The Human Beast; or, the Internet
An Escargotic Commotion
The old world, too, has its foxes, and long before the emergence of the internet as a technological reality, they were already there to sell people on the dream of it. In Paris in 1850, a young man, a former law student and radical candidate for the Constitutional Assembly by the name of Jules Allix, publishes in the feuilleton of La Presse a short article describing a new invention.1 He is not himself the inventor, but is only speaking, he claims, on behalf of his associates, Monsieur Jacques Toussaint Benoît from Hérault near Montpellier, and a man identified only as “Monsieur Biat-Chrétien, the American” (later referred to simply as “Biat”). The discovery is of a “pasilalinic sympathetic compass” that will facilitate “universal and instantaneous communication of thought, at any distance whatever.”
Allix dissimulates, stalls, takes an inordinate amount of time to tell us what this machine actually does. He moves through a survey of theological positions on magnetism. The distinguished men of Notre Dame, he tells us, are prepared to see this power of nature not as a trick or an illusion, but as the crowning mystery of God’s creation, a constant announcement, in the seeking out of metal by metal, of divine wisdom and might. If we are prepared to admit gravity, why not other forces too? Why, for example, should we not admit the “galvano-magnetico-mineralo-animalo-adamical sympathy” that governs the pasilalinic sympathetic compass? Unlike the electrical telegraph, we are eventually told, the compass has no conductive wires, but only two unconnected and portable apparatuses, containing a voltaic pile, a wooden or metal wheel ringed with copper-sulfate-lined metal troughs. And, in each of these troughs, a snail.
A snail? Allix dwells in excessive detail on irrelevant points, and breezes right past relevant ones. He checks off shibboleths of the most recent science—Steinheil’s advances in telegraphy in Munich, Matteucci’s in Pisa—and he front-loads the technical terminology like Star Trek’s Captain Sulu explaining the impossible physics of hyperdrive. After long digression, however, we are offered a bare-bones description of how the machine is to work. He explains, first of all, the natural phenomenon, observable only in snails, of “sympathizing,” which is to say of creating an indivisible bond through copulation:
After the separation of the snails that have sympathized together, a sort of fluid is released between them, for which the earth is the conductor, which develops and unfolds, so to speak, like the nearly invisible thread of the spider or that of a silkworm, which one could unfold and elongate in an indefinite space without breaking it, but with this one difference, that the escargotic fluid is completely invisible and that it has as much speed in space as the electrical fluid, and that it would be by means of this fluid that the snails produce and communicate the commotion of which I have spoken.2
Why is this sympathy found only in snails? Allix does not say explicitly, though he does remind us that snails are hermaphrodites, “which is to say male and female at the same time.”3 We are perhaps invited here to recall the myth, or something like it, of the original androgyne, attributed to Socrates by Plato in the Symposium. In the beginning every human being had four arms and four legs, two heads, and two sets of genitals, and so every human being lacked nothing, and longed for nothing, and the body was in perfect communication with itself. To be male and female at once is to have it all; it appears that, at least in snails, this perfection is distilled into the sexual fluids, so that, once these are exchanged, each hermaphroditic snail now shares in the other’s being completely.
But let us return to the mechanics of the thing. Each snail is matched with its corresponding snail, in the corresponding wooden box, with which it has previously sympathized, so to speak, and with which it, therefore, remains in perfect and instantaneous sympathetic contact. Each pair of snails represents a single letter of the French alphabet, and when one of them is manipulated, it triggers an “escargotic commotion” that causes its partner snail to move. Successive manipulations of different snails in one box thus spell out words in the motions of the snails of the other box. Allix promises that with this device “all men will be able to correspond instantaneously with one another, at whatsoever distance they are placed, man to man, or several men simultaneously, at every corner of the world, and this without recourse to the conductive wires of electronic communication, but with the sole aid of what is basically a portable machine.”4 The machine will serve as the basis of a global system of instant wireless communication: an internet of snails.
