GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

For a while I have tried to figure out how to define Barack Obama politically. “Socialist” is not quite right—he and his party are much more likely to coopt corporations than to take over ownership (and responsibility) for them. But he’s not a typical European social democrat either—how could he be, given that he only barely includes the industrial working class as part of his coalition? He’s not a New Deal liberal, or even a McGovernite either—he’s not just to the far left of particular American concerns like racial justice, individual liberty, civil rights, social welfare, etc.—he is too interested in seemingly odd cultural issues, like sticking it to the Catholic church, gay marriage and defending Mohammed from “defamation.”

The problem is that Obama is ushering in a new form of rule, which we can call “victimocracy.” Rights, under this regime, are defined by one’s claim to victimization, or by having oneself deemed an honorary victim, and legitimate arguments are those which defend some approved victim (not, for example, Coptic Christians in Egypt) against an officially designated oppressor group. The “race, class and gender” mantra that has been parodied for decades now as a symbol of the excesses of the academic left has been completely and unironically mainstreamed—indeed, the President’s successful re-election campaign was run according to that template and had no other content. The victimocrat regime is currently holding in jail Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a man who has committed no crime, for the sole purpose of committing the US to a victimary narrative of the Islamic war against the West—well, against everyone other than them. An organ of the mainstream left, the Washington Post, has gotten on-board with the “argument” that all criticism of Susan Rice, the UN Ambassador and possibly next Secretary of State is racist and sexist, perhaps unless proved otherwise, and, by extension, the views of white men (especially from the South, that land of quintessential white maleness) are a priori discredited. “White male” (or “old white male”) is code for conservative—George Soros and Warren Buffett have exemptions from white maleness, because they have (I hope I am remembering the phrase correctly) “renounced their privilege.” But the code is interesting as, unlike other demonizations, like “bourgeois,” or even “Jew,” this one takes in the whole of what has been taken as normal and normative in our social order.

This seems to be the “revenge” that Obama offered his voters and, in truth, it might, for a while, provide for a very focused and consistent style of governance. Fiscal policy (to which groups and industries to direct loans, bailouts and subsidies) foreign policy (do I need to specify?) and law enforcement can all easily be run victimocratically. It might be a stable and somewhat less than totalitarian rule—the government need only appoint (many are already in place) official guardians of the interests of each and every designated victim group. As for who will guard the guardians?—asking such a question, I imagine, would just be a sign that your white maleness is showing.

Well, I’m working on another post now, and I just wanted to unveil this new category for the political scientists to mull over. I would assume that on some level, the American people have come to realize that victimary discourse must be allowed to play itself out until the end, which may or may not match the 70 years it took Communism. There is no resisting victimocracy—in the name of what—equal rights? Patriotism? Social peace? American interests? Prosperity?—only the white males/whales of the left’s Ahabist imaginary could possibly imagine that any of these categories contain other than victimary content. Whose interest? Whose prosperity? Whose peace (sans justice, no less)? Etc. In the end it must all crash, but in the meantime and in the aftermath, there is only one plausible response (actually, it’s just the least implausible): exodus.

If the determinist hypothesis were true, and adequately accounted for the actual world, there is a clear sense in which… the notion of human responsibility, as ordinarily understood, would no longer apply to any actual, but only to imaginary or conceivable, states of affairs. I do not here wish to say that determinism is necessarily false, only that we neither speak or nor think as if it could be true, and that it is difficult, and perhaps beyond our normal powers, to conceive what our picture of the world would be if we seriously believed it; so that to speak… as if one might… accept the determinist hypothesis, and yet to continue to think and speak much as we do at present, is to breed intellectual confusion. If the belief in freedom—which rests on the assumption that human beings do occasionally choose, and that their choices are not wholly accounted for by the kind of causal explanations which are accepted in, say, physics or biology—if this is a necessary illusion, it is so deep and so pervasive that it is not felt as such. No doubt we can try to convince ourselves that we are systematically deluded; but unless we attempt to think out the implications of this possibility, and to alter our modes of thought and speech accordingly, this hypothesis remains hollow; that is, we find it impracticable even to entertain it seriously, if our behavior is to be taken as evidence of what we can and what we cannot bring ourselves to believe or suppose not merely in theory but in practice… it is not much easier to begin to think out in real terms, to which behavior and speech would correspond, what the universe of the genuine determinist would be like, than to think out, with the minimum of indispensable concrete detail… what it would be like to be in a timeless world, or one with a seventeen-dimensional space. Let those who doubt this try for themselves; the symbols with which we think will hardly lend themselves to the experiment; they, in their turn, are too deeply involved in our normal view of the world, allowing for every difference of period and clime, to be capable of so violent a break. (Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, 71-72)

Gertrude Stein mentioned that she likes having habits, but she’s not a utopian because she doesn’t like other people talking about her habits. This seems to me a better starting place for inquiring into basic human rights than those grounded in either natural law (God given rights based on the divine image in each of us and contingent upon the use of the protected liberties to serve God) or natural right (the most basic right to protect oneself, as a lone, rational beast, against threats to one’s life). First of all, Stein’s observation is just as universal as those of natural law or natural right; second, it doesn’t require belief in the utopian fictions of a divine image or a lone, pre-social proto human. We all have habits, regardless of “period or clime,” and it is a fact well worth noting—animals certainly have repeated patterns of behavior but habits shape a human reality. Through our habits we carve out a space; you could probably learn more about a person through sustained study of their habits than sustained exposure to their speech, much less a recitation of their beliefs; indeed, one’s speech is itself a set of habits, replete with variations on widely shared formulas, chunks and grammatical constructions, accent, intonation, gesture and so on; and beliefs are just more specialized habits of speech, the way we answer certain kinds of questions when others need to know whether to include or trust us. And we do observe each other’s habits, with the same range of deliberate and focused to deeply unconscious attention as constitute the habits themselves. Habits are, on one level, private rituals, the creation of sacred spaces; on another level they are the internalization of the complex set of traumas (which habits apotropaically ward off) and moments of ecstatic bliss (which habits seek to recall in the manner of a cargo cult) which shape us all. Habits range from the highly intimate, even shameful, to the broadly public and contagious. We all like having habits—the notion of a free, rational individual on the Enlightenment model is utopian insofar as we would have to imagine beings without habits, habits which we can only with great effort wrench ourselves out of by giving ourselves repeated imperatives to construct practices which directly and usually painfully counter some habit until the point where the new practice becomes a habit itself. The “symbols with which we think will hardly lend themselves to the experiment” of imagining a single individual freely and rationally making it through a single day, or even a single hour, rational choice by rational choice.

