coincide with ethnic distinctions (which are themselves inherently vague and characterized by minute gradations across territories), national boundaries are always imperfect, with people who identify more with one nation being “trapped” within the boundaries of another nation. A nation is a union of tribes, almost invariably created through an alliance against some imperial or monarchical order—the tribes within the union will be connected to tribes that fall out of it through familial, linguistic and other ties, and these connections will be maintained across borders. (This leaves aside ethnically similar demographics that nevertheless identify with transnational faiths or institutions, such as English or German Catholics, or Jews, who pose similar problems—and it’s very common for the religious divisions to overlap geographic and ethnic ones.) Both MSN and LSN nations will have an interest in leveraging such fuzzy loyalties, which will entangle conflicts within and between the nations. MSN will usually, but not always, prevail in such conflicts, which will redraw boundaries (national honor cannot allow a victory to go without spoils) and lay the groundwork for future conflicts. Nor is this dynamic restricted to neighboring nations. If a MSN with, say, a developed market and a network of merchants and bankers, is allowed or invited (or even if a few enterprising individuals insinuate themselves through force and fraud) into a more distant LSN for the sake of exploiting or elevating the condition of its people (or even the elite portion of that people), those colonists are potential hostages who must be protected in the name of national reputation. The MSN must be willing to use force, which may very well involve long-term occupation of the LSN, or some part of it, or the establishment of “puppet” governments dependent on the MSN. And, finally, more than one MSN might have such interests in LSNs, generating new conflicts between the MSNs (some of whom must be at least marginally more successful than the others, bringing that entire dynamic into play). For the MSNs to behave otherwise would be to allow the LSMs to chip away at their own borders and counter their own advantages through alliances and subversions of their own.

This last point alludes to the obvious question of what makes a nation more successful—and the equally obvious answer, as libertarian theorist Hans Hermann-Hoppe argues, is the nation that allows for more of a free market within the territory it controls, which generally means the more civilized nation. To add yet another paradox into the mix, as Hermann-Hoppe also argues, this means that the nations with the freest economies will also be the most aggressive conquering nations, not only because their wealth translates into military and political power but also because they will be the nations that cultivate the most wide reaching and entrenched interests in foreign countries, as they will be best able to exploit such interests to enrich and empower itself. As the conquering liberal nation comes to bring more and more nations within its direct and indirect sway, it also produces the most cosmopolitan tendencies, becomes the most open to external influences and movement of peoples, and that much less of a nation: generating a new kind of resentment, that of those who once ruled the world but are now being subsumed in and overwhelmed by it.

All this has been essentially an abstract account of modern European history p until the 20th century, the only history of nations (tribes transcended by their unity and new differentiation into classes) in interaction with each other in the history of the world. It’s easy to see how this dialectic led to the catastrophic “thirty years war” of the 20th century West, and any defense of nationalism today would be advised to offer a credible explanation of why this need not be the inevitable outcome of a world of nations. (Or, more pessimistically, why even this possibility is preferable to the anti-nationalist alternatives.)

Despite the contempt heaped upon the more liberal notion of America as a “proposition nation” by American nationalists, sooner or later any nationalism will settle into some kind of propositional form: the nation has to be “about” something. That something need not be some principle abstracted from (and therefore imposed upon) the people, and that is where critics of American “propositionality” are right. The notion of America as a proposition nation derives from Lincoln, in particular his Gettysburg Address, and it is both justified and historically accurate to trace the proposition, “all men are created equal,” to which Lincoln declared the American founding to be “dedicated,” to an older understanding of “British liberties,” embedded in the traditions of people of British stock—and, therefore, to question whether peoples of other stocks can easily conform to those principles. This debate takes us to the heart of the American Civil War—the Southern partisans claimed that by “all men,” the founders really meant “white men,” and there may be something to that, but they did write “all men” rather than “white men” for reasons that are not too hard to imagine. The meaning of propositions cannot be controlled by the contingent intentions of those who assert them—they always transcend the conditions of their utterance because the effectivity of their utterance depends upon them opening up a horizon beyond the immediately local. To refer to my previous post, it is still incumbent upon the guardians of the national proposition to operationalize the sincerity conditions of iterations of that proposition: the national proposition must set conditions for that convergence of rivalries within the nation with rivalries between nations that I have proposed as the definition of nationalism. The exemplars of “British liberties” are not required to universalize those liberties so that they map onto the already existing dispositions of new entrants onto the national stage; rather, those new entrants are obliged to adopt and adapt to those British liberties so as to prove that they are not exclusively “British.” (Nearly explicit in Lincoln’s formulation is that the proposition is a hypothesis that might be falsified.)