Prior to this public appearance, our salesman and communard had been in hiding, following the 1848 “Days of June,” a popular revolt in Paris in response to the closing of the National Workshops that had been set up after the previous February’s revolution to provide training to the jobless.5 He would be arrested one year later in connection with another uprising, and soon after would find his way into the company of the occultist and charlatan Jacques Toussaint Benoît, who had been cooking up a plan to gain sponsorship for the snail compass. He sought to interest the investor Hippolyte Triat, born Antoine Hypolitte Trilhac, who had recently founded the first modern athletic gymnasium in Paris.
On October 2, 1850, the experiment described by Allix in his article for La Presse was carried out in Benoît’s Paris apartment. Messieurs Benoît, Allix, and Triat were all present, and if Allix’s account is to be believed, Biat was there as well, at least in a modality that would later come to be known as “teleconferencing,” from an undisclosed location in America. Allix was far more impressed than Triat. The prospective investor had been installed with one of the two compasses behind a curtain, with Allix and his own compass on the other side, while Benoît had set himself up between them to observe. It is not clear exactly what happened, but it appears that Benoît found a constant supply of pretexts for walking back and forth, on both sides of the curtain, influencing Triat’s actions and gleaning hints and signs in a less than rigorously scientific way. Triat was indignant, and insisted that the experiment be tried out again. Benoît agreed, only to disappear into the night before Triat could have the satisfaction of exposing this dastardly fraud. A few years later, hiding from the authorities on the island of Jersey, Allix will become a footnote to the biography of Victor Hugo, when he will once again attempt to communicate by means of escargotic force, to the great amusement of the participants in Hugo’s “talking table” séances.6
Allix’s article in La Presse seems to have appeared at some point between the initial trial and Benoît’s disappearance. He took on the task of drumming up public support with a dazzling display of salesmanship, erudition, and gumption. Perhaps most remarkable of all, in our present age of nanotechnology, was his promise that, although Benoît’s first models of the machines were more than two meters high, eventually the public could expect to enjoy more convenient models, transformed into stylish furniture or even jewelry made of wood or metal or any material one wished, and would be found everywhere, from government offices to the tops of ladies’ dressers, to the watch-chains around their waists. The original iteration had been built to accommodate snails representing every letter or character of every known writing system in the world, while future streamlined models, made for the larger public, would contain only a convenient twenty-five troughs, one for each letter of the French alphabet. And as each trough can be filled by any species of gastropod whatsoever, and as there are many species that are very small indeed, no larger than the head of a pin, soon, Allix assures us, there will be pasilalinic sympathetic compasses no larger than pocket watches, and ordinary men and women will carry them along as they go about their daily errands, from time to time sending off quick escargotic missives—texts, if you will—to their friends and loved ones down the street and around the world.
Allix promises that by means of the compass there will soon be “electronic newspapers, electronic mail,”7 spreading across the entire world, as if by magic, at a minimal cost. There will not just be a “national press,” in which the news is published in the départements at the same hour as in Paris, but readers will be able to browse “the English press, the German press, and that of all the countries of the world.”8 The activity of government, too, will be translated into the compass, and the walls of the parliament buildings “turned inside out,” as invisible, dematerialized orators are “infinitely multiplied before an innumerably large audience”; their words will circulate “as rapidly as thought to all points in the world, thanks to the mysterious agent of the invisible sympathetic fluid, bringing with them not only the passion that drives the orator, but also the beating of his heart and the least vibrations of his soul!”9 Allix quickly reels himself back in, reassumes his scientific composure: “I must remember,” he says, “that I am not to give in to enthusiasm.”10
The Modern Shiva
There are many important lessons we might draw from the true story of this great nineteenth-century confidence man. One is that we, too, are not to give in to enthusiasm, or, to use the synonym preferred by Kant in his lampooning of Swedenborg (see chapter 3), we are not to give in to spirit-seeing, to hastily concluding that the information we glean through our senses, increasingly mediated by technology, is the evidence of any new transcendence of our basic plight as human beings. Another lesson is, surely, that there is a long prehistory of the internet, which we would do well to understand if we wish to adequately understand the present moment. The preexistence of a technology as aspiration, as fantasy, in the absence of technical feasibility, reveals continuity where presentists prefer to think of new technologies as so transformative as to “change everything.” According to his report, two of the first words that Allix caused to be transmitted through his internet of snails, between Europe and America, were LUMIÈRE DIVINE: “divine light.” The real internet, however, the one built up from fiber-optic cables rather than escargotic fluid, has been much more successful at trafficking darkness and confusion.