Even more, none of us like others speaking about our habits—or, at least we would each get to our own point where direct reference to and examination of our habits would generate enormous, even panicky, resistance. That is, most of us (who knows, maybe Stein as well) would have little problem with playful satirizing of our insistence on a particular dish being made just right, or our over-reliance upon a particular expression, our “addiction” to some TV show or (in more intimate relations) lovemaking script—but it will not take very long before such probing will make further conversation simply impossible. Even more unbearable is other people talking amongst themselves about our habits, even more if their talk involves reforming our habits, even more if such reformation is to be carried out insidiously, by working on those habits themselves and, most of all, is it is to be attempted on a large scale, by authorized pseudo-expert elites, with the aim of making us fit into some scheme of social betterment. And that is the essence of utopianism, along with the source of social determinisms which, as Berlin notes, are both impossible to imagine or live while being real enough to wreck entire societies and hundreds of millions of lives during the 20th century. To plan a utopia you need exact knowledge of the human material you need to rearrange, knowledge of what has made it what it is and how it can be remade. For making the revolution, vaguer knowledge of how large social masses move in response to certain events and processes may suffice; to sustain the revolution once made you need knowledge of habits. Knowledge which you can never have, because habits will evolve in response to your attempt to track and re-train them.

Berlin’s (and not only his) critique of determinism and its link to totalitarianism is well known, and so, thanks especially to George Orwell, is his insight into the need for deterministic totalitarian movements to directly assault the common language shared by humans. But I don’t know of anyone who has grounded that common language in habit, or stated the corollary that not liking others’ talking about your habits is a basic, let’s say the basic, human right. Now, habits, like language, change, in superficial and more wide-ranging ways. But that you have a right to interrupt others when they speak about your habits wouldn’t change. And, unlike abstract rights to life, speech, property, religion, etc., which tacitly and, ultimately fantastically, presuppose some third agency who will be there to prevent someone else from taking your property, burning down your house of worship, threatening your life if you don’t shut up or, for that matter, just taking your life already, the right not to like others talking about your habits presupposes something much more realistic: people will, after all, talk about your habits but you won’t like it and the only way that talking about your habits can continue despite your interruptions is by shutting you up or you shutting up. There are all kinds of ways of shutting up and being shut up: establishing an independent board empowered to determine whether, say, allocating resources depending upon whether treating diseases characteristic of a particular demographic with identifiable life-styles is cost-beneficial is a way of shutting you up. And that marks such a board as utopian, which means that we can’t imagine, in ordinary language, the world that would match its deliberations any more than we could imagine a world with “seventeen dimensions.” The right to not like others talking about your habits doesn’t and can’t mean that some super-agency will prevent that board, established by some hypothetical health care law, from doing a cost-benefit analysis of your habits—it just means that you don’t recognize a political world in which that happens as anything other than a violent imposition on you. What that means practically is as hard to say as what it means to insist upon free speech rights under a tyrannical regimen, but your defense of your right not to like others taking about your habits (and it’s a right that can only exist in its defense) would speaking, and continually learning to speak, and learning how to only speak with others in a language presupposing freedom and responsibility and, to add to Berlin’s analysis, idiosyncrasy and mistakenness. Obviously, I could not consider giving a set of speech rules for freedom, but the reason why that can’t be done is rather interesting—as soon as anyone were to say that anyone who speaks in such and such a way speaks in a way inimical to freedom we would realize that someone speaking in that way in order to parody it would be speaking in a way that epitomizes freedom, and that one could never establish meta-rules for distinguishing one way of speaking from the other. This is just to say that the margin of freedom lies in the possibility that one might be mistaken—another might take my parody of totalitarian speech as threatening, or vice versa. The way that margin works in ordinary language is to open up language onto, not so much the abyss post-structuralism liked to invoke as a different rail. Habits of speech are idioms, and all habits require ongoing tending because habits are intimately dependent upon some parts of the environment while being highly resistant to other parts and there can’t be a general theory that will determine which is which for any particular habit and environments are always changing—language goes off one rail an onto another when idioms are dislocated and there is a discrepancy among the interlocutors over which presuppositions must be true for a particular statement to be understood. You say you really need a cup of coffee and the context and everything I know about you leads me to assume that you are struggling with your attempt to give up caffeine, while you are in fact mimicking what I would expect you to say and thereby signaling your transcendence of that craving and foiling of my expectations. You can triumphantly laugh off my gesture of sympathy. I can then join in your laughter or be offended because the joke seems to be on me, while if I join in you can leave it at that or tease me for my gullibility and if I take offense you can try to appease me or get offended in turn by my elevation of my own vanity over your life changing accomplishment. And so on—that is the rule for speaking freely and responsibly: each meeting of intersecting habits opens up ever ramifying binary choices, each of which is ultimately whether to more fully engage the scene and continue the ramifications, on the one hand, or to withdraw and put them to an end, on the other. That is normal speech, what human beings do, and what political and cultural theorists can do is expand our sense of the possible bifurcations by pointing out where habits lead anyone to see a straight, pre-determined path instead. When you make visible anyone’s habits in this way they won’t like it, which is their right, but attentiveness to the ethics and esthetics of the situation will make it possible for their resentment to be complemented by gratitude; if you are really attentive, even their expression of resentment will get incorporated into a learning habit and once speaking about your habits becomes a habit then you won’t want to give that up. And once we get the habit of not liking others speaking about our habits of speaking about our habits then all the other rights—speech, property, religion and so on—rights which presuppose an individualized world worthy of protection—will come firmly into place.