In a world of nationalisms, there are no guarantees. There are no guarantees in any world, but at least in a world of nationalisms, defined by its constantly shifting rivalries, this would be explicit. Even the horror of nuclear war between the world’s leading nations and, by now, even some of its second-rank nations, provides no assurance that national rivalries won’t lead us to a brink that some miscalculation or arrogant short-sightedness could tip us over. It may be the best that we can hope for is, first, the shrinking gap between first, second, and third rank powers will prevent the kind of concentration of power into stable imperialist blocs that could focus all attention on each other; and second, a renewed recognition of the fragility of civilization, now threatened by a world wide jihad against paralyzed rich nations, will make common interests among the civilized nations outweigh their rivalries—or, better yet, that their rivalries will get channeled into competitions over the defense of civilization, internally and externally. The countries that can best leverage, while making national membership condition of this possibility, their ethnic, religious and cultural minorities and the international interventions (and consequent alliances) they are drawn into will succeed and the set the model for others.

The post-nationalist political imaginary models a nationalist world unrestrained by international institutions on the originary scene: as all-encompassing imminently violent rivalry just waiting for someone to pull the first trigger. Certainly the configuration of individual nations in competition over resources, power and prestige fits the model. Ultimately the Nazi genocide of the Jews exemplifies this model, as a world war of competing nationalisms ends up targeting the minority (the paradoxical nation, dispersed and extra-territorial) that never managed to fit, unproblematically, into any of them. That’s why even the most normal nationalism—say, the Hungarians’ refusal to allow more than a very small number of “Syrian” refugees—triggers a quasi-allergic response from the transnational progressives. But it may be that precisely the more prickly nationalism, which responds in kind to every insult or injury, that will keep the peace, rather than attempts to defer these conflicts to international mediation that will be satisfactory to the extent that it was unnecessary in the first place. The Mexican government provides aid and advice to its citizens trying to stay in the US illegally—that’s no causus belli, but there are plenty of ways of retaliating far short of war. Such tit for tat exchanges may seem childish, and in a sense they are—but they are also the most important way in which we continue to learn from social interactions throughout our lives. It may be that the cause of WWI and hence the profound crisis of European civilization in which we still find ourselves was less unchecked nationalism and more the pervasive fantasy of endless enlightenment and progress so ascendant in Europe at the turn of the century—if you imagine that universal comity is transcending all rivalries, you would not find any reason to engage those rivalries, to test the relative strengths and weakness, real and imagined, of the respective parties. And then you will be shocked and disillusioned to discover that mimeticism has not yet disappeared from the planet.

I would recommend watching, if you haven’t already, the video referenced and linked to in this report from Breitbart News: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/11/watch-anti-migrant-video-going-viral-across-europe/. The Breitbart writer’s unease with the antisemitism that emerges at a couple of crucial points in this very powerful video marks a split between the philo-semitic and antisemitic factions within the global right that is sure to intensify in coming years. While among the villains of the piece are European elites making the demographic argument for increased immigration that Mark Steyn has been harping on for more than a decade, it’s not clear that the nationalists have an answer to that inescapable question. If your nation stops having babies, the suicide is not exactly “enforced”—even if it can be dramatically accelerated through force and fraud. The real test of a reinvigorated nationalism is whether it generates a new baby boom. Faith provides a compelling reason for procreation, but we don’t know if the kind of immortality offered by the nation still does so. Only a very profound, multilayered revolution will enable one to answer that question confidently in the affirmative. At least the requirements of that revolution converge with those of the anti-victimocratic revolution that is its precondition, insofar as having more than the replacement level number of offspring is a way of engaging in inter-familial, inter-regional, and international rivalry—so, it can all be rolled up into one ball.