The definitive transformation of the internet, from vehicle of light to vehicle of darkness, may be dated to 2016. That is the year in which the major social-media companies began slowly and belatedly to acknowledge how underequipped they were to handle the enormous new responsibilities for the preservation of democracy and of civil society that they had unwittingly been handed. That is the year, too, that a new sort of “hybrid warfare” waged largely through the internet came into public consciousness as a new reality and a growing problem. Russian spy agencies had by now got in on the playful fun of dark and sinister meme making. Part of Russia’s intervention in the US election included placing ads on Facebook that spanned the political spectrum: some were in support of Black Lives Matter against police brutality; others supported “Blue Lives Matter,” defending the bravery of police officers who put themselves in harm’s way. Some were in support of crackdowns on illegal immigration, while others promoted LGBT rights, including one meme that invited social-media users to color in a muscular-hunk version of Bernie Sanders at the beach.11
What exactly was the strategy here? Some people have taken this willingness to play all sides as evidence that the Russian regime could not have been straightforwardly pro-Trump. But it seems to miss the point to suggest that that regime’s responsibility in Trump’s victory must have had anything straightforward about it at all, or that its support of Trump must have been in the same spirit as the support expressed by a misguided but nevertheless sincere American voter. The purpose of the Russian operation was to sow disorder and to weaken the American political establishment, and its agents understood that supporting left causes at the same time as they supported Trump was the best way to do this. In this Russia was following the exact strategy already worked out during the Greek crisis, in which its agents supported both the far-left Syriza Party and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn.12 They did not want the Republicans to triumph as an end in itself; they wanted chaos to triumph, and here they clearly succeeded. Unlike misguided American voters, they understood that Trump is not in any meaningful sense a Republican, but rather an agent of chaos.
And so the Russian intelligence agents took to social media, or, more precisely, they paid young Russian college graduates to work for their cause by farming likes out of a troll farm in St. Petersburg. And soon enough Russian trolls were successfully goading Americans on Twitter and Facebook into debating, sharing, and liking content on all manner of distractious hot-button issues. At least one social-media user by the name of Jenna Abrams turned out not to exist at all, but to have been invented as a false identity for one or several Russian trolls.13 Before being exposed she had succeeded in riling Americans into engaging with her on the meaning of the Confederate flag; on Rachel Dolezal, the white American woman who had been outed after some years of living her life as an African American; and on “manspreading,” the recently concocted transgression of men on public transportation who do not hold their legs sufficiently close together.
Social pressure, largely generated by social media, had by 2015 pushed New York City to make sitting with your legs too far apart an arrest-worthy offense, and that same year the Police Reform Organizing Project reported that at least two unidentified Latino men, with other outstanding warrants, had been arrested on the pretext of having manspread, after midnight, in a presumably fairly empty subway car.14 This application of the force of law in the name of a newly emerging social norm was problematic in the extreme. Yet in social media, any acknowledgment of anything that looks like an objective dilemma is more or less impossible—as, for example, that there might be a conflict between the imperative to eliminate patriarchy as manifested in the microagressions of male fellow citizens, on the one hand, and, on the other, the imperative to combat police persecution of marginalized communities. Acknowledgment of the complexities of reality is impossible, as social-media algorithms funnel our views into binarily opposed options, rather than inducing us to reflect and to doubt, or to “like” in a qualified way. And so the social-media-based left came down decisively in favor of wiping manspreading from the face of the earth, and doing its best not to see the downside of this campaign.