This is all after democracy because democracy, with its ever growing pantheon of rights, is utopian. Once the rage against hierarchies begins it will race right past the hierarchies you happen to dislike and not stop until it’s attacking the hierarchies you are unknowingly implicated in—in the end, there is no criterion other than the appropriation of signs of antinomic agency, also known as “cool.” The endpoint of liberal democracy is that the satisfaction of the rights of one require a great deal of talking about the habits of everyone. Putatively racist, sexist and homophobic impulses need to be programmed out of the population, but what counts as racist, sexist or homophobic is resistance or even indifference to the need for programming. We are all collectively responsible for everyone’s health, so we must all be concerned with everyone’s taking care and being insured. It isn’t often noticed how much can’t be discussed within liberal democracy, and it would be hard to tell how much that we can’t discuss goes unnoticed—and more will go unnoticed, since that of which we can’t speak can’t be noticed. The most obvious example to me is gender difference—everyone knows that there are differences between men and women, important and trivial, always with plenty of exceptions, capable of misunderstanding and misuse, but undeniably there—yet, except for the pervasive, smug, maternalistic assumption of female superiority spread through the advertising and entertaining industries it is virtually impossible to discuss them, especially in mixed company. And this in spite of the fact that the topic is very interesting in sheer intellectual terms (especially given women’s now extensive participation in all areas of social life, which reveals all these differences in very diverse ways as well as removing the issue of distorting, imposed social roles from the equation) as well as being of vital interest in everyone’s personal life. Equally obvious is the taboo on discussing racial differences, which genetic science is sure to disclose in years to come, probably in ways that bear little resemblance to the stereotypes that terrify us. In short, any expression that might by any chain of events conjurable by the imagination bear upon anyone’s exercise of their rights is beyond discussion. Also unspeakable is the fact that immigrants to the US have always brought the socialism and cronyism from their native countries and implanted them here—not just the Hispanics today but the Italians and Jews of yesteryear—the only difference is that previously the culture of Anglo-Saxon liberty was robust enough to contain the damage for a while and allow for at least a sizable proportion of those groups to expend their energies more productively. Anyone saying such things now would find himself banished to the far reaches of crankdom. What can be discussed are the supposed pathologies inimical to rights and what can be analyzed and dissected are the bearers of those pathologies—white racists, male sexists, heterosexual homophobes, Christian “haters,” the 1%, etc.

Utopianism breeds irreconcilable contradictions and makes it impossible to discuss them: the rights of seniors to free health care and undiminished pensions, health care coverage for everyone, increased spending on education, increased workplace, financial and environmental regulation, promises of jobs or some type of perpetual support for all can’t all continue forever, and it was fascinating to see the Republican candidate for President this year go out of his way to avoid giving the impression that he would infringe upon any of these “rights.” The left can at least claim that government will give all this to you—since they want to run the government, at least you can imagine them doing it. Conservatives, though, have to make the more counter-intuitive and equally utopian claim that the free market will provide all of these goodies, and its easy to see why people would be skeptical since on some level they know that getting these things on their own on the free market requires hard work and risk taking, and even then can’t be guaranteed. To say that no other way of life is remotely plausible than one in which our habits brush up against the rough edges of others’ habits, that a social order in which some rough relation between desert and outcome is discernable is the only endurable reality, is to mark oneself as consumed with hatred for those who, according to your own model, will fall short in some respects. It’s at least as bad when it comes to foreign policy, but why bother going into that, since the U.S. will not have any coherent foreign policy for some time to come. The point is that the most basic observations about undeniable social realities are unspeakable and any hint of them simply calls forth a barrage of aspersions on the habits of those who make the observations. Liberal democracy is not totalitarian, so we can of course speak about such things amongst ourselves (as long as we carefully choose “ourselves”), and write about them in marginal arenas like this blog. But the safeguarding of public discourse from such discussions is made ever more complete.

This utopianism cannot be attacked from within, so we will have to wait until it collapses, due to the contradictions I just pointed out and even more profound and unspeakable reasons like the demographic ones often discussed by Mark Steyn (rising aging population, declining birthrate, the need to import foreign workers to support the increasing benefits those workers have no reason to expect to see and therefore no reason to work to support for long—and, yes, Steyn is a fairly well known writer and so these ideas are not censored, but outside of conservative circles Steyn is demonized as a racist, war-mongering madman, to the extent that he is taken note of at all). When it does collapse, I think that “not liking others talking about my habits” or something close to it (I wouldn’t quibble over the wording) will provide a “remnant” with a way of restoring normal speech to public and even private discourse. There is no better way of refreshing one’s relation to reality than committing oneself to recognize, work around, subtlely re-shape, occasionally comment on and refrain from too openly examining others’ habits. And this can only happen publicly when people join together by explicit agreement to accomplish something, where they all have something to gain and something to lose, where the success of the work depends on them alone, and where they therefore allot to everyone specific responsibilities and rights while developing an “oral law” or set of idioms (normal, infinitely ramifying speech, sedimenting tacit agreements in the explicit ones) that keeps the project open. And that can only happen when enough people accept, to quote Gertrude Stein again, that “the most important thing is knowing what is your business and what is not your business.”

