In Chronicle 816, reflecting on the complaint of a religious thinker that in today’s world religious thought is no longer taken seriously led me to consider the connection between the dismissal of traditional religious revelation and what I have been calling the epistemology of resentment, which provides the foundation for what is in effect a new-old form of sacred: a “social conscience” whose revelation is rooted no longer in the mediating deferral of conflict imposed by the originary scene of language and its religious derivatives, but in the visceral or pre-cultural sense of injustice provoked in the human subject by what is experienced as unequal treatment. This sense can also be aroused on behalf of other individuals and groups with whom one comes to identify in a sympathetic mimetic reaction.
As I have previously observed, as a more than sporadic social phenomenon, the sacralization of resentment is a product of the French Revolution, as marked by the origin of the “Left” in the 1789 French National Assembly. Variants are also found on the modern “Right,” that of the Fascists and Nazis of the 20th century, and in dictatorial regimes and démocratures like Venezuela. Their source lies in popular resentments of a not strictly anti-hierarchical nature, but rather expressing a massified form of what the word “resentment” meant in aristocratic society: lèse-majesté, failure to honor one’s privileges, be they as mythical as that of “Aryans” under Nazism—or as understandable as the birthright of the native population of many European countries in contrast with the generous advantages accorded recent immigrants.
The historically most significant theoretical justification of this phenomenon was Marx’s description of the modern world as “class society” in which the owners of capital exploit the “labor power” of the working class, which alone creates value.
That the inequalities generated by our “post-industrial” society are comparable if not greater than those of the past is made tolerable by the vast improvements in overall prosperity and living conditions. As a result, even if we can generally be expected to accept John Rawls’ justification for these differences on the ground that they are conducive to greater prosperity for all, their acceptance by the individual is understood less as fundamental moral issue than as a personal coming-to-terms (“adjustment”). As a result, the society remains permanently at the mercy of perturbations which, by making such adjustment problematic, provoke open expressions of resentment that present themselves as appeals for justice. Of which the most recent is what we experience today as “Wokeness.”
This form of sacred unmediated by religion deserves further examination. The conscience through which we learn to distinguish right from wrong is no more infallible than any other source of intuition. Whether or not the sacred be attributed to God, its specific reality for a member of a given community is a function of his interactive experience and his reactions to it, beginning in earliest childhood along with his apprenticeship in language.
Although we normally assume that political and/or religious tyrannies impose their will by force as opposed to inspiring faith, the boundary between the two is far from stable. Thus throughout the convulsions of the Soviet Union, the early Bolsheviks, and even many of Stalin’s later victims, retained faith in communism and in Stalin himself, which dissipated gradually over the decades as the USSR/Russia passed from Khrushchev to Gorbachev to Putin. Nor is it clear that even the quasi-deification of autocratic rulers, for example, the Kims in North Korea, is without effect on the consciences of some or most of its citizens. We must always distinguish between what is publicly affirmed as sacred in a given society, or even in a given family, and what an individual accepts as sacred at a given moment—without ever presuming that a person’s conscience is a stable entity that achieves its final state through a profession of faith.
Were we to attempt a history of the latter-day form of sacrality based on the epistemology of resentment, it would seem that Christianity must be seen as its distant ancestor. In contrast with Buddhism and the other Eastern religions from Hinduism to Confucianism, Christianity insists on the reconception of the One God in Trinitarian terms, most importantly, his fusion with human mortality. And whatever the aberrations of Wokism as the most recent stage of this epistemology, it is easy to see its roots in Christianity’s denunciation of the powers of the “world” and its message that “the last will be first, and the first, last” (Matthew 20:16). That Christianity teaches that the resentment implicit in these denunciations is transcended by Jesus’ sacrifice is an additional commandment that many secular Westerners interpret today as obliging them to grant compensatory privileges to those who can claim the status of victims.