A society that spends its time talking about manspreading cannot be doing well. Jenna Abrams’s role in keeping that particular conversation going was part of a broader effort to ensure that public discourse not improve, at least long enough to whisk into office a new American president who is himself the personification of this sickness, whose own orally produced speech sounds, in style and grammar and syntax, more or less echo his textual interventions in social media. The intelligence operation did not require any ingenious back-channel maneuvering, or any intelligence at all of the sort that we have traditionally expected spy agencies to excel in. In order to do their part in making a social-media celebrity the president of the United States (note, there is no claim here that the role of such efforts was the exclusive cause of his victory; it is yet another lamentable feature of social-media debate that complex events must have monocausal explanations), foreign intelligence operatives had only to get into the spirit of social media itself, to master the English lingo, to become fluent in meme making, and in general to adopt and promote the norms of discourse that in any case had already triumphed on social media in the United States. Russian intelligence agents did not invent manspreading—on the Moscow metro, in fact, a man is much more likely to be confronted for the opposite transgression of crossing his legs, which is perceived as feminine (I should know: I myself have been assaulted in Moscow for this very thing). But they did understand how to seize on this American invention and use it for the further corrosion of public discourse.
Nor, of course, did Russian intelligence come up with the new economy of likes, but this did not prevent its agents from incentivizing the work of its trolls by measuring their success in this new quasi-currency. As one troll told an interviewer about their work, “You should always write that sodomy is a sin, and that will bring you a couple dozen ‘likes.’ ” This economy was devised in the United States (the inventor of the like button, Justin Rosenstein, born in 1983, has deleted his own Facebook account in part out of concerns about its addictive power).15 But unlike the attempts in the 1990s of American economists and others to export economic expertise to a system that did not wish to receive it, like-seeking, though of course only in its early stages, appears ideally poised to take over the world.
It is particularly well suited to regimes, and to those sectors of society that serve them, that are intent on fostering chaos, precisely because, where likes are being sought, the goal of tolerance and understanding has almost certainly already been abandoned. In online discourse, to cite a well-known critic, “measured speech is punished by not getting clicked on, invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you towards content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended.”16 To certain holdouts from the old world, these punishments might seem to have to do only with such relatively unserious matters as our circles of friends and our self-esteem. But the emerging reality—a reality the trolls know how to exploit—is one in which what gets liked, and what gets flamed or trolled, is not just a concern that we have in our personal lives and that we leave behind when we think about political and economic matters. What gets liked or clicked or trolled, rather, is now, suddenly, at the very heart of politics and economics.
The internet is destroying everything. In the aftermath of its Shiva-like arrival, the rest of the world, all that was here before, can easily appear as a ruin. It has destroyed or is in the process of destroying long-familiar objects: televisions, newspapers, musical instruments, clocks, books. It is also destroying institutions: stores, universities, banks, movie theaters, democracy. On the plus side, some findings indicate that it is even bringing down teen-pregnancy rates, at least in the United Kingdom.17 The Hindu god just invoked in comparison, often given the epithet “the destroyer,” is not for that reason an entirely negative force. It is good and natural to raze the old, to slough off what is no longer vital or useful, as hunter-gatherer cultures understood already in deep prehistory when they mastered the practice of controlled burning. Fire, in fact, seems like the most suitable comparison in the prior history of technology: when our hominid ancestors learned to use it at least 400,000 years ago, the suite of changes they initiated was immense.18 It brought cooking and heating, and it also brought countless deaths and immeasurable environmental destruction. It made us what we are, and the internet is already in the course of making us what we will be.
If we think the current transformations are unjust, or excessive, this cannot be because they constitute a break from the general course of human history since the Paleolithic. It is, rather, because they are a suddenly punctuated jerk (to invoke once again the language of Stephen Jay Gould) in the same direction in which we were already creeping—a change that has taken place without any collective decision having been made about it, in an era in which we had not long before come to believe that great transformations require, and deserve, collective rational deliberation, followed by a vote, followed by citizen oversight. The fact that there has never been any question of such a procedure for determining the way the internet is to be incorporated into our lives is in itself a clear indication of how much more powerful it is than liberal democracy. The internet trumps liberal democracy, as fire surely burned right through the myths and practices of hominid groups that had previously got by without it.