For now, though, it is at least possible to stop speaking democratese, predicated upon the supposedly compatible faiths in the individual and the people and the concomitant hatred of everything undermining such faith. A good starting point is the default assumption that no one can have any idea of what another might be capable of, for good or evil; but anyone right away puts forth signs that break that unknown “anything” down into two broad possibilities, to which one can tentatively assign probabilities; each new engagement leads to adjustments in the probabilities and further bifurcations within the original possibilities. Your own habits and idioms converge and diverge with theirs in particular ways, as you read your habits and idioms off their response to you and you assume they are doing the same—this is the establishment of joint attention. Entering any discourse involves alienating one’s desires and resentments, otherwise every conversation would involve each interlocutor simply listing things he/she loved and hated. The problem with democratese is that it cuts off the pathways from desires and resentments, which, cumulatively, are habits and idioms, to the shared public discourse. For some people this is certainly liberating—rights talk, like theory talk for academics, can be very empowering. Others see too many things they might like to say or hear said be denied utterance. If you are one of those “others” then I would propose taking sides with the lesser probability at each bifurcation because if you inculcate that pataphysical habit you will at the very least create a lot of new ways of having your habits and idioms intersect with others’.

In more straightforward political terms, that means looking for the signs of secession and nullification—for the free associations liberal democracy can’t digest. Obtaining exemptions and waivers for alternative markets and even currency will be the most worthwhile expenditure of political energy in the coming years. Instead of speaking democratese, it is possible to push back the frontiers of the state by imagining private ways of performing many, most, eventually all state functions, until references to statist abstractions are resolved into descriptions of possible yet denied agreements, tacit and explicit.

The Jewish revelation establishes the principle that all humans are created equal because and insofar as they are created in God’s image. We are all like God because God is equidistant from all of us and from Himself: the “I am that I am/I will be what I will be” removes from God the self-sameness that would enable us to figure out how to get Him to do what we want him to do. But God did make a covenant with a people, in which He promised to protect them and have them prosper if they would obey His law. Judaism has an account of how that came to be. The immediate presence of God to man, from Adam and Eve to the generation of the flood, was a failure, as God Himself acknowledged. God cannot walk among men: His presence becomes the source of murderous envy, and tyrannical and mob-like emulation, until God is finally utterly repudiated and the world filled with violence, necessitating the destruction of His creation. I imagine that we see here a history of humanity subsequent to the emergence of the Big Man, the patriarch, the tribal leader and ultimately the emperor, which would have been the first forms in which the human being was divinized. Maybe Christianity’s re-divinization of man is predicated upon the judgment that Judaism had not settled that question in its absolute separation of God and man. So, we could ask whether Judaism might, in fact, have settled it, if only there had been sufficient patience and ingenuity to spread its more rigorous word of God throughout the world; or whether Christianity re-opened the question only to make it worse; or, whether both have failed, or reached their limits, which is to say have not exhausted the possible models through which we can think the originary scene. The means by which God proposes the separation of God from humanity is the covenant that founds a people governed under the law. Already subsequent to the flood this approach had been introduced as God imposed a code of 7 laws on Noah and his descendents (the “Noachide code”) as means of distancing the divine from the human while leaving the latter with an “image” of the former (God, then, is conceived less as a source of sustenance than as the origin of our capacity to covenant with each other and live under publicly shared laws). At any rate, we end up with the paradox that Eric Gans and others have noticed: the universal principle of human equality under God can only be proclaimed and instantiated in a single, small, weak people, in the midst of imperial orders predicated upon man creating himself as God. Judaism later (mostly powerfully in the thought of Maimonides) devised a perfectly plausible theory of how this paradox was to be resolved: the Jews, by living a well-ordered and holy life in observance of God’s law would be a “light unto the nations,” living propaganda for the superiority of living under God’s word over the merely man-made laws of other nations. Perhaps some peoples would convert to Judaism, but for the most part one could readily imagine other peoples treating the Bible’s history of humanity as their own and revising the law it provides according to their own national peculiarities and, finally, their own “oral law.” But this seems like a recipe for anti-semitism, doesn’t it? The Jews would still be at the center of this monotheistic world, they would still be responsible for preserving and exemplifying the law, any success they enjoyed would be taken as a sign that they were still god’s privileged children, and any catastrophes suffered by others blamed on the false promises of the Jews. In other words, the same problem of God’s too present presence because Judaism cannot shed the signs of its birth in a world of violent God men. It can’t be originary enough. As Eric Gans argued (or I, at least, took him to be arguing) in Chronicle 432, we should have some respect for our egalitarian ancestors, and not only because of their blissful lack of knowledge of fixed hierarchies but because of their richer and more diverse experience of the divine. All contemporary attempts, most egregiously through the UN, to create a global law under which we could all live as equals, can only lead to monstrous tyrannies or, perhaps, disorder. Even national systems of equality under the law are seriously fraying, as no one has yet found a way to resolve the twinned freedoms of economic initiative and of generating resentment towards the results of that first freedom. We then end up with endless, fruitless and acrimonious disputes over the real “meaning” of the law, our founding principles, freedom and equality and so on. The only spaces in which we can be free and equal are those where we multiply endlessly rather than withholding the names of God. I don’t expect colloquies with insects and mountains, or that every spring will have its own nymph, or that we will “Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.” The gods are already separate from humanity under the original egalitarian order—the entire problem posed by the Bible doesn’t exist in equality under the sign rather than under the law. The gods are in language—any possibly meaningful utterance at least slows down our rush to appropriation, enough to make sense before proceeding. We can always pry open utterances and the materials of language so as to hear from the divine—struggle with a mistake, pretending that it makes sense, and miraculously, it will; add or subtract a letter from every other word from a sentence and you create a new sentence, in an oddly revelatory dialogue or argument with the original; the same if you reverse elements of a sentence—the declarative sentence is still the name of God, albeit in infinite manifestations. And maybe this is Jewish after all—the Judaism, most famously of the Kabbalah but certainly going all the way back to the Rabbis and no doubt beyond, to the very beginnings of the divinization of God’s word through the alphabet—the Judaism which contends that God looked into the Torah and created the world out of its linguistic materials.

We know that we can reach agreements with people, because we all the time act in accord with others’ tacit and explicit consent. We know that there must be some explicit dimension to our agreements with others—each of us must know that each is letting the other pass on the street, sticking to our respective places on line, etc. We also know that however explicit our agreements—even in the most elaborately constructed and sophisticated contract—there is a tacit dimension which makes it possible for us to understand what we have agreed to explicitly.

