Since 1941 I have lived through quite a few elections, but 2024’s was surely the most crucial. The defeat of the partisans of what we should call the “Iranian option” in the Middle East prevented what risked becoming the abandonment of the people whose conception of the sacred has been the foundation of the West, and that has underlain the Classical heritage of Greece and Rome. And the past year’s experience has made it clearer than ever that our implementation of this latter heritage is ultimately dependent on its Abrahamic inheritance.
Jew-hatred is the originary form of Western oikophobia, and in an era when the West is being seriously challenged, it is more crucial than ever that it be faced down and soundly rejected—not compromised with as though Israel’s war with Hamas has truly had “genocide” on both sides of the equation.
Just as the friends of Hamas accuse the IDF of “genocide,” the Democrats have had the clever idea of associating Trump with Hitler—remindful of Bushitler a few elections ago. But if our university and street rioters are massively on the side of Hamas, the American people are not.
I wonder how anyone can pretend that endearing election gimmicks like Trump working at McDonald’s or wearing a sanitation worker’s uniform were manifestations of contempt. Trump’s trolling operations were just the opposite: expressions of respect for fellow Americans doing honest jobs—while mocking his opponents in two different ways.
Trump’s victory, along with a Republican Senate and House, are now assured. And the relatively gracious tone of Harris’ and Biden’s concession speeches hopefully suggests a different atmosphere, in official Washington at least, from the hostility of 2016. Although the Never-Trumpers may never change (see, for example, the December National Review, from before the votes were counted), and the university-based Jew-hating contingent will continue to make its views known, this time the public’s choice is unambiguous—as is its judgment of the Biden-Harris administration.
Empirical Science and Humanist Anthropology
There was a time when it seemed that all powerful ideas were simple. In Chronicle 815 I quoted Pope’s lines:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
as the quintessential Enlightenment expression of this view. But a more nuanced presentation would refer rather to Jansenist mathematician Blaise Pascal’s prophetic idea of nature’s “two infinities,” great and small, which ever-more-powerful instruments like the new James Webb Space Telescope continually corroborate. For Pascal, there was no contradiction in the contrast between the infinite complexity of nature and the necessity of a sacred-centered ethic; and in a very different mode, GA’s humanist anthropology makes this same affirmation.
As a 60-year subscriber to Scientific American, I have been troubled over the past decades by what can only be described as the increasingly anti-Ockhamian—and anti-Popean—complexification of physical theories purporting to describe the universe.
George Morales, my physicist colleague and neighbor, views this development in positive terms, and I can well understand that for scientists, ever-increasing complexity offers ever-expanding opportunities for research, and consequently for jobs and grant funds (in contrast to the situation in the Humanities, where UCLA’s recent consolidation of French, Italian, German, and Scandinavian in a single ELTS—European Languages and “Transcultural Studies”—Department may well be the first step toward replacing its entire faculty with a next-generation AI program).
If we accept for the sake of argument my claim that GA is the most significant result of the now-defunct “French Theory” movement, whose original focus was the application of post-metaphysical thought in linguistics, philosophy, and structural anthropology to literary analysis, we can explain GA’s relative invisibility as the counterpart to the seemingly endless expansion of natural science. If, as I attempted to show at this year’s GASC in Tokyo—see Chronicles 802 and 806—humanistic in contrast with empirical thinking inevitably leads to a simplification, in which the origins of language, the sacred, and the rest of the human cultural scene may be understood as consequences of the introduction of a single bit of différance—Derrida’s portmanteau word combining to differ and to defer (both différer in French) in reference to both the deferral of “instinctive” acquisitive behavior and the difference that this enables among the multiple signs of language—it is easy to see why those who depend on the empirical study of nature for their livelihood would be repelled by it.
The concepts of pre-GA French Theory had been applied to the world of human culture, if not to the world of human origins. Derrida’s différance, understood as the genesis of signification from the deferral of desire, was in my view the most significant of these. But GA’s revelation of the originary power of this marriage of difference and deferral coincided perhaps inevitably with the exhaustion of the original movement, and it is most unlikely that the academic world will ever permit its flame to be reignited.
Curiously, the same problem has confronted my analysis of antisemitism. Once one points out that this curse on the “elder brother” is the product of Judaism’s Abrahamic heirs’ insistence on their own originarity, as though they could by suppressing the Jews rid themselves of their lateness, the twin taboos on these ideas appear as two versions of the same phenomenon. For both these cases refer to the sacred at what, from the Western perspective that has become the world perspective, must be seen as the two key moments of its history: first, the originary “bit” of sacrality/conscience as the motivation for the deferral of the gesture of appropriation transmuted into the first sign, and second, the origin of the spiritual foundation of the modern world in the affirmation of the One God, whose uniqueness reflects that same unique origin—which, however many times it may have been approximated and repeated in the history of our species, was in essence always the same event with the same motivation.
The genius of Christianity, as expressed in the first verse of the Gospel of John:
In the beginning was the logos.
had already united these two ideas. Sacred writings are not helpful in empirical science, but that is far from the case in humanist anthropology.
