What, no donkeys in the new Jerusalem (Copenhagen)?

IsraCast: Dec. 1917 - General Allenby Enters Jerusalem:

On the first day of the Jewish feast of Hanukkah in December 1917, the Battle of Jerusalem resulted in the city of Jerusalem falling to British forces led by General Allenby, after 400 years under Turkish rule.

Allenby was an accomplished horseman and it would have made sense for him to ride triumphantly into the city. However on 11 December Allenby entered on foot out of his great respect for the Holy City, becoming the first Christian to control the city in centuries.

According to Wikipedia:

In both Jewish and Christian traditions, the messiah (Jesus Christ in the later case) was often described as riding on a donkey. As noted, in the context of the Hebrew Bible this connoted wealth and affluence befitting the House of David, as at the time commoners are described as simply going on foot. However, in later times when the aristocracy used horses, depicting the messiah as riding a donkey came to have an opposite connotation, as indicating a simple, sober way of life and avoiding luxury. The same connotation is evident in the description of saints such as Francis of Assisi as riding donkeys.

This is all preface to the latest news on the great religious festival now unfolding in Copenhagen: Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges - Telegraph:

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.
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And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to "be sustainable, don't buy sex," the local sex workers' union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate's pass. The term "carbon dating" just took on an entirely new meaning.

I'm not sure, but I sense this gives a whole new meaning to allegations of "raping the planet." In any case, we can forgive Bruce Bawer for being confused, in an otherwise first-rate piece of reporting on "Hopenhagen" ("Barf"):

Well, here I am at the Vatican in Rome, where thousands of pilgrims from every corner of the earth crowd St. Peter’s Square, their eyes trained on the glorious basilica within which the College of Cardinals is gathering in secret conclave to settle the all-important question: Who will stand in the shoes of the fisherman?

I despair at what is going in Copehagen, as the left seeks to gain control and put serious breaks on economic freedom and legitimate human aspirations to escape from poverty and the nanny state. Yet as I tell my friends, it's time to get used to this kind of "new" religion. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe much in the religion of AGW, to the extent it is a form of scapegoating Carbon Dioxide in the support of the leftist desire to control and limit economies, instead of seeking, if it proves necessary, other forms of mitigating or adapting to climatic change. And I condemn the many in the "climate science" field who have proven themselves, as the latest CRU scandal further emphasizes, just too keen to corrupt science to religious ends.

But it is the very nature of science that it can't have the final word, that its work is but a series of discrete empirical observations and not complete knowledge of complex systems. These observations well may, and in many cases should, allow us to construct models of larger systems; but it is the nature of science that we realize that these models can never be complete, that we must remain open-minded as to the unending chain of causes and consequences on that which we are now modeling, and not discretely observing.

This means that science cannot enter into political calculations without some element of religion creeping in, for religion is inherently that which mediates the specifically human, self-interest in the meaning of causes and consequences. Ultimately, what the global warming debate teaches us is not science's final word - the religious belief that the "science is settled" is ridiculous - but rather what the various sides in "debate" want to believe of sciences, as a basis for their political and economic desires, be these of a relatively totalitarian or libertarian bent.

We live in a time when the growing number of discrete observations of science are, whatever they may prove to be, only going to add up to more complex models of the interactions of human behaviour and larger geo-physical systems. In turn, these models, one way or another, are inevitably and increasingly going to be used in political and economic arguments.

At the same time, human beings cannot live without something akin to a religion, some kind of shared belief in what we should hold together as sacred. All language, all consciousness, depends on shared scenes of desire, focussed on some central object of desire (hence made "sacred") whether we desire to imagine a world without cars, or without prostitution, etc. etc.

Those of us who would defend science from religious corruption must keep this need for religion in mind: one way or another religion and politics in future is inevitably going to use science to buttress its accounts of humanly-significant causes and consequences. Our task is not to pose facile oppositions of science vs. religion, presuming the twain should never meet: we should reject both the polemics of Richard Dawkins, and the Carbon-Dioxide-Witch Burners, but also some of their polemical opposition, all for similar reasons. Rather, we need to become much more sophisticated about how to relate our understanding of real human religious needs to cool, disinterested, reason. As Eric Gans argues:

The predicted catastrophic consequences of global warming, however distant, are no more or less hypothetical than those of an Iranian nuclear device. Politics exists to adjudicate the respective degree of gravity of such dangers, which cannot be determined in the formal rationality of a judicial procedure but only through the negotiation of personal and collective resentments. What is both fascinating and frustrating about such debates is the impossibility of maintaining the "objective" basis of the issue, that is, the projected significance of global warming for humanity in general, outside the sphere of political debate. The real question at stake is not whether the Earth is getting warmer or even whether human activity is the cause, but how much industrial productivity should be sacrificed for how much reduction in "greenhouse effect." The Left sees global warming as a weapon in its critique of the market system and its values; the Right sees its opponents as mere resenters of a system they consider fully capable of dealing with environmental issues in its normal course of operations. If tomorrow it is discovered that the production of CO2 actually reduces global warming, within a few days all the positions will have switched around, but all the underlying resentments will remain the same.

Although the coming and passing of the postmodern era has posed challenges to the market system, it has not put an end to the modern political dichotomy of Left and Right. On the contrary, the recent evolution of virtually all the major European countries, which were dominated during the Cold War by shapeless "center-right" coalitions as bulwarks against communism, suggests that if anything this opposition has been sharpened--as witness the just-concluded French election. If "politics" is an indispensable feature of the market system, it is because it has proved effective at releasing energy from the deferral of violence into the economy at large. Today, as the modern world confronts its Other [i.e. Islamic Jihad] in what appears to be their "final conflict," it is easy to grow impatient with a political debate that seems so irresolute in the face of the fanaticism of transcendentally guaranteed resentment. And the critique of this lack of resolution is an important element of the debate itself. But whether its outcome be reason or folly, the only alternative to the uncertainty of politics is not the certitude of "science," whether of climatology or of Generative Anthropology, but the dogmatic truth of our enemies.