This in turn helps to explain why, even though it was still being heralded just a decade ago as the bringer of a new liberal-democratic utopia in the very near future, when Twitter was still winning awards for its role in bringing the Arab Spring,19 it nevertheless could reveal itself to be doing exactly the opposite in such a short period of time. After all, its destructiveness has consisted largely in amplifying the very powers that had long been taken to be the bedrock of liberal democracy—most notably free speech. Billions of people now have a sort of free speech, in the sense that they have the power to say more or less whatever they think they want to say, and generally to get at least a few likes for it.
But they have this power in a new and mutated form, where it is disconnected from any obviously binding standard of truth, or any expectation that it will be deployed for the purpose of sincere communication, that computers, in sum, will be used in anything like the spirit Leibniz had in mind with his irenic-rationalist hortation “Let us compute!” The new free speech is free, moreover, only in that it seems to flow directly from the desire of the speaker (or writer, or tweeter). Once it is released, however, it is channeled by secret algorithms (on which, again, we have made no collective decision and in relation to which we have no oversight) along pathways where it is practically guaranteed not to bring any more light, human or divine, to anyone regarding the subject of interest. It will serve only to reinforce group solidarity in an online community, or to accost and attack an outsider to that group, usually by means of ad hominems, and in total ignorance of the past few millennia’s hard-won effort to lay down rules for the avoidance of fallacies in our reasoning and communicating.
Online discourse feels free, to the extent that it is pleasing to the individual who puts it out there, but it is more or less always channeled either down the path of like-seeking, or down the path of trolling. This pseudofreedom affords authoritarian leaders the appearance of at least a vestigial concern to protect the core values of liberal democracy. As long as individual citizens continue to believe that democratic citizenship has attained its full realization in an unending online argument about manspreading, the autocrats, as they say, have won.
Nor is it the case that within a bubble, that is, within an algorithmically generated imagined community, all is peaceful and stable. Bubbles are fragile, and soap gets in your mouth. This is particularly so when other members of the community are constantly seeking to wash out the mouths of those whose speech they deem insufficiently pure. This dynamic seems to be intrinsic to left-wing debate online, to the so-called call-out culture that reigns there. As the critic Mark Fisher wrote, this culture is “driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd.”20 Thus, to return to the issue of manspreading, it is not just that so many people are exhausting themselves arguing with Russian trolls pretending to be American conservatives who think it is a man’s right and an anatomical necessity that he spread his legs as widely as he wishes. They are also exhausting themselves—and needlessly and destructively hardening themselves where obviously some flexibility is in order—to the extent that they are perpetually seeking out and condemning any recognition, however hesitant, that sometimes legitimate desiderata are mutually exclusive.
When unorthodox views are essayed online, the enforcers of the relevant orthodox community are ready to pounce, and to make the doubter know she or he is not in the in-crowd. This may be a small punishment, compared to public stocks or flogging, but it adds up to real-world effects. It is not the Cultural Revolution, but that does not mean that its spirit is not fundamentally Maoist. The fact that Maoism can thrive at a substate level, and have real political consequences, even in a world that is governed by right-wing populism, is a significant lesson, and one Mao himself surely could not have predicted. We are in a peculiar predicament, in which what are effectively purges are taking place at a substate level, in the name of a nominally left-wing ideal of redistributive justice, while at the helm of state, meanwhile, we have in the United States some ill-defined species of right-wing populism. This is an unusual state of affairs, and one might suspect that the substate actors leading the purges are acting on behalf of the state in a way that they themselves do not understand.
Observations of this sort are, however, for the most part met with denial. When Jonathan Haidt argued that the right wing in political power and the left wing on campus are two manifestations of the same threat, he was mocked on Twitter by Jeet Heer of the New Republic: “ ‘The Weimar Republic faced two threats: the Nazi Party and the musical theories of T. W. Adorno’. You see how silly this sounds?”21 Without wishing to support the entirety of Haidt’s argument, we may at least say with confidence that reactions such as Heer’s are disingenuous in the extreme. There were also Nazi music theorists who, by themselves, did no real harm; conversely, music theory is not the only thing Marxism was being used to mobilize in the 1930s in Europe. There were also show trials, summary executions, ethnic cleansings. Nor is the boundary between theory and political injustice so clear. Adorno did no harm, but Maxim Gorky certainly did: he managed to scrape through the insanity of the Stalinist purges by vomiting up just the right spew of socialist-realist platitudes, and by looking the other way when his old friend and protégé Isaak Babel was hauled off and shot for his inability to talk the same talk (see chapter 4). And today, online, it is typically the most cutthroat and unflinching personalities who thrive, the Robespierres and the Berias. Virtually no one whose public reputation was built up entirely in social media can be said to be noteworthy rather than notorious. It is an ugly dystopia and has utterly failed to deliver on its promised goods.