As I survey the field of thinkers and doers determined not just to complain about “political correctness” but to undertake to destroy it (most exemplarily, Vox Day of SJWs Always Lie) I notice one weakness in their analysis that some of us familiar with academic developments over the past half-century are well equipped to remedy. SJWs lie, they double down, they project; any apology they manage to extract will be pocketed as a confession and used to pursue further prosecutorial actions; they exploit vague “codes of conduct” and appeal to “amenable authorities” to find weak links in the organization; and they have absolutely no concern for the genuine goals of whatever project they infiltrate—indeed, as Vox Day could say, but I don’t think he does, people with genuine “projects” are the favored targets of the SJW because the enemy of the SJW is someone concerned with achievement, success, participating in civilization, and who is therefore indifferent to margins of perceived inequality. All true! All this addresses the SJWs as an enemy in an ongoing civil war (a “cold” civil war, so far), and therefore focuses on weapons, tactics, strategies, weaknesses and vulnerabilities, etc. As befits a fighter.

But Vox Day doesn’t seem particularly interested in the question of why all this works, and it does need to be explained—we don’t need an explanation for why saturation bombing and an invasion of hundreds of thousands of troops breaks the enemy’s will and leads to surrender; we do need an explanation for why everyone in a corporation cowers when a charge of “racism” or “sexism” is levied. (Of course, part of the explanation is simply that the government can exact a very heavy price for such transgressions, but not only does this just push the question back to another level [why do we comply with government rules that no one ever voted for?], it is far from always the case that complaints which are anxiously addressed rise to the threshold of legal action—the anxiety is more free floating than that.) We can pursue these questions through new theories of warfare (e.g., William Lind’s “4th Generation Warfare), which very much interests the SJW slayers, but it seems to me there’s not much there there. Why do guerilla warfare and terrorism work? We require the same kind of explanation for a kind of social and political paralysis in the face of very asymmetrical means for that as for the everyday pastimes of the domestic SJW. Of course, our own understanding of White Guilt and victimary thinking offer an explanation well beyond anything the anti-SJW camp has to offer, but it is ultimately a contemplative view of things, a description which, for reasons I hope to explain here, is not likely to interest those committed to the principle of SJWs delenda est, and for good reasons. Think tanks will not sink the SJWs. Anyway, even on the terms of a “declarative,” objective, social sciency account, references to feelings like guilt and fear tend to be like theories of soporific qualities causing sleep.

However we explain it, the source of the power of victimary politics is the assimilation, by now tacitly by most participants, of a post-structuralist understanding of language. Judith Butler tied together Derridean and Foucauldian threads from French theory with the speech act theory of Austin and Searles to provide an effective way of acting on the principle that all language is performative. All saying is a kind of doing. Whoever practices language according to this assumption will have incalculable advantages over people still adhering to what are ultimately metaphysical understandings of a detached, disinterested, objective analysis, to be presented, refined and disputed at leisure. You think you’re putting together an interesting, plausible theory that can withstand and benefit from the most rigorous scrutiny and reward the most sustained study—they see that you are building fences, prescribing behaviors, disciplining and organizing masses of people, and will act on that perception. And they can do so because they are not wrong, as adherents to the originary hypothesis should be the first to recognize: putting forth an “idea” is sustaining or undermining institutional arrangements, and establishing protocols for inclusion and exclusion regarding those arrangements.

The originary hypothesis shares with post-structuralism and speech act theory the same basic post-metaphysical premise: the purpose of language is not to communicate true statements, it is to make things happen. If we ask, to make what happen, we all depart from each other, as post-structuralism has an implicit answer (to subvert the violence of reducing language to true statements) and speech act theory, being more purely descriptive and classificatory, has none, while, of course, GA has a crystal clear one: to defer violence. The power of post-structuralist subversion lies in the antinomy it embraces: it assumes both the “declarative” or “constative” world in which claims about equality reside, and the potential of perpetually undermining that world both to redress its hypocrisies to be liberated from its responsibilities. Any time an order and therefore any mode of reciprocity is established, it is possible to expose that order as exclusionary—some practices or qualities will not fall with the sphere of prescribed reciprocities. You can thereby implicate everyone who has bought into that mode of reciprocity. There is a kind of shell game going on—you distract people’s attention away from the purpose of that reciprocity to the rules constituting it. But part of a civilized order is the capacity to reflect on rules, which is often necessary (especially once institutions evolve beyond face to face encounters), but which can only be done within the shared good faith (which also means shared purpose) of all involved (the attempt to establish meta-rules to settle disputes over how to apply the rules leads to infinite regress). There really is no statement that you can make that will be even minimally immune from such subversions. To put simply, saying that a putatively neutral and innocent claim is exclusionary is something even the most dull-witted can do at will—it’s like using a coloring book. And, stating that police acted reasonably in using force to break up a fight that could have devolved into a riot is, indeed, doing something—defending civilized norms against enemies. But the SJWs are closer to the truth when they say that statement is an act of violence than you are when you say it’s “just my opinion.” But openly defending civilized norms is a slippery slope—do it once, and you draw the enemies of civilization like flypaper, and will never be able to stop doing it.