See also:

Religion is about faith, and faith is about supporting a hypothesis—making a bet. To believe in global warming is to bet on the veracity of a set of hypotheses. More specifically, the kind of faith that deserves even metaphorically to be called a religion is one that is focused on deferring the violence that threatens to destroy the human community. Indeed, the belief in global warming and the catastrophes it is presumed to entail makes explicit that the deferral of violence is the primary object of faith, a truth masked in traditional religion by the mediation of supernatural powers. Global warming is like a divine punishment for our sins of excess energy consumption—sins against "Gaia," if you like, but the divinization is altogether optional because the punishment is the wholly natural consequence of these sins. Global warming is comparable to the self-generated sufferings of a drug addict rather than the externally inflicted punishment of a murderer, except that, as its name implies, it takes place on a global scale, and its cure, assuming this is even possible, will preoccupy all of humanity for decades, not to say centuries, to come.

But this emphasis on the deferral of external violence is not the only, nor even the principal deferral effected by the belief in global warming. Its most important feature is that it provides its believers with an externally-directed goal that can in principle defer human violence. Violence and disaster—même combat. By turning our desires away from what might be thought more pressing dangers—Osama with an H-bomb—toward reduced energy expenditure, we work for the benefit of humanity as a whole. More precisely, by focusing our efforts on global warming, we not only diminish its effects, but we also demonstrate the possibility of action toward a goal that can in principle be shared by all—Osama reducing his "carbon footprint." Like the "Aranda" religious rituals described by Durkheim, the global warming praxis serves to promote solidarity. But where traditional religions, however "universal," have concrete historical roots that, involuntarily or not, exclude others, the science-driven behavior demanded by the fight against global warming obeys no such constraints. It would not be an outrageous exaggeration to claim that global warming is the first global religion—which makes its principal spokesman, independently of all politics, a perfectly fitting candidate for the Peace Prize.

The religion of impending disaster transforms the nature-centered apotropaic rites of "paganism" into rational, goal-directed activity. Instead of sacrificing an animal to appease Neptune or Apollo, one rides a bike to work to lower one’s gasoline consumption. The nonbeliever may scoff, but this activity makes a fully rational appeal to natural forces. Nor is global warming comparable to the Enlightenment-derived secular religions of Communism and its Fascist antithesis, whose worship of unaided human powers leads inevitably to their concentration in a quasi-deified Supreme Leader. Al Gore is closer in spirit to Jesus or the Buddha than to Stalin or Mussolini.

Is the sea level really fated to rise twenty feet? (At its present rate of 3mm per year, this will take place in about 2000 years.) There are moments when the religion of global warming overreaches itself into apocalyptic fantasy not all that different from cultist predictions of the end of the world. One might say in their defense that these extreme possibilities are evoked to dramatize the urgency of conversion. Yet these apocalyptic tendencies reveal in this new embodiment of the sacred a potentially fatal flaw.

The traditional objects of faith are, ultimately, hypotheses concerning the divinely approved forms of human interaction; such hypotheses can be discredited only by the failure of the faithful to maintain a viable society. This is equally true of political religions such as Communism; had Khrushchev really "buried us" under Communist productivity, it would have been the USSR who won the Cold War without firing a shot. In contrast, faith in global warming is adherence to a scientific hypothesis independent of human activity, even if it concerns this activity as an important parameter. This makes global warming vulnerable to disconfirmation independently of the benefits the fight against it may confer on global human society. If next week or next decade the climatologists revise their models of climate change, the common goal that was to have preserved us from the selfish incentives of the Prisoner’s Dilemma will vanish. If they do not, bringing climate change within acceptable limits would have the same result.

A bioethicist who finds human hierarchy in all the wrong places

Dag and I recently had a conversation touching on the nature of hierarchy. So when I read today in the Ottawa Citizen the following comments from Margaret Somerville on the nature of hierarchy (hat tip: Catfur), I thought it might be useful to say something about this fine example, from Canada's most famous bioethicist, of how contemporary mainstream academic thought tends to locate such basic human questions as the nature of hierarchy.

My goal will be to point out what is ignored by the present mainstream ways of thinking, as it appears to me as a student of Generative Anthropology which is a new way of thinking, developed by Eric Gans, that has yet few followers despite, to be frank, its superiority (as its students attest) as a way of thinking about the human.

Margaret Somerville is addressing the controversial awarding of membership in the Order of Canada to the abortionist, Henry Morgentaler, an award which Somerville herself was denied for being too controversial, given her opposition to same-sex "marriage". Here's what Somerville writes:

We seem to have a great need for hierarchy and recognition, but the practice of awarding civilian honours such as the Order of Canada raises a host of difficult issues

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the awarding of the Order of Canada to Henry Morgentaler, the question arises: Are citizen honours a good idea?

First, however, in the interests of transparency, I want to note I'm in the somewhat unusual position of having been both given such an award and, 17 years later, refused one. It's an open question whether those experiences qualify or disqualify me from weighing in on this issue, but here goes.

We all like to be recognized and the urge to establish hierarchical structures is almost certainly programmed into our genes - it's a survival mechanism, a psychobiological phenomenon that, as the new field of epigenetic research is showing us, may well be activated by certain environmental triggers that physically change the genes involved.

Over the years, I've mused on why most of us react as we do to "famous" people. I keep thinking they're just another person and it doesn't make sense. But, like many others, I've found it "special" to meet such people. We seem to need them to be "famous" and they oblige. Part of the explanation might be that we vicariously experience their fame - we feel some of it rubs off on us. Citizen honours are a mini-fame - most of us notice the person in the elevator or on the plane with the Order of Canada snowflake on their lapel and wonder who they are and what they did to merit it.

We can take the millennia of monarchies, dictatorships and empires, as well as social structures used by other animals (my cats eat their shared meals in their order of hierarchy and become distressed if I intervene to try to change that), as evidence that the basic or default position is hierarchy. That means egalitarianism, for instance, as implemented in democracy, is the exception and has to be worked at if it is to be maintained. Tragically, many examples supporting that fact can be pointed to in our contemporary world.