From this self-evident knowledge, I would further propose that we are led to seek the basis of our agreements when our explicit agreements become problematic in some way and that when that happens the best place to look for those foundations is in those tacit understandings, rather than, say, in concepts like natural law, natural right, and so on. The fact that we have agreed reveals us to be the kind of people capable of reaching and maintaining, to the extent that we do, those agreements. We are people with certain common needs, which those agreements tried to meet, with some kind of shared past and language which enabled us to meet and shape the agreement, and with certain capacities which our adherence to those agreements and responsibility to the exigencies consequent upon them have placed on display. We are also people with a certain relation to each other—we have agreed so far and no further, we have shored up and repaired the agreement where it has frayed in particular ways, we have let slip this or that obligation, kept an eye on each other in some particular way, and so on.

Further: a social theory starting from these minimal particulars can enable us to look forward: a thriving community will be one which can construct meta-agreements allowing for consensual revision or discarding of existing explicit agreements; which can allow for tacit agreements to become explicit in such a way as to enrich the existing body of explicit agreements while simultaneously re-sedimenting new layers of tacit agreement; and that can generalize existing agreements so as to welcome outsiders without diluting what we might call the “density of the tacit” embedded in the current world of contract and covenants. Instead, then, of talking about imaginary constructs like “progress,” we can study the visible forms of communication and cooperation in terms of the degree to which they reveal forms of rooted openness.

Judaism, and Christianity after it, is rooted in the repudiation of human sacrifice. Human sacrifice enters history with the asymmetric gift relationship established by the Big Man become tyrant become emperor/god: the Big Man gathers the resentment of the community upon himself, and can therefore be the “emissary victim” for the community; the Big Man continues to stand in for or represent the community, but the bigger he gets the less likely he is to allow himself to be victimized, in which case substitutes need to be sought; once it becomes possible to supply substitute victims (what kind of conceptual leap and what kind of event must have been necessary for this transformation?), the appetite for victims will expand. The power of the empire will be devoted to seizing victims, which introduces war on a massive scale (the conquest and incorporation of entire communities and even smaller empires) and then slavery as a utilitarian by-product. The one God, the God whose name is the declarative sentence, calls for the repudiation, at least in principle, of this entire system, and it seems to me it does so on the following grounds: first, an observation of history (and it is succession of empires and emperors, the dramas of their successes and failures, their over-reachings and usurpations that is, first of all, “history,” i.e., a discernable pattern to events) teaches us that kings come and go while the king who is greater than all kings, the God greater than all gods, endures and gives sustenance to those who hold fast to Him despite conquest and defeat; second, what they hold fast to is a rejection of scapegoating, of the arbitrariness of victimage, in the name of law and the truth—a wrongdoer can be punished, but only insofar as he violates a pre-existing law and is known to have done what he has been accused of. The hubris, the haughtiness, which leads inevitably to the fall of the great, is rooted in this endless search for victims, this belief that arbitrary deaths can feed the life of the community, of which the victimizer himself ultimately becomes a victim.

We know that the social contract theories of the origin of the state are liberal myths—the state, in its origins, was the empire, with its subjugation of all communities and, actually or potentially, all individuals, to a common center, which in turn required a large bureaucratic apparatus, infrastructure, massive armed force, and a transcendental gift relationship between center and margins: the emperor gives life to the people who must in turn be ready to give their possessions and if necessary their lives to the emperor. Along the way, empires came to depend upon legal structures providing regularity and predictability in managing the relations between center and margins, which in turn would secrete minimal notions of fairness and mythologies of cosmic order which the earthly empire mirrored: the monotheistic religions drew upon, while polemicizing against, the more enlightened versions of imperial mythology. All subsequent states, including our liberal democratic ones, are carved out of the ancient transnational empires, through a variety of processes: national liberation, which replaces a large, distant imperial order with one closer to home and therefore easier to confront and control; the creation of norms and contracts, enforced through threat (quite often acted on) of rebellion and/or regicide, making leaders accountable to the ruled; and, finally, the actual staffing of the state apparatus through participatory selection processes. (This last development, and I am sure the others as well to some extent, drew upon modes of accountability already available, indeed in more robust forms, in smaller, more primitive communities, such as selection of leaders by lot, the gathering of supporters ready to wage war behind contending leaders, and so on.)

What hasn’t changed is the relation between politics and history, which is to say the establishment of the state as a stage upon which the destiny of the nation is performed before a critical audience. How else could we account for the celebration of Obama’s election as some kind of triumph over our racist past if the political arena was, far from the neutral, problem-solving technocratic arena imagined by progressives, or, for that matter, the issue-oriented, debate-club style with an ideally informed public fantasized by another version of liberalism, if the political arena were not still imagined in basically dramaturgic terms? But dramaturgic means: still sacrificial. Through Obama we will transcend our racism, either through his willing self-sacrifice to the still powerful forces of racism or through his summoning of our “better angels” to deliver us from racism once and for all; or his sacrifice will be in vain and we will descend once more to our racist roots. These are, of course, the leftist versions, reiterating once more the leftist contradiction between heightening the historical contradictions toward the decisive confrontation and transcending the irrational passions, grounded in unjust social relations, that have driven history. On the conservative side, there are certainly dramatic constructions in play as well—overcoming the usurper, restoring the constitutional order and the transparency of rule by the people after the century long Progressive transgression. The conservative script (I’ll let others decide whether my own bias interferes with my analysis here) seems to me a more contained, less apocalyptic, and therefore less sacrificial one, but it is vulnerable to the objection that there is no true Constitutional order to be restored.