You have to play on the same field as your enemies—if they transform the field, you either have to learn how to play on that field or to transform in some other way. The victimocracy creates a performative field, and I think they can ultimately be made much more conflicted about this than the SJW slayers. The power of the originary hypothesis to help us think this problem through has not been explored at all. To say that all language is performative, is to say that all language creates reality. Austin’s example of the wedding vow is still the simplest one to work with: when the couple says “I do [take this man/woman to be my lawfully wedded wife/husband]” they are not standing outside of their actions, describing them—they are transforming their condition. Of course, ritualistic settings are the most obvious examples of this use of language, but there’s nothing to prevent us from saying that even the most neutral, inoffensive, trivial claim about reality transforms those speaking with each other into participants upon a formalized scene, bound by a promise to continue speaking and acting in ways entailed by the observation in question. In our casual conversations we are also setting and re-setting an order and a mode of reciprocity—and we can therefore always point out that someone else is doing the same, and that the two orders may be incommensurable.

The vulnerability of the SJWs derives from their strength: their shell games depend upon others’ commitment to a declarative order to which they themselves remain uncommitted. But a crucial condition of a performative utterance is what Searle calls “sincerity conditions”—“I do” only effects the transformation it purports to if it is uttered sincerely, which is a very tricky concept but can be operationalized in all kinds of ways (we don’t need to read the groom’s mind to know that, if he already has a wife, he is not uttering the vow sincerely). The SJWs can always be targeted for their failure to meet sincerity conditions. They must fail to meet those conditions for the same reason they must always lie: they enter an organization for the purpose of subordinating its operations to the imperatives of “social justice,” but they can never admit this outright to those members of the organization who are sincerely devoted to its mission. Entering any organization is a performative gesture: you promise to adhere to its norms and support its purpose. So, yes, such a promise is an exclusionary gesture: it excludes everyone indifferent or hostile to its purposes. Every intervention by the SJWs can be targeted on these grounds: Black Lives Matter is transparently uninterested in making police work better; sexual harassment law is interested in generating conflicts at work, not amity; those fear-mongering about a “rape culture” on college campuses have no interest in making women safer or improving the relations between men and women on campuses (much less advancing the academic mission of the university). Just ask them! They won’t be able to give you a coherent account of what needs to be improved, much less how to improve it—to the extent that they have a coherent account, it will be a completely and obviously false one. They see their opportunities and they take ‘em. (And, indeed, they will be driven to undermine the kind of disciplinary space required for an assessment of truth claims—it is helpful to remember that truth claims are never just free floating statements that aim at garnering universal agreement and can be meaningfully confirmed or refuted in a vacuum by “reasonable” people, but resolve themselves into ostensive gestures that can only be assessed on a scene that is performatively constituted.)

A performative approach to the SJWs wars requires a transformation in those who, up until now, have mostly laid back and allowed themselves to be waylaid by the SJWs. Once they have a hook in, they can still be fought, but it’s much more difficult, and one must have certain advantages going in. Institutions and organizations must be immunized against them. Those who would protect their institutions from the SJWs must be performative themselves—they must make the promises and the sincerity conditions entailed in those promises constitutive of the institution explicit from the start, and they must embed them in daily routines and interactions. Even more, they must pounce on insincerities immediately, and use them to make the claims and acts they guarantee infelicitous. Of course, today this might put one in opposition to federal law in all kinds of ways—which means that an expanded mode of performativity, some combination of changing, weakening, blurring, evading, delaying, undermining and defying the laws must be part of such a strategy. There is no neutral ground—nothing simply is—the law is just one more means to be used in the struggle for civilization. In this way, one is ultimately restoring the law itself to its true purpose of facilitating voluntary agreements and exchanges. A call for the return of sincerity conditions, in some suitable translation, should be a winning slogan. The theory of language becomes a theory of war.