So do citizen honours interfere with egalitarianism? Is putting letters after one's name obsolete - or even harmful to society as a whole - a relic of the age of monarchy and its various trappings? Is it an example of the "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" principle, that is, an unjustified power grab? Does awarding OCs endorse a philosophy that some of us are superior to others of us?
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Margaret Somerville " Questions of merit:

The most important thing to note about Somerville's comments is that that since she concludes "that the basic or default position is hierarchy" she can't seriously explain herself and her own moral intuitions: why does she even think of making her cats' lives more egalitarian? Why is democracy such an exception in human history, as she claims? Why do so many people today care so deeply about equality?

Somerville comes to her assumptions about the "default position of hierarchy" because her cats have a pecking order, and on the fact of monarchies, dictatorships, and empires. But these hierarchical institutions are all the products of agrarian societies, which have only existed for five to ten thousand years, unlike the more ancient and much longer-lived hunter-gatherer societies that are ruled by a collective ritual and myth that no one controls or dominates but that evolves communally in some way.

Somerville wants us to believe that our democratic instincts are something very new in history and hard to sustain. But are we moderns really the discoverers of some idea - equality - so radical and unheard of in human history until recently? Can anyone who notes how deeply felt today are our moral intuitions of some fundamental human equality - how deeply passionate (not only) the left is about such matters - really think this is simply the discovery of some Enlightenment philosophers, a few hundred years ago, or maybe of Christianity, a mere (in the lifetime of the human species) two thousand years ago?

It's oh so tempting for moderns to think that they have discovered something rare and profound in the way of justice, as if the key to a whole new way of being in the world were unveiled by our genius, just recently, thanks to some heroic revolutionary. Notwithstanding that we are continually refining and deepening our understanding of ourselves, I think it's a great delusion to believe in unprecedented discoveries and revolutions.

In the thinking of Generative Anthropology, it is by reflecting on the nature of human language that we come to see how our intuition of equality is one of the most basic qualities of human language itself. And for GA, symbolic language is the defining quality of the human, that which distinguishes us from the animal world.

Whatever our differences in the material world, whatever our differences in social status, language only works when all members of the community share in it. We are not divided by nature into camps of listeners and talkers; everyone who uses language must be potentially both. Language only works when we are all willing to exercise free will and sign off on, or refuse, the shared meanings we accord to arbitrary collections of sounds, gestures, or letters.

Keep in mind , for example, that one of the first thing an infant learns to say to the mother on whom she is almost entirely dependent for survival, is "no"! That is a bold assertion, at such a young age, of both difference and moral equality.

No matter how nasty a tyrant may be, he cannot overcome the thought in those he rules that he IS a nasty tyrant. He must insist on obedience to his intentions and meanings. He must insist, because we could refuse, if only we had the courage. So where does this thought that he is an evil tyrant come from if hierarchy is our "default position"? Why shouldn't we just accept the tyrant as readily and unconsciously as cats accepting their order of dominance and submission?

And one thing any student of history can tell you is that throughout the entire history of hierarchical societies there have been at least some people who have had some sense of injustice at inequality. (I would not say the sense of injustice in the past was ever as strong as it is today in our more egalitarian times but this is a paradox I will leave aside for now.)

Personally, I wouldn't argue that our common sense of injustice is always reasonable. Hierarchy can definitely serve collective purposes: in organizing a society in ways more complex than the equalitarian hunter-gatherer society, a hierarchical society becomes better able to create wealth and to defend itself in warfare. In the modern world, differences in wealth often reflect a return on investment for the risks people have taken in creating opportunities for others, without knowing in advance that they would be rewarded in the marketplace for trying to create wealth and opportunities for others.

But notwithstanding that our sense of injustice at inequality can be irrational, there is no doubting how strongly this sense of injustice can be felt. The powerful intuition that human equality is somehow fundamental to our nature cannot be seriously denied.

Defenders of freedom (which is often in tension with our moral intuition of equality) need to realize this and not attempt to escape the issue with lazy arguments about our cats. We have human language, and hence the intuition that comes with sharing equally in the signs of language, precisely because at some point in our past the animal pecking order was no longer sufficient to keep all our proto-human forebears in line. The alpha "dog" was losing control; the order of the pack was breaking down... a new kind of order, specifically human, had to emerge... or so begins the powerful hypothesis of Generative Anthropology.

Animal hierarchies are notably different from human ones. Animals relate to each other in one-to-one relations of dominance and submission. The alpha dog does not have to get up on his hind quarters and address all the other dogs as a communal whole, convincing them why it would be better if they didn't all gang up and turn on him. Rather, he only needs to address his immediate rivals for alpha status. Images of dogs playing poker with each other are strictly for human consumption. Only human culture is structured as a relationship between a sacred centre and a collective periphery (in poker, the sacred centre is the pot, or the winning hand).

A human king must be in continual conversation with his subjects, lest they do gang up and turn on him. Whatever the attempts to defend monarchy in terms of a theory of the divine right of kings, we are all susceptible to the revelation that the king is just a man who should be brought down to our level. On the other hand, the reason we all are interested in fame and we are usually keen to have some of it "rub off" on us is that we all know that there is something sacred in human affairs that we are all more or less equally interested in. We all want to use celebrities in our conversations with each other. We all want a piece of the sacred action. It is precisely our desire to share in the signs and things that we make sacred that leads us to create more and more social differences, and hence some hierarchies.

We create signs of difference that differentiate one human from another; but we do this so that these signs of difference may circulate widely, that we may all be empowered by their use and transformation. Give Morgentaler the Order of Canada, if you will, but be assured that this will only renew the debate on abortion. Liberal elites can't settle the issue by declaring Morgentaler a national worthy; rather they can only make clearer the sacred stakes in the battle and thus add fuel to the debate, as we in Canada have seen in recent days.


Finally, to attempt to explain human culture by reference to "epigenetic" research is to commit a serious category error. Human culture cannot be measured discreetly in the laboratory. It is the product of history, of a complex evolution by which we have periodically renewed and reworked the first ever memorable scene where a sign of language was shared equally by all involved.

Empirical research into human nature means little on its own. It must be adopted by an overarching theory of the human. The empirical is subject to the theoretical because we are ultimately ruled by our shared language and our freedom to use it in ways complex and paradoxical. Theory is the attempt to understand the shared but contested scenes of language, religion, and culture. And that is why we need ethicists, to theorize what maximizes the human good. And we will always need them, for there will never be a day when science and facts simply rule us.