Thus the image from June 2020 of Democratic leaders adorned with Ashanti scarves kneeling in homage to George Floyd is not a mere caricature of ceremonies such as the Pope’s washing the feet of beggars on Holy Thursday. It extends the notion of the holiness of the poor to their presumed equivalents in modern society, just as Alvin Bragg’s refusal to indict New York City’s turnstile-jumpers and shoplifters is an updated version of Victor Hugo’s sympathetic portrayal of Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread in Les misérables. Although true believers of Woke ideology tend to have contempt for believing Christians, taken as the primary basis for public morality, the above phrase from the Sermon on the Mount—which is by no means unanticipated in the Hebrew prophetic tradition—is at the root of all “progressive” or “revolutionary” thought, marked by the presumption that “the powers of this world” are by their very nature satanic.
Not that we should blame Christianity, or Judaism, for this prophetic slogan. In Jesus’ mouth, these words must be seen as a denunciation of a corrupt world that needs to return to its originary divine inspiration. But to know when the prophecy applies, as a Christian must presume it does when we encounter it in the New Testament, that is the real question, just as knowing which changes really improve the human condition and which do not is not something that one’s conscience can foretell in advance.
Nor can the epistemology of resentment, however disciplined by a communal sense of the sacred, be simply ignored. How else would we become aware of real injustice, however defined? The one thing we can be sure of is that what makes us human is our capacity for deferral, for exercising judgment, such that formulas like “the first shall be last” must be applied with discretion. All the more so in our “postcolonial” era, when many have been led to view the “Northern” Jews as ipso facto the oppressors of the Palestinians, paradoxically all the more so when the latter have dared to rebel by torturing and massacring unarmed Israeli civilians.
Which brings us back to the question of how we are to distinguish between an authentic sacred and its resentful caricatures. The difficulties raised by this question might well lead us to the conclusion that, in times like ours in which millennial inequalities must be negotiated, the first duty of our conscience must be to put our always potentially resentful desire away from us, following the Buddhist path of accepting to define it as what Girard called a mensonge romantique. And indeed, the popularity of Buddhist-inspired spiritual techniques in the West attests to what is ultimately the advantage of this attitude for one’s personal “adjustment.”
No doubt the defeat of fascism in WWII followed by the collapse of Bolshevism in 1989-91, while hardly being equivalent to “the end of history,” did seem for a while to have settled the global issue in favor of Western civilization, with its social sacred largely inspired by Judeo-Christianity. Yet it was surely this very sense that the world order had been stabilized in favor of the West under American hegemony that revived the somnolent forces of “third-world” resentment—and eventually of antisemitism—first in the 1960s, and then with far greater force after 9/11/2001, when the West responded to this unexpected humiliation from its recently decolonized South by seeking maladroitly to “spread democracy” to the Middle East, thereby activating “post-colonial” resentments, echoed in the West itself by the oikophobic condemnations of such as Noam Chomsky in defense of the al Qaeda martyrs.
One thing at least is clear: Whether the epistemology of resentment be applied directly in political revolutions or, as currently in the Western world, indirectly through mechanisms like Wokeness, it is hard to think of a single case where it has improved the ability of a population to solve the eternal problem of reconciling its citizens’ sense of moral equality with their respective benefit to society. The natural preference of the many who would choose a new land to inhabit remains overwhelmingly for those nations that practice some form of Western-style liberal democracy—what Churchill called the worst system except for all the others. In contrast, the new societies founded on the epistemology of resentment have been uniformly judged by all but militant jihadists or their equivalent as less attractive than those they have displaced. Even where these societies are relatively successful, as in mainland China, it is hard to imagine anyone choosing it over the freer society of Taiwan, and this is all the more the case for the far less successful majority of these nations, from North Korea to Cuba and Venezuela. Nor would anyone claim that the Muslim revolution in Iran and its extensions in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen… have improved the daily lives of their inhabitants.
As a consequence, the West’s need to maintain the public order that we associate with “civil society,” now that it can no longer depend on a set of religious values such as the “Judeo-Christian” United States implicitly shared not long ago, has become all the more urgent, in the interest of maintaining not only social harmony but above all, the economic and military strength to resist the increasingly powerful forces that oppose it. It is in this regard that the need to reinforce what we may call the societal sacred becomes crucial.