What is on trial now is that modern confection of Politics as the Center Stage upon which the Drama of the People’s Self-Liberation is Enacted. Local communities resisted empire because the asymmetrical gift relationship with the imperial center became onerous, but extracting concessions from, which is to say, entering agreements with and creating reciprocal obligations with the center had the effect of giving the people a share in the crimes and follies of empire. The only other choice would have been to withdraw altogether from the imperial order, which would have led to extinction, one way or another—so, there was really no choice. Indeed, though libertarians will dispute it, I consider it quite likely that commerce could only have expanded under the protection of empire and, even more, that modern science and technology could not have developed outside of the cosmological picture generated by the imperial incorporations of Christianity. Still, the distribution of responsibility between rulers and ruled has never been worked out, which is why war was transformed from an affair of monarchical and aristocratic elites, with restricted ends and carefully constructed rules (even if, of course, civilian populations in the way often suffered) to exterminatory assaults upon civilian targets (in World War II)—after all, from a democratic perspective, shouldn’t we hold the people responsible for the policies of their rulers (and even if the Nazis usurped power from the democratic state, the people must have been complicit in that usurpation, and hence still guilty) and assume that they can affect them?

Another very serious problem has not been solved and, unlike the problem of democratic war, this one has not even been addressed by the modern political machines. The ancient resentment between rulers and ruled has never been resolved—one reason for this is that the contending elites have an interest in keeping this resentment going insofar as each wants to represent itself as the popular party; but an equally important reason is that institutional separation between rulers and ruled is almost as stark as ever—we really do have a “ruling class” of Washington governmental and media elites and the corporate elites tied up with and favored by them. This resentment is stoked in a paradoxical way: by continually ratcheting up the asymmetrical gift relation between rulers and ruled, which is to say by extending more and more government largesse. The people resentfully assert on this on the assumption that the rulers live at their expense and this is just payback; the rulers give it through partisan competition but also through fear, never far from the minds of the rich and the politicians during the long period of Communist global terror, and, going even further back, the roots of the civilizing empires in slavery and conquest, of popular uprisings or some kind of leftist or rightest putsch; even more, such largesse must be concealed under democratic forms so as to include the middle class—so, while our finances would probably be in better shape with straightforward redistributions from, say, the top 1/3 to the bottom 1/5, it becomes politically necessary to insist that the entitlement programs are really social “insurance” so that we only get back what we paid in.

In this way, the government grows in power by capitulating to public demands, while the public can remain in an infantile state of rebellion, with “grass roots” partisans on each side exposing the dirty deals of the other, as the government becomes more powerful. The most binding long-term explicit agreements are more and more made by government bureaucrats amongst themselves and with their clients, with mere, and increasingly formulaic, ratification by the people; and these explicit agreements are more and more distant from the tacit agreements formed in companies, institutions and communities, which remain much closer to their traditional character: each is responsible for self and family, individuals who can be relied upon are trusted and rewarded, breaches in trust are scandals, good will is presupposed in most interactions, etc. Victimary thinking, and its apotheosis in the hysteric swell of support for Obama as transcendent figure in 2008, while an authentic religious response to the event of the Holocaust, in its hostility to the normal (re-coded as a source of unthinkable violence) has been redirected towards the effort to bring our tacit agreements and arrangements into alignment with those constructed at the top, but such attempts are becoming increasingly strained, to the point of desperation. At the same time, those more local attachments, grounded in an unself-conscious “oikophilia,” have no other external orientation beyond the central political stage while that stage has alienated itself from those local, familiar “affections.”

The rule for discourse under a democratic regime (and by “democratic,” I mean the resentment against everything imperial except for what is constitutive of the imperial: a single center from which each is equidistant) is that every agent and interest be represented as equal in relation to a presumed center; to put it another way, no one’s resentment is to be left out or left unbalanced by a complementary resentment. This process of balancing resentments holds for any community, but in the implicitly unlimited democratic community (which by now extends well beyond the nation via international human rights law, institutions and activism, incorporated into diplomatic discourse) in which the repudiated yet rights bestowing center must be distanced ever further, the balancing, increasingly, is driven by the most formulaic of explicit agreements (as if one’s feelings towards, say, same sex marriage, should be determined by the latest finding on civil rights law by a particular court), with no attention to the tacit realm. There have always been and still are many things (peoples, vocations, habits, dispositions) that democratic discourse cannot deal well with, and Jews are among them, and whatever can’t be framed in democratic terms must be framed in “meta-democratic terms,” as a usurpation of the center—perhaps foundational, perhaps salvational, but ultimately totalitarian, as the center, whenever evoked, must enforce the equidistance from itself. Anti-semitism, then, places Jews at the center—not, though, at the center of a centerless market society as Eric Gans once argued, but at the evacuated center of a democratic society that has constituted itself through its resentment towards imagined attempts to re-occupy that center.

Anti-semitism, in other words, is a “meta-democratic” discourse: it represents what cannot be balanced out within the chain of equivalences within democratic discourse but yet what is required to account for the uni-directional change metaphysical thinking requires: the evacuated and hated center (that from which we have liberated ourselves, which should only give, but yet insists on taking). The best way to identify anti-semitism, I think, is simply to look at how someone speaks about Jews and Israel—what is important is not the degree of hostility expressed, or whether Israel is singled out among nations, but whether in that discourse Israel or the Jews is the only agent. If someone is telling a story and Israel or the Jews is the only actor, with all other figures represented as passive victims or dupes, then we have an anti-semitic discourse. What “the Jews,” “Israel,” “Zionism” or, now less often, “neo-conservatism” is then being used to explain is why the resentments don’t all balance out, with the people thereby made collectively aware of its real interests and general will. There is really an imperial order, more hideous and insidious than any that has previously existed, even in the imagination, and that makes us all equal, but as slaves. It is such a discourse that makes interaction with Jews unthinkable, and their elimination correspondingly thinkable, because Jews operate on a different plane than everyone: getting rid of the Jews will restore the people. And this holds true for thoroughly undemocratic regimes like Nazi Germany and the contemporary Arab and Muslim dictatorships, which even more than liberal democratic regimes insist upon the homogeneity of the people’s will and the treachery implicit in any deviation from it. As modern societies, at least politically (insofar as any country needs a presentable government), these are totalitarian democracies (as was Communism). (The supposedly hopeful admonition that the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy suggests, in this context, a continual expansion of the most formulaic terms of explicit agreement to every single area of life—an expansion which, of course, will always encounter obstacles, which will always be some kind of unregulated initiative, and which must be named and targeted.)