Somerville cannot understand herself as a fan of democracy and equality because she takes for granted the language with which she makes her claims about the world. She does not make fundamental the question of how it is that she only understands herself and the human world through shared cultural representations that exist, not anywhere in the material world, but only in a transcendent domain.

This is the kind of thing that a modern "scientific" thinker is afraid to discuss. Transcendence?

But seriously, an idea has no material reality; it has no permanent presence in anyone`s brain or in any other material thing (a book, as a material thing, is only a collection of printed symbols). We find the idea, somehow, when our brains, firing neurons in ways we can hardly begin to understand, are able to associate words (by associating sounds or letters, images or gestures, etc.). When our brains are not making these associations, where does the idea reside? Well, it is hard to get our heads around it, but frankly the idea only really exists in some domain above or among us. The existence of this transcendent domain is a mysterious fact of our humanity that only religion, and not yet science, has tried seriously to understand. In other words, religion is a form of anthropology yet superior to anything produced by "scientific" anthropology.

The hierarchy of human culture is somehow built on top of our animal past that was no doubt hierarchical in the way of Somerville`s cats. But there is quite a divide between the world of cats, or any animal pecking order, and the world of kings and peasants. And we can only understand that divide by understanding how humans made it through the use of language and representation. We build on top of our biology by creating differences in language or culture. And every cultural difference begins as a basic distinction between a material thing, like a cat, and a transcendent word, like "cat". Human hierarchy is not simply or largely based on biology, but on the basic difference between things and representations, the difference between the material and the transcendent.

When we use language, we make a difference, but not in the material or biological world. We create difference in the symbolic world of representations. Yet even as we make a difference in this transcendent world, a difference that will allow us to distinguish one human from another as being more or less central to whatever it is we are representing, we all share equally in using language. Thus, difference and equality go hand in hand. They are both defining, or originary, qualities of the human. This is the fundamental paradox of the human that Generative Anthropology begins to explore.

Eric Gans: Transcendence is a Human Fact

The intellectually curious should not miss the latest essay from Eric Gans: Chronicles of Love & Resentment CCCLVI, which takes on the dialogue of the deaf between the currently fashionable camp of atheist polemicists and the defenders of religion.

What neither side has, as Gans never tires of pointing out, is an adequate anthropological account of how our shared human consciousness or transcendence works, or could have first come into being, something that Gans' Generative Anthropology (GA) serves to hypothesize. To those of us familiar with GA, it is clearly a superior way of approaching the question of transcendence, and yet the science vs. religion polemicists keep on fighting, showing little interest in GA's way of minimizing the difference between the two camps. GA is founded on an "originary hypothesis" concerning the minimal conditions for the simultaneous origin of human language, religion, and our transcendent consciousness, and GA's work is to continually refine this hypothesis:

I am currently in the preliminary stages of a project that will address the question raised by the current wave of anti-religion books and the replies they have received from the faithful. Now that I've read a few works in both categories, I am able to provide an update. At this point I will not address the specific points raised in these works. Although eventually I will have to respond to their chief arguments, such as they are, my readings confirm my conviction that no one conceives which I shall call the question of transcendence in anything like the same terms as GA.

As might be expected, although the common assumptions of both sides exclude consideration of the originary hypothesis, the arguments in defense of the transcendental are more congenial to it. As a rule, those who attack religion assume that the universe can be understood as composed entirely of matter and that the human does not put into question this overall materialist ontology. The a priori exclusion of a transcendental realm, which reduces representations to forms of matter associated with other forms, more complex but not ontologically different from the strands of DNA that are "expressed" in bodily traits or functions, makes the construction of a hypothetical originary scene a waste of time. In contrast, for those who defend God or the "spiritual," the originary hypothesis can be understood as a minimal reading of a scene of creation, and even if the defense drifts off into the cosmos, the human battleground remains the essential one. What these defenders do not do, however, is propose a minimal hypothesis of their own. Either they accept in some sense a specific religion's account of creation or, more commonly, they avoid discussing origin altogether, since the "spiritual realm" is simply assumed to exist independently of humanity. Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary's The Spiritual Brain (HarperSanFrancisco 2007) is the best example I have seen of this kind of argumentation. This book's claims for "spirituality" are not in real contradiction with the principles of GA, but there is no expressed concern for restricting these claims to the domain of anthropology.

Of the atheists' various theories of how religion came into existence, the most serious are founded on evolutionary psychology. If religion is widespread despite its costliness in time and energy (not to speak of its absurdity, criminality, imbecility, etc.), it must somehow be adaptive, so we may assume there exist for its central traits genes, or brain modules, or complexes of "memes"--unless religious activity is merely a "spandrel," an indirect consequence of genuinely adaptive traits, such as our love for stories. As for what might make religion adaptive, perhaps the best guess is that it satisfies our (or our children's) tendency to attribute intention to ostensible agents, whether truly animate or not, including the dead, whose agental status we tend to prolong as their bodies decay. Aside from the pseudo-scientific vocabulary, most of these arguments are not measurably more sophisticated than the 19th-century figure of "primitive man" bowing down to the god of the thunderstorm. In perhaps the most serious of these explorations, Daniel Dennett's insufferably long-winded Breaking the Spell (Viking 2006), the set of possibly useful analogies with which the author begins his investigation includes such things as our excessive fondness for sugar and behavior influenced by parasites. The idea that a complex institution bound up with the whole of human culture can be approached by means of such analogies is a category error of astounding intellectual arrogance. Concerning those works that dispense with both diatribes and evolutionary speculations and limit themselves to philosophical demonstrations of the Impossibility or merely the Improbability of God--the titles of two collections of philosophical essays--they commit a less dramatic version of the same category error by discussing the God-concept independently of its necessarily anthropological context.

Beyond Voltairean religion-bashing that has no bearing on the question of transcendence, the bottom line of the atheistic side's arguments is that what we know about matter and its organization gives no evidence of a creator-designer, that is, a world-creating mind gifted with intentionality. Everything from the big bang to the emergence of life to that of humanity can be reasonably attributed to matter's self-organizing properties, as manifested in particular in the Darwinian evolution of life.