The degree to which Western societies generally have demonstrated their inability to deal with the low-level violence and disorder that has made our large cities increasingly dangerous and disorderly has become a farcical parallel to the real danger inherent in the West’s decreasing readiness to defend itself militarily, a critical problem if we would avoid catastrophic conflict in the coming decades. In particular, our scandalous vulnerability to the violent rhetoric and actions of radical Islamism cannot be allowed to persist. Neither the US nor its allies can tolerate in the long term the formation of mobs of organized agitators who can with virtually total impunity call for the death of Jews and the end of Israel, deface public monuments, and burn our flag.
Coda: Re-integrating Western Culture?
France is still today Europe’s, and the world’s, most culturally marked country. And although neither France’s economy nor its cultural creativity have retained anything like the importance they had at the time of the preceding 1924 Paris Olympics (depicted in the film Chariots of Fire), still today no city is comparable to Paris in the worldwide familiarity of its monuments and the prestige accorded to its fashions, cuisine, and lifestyle. Thus these Games were an exemplary attempt to celebrate the whole world’s unity in the cultural capital of the West.
In this regard, the recent controversy over the Dionysus-drag-queen Last Supper segment of the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris is in my judgment less a symptom of the West’s current cultural malaise than, on the contrary, what strikes me as a good-faith if somewhat awkward attempt to integrate its traditional values with those of the radically permissive culture of today’s avant-garde, as exemplified by its perhaps most characteristic element of gay liberation.**
Although many found this production offensive, I am willing to accept the creators’ assertions that the program was not intended to scandalize its audience, but rather to make them smile at its no-longer-forbidden-or-even-daringness. That is, to put the best face on it, as a celebration of the freedom of 21st century Western culture to include both the Last Supper and drag queens—and a near-naked Bacchus—without really offending anyone. And for many if not most members of this society, that was certainly true.
That this effort would predictably be greeted with hostility by traditional religious believers was a consequence the organizers evidently assumed would not prevent it from being enjoyed or at least tolerated by most of its audience. This could only be ascertained by a statistically controlled survey. And it is at least a notable indication that in the conservative Le Figaro’s daily readers’ poll of July 29, in answer to the question: Did you appreciate the opening ceremony of the J.O.?, 62% voted yes and 38% no. No doubt the ceremony included many other elements, but one would assume that anyone truly offended by the parody—as its news coverage on all the networks I have seen made clear by the reactions of their respective pundits—would have voted no.
But rather than arguing over whether this sequence was or was not offensive, it is more important to see it as an attempt to unify the contemporary world’s heterogeneous popular culture—an attempt such as could not have been conceived, let alone attempted, until very recently. And we cannot deny that—in contrast with holding drag queen readings in elementary school libraries—including this sequence in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is not without legitimacy as a gesture of lighthearted cultural synthesis.
As for those who point out that no one would have dared to deal in an analogous manner with the sacred material of Muslim culture, we might respond that, precisely, the fact that Western Judeo-Christian culture has traditionally had a freer attitude toward its own sacred material is not a sign of religious inferiority, but of its more sophisticated integration into daily life. Indeed, the West, as Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out some time ago, and as readers of Boccaccio or Rabelais should recall, has a particularly rich carnivalesque tradition. (See in particular Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.) Which is not to say that this episode is a fortiori worthy of their example, but merely that its “shockingness” is far from a sign of the decadence of our cultural tradition. And whereas the issues raised by what are best called marked sexual attitudes will always provoke controversy, the larger society, as in the case of gay marriage, often adapts to them surprisingly quickly, so that a modus vivendi appears much faster than one would have imagined—even as it continues to treat other forms of the “marked” less acceptingly.
If such kerfuffles were all contemporary Western culture had to worry about, we would be blessed indeed. Our societies should rather concentrate on eradicating real disorder and violence and creating an atmosphere of mutual tolerance and respect. This seems indeed to have been accomplished quite successfully for the duration of the Games—with the result that when Le Figaro asked on August 10, their penultimate day, whether the Paris JO was a success, a full 88% answered Oui!
**Unfortunately all videos showing this sequence without commentary have been removed from YouTube and no doubt from other internet sources. I was only able to watch a few minutes of this spectacle, and so regrettably cannot analyze it in detail.