We may well be at an early point in the history of the internet analogous to the moment when, after just having seized a lightning-struck branch and used it to keep warm for a night, an entire hominid encampment was burned down to ash. The warmth felt good initially, and then it didn’t feel good anymore. After that first night’s tragedy, human beings could of course have had no idea of all that was to come, all the violence and innovation, all the warmth and death. The great difference is that between the mastery of fire and the rise of the internet human beings came to aspire to a form of collective decision making, based on reason, and the internet seems now to be playing a central role in the rapid decline of that aspiration, even though until very recently it was hoped that the internet would strengthen and build up democratic institutions rather than weaken them.
Nothing Human Is Alien
Since the end of World War II, and the reckoning with their violent potentials that liberal democracies, not least the Federal Republic of Germany, have had to undertake, a particular anthropological model of the human being has come to predominate in much popular wisdom. According to this model most of us are neither fundamentally evil nor fundamentally good; rather, in order to maintain our goodness, we depend upon circumstances in which we are not invited, pressured, or encouraged to do evil things. This insight is a corollary of Hannah Arendt’s perhaps overcited thesis concerning the “banality of evil”: those who carry out evil deeds in social circumstances that make these deeds possible are doing so not monstrously, but banally.22 The functionary who signs off on papers that will assuredly send people to the death camps is operating, often, under the illusion that this is just normal procedure, for if it were not, how could there be such clean and correct forms awaiting signature?
In a comparative ethological perspective as well, human violence is banal. A recent study shows that our species is fairly average among other primates with respect to its murderousness, though primates as a category are far more violent than other mammals.23 Killing members of our own kind appears to be part of our behavioral repertoire as a species, for reasons that long precede us. This does not mean we should accept it, as some have supposed in setting up a false incompatibility between evolutionary explanations of human beings on the one hand, and aspirations to social improvement on the other. But it does help us to identify the depth of the problem: our violence is not a result of some recent degradation of social circumstances, but part of who we are.
There are also many cases in which “ordinary” people find themselves in circumstances they experience as extreme, unlike the Nazi functionary who experiences his job as routine, and who enter into a phase in which the usual moral rules that have previously shaped their lives are suspended or reversed. The examples are seared into our childhood imaginations, in stories we read and stories we invent. Consider, for example, Melville’s description of drawing lots in a lifeboat, to determine who will be eaten and who will get to eat, in his remarkable 1855 novella Benito Cereno, or any number of accounts, veridical or fictional, of wartime atrocities. There is nothing banal about devouring your slaughtered mate after hundreds of days drifting at sea, but you might just do it anyway.
Both the everyday evil of Nazi Germany and the exceptional transgressions of the shipwrecked are species, however, of the rather generic wisdom offered by the evil Noah Cross in the 1975 film Chinatown: “You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they’re capable of anything.” Cross, again, is evil: what he himself was capable of, and what he is here admitting to Jack Nicholson’s character, the detective Jake Gittes, is that he has raped his daughter.
Surely we are not all capable of that. Or are we? Not all of us have daughters, and some of us are ourselves daughters who might be fending off rapist fathers, so if we are “all” capable of it, this capability is something rather more abstract than simply being among our present immediate options. Roman Polanski, himself a child rapist, was likely thinking in part of what he knew himself to be capable of, in a narrow and factual sense, when he approved this line of dialogue. But Cross’s insight should not be simply waved off by upright watchers whose first inclination is to reply, “Speak for yourself!” It is, after all, a variation of Terence’s famous adage Humani nihil a me alienum puto (Nothing human is alien to me).24 We usually take this as an expression of the Roman playwright’s liberality of spirit (in fact it is a character in one of his plays, and not Terence himself who says it), his unwillingness to condemn other human beings for being different or unfamiliar to him. But child rape and incest are human too, in the straightforward sense that there are, in reality, human beings who have committed such transgressions. So child rape and incest are not alien to Terence. Does this mean that he has committed them, or is likely to commit them? No, not necessarily, but only that he in fact has the resources within him, as a human being, to imagine his way into the inner life of someone who has—that he is not of a different nature or species from the child rapist; the two do not exist across some great ontological divide from one another.