My claim is that this line of argument is simply irrelevant. It fails to address the real question at stake, which should not be posed--by either side--in terms of the existence or non-existence of a "designer." Religion is about the human, and God's existence in realms not inhabited by humanity is of at most allegorical significance. Christianity makes this explicit with John's "In the beginning was the word," rewriting what was already strongly implicit in the Genesis original, where God creates the universe with language. Speculating on what God was or was not doing at the big bang, or whether he created just one universe or a zillion alternative ones (to respect the "anthropic principle") is the contemporary equivalent of counting angels on pinheads. As for the "proofs" of God's impossibility or improbability, it suffices to say that if God exists, he is no doubt capable of arranging things as he likes, including dealing with the logical impossibility of being at once omnipotent and omniscient. To suggest, as some do, that if God really existed, he would almost certainly have made the world differently reflects the cosmological arrogance that scientists display whenever they forget that to present quantum indeterminacy and the decomposition of matter into quarks as the definitive ontology is to declare the end of (scientific) history.
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Our possession of representations is the central feature of what we call our "consciousness." Animals have intentions and make calculations, but they lack a "theory of mind" that allows them to understand and predict not merely the actions but the intentions of other beings. As Richard van Oort has pointed out, based on Michael Tomasello's studies of chimpanzees, even the highest animals, although clearly able to react to the intentions of others (as a prey animal avoids its predators), are unable to attribute intention to their fellows, for example, in teaching/learning a new technique. From this we may conclude that these creatures lack a theory of their own mind and cannot attribute intention to themselves. Humans acquire an intuitive grasp of others' and their own intentionality through the shared use of representations. Unlike the tool-like actions of chimpanzees, speech acts are intrinsically intentional--intentionality is all they are. We are able to guess each other's intentions because they can in principle be formulated in language.

A familiar point against the materialist denial of human specificity is that a robot or computer has no internal mental state. Computers use signs, but they are our signs; to the computer, they are so many bytes--in fact, there is no "to the computer" at all. As Beauregard and others point out, the claim that our mind is nothing but the activity of our brain is an act of faith, not a scientific truth. What the originary hypothesis adds to this debate is to clarify what it is that humans share with respect to the use of representations: their creators' originary and subsequently virtual community. The individual brain does not "contain" the representations it uses; it borrows them from a communal source to which they always remain attached. It is their dependence on the human community that distinguishes the signs of language from the indexical signs employed by our animal forebears. Whereas animals' signaling systems are rooted in individual, genetically inherited behavior patterns that have been refined by evolution to arouse the appropriate reaction in their fellows, requiring at best some postnatal training, humans invent, use, and modify language in a collective setting. Each use of a word or symbol takes place before this virtual community, whose members' mutual recognition as fellow language-users is ultimately dependent on a shared sense of the sacred. The virtual presence of the human community generates the scenic space within which we become conscious of ourselves.

The arguments given above do little more than summarize, with some added refinements, ideas I first put forth on this subject in 1981 in The Origin of Language. I am prepared to continue repeating and refining these same ideas--in dialogue with the handful of free spirits who take them seriously--while I am able to think at all.

So long as the two sides in the public debate agree to disagree about "the existence of God," there will be no progress. It is only when both sides come to accept the fact that--as I think Derrida realized in his last years (see Chronicle 340)--the distance between the faith of the possessor of human language and that of the believer in sacred revelation is vanishingly small, that the understanding of what these two "believers" have in common can become the focus of a way of thinking about the human that will finally be worthy to be called anthropology.

Falling on your own sword

I remember with interest a book I once read detailing a common theme in myths from around the world. These would be myths characteristic of an agrarian society with a dawning consciousness of how its myths work. These myths tell us about a society that, in times of trouble, hears the words of a wise man, or, alternatively, someone who is not usually heard from, telling the people to look for a special sign of something or someone - say, someone whose pants have a horizontal, not vertical, seam - someone who, it is implied, is somehow connected to the cause of the crisis. The person who speaks intuitively grasps that the community needs a victim, someone to point to and cast out, not that they know exactly what it is to scapegoat; what the person does not realize, until too late, is that in speaking out he or she becomes marked as a potential victim him or herself.

Such a myth is mark of a world still somewhat primitive, not yet fully in the light of the Judeo-Christian unveiling of myth's role of transfiguring sacrificial violence by making victims into myth's tragic heroes or gods, a world not yet troubled by myth's inability to explain itself, its own history and relationship to human violence and to the rituals that represent and obscure originary violent events.

I'm really not sure if I am being facetious in suggesting that such a mythic consciousness would be roughly the equivalent in religious consciousness of today's Archbishop of Canterbury:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has called for new laws to protect religious sensibilities that would punish “thoughtless and cruel” styles of speaking.

Dr Williams, who has seen his own Anglican Communion riven by fierce invective over homosexuality, said the current blasphemy law was “unworkable” and he had no objection to its repeal.

But whatever replaces it should “send a signal” about what was acceptable.

This should be done by “stigmatising and punishing extreme behaviours” that have the effect of silencing argument.

The Archbishop, delivering the James Callaghan Memorial Lecture in London this afternoon, said it should not just be a few forms of extreme behaviour that were deemed unacceptable, leaving everything else as fair game.

“The legal provision should keep before our eyes the general risks of debasing public controversy by thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting,” he said.
[...]
In 2006, Parliament passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which creates an offence of inciting or “stirring up” hatred against a person on the grounds of their religion. But the act was so watered down during its passage through Parliament that its critics fear it will be almost useless.

Dr Williams said: “It is clear that the old blasphemy law is unworkable and that its assumptions are not those of contemporary lawmakers and citizens overall. But as we think about the adequacy of what is coming to replace it, we should not, I believe, miss the opportunity of asking the larger questions about what is just and good for individuals and groups in our society who hold religious beliefs.”

Dr Williams was criticised by the National Secular Society who accused him of promoting “self-serving and dangerous" ideas.

Terry Sanderson, president, said that the Archbishop’s speech was a “blatant pitch for new legislation to replace the blasphemy laws that the Government are planning to scrap.”

Thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting? Self-serving indeed. I mean what could be more thoughtlessly sacrificial than pointing the finger at someone and labelling them with highly emotional and subjective labels like "thoughtless" and "unintentionally cruel", and then casting them out of society as the bad guy? Sure the lawyers would develop all kinds of standards and protocols for such charges; still, at the end of the day, what kind of law can judge "unintentional thoughts" without making the traditional English ideal of a univerally-applied law into a plaything of arbitrary judicial interpretation? How could a society with such a law not corrupt its judiciary and their aspirations to disinterestedness, given that a judge would have to rely on political correctness to know when someone was being criminally thoughtless and unintentionally cruel?

A society that became so irrational as to cast out all that Christianity has taught us about the irrationality of scapegoating and depending on victimization for creating social order - a society whose present erosion is in part tied to its religious and political refusal to name and contest the primitive religious sensiblity that is growing in its midst (as anything other than "anti-Islamic" and "cruel") - is a society that could easily turn on the Archbishop and say that he is the one being thoughtless and unintentionally cruel, and cast him out.

Where do they find these people, these half-witted readers of Rene Girard (I have read that Dr. Rowan Williams is among their number) who never seem to appreciate what Girard is really telling us about our cruel addiction to casting out the bad guy, "Mr. cruelty"? The British Isles that gave us the greatest lessons in the rule of law and free speech, are now home to many high officials and sacrificers who need to go back to school and relearn those lessons.

As usual, the work of Eric Gans is to the point:

The claim that what Robert Sheaffer--an interesting "amateur" theoretician of resentment to whom I shall return in a future column--calls "envy control" is the founding principle of human society strikes me as more valid by every reasonable intellectual criterion than, for example, Richard Rorty's popular idea, borrowed from Judith Shklar, that the good society is one that avoids cruelty. The idea of avoiding cruelty is so sanctimoniously self-serving, in a word, so sacrificial--Cruelty as the black-hatted Bad Guy--that it makes me nostalgic for the Aztecs who supplied themselves with protein by slaughtering their neighbors; no mealy-mouthed hypocrites there! But this Nietzschean reaction, however natural, only plays into the hands of the "institutional middle class," with its "empathic" notions of compassion and cruelty-avoidance. As proof, Nietzsche himself has become a hero of this class, which is to say, of the Left, which he execrated. His revaluation of all values is now, with fitting irony, put to just the opposite use to that for which it was intended: the conscration of the victimary. This should be a warning to all thinkers who dare speak of resentment.

Are you next? After me?

In an article in today's National Post, Terry O'Neill brings our attention to

Section 7 of B.C.'s human rights act [which] makes it an offence for any person to publish "any statement, publication, notice, sign, symbol, emblem or other representation" that so much as "indicates discrimination or an intention to discriminate" against a protected group, or "is likely to expose a person or group or class of persons to hatred or contempt." No actual discrimination or hatred has to occur for an offence to occur. And, as pointed out on these pages over the past few weeks, truth is not a defence.

Did you know you were living in a totalitarian society where you can't speak the truth if there is any chance someone or some group who is privileged, by the state, to be considered more socially or culturally marginal than you, claims to be hurt by what you say or write? Were you aware that to think is to discriminate and, effectively, to hate evil? and that to be human is to be inescapably resentful in some degree, to feel alienated by someone who is closer to the sacred center of attention than are you? Did the British Columbia NDP government that passed the above-quoted section of the Human Rights Act - which should be considered unconstitutional and long ago thrown out (but it's still here) - ever win an election on the question of whether British Columbia should be a totalitarian state where you cannot express (and hopefully make productive) your inevitable human resentments of others?

No, because the people who pass such legsialation are not themselves aware that they are full of hate and contempt, especially for those they declare - with much passion - full of hate and contempt: e.g. the Archie Bunker stereotype, the "bigoted white male Christian", the "reactionaries" who act as what Rene Girard called "mimetic doubles" for our heroic "progressives". No, our left-liberal elites think they're secular, but they have a very powerful religion, of a Gnostic variety, that responds to the great and gut-wrenching uncertainties of our conflict-ridden human existence by looking for guarantees of self-righteousness. They're against hate and contempt, you see. They must be on the side of the holy. They're right, and you contemptible one are not, unless you "think" and chirp like them. It's oh so Utopian and feel-goody.

To understand how their religion works, we have to understand their utter dependence on the figure of the victim, around which their self-righteous consensus develops. They are, to put it bluntly, a variety of death cult, of human sacrificers, only less honest about it than were, say, the Aztecs, or less aware of how their need for victims - in order to appear politically self-righteous in supposedly defending victims - tends to lead to the production of the needed victims, if only (but it is not only) most obviously by the stigmatization of "right-wing religious bigots" (which in turn creates a desire for a class of people to go through life as the putative victims of "right-wing religious bigots". In extreme cases the cult of "human rights" leads "freedom fighters" to make victims of "their" own people to put on display before the world media, always in need of victims of modern Western States, in order to champion a cause.

What would be a simple example of this religion's mindset? Well consider this excerpt from another opinion piece in today's National Post, regarding the scandal of the Canadian "human rights" police. Barry Cooper tells the story of a Christian who apparently thought he had the right to a critique of homosexuality (not of the personhood of homosexuals, which as a Christian he must consider divine), long a part of a Judeo-Christian culture for reasons that we could debate (if we lived in a free society):

Last November, Lori Andreachuk, QC, a Lethbridge divorce lawyer and chair of an Alberta human rights panel, decided that, by writing a letter to the editor, Stephen Boissoin exposed homosexuals to hatred and contempt, which violated the Alberta human rights act.

[...the]entire ["Human Rights"] process is skewed. Most obviously in that complainants get a free ride and defendants pay full legal freight. The taxpayers of Alberta paid for Levant's interrogation. A lawyer from the Alberta Attorney General's office was present at the Boissoin-Lund panel.

This meant that, unlike the procedure in a genuine court, even if the defendant wins, he loses -- money, if nothing else -- and even if the complainant loses, he wins by ensuring that potential critics will think twice about speaking up.