The Jews can be imagined on this “other” plane because the tensions between Jews as a people, Judaism as a religion, and Jews as an ethnic group; between actual Jews and the Jews of the Christian and Muslim theological imaginary (and the Jews of the Western literary and philosophical imagination more broadly), have not been resolved, not any more that the tensions between ruler and ruled I discussed earlier, and not any more for Jews themselves than for others. Here, I’ll make the point that I am simply supplementing, and not at all trying to replace, Eric Gans’s analysis of anti-semitism as resentment of firstness: most specifically, resentment at the Jews for discovering/inventing the One God, while resisting and exempting themselves from the Christian and Muslim universalizations of that discovery/invention; more broadly, though, as initiators of and within the European market economy and modern political and cultural institutions; even more, as pioneering, through the socialist and communist movements, the critique and dismantling of that modern, market society before a majority of citizens, even in the West, had had a chance to acclimatize themselves to it. The simple addition is that Jews must be resented within democracy, or any polity predicated upon a general will implicit in each citizen and recoverable through either through unfettered dialogue amongst the citizens or through revolutionary events, just as much as they must be resented within Christian and Muslim polities. Democracy cannot assimilate the Jews because it cannot assimilate firstness which, by definition, upsets the established balance of resentments and initiates some new form of agreement, something one can “sign on” to without prior permission or authorization. “The Jews” will always be a serviceable answer to the question, “why don’t the people see their way clear to their own best interests,” and that will always be the question of democratic discourse because that discourse presupposes that only the usurped center can interfere with our convergence upon shared understanding of our common interests. Democratese, in other words, is intelligible under the assumption that, presented with the relevant facts and freed from whatever ideological manipulations blind them, everyone would say what I am saying now.

I would conclude, then, that opposing anti-semitism within democratic discourse is a futile exercise: you can’t refute it, because the absence of evidence of Jewish control and manipulation is, of course, the best evidence of it. By now, charges of anti-semitism have been pre-emptively marked as disingenuous attempts to silence critics of Israel, and therefore more proof of Jewish manipulation, control, malevolence, etc. We can no longer assume some “mainstream” protocol by which well intentioned people recognize anti-semitism and shun it—the post-War victimary discourses which enabled the establishment of such a protocol have mutated into the most virulent source of anti-semitism, in the resentment of those whose victimary centrality has always already been pre-empted by the Jews. But, I think, it might be just as well to have less coded and more overt expressions of resentment, especially since those codes have constrained the speech of us Jews and those philo-semites who do and might stand with us, as taboos on “singling” out elements of Jewish singularity, for good and ill, have impinged upon all discourse.

It’s silly to tell other people what they should say, but my own preference is for speaking bluntly, as a Jew, about Jewish accomplishments as well as Jewish blunders and instances of genuine irresponsibility within modern Jewish history, such as the rush into the Communist movements, especially in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, and especially in the Bolshevik revolution—movements which could never have gained the power they did without massive Jewish participation. Yes, Jews were oppressed under Czarism, indeed Czarist Russia was a dead end for Jews, they saw Communism as a liberation, etc.—but enough of such rationalizations! This is a key pathology of democratic discourse—any wrongdoing of which I am accused must be traced back to a wrong done to me so as to even things out, and I imagine the hope of many Jews was that tracing the ultimate wrong to the “ruling class” oppressors would mean it wouldn’t be traced back to them—but why not just acknowledge the wrong, assess the damage, repudiate the sources in one’s own experience that were evidenced in these events, rethink and create new practices? Yuri Slezkine, in “The Jewish Century,” traces the modern Jewish trajectory along three lines: Communism, with its fullest expression in the USSR; Zionism, leading, of course, to Israel; and the “therapeutic state” which he asserts Jews created in 20th century America—with this latest perhaps the furthest reaching, intellectually and socially, of them all. We can afford to reject the Communism, and Leftism more generally, while embracing Zionism and the flourishing of Judaism and Jewish culture, along with the remarkable example of a free, market society under construction in Israel, and untangling the complex legacies of the “therapeutic,” which I believe has done more good than harm in contributing to the self-understanding of modern society. In other words, there are many good reasons to be disgusted, to renounce and condemn anti-semitism, and I don’t say that Jewish repudiation of Leftism is a precondition of such responses; I do say, though, that Jews and their defenders will only be able to engage this battle fully through such a repudiation, which will enable us to frankly acknowledge our admittedly outsized contribution to the world and make the perhaps unsatisfying but undoubtedly true claim that we are more sinned against than sinning—but, in the end, who wants to keep score? We are strong enough to do this, and not simply adopt a victimized stance in relation to anti-semitism.

To return to social theory: the basic social model bequeathed by Judaism is one of a covenant formed through the revelation of a divinity external to any social center; implicit in this model is a law, both oral (given in the event of revelation itself and transmitted pedagogically and in practice) and written (with simulated reluctance, because the law can account for the dispersal of the people and the cutting of threads of tradition insofar as we supplement these losses with the sacralization of the very language in which the revelation took place); implicit in the law—actual statutes, governing everyday life and ethical experience, debated and implemented by specialists but visible to all—or Halacha, are the store of examples, embodied in stories, high and low, tragic and comic, constantly undergoing revision and accreting commentary, or Aggadah, in which the kind of people who discovered/invented, expanded, exemplified and violated the laws can be disclosed along with the kind of world in which such people would have been born, grown and struggled. Implicit in all of the above is a people capable of living in a world of strangers, of switching back and forth between explicit and tacit, extending the benefit of God and the Law to those who wish it while defending themselves against those who don’t—at any rate, there is never any social relation outside of some covenant, some mutual pledging, some willingness to be taken hostage or stand in for one’s fellow. This is pretty much the social model I proposed at the opening, which means we can now answer Marx’s implicit accusation and say, yes, we want to make all of society Jewish, and this is what it means.