The insight is not just Polanskian and Terentian. It is also deeply, fundamentally Christian. In this latter version it is articulated as “original sin.” Why is it that, according to traditional Christian theology, an infant who has not yet had the chance to do much of anything at all is nonetheless held to be a sinner? Because it is a human being, and nothing human is alien to it. Augustine wondered in his Confessions whether he, as a baby, was not already putting his sinfulness on display with his unrestrained displays of desire for the breast, and with his petulant, self-absorbed tantrums when his desires were not satisfied. This behavior is, certainly, a sign of what is to come in the life of an adult sinner, but even if it were not manifested, even if the infant were, as they say, perfectly angelic, it would still be a sinner, simply in virtue of its participation in the human essence. From a Christian point of view, this is good news and bad news: it is a heavy burden to come into the world with all of the sins of all of our fellow humans attached to us, but it also shifts the criteria, radically, that determine warrant for love. Since we all have original sin, it makes no sense to deem an exceptionally well-behaved boy or girl somehow more worthy of love, or of eternal salvation, than any other. From a humanist point of view, it is likewise both good news and bad news: we can, through the insight that nothing human is alien to us, cultivate liberality of spirit, learn not to judge too swiftly, find ourselves motivated to defend political egalitarianism. At the same time the insight forces us to recognize that the horrible crimes we read about online are committed not by monsters of a different species, but by people more or less like us.
In neither its Christian nor its humanist iteration does the insight enjoy much popularity today, and least of all on the internet. In the dispensations of supposed justice that occur online, verdicts are as total as they are swift. Twitter outrage and other forms of online mobbing typically occur with no attempt at all to probe into the mind-set of one’s opponent. This mobbing is underlain by a social ontology that subdivides humanity into fundamentally discrete kinds, where whatever is characteristic of another kind of human being is by definition alien, and where there is virtually no recognition of any broader genus of humanity in which the apparent alienness of another subgroup of human beings is resolved. We cannot write, or think, or imagine, or know anything at all across the chasms that separate us by race, gender, sexual orientation, and other common variables—and this notwithstanding the ostensible commitment, within this new mentality, to intersectionality, to the idea that we may be many things at once. Only certain variables can intersect, the thinking goes, while others are contrary or contradictory, and so mutually exclude one another.
This is a dismal state of affairs, and from even a slight distance it is self-evidently a symptom, within the online self-identified left, of the same historical moment that has propelled Trump into power. This is not to resort to the sort of facetious excuse making that we heard from Trump himself after the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, in which he sought to blame “both sides.” It is only to seek to diagnose the current political moment in the United States in a way that does not take the individual actors and interest groups as if they were on entirely separate causal trajectories, but rather sees them as, so to speak, adapting to the same ecosystem. And that ecosystem—with the perpetual forgetfulness of the mass media, lurching always from one outrage to another, with no cumulative lessons ever learned, with the identitarian mobs on social media exacting swift justice on perceived enemies who are in truth their brothers and sisters—is greatly polluted.
More Gender Trouble
Nowhere is this pollution more evident than in recent online conversation around gender. Here, many of the claims that are circulating might be most appropriately compared not with creation science, as discussed in chapter 5, but with flat-earth theory, in view of their extreme departure not only from prevailing causal theories of how the world got to be the way it is, but also from the most basic and immediately evident facts of human existence.