What this disparity between the sacred/human and the empirical/natural demonstrates is something that we should have realized from the beginning: the human universe is not structured like the natural. It begins with the single bit of différance that marks our communal agreement on a sign, which even when multiplied by thousands and quintillions remains the heir of its point of origin. We may compare this with astrophysics’ superficially similar theory of the origin of the universe some 13 billion years ago. For the presupposition that this “creation” was ex nihilo has no other basis than… Ockham’s razor itself. If evidence emerges of other “creations,” whether previous, subsequent, or simultaneous, empirical science will simply deal with them as it has always dealt with natural phenomena. And this may perhaps include the discovery of other forms of “intelligent life,” with their own evolutionary origins. Whereas the principle of a minimal origin of human culture, whether or not it emerged independently of such extra-worldly influences, need never be renounced.
As its language implies, Pope’s Newtonian dawn assimilates the natural universe to the human, whose unique origin as figured in the Bible supplied the basis of Pope’s metaphor. Thus today, when it is considered bad form to use the sacred as the basis for any kind of scientific thought, the notion that “the human” is best understood on the basis of a conceptually unique origin is viewed as a throwback to pre-scientific thinking.
Whence this curious inversion: in today’s scientific consensus, the origin of the physical universe is conceived as singular and datable, although subject as ever to new evidence; whereas the very notion of a punctual origin of the human is dismissed as a Genesis-inspired myth conflating a complex series of developments.
A New Look at the Sacred
It is time that we rejected the current common-sense dichotomy that treats the sacred (“religious belief”) as a self-contained domain independent of objective thought. I have many times cited anthropologist Roy Rappaport’s assertion, in his Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999) of the coevality, the simultaneous origin, of language and the sacred. In GA’s originary hypothesis, the first instance of the sacred is the moral hesitation/deferral of a gesture of appropriation that transforms it into an act of pointing, the origin of the “joint mutual attention,” not available to animals, that is the basis of human language.**
Just as words, as opposed to animal signals, are each the product of a communal consensus, so the phenomena of the sacred emerge in communal contexts and embody the imperatives of communal life. Ultimately there is only one great human scene, divided into innumerable subordinate scenes of varying mutual impact, and the fact that we have attributed the moral laws that we consider sacred to a transcendental divinity, particularly since the broad acceptance of monotheism, which can be said to have defined the “proto-modern” and now the modern world, need not prevent us from understanding these moral principles in strictly human terms. Hillel’s “golden rule”:
That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow! That is the whole Torah; the rest is interpretation.
sums up this position very nicely.
The relevance of our understanding of the human to the current moment of our history has been made clear by today’s unexpected recurrence of antisemitic violence as the Ur-manifestation of Western self-rejection or oikophobia. As I pointed out in Chronicle 804, similarities to Nazi attitudes and actions should not let us forget that the Nazi ideal was the triumph of Western civilization as an “Aryan” invention uncontaminated by “Semitic” Judaism and its Christian and Muslim derivatives. Hitler’s alliance with the Muslim Mufti was a tactical one; like Stalin and Mao, he had no real use for the Abrahamic religions.
The antisemitism we see today, catalyzed by the October 7 pogrom, is at base a denial of “colonizing” Western civilization, as though once Western science produced the engines and techniques of modernity, its civilizational basis could simply be eliminated—beginning with Israel and the Jews. It is in this light that we must examine the “post-colonial” ethic that has been bringing together the “global South,” whose hostility to the West was already reflected in Obama’s turn toward Iran that still deeply influences the Democratic Party, as well as a number of European parties, as we see today in Great Britain under the Labour government.
It is the very tension and danger of these times that has made both possible and necessary GA’s new way of thinking. We need this originary framework to understand what it is that the survival of the Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, has as its duty to demonstrate to the world—which may well be the Westphalian nation-state system itself, as opposed to the centralized tyranny that is the conscious aim of both the world’s Islamist and its secular totalitarian movements.
By now we should be aware that our knowledge of nature and nature’s laws, however great its benefits to human life in every sense, cannot resolve for us the problems of mimetic desire that only our common sense of the sacred can help us to mitigate. I trust that the second Trump administration will resume its interrupted project of seeking to bring together the Abrahamic religions in an effort to spread their unifying insights throughout the world. That our recent GASC meeting in Tokyo permitted a fruitful dialogue between GA and Buddhist thought shows that there need be no barrier between the world’s great revelations of the sacred. This is hopefully a sign that nuclear apocalypse can be avoided and the age of atomic weapons morph into a world of peaceful competition—but only insofar as this world remains for the foreseeable future respectful of the leading contributions of Western civilization.
**I recall a discussion five years ago at UCLA on the topic of The Soul, led by Dean of Humanities Herbert Morris, who passed away in 2022. (See Chronicle 616.) None of the participants, including myself, were altogether able to assimilate the religious origin of this concept to the terms of an academic discussion. But in reality, the simplest way to understand the soul is as the seat of our conscience, our first awareness of which—as Adam and Eve would experience on eating the forbidden fruit—is our originary experience of the sacred. I regret that I arrived too late at this understanding to communicate it to Herb during his lifetime.