Clearly, we need a radical break with victimary culture, which exacerbates what I have called “meta-democratic” discourse, has no intrinsic limits and in the near future might make basic economic activity and the maintenance of social peace problematic. Since the last radical break with victimary culture was that effected by the Nazis, people will understandably be cautious. I think that only the sacralization of agreements, tacit and explicit, will suffice—even unfair agreements, agreements entered into rashly, agreements undermined by changes in the conditions which first underlay them, agreements we have discovered we must have made in order to cooperate as we do now—a fetishization of agreements, and engagements which foreground what we must have already agreed upon simply to make the engagement possible. This would not replace a “victim” culture with a “victor” culture, but with a culture which privileges those who stick with commitments they have made and offer themselves as examples of the agreements we must have made simply in order to make sense of the example. The fight against anti-semitism might put forth those elements of Judaism that represent the human as subject to agreements already made, those yet to be made, and those we are to discover we have always already made. In seeking ceaselessly to covenant with our fellow men and women we earn the right to make explicit the covenant with God whose promise underlay that quest in the first place—even if we are at the point where we can eliminate the name “God,” if need be, and just treat every word as containing a solemn agreement with whomever cares to repeat, embody or mistake it.

It seems to me that the desire for fame and the corresponding resentment towards others for one’s anonymity that Eric Gans identified as “the fundamental human value” and the source of the “radical evil” motivating the mass murderers of our time must, in turn, be rooted in more originary desires. Interesting, Gans doesn’t posit an opposing form of the desire for fame—rather, he contrasts that desire with moral responsibility and human solidarity. But there is a very clear contrast with the radical evil, demonic desire for fame, and one that I think would have been foremost in the minds of practically every person up until a couple of hundred years ago at most, and that David Goldmann (the online “Spengler”) places at the center of his political analyses: the desire for the soul’s immortality. The motivation for resisting the temptation to do evil has, historically, been the fear of eternal punishment and the hope of eternal reward. The desires circulating around celebrity are a substitute for that fear and hope—the tawdriness of much celebrity and the periodic outbursts of this radical evil might suggest that this substitute is a pathological one, but I would agree with Gans that it is very difficult to tell for sure—aside from Gans’s reasoning in his “Aurora and ‘Radical Evil’” (Chronicle #428), there is no lack of atheists out there who will recount to us all the blood that has been spilled on behalf of behalf of this or that favored version of immortalization. Maybe the costs of celebrification are lower. But there have been other alternatives to the orthodox modes of immortalization in modern times: living forever in the nation one belongs to, in great works and, perhaps, most accessibly, in ones descendants—all of these modes, indeed, long co-existed with belief in eternal damnation and salvation, while being capable of existing without such belief. The first two are certainly of receding credibility, having been associated with violence (of nationalism, war, the megalomania of the tyrant), while few are capable of unambiguously benevolent great works (like curing diseases). And families are smaller, more individuals are without them, tensions between the generations make the pleasures of seeing one’s self carried on in the next generation more problematic. If immortality is a basic need for we sign users, whence can we reasonably hope to receive it?

We certainly don’t need to be nostalgic for presumably more certain guarantees of immortality: the promises of the Church and other religious authorities in this regard were clearly extravagant and, fortunately, so were the threats. People must have always noticed, regardless of whether they would discuss or reflect upon it, that no one could really know about any of these things one way or another. Furthermore, nations dissolve and leave the stage of history; family lines die out; with very few exceptions, great works change their meaning over time, as no one has any way of knowing whether he will end up a Herostratus or, say, a… well, who—would anyone like to venture to name an individual whose legacy has been received with enduring and unambiguous adoration?

All that endures is language, and whoso would seek out immortality today would best do so therein. Indeed, as Gans has argued on many occasions, the eternity of the sign is the model for all our other understandings of immortality. So why not cut right to the chase? The only guarantee of immortality is some discernable, irreversible change to the language—we need only think in terms of some minimal shift, a “style,” which one cannot help but have, and of which one can, with only a slight introduction of self-reflexivity, identify the markers. This really is a sure thing, because even if one, near the end of one’s life, were to discover that one’s style was completely derivative, even parasitic upon some precursor or mere repetition of the deadening formulas of everyday life and common sense—well, even carrying a copied style forward into new domains constitutes something new, and the latest iteration of the formulaic or commonplace communicates something extra, whether it be a charming naivete or unwitting parody. Of course we are lowering the bar here—we surrender the power to direct sinners netherward, to nominate heroes to adore and villains to abominate. But styles are subject to judgment as well, and a kind of posthumous punishment, and all the paradoxes of faith are activated here as well—it is precisely the most scrupulous, those who attend to their style, those who seek to bound up style with substance, to familiarize themselves with so as to distinguish themselves from a range of styles, who will be most tortured with the fear of the irrelevance, harmfulness, or fraudulence of their contribution to the language, while those who just absorbed some off the shelf style that “worked” for them will exhibit that style most blithely (and, who knows, maybe with greater approval). But this just means that such judgments are out of our hand, as they should be—our inability to force the issue, to ensure that our style enter the language in a particular way, or ripple out with ascertainable effects, signifies the absence of violence from this form of immortalization. At the same time, though, we could always reasonable hope that some little bit of our style, especially now that we can record and make universally available the most trivial of our experiments in style, will resonate sufficiently, even if in a mediated or marginal way, with some, a few, down the road, perhaps even so much that someone will take the time to find their way back to the “original.” And since it would be like that person is conversing with us, it is also like I or anyone else is conversing with that person right now. Perhaps that is, or can be, immortality enough.