Worse, the common-law rules of evidence do not apply so that the most bizarre and unconnected phenomena can be introduced as if they were relevant. These tend to involve the "feelings" of the defendant. In principle, human rights panels are inquisitorial bodies operating in what is usually an adversarial legal context, but they lack the balance that characterizes both systems taken on their own terms.

Incidentally, the government lawyer at the Boissoin-Lund panel asked me one of the strangest questions I have ever answered in many cross-examinations as a so-called expert witness. "How," he asked, would I "distinguish" Boissoin's letter to the Red Deer Advocate from Hitler's Mein Kampf? I resisted the temptation to give the reply that came immediately to mind and provided a more or less civil answer.

But Barry - and this is my example and point illustrating the Gnostic and victimary religion that motivates the "Human Rights" world view of today's liberals - this insane question is not at all incidental to the mindset of those who promote and prosecute thought crimes. It is a perfect example of how the central revelatory event of the religion of White Guilt - i.e. the Holocaust - allows one to lose all sense of differences and scale: everything is reduced, or inflated, to the central truth: that Western Society, as exemplified by the middle-class and professional-led Nazis, can, when taking its "norms" and "prejudices" seriously, result in the absolute and unquestionable victimization of the perfectly innocent "Jew" by the perfectly evil "Nazi", and with the more or less active co-operation of every "normal" person and profession in the country. That did happen in 1930s-40s Germany, so does that mean we in contemporary Canada can't be trusted to do any better with our freedoms? But if we can't, how can we be protected from our "protectors" and their ideas about who is a victim and who a victimizer?

Once the guarantee of the righteousness of the "victim" is determined by simply invoking memory of the Holocaust, all that remains for the neo-fascists of the "human rights" police is to insure that every worthy or potential victim of Western norms can now be clothed in the dress of the "Jew" and everyone who is in a position of normalcy, authority, power, or success in the Western world can be labelled a "Nazi". Many will have noted the leftist glee with which the Israelis and Americans have become the new Nazis. Those who have developed the power and means to lead and feed the world are now often the epitome of evil. Nazi antisemitism has given way to new left antisemitism. Mimetic doubles.

And so, the poor bugger who writes a "homophobic" letter to the editor can be fined and possibly jailed, be banned from speaking on given issues, because there is no essential difference - at least not in our human rights law - between his little Christian text and Mein Kampf. All sense of empirical discrimination - i.e. reference to facts and calm reasoning about the degree of one's reliance on the victim figure - is thrown out the door in a religious rush to the New Utopia. It is a passion that only creates a need for more victims in the guise of defending them.

I would like to be a bit more reflective about all this, but I'm damn angry (not that I ever get too angry) and I want to get this post up now, so I will conclude by quoting a better mind, Tom Bertonneau on the authors Howard Schwartz and Eric Gans:

The politically correct university is not only, as Schwartz notes, a "psychological regression" (159) into infantile narcissism, it is likewise a cultural atavism, a relapse into archaic, indeed sacrificial, forms of communal organization that belong more properly to the Stone or Bronze Age than to the twenty-first century of the Christian Era. I return here to the work of Gans, who argues in Signs of Paradox[1997]the Holocaust represents a cultural turning point in the Western moral imagination, by verifying in a massively empirical way the essential Christian revelation that communal solidarity based on persecution and victimization is evil. "Our ideal moral certainties are re-grounded in the opposition between (Nazi) persecutor and (Jewish) victim" (188). But it is really a good deal more complicated than this, because:

The descent of the absolute into the empirical world is the moment of its undoing. As soon as we posit an absolute difference between victim and persecutor, the underlying symmetry of their relation reasserts itself. When the SS torturer becomes the villain of the war film, he is turned into a sacrificial figure, a scapegoat, [a] structural equivalent of the Jud Suss in Nazi cinema. In the already tiresome clarity of this asymmetry, culture has been abandoned to youth; adults are too world-weary to participate wholeheartedly in the eternal and now transparent structure of victimary resentment. Group resentment has replaced individual resentment - the point of essential difference between the high and the popular - as the primary object of cultural deferral. (188-189)

Gans remarks how

a long-lost Dionysian frenzy reappears in the ecstatic forms of postwar popular culture, in its music and dance, the audience of which more than that of any other popular form incarnates "the people." These central dramas of the youth-culture are not coincidentally the most subject to black and other minority influences. The rhythms and chord progressions of popular music dissolve individuality in a real or imaginary group movement that is the historical heir to sacrificial ritual. They create, in an imaginary context, the resentful unanimity of the sparagmos [ripping apart and distribution of the sacrifice or victim]. (189).

Schwartz's "Revolt of the Primitive" and Gans's atavism of a minoritized "youth culture" are, I believe, aspects of the same epochal cultural transformation. The primordial mother is the ringleader and youth (always in a rainbow coalition of sexually ambiguous misfits) are her press gang. Schwartz interprets the phenomenon more pessimistically than does Gans, who notes, but does not particularly stress, the sacrificial character of the new, resentment-driven forms of collective identification. Yet Gans does admit that "what is new in our era is the promotion of non-integrative local theories - as though they were the only theories conceivable and it were no longer possible for the human community to think of itself as a whole" (198). He also notes how "feminism and other minority approaches, which maintain their link with universal thought only through the unacknowledged mediation of the Christian centralization of the victim, are fast driving out other forms of cultural interpretation" (198). Gans' "non-integrative local theories" are nevertheless deeply troubling, not least because their most recent prototype appears to lie exactly in the ferocious biological dualism of Hitlerian anti-Semitic policy, as "non-integrative" as you can get. Paradoxically, of course, the proliferating new ubermenschen find their superiority to all others in their own alleged victimization, which then becomes the pretext to victimize all who would deny the in-group's special (mother-authorized) victim-status. The lese, as it were, proves the majesty. Where the lese does not exist, which means just about everywhere, it is necessary to invent it. There is much burning of the Reichstag. Schwartz catches the same paradox, noticing that the eidos of women in the regime that they now obviously control is a contradictory one, simultaneously a picture of "passive, hopeless victim" and "exemplars of the primordial mother" (158).