There are statistical disparities between groups in all areas of life: educational accomplishment, mental aptitudes, physical ability, and so on. We are now capable of measuring these disparities in ever more nuanced ways, holding constant whatever variables we wish to isolate particular causal relationships. We couldn’t stop getting better at this if we wanted to, and we can’t stop talking about if for no other reason than that such disparities are proof, for the victimocracy, of the oppressions whose exposure and remediation justify its own existence. Such talk makes normal people very nervous, because we all thought we were done with it, and had all agreed to pretend to believe in a kind of blank slate equality, under the assumption that such a belief was a precondition of the legal and political equality upon which our civilization is predicated. But victimary thinking has shattered that pretension and, now, if you don’t want to accept that the disproportionate number of black men in prison can only be a sign of white supremacy, that the lower number of women in the sciences can only be a sign of patriarchy, and so on, you will have to treat statistical disparities as providing us with information about the capabilities and propensities of the groups involved rather than about the oppression or exclusion they suffer. There is no third way (even to say “it’s a little of both” breaks up the victimocracy’s ethico-epistemological cartel, because the precise proportions are then, unbearably, open for discussion). This is a very difficult way. Perhaps too difficult. In theory, exploding assumptions about natural equality (whether we see inequalities as natural, or cultural or historical, makes some difference, but not much in the short or, probably, medium, run—even if we could, say, trace some “disabling” features of femininity back to “patriarchy,” it is now free women who enact those features) need not undermine presumptions of legal and political equality, or meritocratic principles more generally. In practice, it is likely to do so, as just about everyone likes to have proxies for the traits they desire in an employee, student, friend, partner, etc. (That’s why we’re interested in probability in the first place.) But how theory and practice are mediated will depend solely on how we learn to speak about such things in the only way that we now can, if we are to resist (and put, to quote Lincoln, on the path of eventual abolition) the victimocracy.

Of course, to conform to statistical reality is to entrench and intensify it. More men will see women as alien to science, more whites will see blacks as criminals, and then fewer women may attempt scientific careers and more blacks alienated from society drawn to crime. The only effective counter-statistical measure, though, is discipline—the interest in an enterprise that depends open being open to improbabilities, to the idea or individual no one else expects much from. Such a discipline involves training oneself, while acknowledging broad statistical trends, to see minor counter-trends—perhaps some stereotypically “feminine” characteristic that provides a unique way into the sciences. There will always be sufficient limits to our understanding of human capabilities and their distribution to justify the energy expended in the detection of such counter-trends, which can perhaps serve as a proxy for a kind of hope.

I suppose I assumed that it goes without saying, but in discussing groups it should be remembered that every group has a more or less mythicized founding event, involving a “nomos,” in Carl Schmitt’s terms: an originary division of a property cleared away for the “settlement” of the group. This “property” can be, and has been for most of history, land, but can take on other organizational and institutional forms (activist groups “own” a particular constituency and will battle other groups for it). There will always be land, though, so such groups must be considered the most fundamental—other groups exist at the sufferance of the group that “owns” (through some mutual defense covenant) the land. Attempts to reaffirm the group’s identity are always restorations of the imagined nomos, including a defense of territorial boundaries and form of internal allotment—and such attempts presuppose some disorder in the nomos, which will most likely be attributed to some betrayal on the part of some portion of the community (which presumably has misused its allotment, or manipulated the rules of allotment). Members of groups must imagine themselves in their groups in these terms, whatever violence to reality must be done—but we need not assume that the imagined allotment always does violence to reality, anymore than we assume that such violence is done by the originary hypothesis itself.

An exchange I have been having with someone very familiar with GA regarding issues of antisemitism, victimary thinking, etc., raised the question of how we account for group belonging in terms of the originary hypothesis. Are Jews a group, or just a phantasm in the anti-Semites imagination? If they are a group, how so—do they act together in some meaningful way, participate in shared institutions or practices, have common characteristics or interests? The same, of course, applies to any group—what makes a nation a nation, an ethnicity and ethnicity—religions at least have shared belief systems and rituals (not that there aren’t plenty of difficulties here as well)?

The answer is, I think, simple, while requiring subtle gradations in actual analyses. Groups are bound together by honor systems, more or less tightly. If you are Irish, and you take pride in the accomplishments of your “fellow” Irish, are ashamed by their misdeeds, feel compelled to defend them against accusations, are concerned with how their actions reflect on you, then you are a member of the genus “Irish.” Of course, these compulsions can be felt more or less strongly, depending on how dependent you are on the group for protection (or how much you fear its reprisal for perceived betrayal). To put it in more fundamental terms, you are a member of a group to the extent that you participate in the redemption of its hostages—both literal hostages, in the sense of coming to the aid of threatened members, and figuratively, in the sense of trying to lower the threshold of what will count as an “attack” in the first place—and are a potential hostage yourself.

