to the memory of Charlie Kirk
One more Jew vs Greek, sacred vs worldly question, one that reflects the fact that once the sacred reaches maturity—a matter for l’esprit de finesse rather than l’esprit de géométrie—it ceases to evolve, whereas worldly knowledge evolves unendingly, so that the technique-dependent danger of destruction grows much faster than our ability to defend against it.
For a few years after WWII we worried a great deal about nuclear war, but after a while its ever-present possibility served only as a deterrent, albeit one that a new advance in weaponry might at any time make ineffective. Not to speak of the emergence of alternate modes of warfare, such as the creation of pandemics, a small sample of which we recently experienced.
Better not to think too much about such dangers, which by their nature are impossible to anticipate, let alone prevent with any assurance. Like Hitler’s gift of a half-century vacation from antisemitism, that from major wars will surely not be eternal, and just as WWII was far more destructive than WWI, one can predict the same for WWIII et seq.
So we had perhaps better bend our energies to making life in the present more pleasant for those around us rather than attempting to anticipate the progress of humanity in future millennia. Our flaw, quite possibly fatal, comes from the fact that once we have reached Hillel’s principle, and then, with the aid of credo quia absurdum, the paradoxical apotheosis of Christ, the Western sacred could evolve only as it has in Islam, whose affinity for the Red-Green alliance is anything but accidental, while our command over the object-world constantly increases—so that, on the one hand, we can vastly improve every aspect of our worldly lives, but on the other, our ability and willingness to put an end to human life (to “love death”) cannot be prevented from growing ever greater, to the point where it might seem virtually inevitable that at some point, we will do so.
Among the present signs of this gradient in the West are the falling birth-rate and the decline of humanistic thinking, as reflected in the academic world in the decline of humanities programs, including the humanistic anthropology represented by GA. The other day I spoke to an educated woman in her thirties who had never heard the name of Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous philosopher of his generation not all that long ago.
Will there be any more “great thinkers”? I have tried to do my bit, but hardly with much success. There is little profit in such speculations. Meanwhile, physical science continues to progress in every direction, creating ever more powerful tools and concepts for exploring ever farther Pascal’s two infinities of great and small, yet showing no signs of arrival at a new synthesis.
Can it just be a fluke that throughout my lifetime my impression has steadily grown that the more we learn about the natural world, the less we know it, in the sense of understanding the whole? Can we really imagine someone someday updating Pope’s lines:
Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light!
Einstein was the last physicist to whom that couplet might have been applied, although he himself would have rejected it. And since his day, the more the sciences advance, the less easily can they be explained even to the educated layman, and if certain elements of progress are clear enough, it is certainly not obvious what the mastery of quantum mechanics (and its pending integration of gravitation) would hold out to us, and anything but obvious what an updated “theory of everything” would look like.
But physics aside, the essential point is simply this: if indeed the irreversible growth of entropy implies that of increasingly complex negentropic beings, the increasing complexity of such beings that has led them to become increasingly subject to mimetic desire and hence to resentment makes the attainment of a harmonious society in the face of the constantly increasing potential of physical annihilation increasingly inconceivable.
As we seem to be seeing today, the relative stability of autocracies is no longer associated with a more primitive level of technology; on the contrary, the choice seems increasingly between a totalitarian system like that of China and democracies collectively evolving in the direction of anarcho-tyranny: the breakdown of local order and the spread of petty crime contrasted with wealth and monopoly of power as the only clear protections against disorder. And although the US still maintains, at least outside its major cities, a reasonable level of what we may call bourgeois order, in producing the materiel of war it has clearly fallen behind China, whose armies, however untested, are being increasingly supplied with the capacity to overwhelm those of the West.
What force is there to counteract the steady improvement in the instruments of violence, to which artificial intelligence has only begun to make its contribution? Although each army will prefer to avoid sacrificing vulnerable humans on the battlefield as opposed to increasingly intelligent drones and other automata, the principal aim of the latter will not be to destroy their enemy counterparts, but the humans that they are protecting.
What authority can we cite that might persuade us that such developments are not inevitable in the next couple of generations? Putin’s ability to invade Ukraine with impunity is just one minor consequence of the existence of “ultimate” nuclear weaponry, from which the immense area of his country allows him to credibly assume a greater immunity than any other, despite Russia’s renunciation of the USSR’s former aim to “bury” the Western economies. For who needs an economy when he has enough nuclear bombs? And while the Earth remains the same size, there is no reason to doubt the future evolution of increasingly deadly weaponry—and pace sci-fi, little chance indeed of finding safe havens elsewhere in the cosmos.
How might the countervailing force of the sacred conceivably counteract this evolution? Today the only real use for the sacred in human competition is creating the kind of monsters that invaded Israel on 10/7/23, whose “love of death”—as they proudly boast—gives them strength where their enemies’ love of life brings weakness. It is in this sense alone that the atavistic sacred of Jihadi Islam is “more advanced” than the Judeo-Christian religions.
No doubt Israel will likely emerge victorious from the present conflict, but the Jews’ very exemplarity makes them inimitable even by those few who have the generosity to admire them… And as we have seen from the world’s reaction to 10/7, and even in the race for the mayoralty of New York City, not long ago the world capital of Judaism, the psychological rewards of the transcendence of love by hate seem ever-increasing.
Conclusion
I have no doubt that in objective terms, Generative Anthropology has made considerable progress with respect to the state of anthropology at its inception. But whatever my personal limitations, I cannot imagine that ideas such as our originary hypothesis remain virtually unknown merely through a failure of marketing.
The fact is that in the (post)modern world that we inhabit, the “taboo” subjects—antisemitism, language origin—that I have repeatedly referred to in these Chronicles are really dangerous, accessible to only very few of those who seek to understand the human unshielded by divine protection. The heyday of “French theory” was one more legacy of WWII, a transitional period during which esthetic culture, particularly literature, could become a privileged source of anthropological understanding. But it’s all over now, and I don’t think that even Taylor Swift could popularize my theory of the origin of language—or of antisemitism either.
There is a reason why these thoughts, which in my perhaps overly self-centered judgment are the most significant anthropological advances of our new century, remain all but unknown, and will likely remain so when I have passed from this earth. As we saw in the previous Chronicle, the market for explaining the origin of language still remains blithely open to such Woke considerations as privileging women and children over men, making it useless to insist that, given that the focal point of culture is the deferral of intra-human violence, men have played the greater role simply because, as non-child-bearers, they remain necessarily even now the more violent sex.
But I think it is clear enough from these Chronicles that addressing the origin of language or its “spread” as the effect of one or another worldly activity simply refuses to take into account the contribution of French Theory to our fundamental anthropology. Which is to say, the real point of Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire and its potential for inciting conflict—the burden, we might say, of the human soul, of our independent intelligence.
We acquired language because we needed it as a means of deferring our desire before it could lead us to violate the Golden Rule. But having attained through language the deferral of our potential violence, we ironically became able, with accelerating facility, to vastly increase our capacity for violence, to the point where at some point in the near future, an act within the power of a single human being might conceivably put an end to human life, or indeed, to earthly life altogether.
And yet, to this ominous truth, our only reply can be, “While there is life, there is hope!”