Bertonneau, Gans, and Schwartz are liberating thinkers, devoted to the true liberation of each and every individual, regardless of sex or race, from group passions and resentments. But I have my doubts if anyone in British Columbia would dare publish them, given the expensive frustrations the new Nazis of the Candian "human rights" commissions could throw at you for revealing an ugly religion - their religion - for what it is.

As Barry Cooper says, in the conclusion to his article, "Grow Up, People". Now is the time to demand our politicians pay attention to the growing outcry, so far limited largely to cyberspace, and insist they remove from all human rights legislation the ability of the state to police "hate speech". One may argue for retaining a criminalization of an incitement to violence, but in a free society we are best protected from hate by everyone having the freedom to speak out and show the hateful what they are, in full light of day. The state cannot really protect us, for it is the biggest threat. We must each, as individuals, sign a covenant to act as guarantors of each other's freedom. As the Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant cases make clear, we as a civilization presently have no sane understanding of what human rights really are. And if the Mainstream Media are any indication, we have little will to stand up and defend them, in face of state evil. If you need a better understanding start by reading Cooper and O'Neill in full, two of only a few opinion pieces you will find in the Canadian papers; digest their arguments and then sit down and do your civic duty and write your provincial and federal politicians and tell them to fire the censors, now! They have no right to impose their religion and need for victims on the rest of us. They are not the good guys. You are, if you act now, in defense of freedom which is always the surest guarantee of our ability to minimize human violence. There is not some all-wise figure in the government, some Gnostic elect, who know how to do it better than millions of Canadians, liberated to speak their minds, to defend each other, in daily life.

Eric Gans in Vancouver: Public Lectures Not to Miss

Eric Gans

Vancouver is this weekend host to a conference discussing the work (and its ongoing extension) of one of the most important intellectuals of our time - his importance for our increasingly decentralized age partly reflected in the fact that his non-charismatic work is not as well known as certain lesser intellectuals who cling to the public showmanship and sacrificial theatre of old. Eric Gans is a prophet for our age when each of us should aspire to be a little leader in our own little neck of the woods. Gans' work, Generative Anthropology, provides us a deeper understanding of what all humans minimally share, an understanding of how culture or language first emerged, in a memorable event, and is since re-presented or generated through history on scenes, or in events, of shared consciousness.

In a global village where cultural and cognitive differences among individuals and populations remain significant, a firmer grasp of those aspects of human nature or culture that we all share helps provide us intellectual and spiritual tools to meet all comers, face to face, and hopefully to engage them in useful exchange, or, if need be, better to confront our enemies, whatever our neck of the woods.

Now is not the time to try more seriously to summarize the work of Eric Gans (though following the links above will get you started). But if you're in Vancouver and you are interested in real thinking, you'd be a fool not to make time on Saturday to see Eric Gans himself present his discipline of Generative Anthropology to the public, in Room 527 of the Vancouver School of Theology, University of British Columbia, 1:30-3:30. (Directions and link to map here) The lecture is titled "Generative Anthropology: A New Way of Thinking". Another public lecture being given as part of the Generative Anthropology Thinking Event is by another great scholar, Eugene Webb of the University of Washington, on Friday afternoon, 1:30-2:45, also in Room 527 of the Vancouver School of Theology. Prof. Webb will speak on "Stepping Back: Religious Faith and the Differentiation of Consciousness".

Covenant Zone blog is also organizing a chat, Friday evening, with a great student of Generative Anthropology, Adam Katz, whom we have often linked at this blog; anyone interested in attending should send me an email by early Friday morning (truepeers@gmail.com) for details. Sorry for the late notice.

Human Sacrifice

Those interested in our specifically human origins, i.e. in the origin of human culture, as distinct from animal biology, should be interested in the work of Rene Girard and his student, Eric Gans.

One of the major points of contention between the two is Girard's claim that human culture begins with the emergence of human sacrifice or scapegoating as a way of solving "mimetic crisis" in proto-human animals who are too good at mimicing each other's desires that the biological pecking order breaks down. With the loss of social differences among these highly mimetic creatures, difference is re-established by arbitrarily choosing a scapegoat-victim. Once he is sacrificed to appease the built up tension, the scapegoat can carry the weight of everyone's blame for the crisis. The community, temporarily luxuriating in peace, imaginatively begins to turn the scapegoat victim into a divine figure whose sacrifice was responsible for saving the community from itself. For Girard, the transformation of victims into gods is the origin of myth and culture.

In contrast, Gans argues that while animal sacrifice (a new way of dividing up the fruits of the hunt that distinguishes human society from the animal pecking order) is indeed original to the human, the substitution of human for animal victims would not have emerged until the emergence of agricultural surpluses and the development of hierarchical, stratified societies ruled by a "big man" who controlled the distribution of the surplus by controlling the religious rituals where this surplus was distributed. The growing resentment occasioned by one man's domination of the ritual centre of society would have required new, more awesome, religious forms to mediate the tension. Human sacrifice, as a specifically religious act, would not have been a feature of the more primitive, equalitarian, tribes who worshiped the gods in animal form and who could not have afforded to lose members on a regular basis to sacrificial rituals.

Interestingly, a new study seems to split some of the difference between Girard and Gans: Ancient Graves Suggest Human Sacrifice

June 18, 2007 — Physically disabled people may have been ritually sacrificed by European hunter-gatherer tribes as early as 24,000 years ago, according to an investigation into burials from the Upper Paleolithic period.

Well known in large, stratified ancient societies, ritual human sacrifice has never been apparent in the archaeological data of Upper Paleolithic Europe (about 26,000 to 8,000 B.C.).

But, according to lead study author Vincenzo Formicola of the University of Pisa in Italy, several of these burials suggest that human sacrifices may have been an important ritual activity in this period.

"Our findings show that the Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers developed a complex system of beliefs, symbols and rituals that are unknown in small groups of modern foragers," Formicola told Discovery News.
[...]

And, on a somewhat different note, for a recent and reasonably accessible paper by Richard van Oort, a student of Eric Gans, that touches on the differences between Girard and Gans in their understanding of our mimetic nature, while focussing on the ingenious empirical science of Michael Tomasello who compares chimpanzee and infant human development to demonstrate how human cultural evolution is really something quite different from anything in the biological world, see here.