What this means is that “groupness” is intrinsically barbaric—there is nothing “modern” or “enlightened” in the defining element of group belonging. Which is why the most modern and enlightened among us tend to despise or deny the reality of groups. The whole point of a “culture of dignity” (to refer to the analysis by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning I have been using in recent posts) is to make it possible to treat individuals outside of groups, i.e., as other than hostages. A culture of dignity creates the optical illusion that individuals can exist outside of groups because it develops (political and economic) mechanisms for isolating individual actions against a background from which group entanglements have been erased, but this is only possible because we are all now part of a new type of group in which we find honor in protecting all individuals from being taken hostage, and by a wider (if vaguer) range of dangers. Modern nations are cultures of dignity overlaid on honor cultures, in some mixture—if a space for dignity is not carved out, we have a tribe, not a nation, and a tribe certain to degenerate in its encounters with nations due to its addiction to violence; if dignity is interpreted and practiced in such a way as to treat honor as inimical to the dignity of the individual (if it, for example, takes seriously claims that displaying the national flag at public events “offends” some marginalized group), then it won’t be long before that culture fails to protect anyone’s dignity either. (And it also follows that anyone who tries to be a member of the national group without displaying loyalty to more local groups—the South, Italian-Americans, Midwesterners, Bostonians, etc.—is likely to be considered less completely a member of the national group as well. National loyalties are tested less often, so without the proving grounds of more local loyalties, one’s trustworthiness will always be in question.)

Political parties and activist groups, which is to say groups founded within modern nations, fit this model perfectly—they preserve the dignity of the individual at the very least in allowing any individual to leave the group (which is a reflection of the national dignity culture), but, otherwise, insofar as one acts or allows oneself to be identified as a member of that group, one is a potential hostage and committed to the redemption of hostages. We could obviously analyze all the other groups in which people participate—they would all exhibit the same unsavory defensiveness on the part of group members, whose first response to any accusation against the group will be denial and counter-accusation, to be succeeded either by a more or less traumatic break with group, continued denial, or a reconciliation with these newly discovered vulnerabilities with the protection one finds the group still offers—whether that protection be from physical attacks or, as is much more common in modern groups, from some form of moral contagion caused by the compromises of civilization. (The point of being in one group, then, is largely to assert you are not like that other group.)

So, what of individuals? Are they, rather than groups, the real illusion? Has anyone ever seen one of these individuals of whose existence we have heard rumors? What we recognize as individuals are initiates in some discipline—to commit yourself to some moral or intellectual discipline is to have in reserve the capacity to resist the importunities of groups for reasons other than shame or fear. Even so, the individual exists on the margins of groups, not outside of them: an American who can examine, and criticize, as if he weren’t an American but a “historian” or “cultural theorist,” the various events, doctrines and figures making up American history and culture, is still a potential hostage and recipient of protection from fellow Americans, even if he eschews participation in the common American culture. Unless his disciplinary vocation involves a resentment towards that culture that not only makes the critical distancing easier but exceeds the boundaries of the discipline—in that case, the critic has simply joined, more or less explicitly, some other, perhaps internationalist, group. Disciplines can become groups—one can feel compelled to defend the honor of the profession after a well known historian has been caught plagiarizing—but only to the extent that it becomes less of a discipline (rather than the defending the profession, the true historian should root out all forms of “groupiness” that might lead members of the profession to place loyalty over the rigors of inquiry). Naturally, I don’t mean to imply that disciplines must be institutionalized—there are all kinds of disciplines, which is to say ways of establishing one’s dignity. Indeed, almost everyone has at least some discipline in this sense. Another source of individuality might be those liminal conditions so common in modernity—being a foreigner, being associated with foreigners, being a minority whose membership in the larger group is not certain (perhaps you wouldn’t be redeemed from captivity), associating with such minorities, etc. To the extent that such conditions constitute more than confusion and uncertainty, though, it is because those thereby situated make a discipline out of their anomaly, perhaps a discipline in the study of the group in relation to which one stands somewhat askew. Seeking to integrate that discipline as a kind of gift into the knowledge of that larger community ultimately confirms one as a member; using that discipline to discredit (bring shame upon) that group indicates an attempt to find some other, most likely political, group to join.