As of August 2018, Judith Butler, who has for decades stood atop the hierarchy of academic feminist theory, finds herself on the unpopular side of a sexual-harassment scandal involving one of her peers, and it may be that the process of her displacement, and of the succession of a new generation of theorists, has begun. However, up until just one month ago or so, as I write this, her word could still be cited in some circles as absolute authority, and few were made uneasy by this sort of argumentum ad auctoritatem. Consider, for example, this, from a recent online “syllabus”: “[Judith] Butler proves that the distinction between sex and gender does not hold. A sexed body cannot signal itself as different sexually without cultural gender categories, and the idea that sex comes before cultural factors (which are believed to be only overlaid on top of sex), is disproven in this book. Gender is performance, there’s no solid universal gender basis beneath these always creative performances. There is no concrete sexed body without constructed human categories to interpret it.”25
But what happens when we move, as empirical science is prepared to do, from the question of human sex to the question of sex in the broader world of animals and plants? We know, for example, that the male of some species of anglerfish (e.g., Haplophryne mollis) is several times smaller and vastly weaker than its female counterpart. In order to mate, the only option it has is to bite into the side of the female’s body, to pass its seminal material into her bloodstream, and then slowly to wither away, eventually becoming a tiny appendage of its polyandrous spouse.
Now, is there anything constructed about this? Anglerfish sexual dimorphism is extreme, but it is not different in principle from that of mammals. And if we insist that anglerfish reproduction is just a natural fact, while human sex and sex difference are constructed, then we are more or less explicitly claiming that human beings are not animals alongside others, but that their essence is nonnatural in origin. This is a fundamentally conservative stance to take, and Butlerites share it with traditional Christian theology, among other currents of thought. Butlerism buys its sex constructionism by means of a deepened commitment to species exceptionalism—and at a terrible exchange rate.
The “syllabus” says that Butler has proven that the distinction between sex and gender does not hold, while gender is constructed. Therefore, sex is constructed. But again, does this include ape sex, anglerfish sex, and so forth, or only human sex? And if only human sex, does it follow that human beings are not part of the same natural order that includes apes and anglerfish? None of these questions are meant to suggest that sexual dimorphism in the animal world is simple, obvious, or universal. We know there is tremendous variety out there, and this variety is also sometimes invoked by neo-Butlerites as biological evidence for the constructedness of human sexual binarism. But invoking this evidence, they only complicate matters. If it is true that a number of species of lizards can switch from sexual reproduction to asexual parthenogenesis in the absence of suitable mates, then there is at least some natural fact about lizards and sex. But the neo-Butlerite claim is that there is no natural fact about humans and sex (“there is no concrete sexed body”). What is the difference between humans and lizards that justifies this distinction?
Orangutans show not so much a high degree of sexual dimorphism between males and females of the species as a dimorphism between males: some mature males get “flanges,” that strange condition that makes their faces into enormous discs, while others remain as they all had looked in adolescence, which is also the way female orangutans look across the life cycle. Look at a flanged male orangutan and try to insist there is something performative about that.
In the history of hominid evolution, dimorphism is clearly diminishing. Males of the Australopithecus genus were on average around 50 percent larger than females. In modern Homo sapiens, the disparity is closer to 15 percent. That is still not insignificant. (It is, for one thing, enough to yield the physical difference that gets translated into social reality as patriarchy.) A moderately well-trained physical anthropologist can look at the pelvis of a human skeleton and tell you fairly accurately whether it belonged to a man or a woman. The pelvis, like the living male orangutan’s flanges, is a plain giveaway. Let us grant that all of the social and symbolic dimensions of womanhood that have been assigned to bearers of the one sort of pelvis throughout history have been completely and utterly arbitrary. It cannot follow from this that the perception of an anatomical difference so deep as to often be evident in the skeleton is nothing more than an illusion.
Perhaps in contemporary reflection on sex and gender there is a dim awareness of the past few million years of evolution, of the progress we have made from 50 percent to 15 percent, and a sense that this trend toward nondimorphism can be hastened by collective political will. Perhaps it can be. Still, flat denial of dimorphism is an expression of how one would like things to be, not a description of how things are. And when dimorphism is finally reduced to 0 percent, and reproduction is taken care of by technicians in laboratories, and patriarchy is banished to the past, the claim that there is now no sex difference will still be a factual claim about certain entities in nature (entities that have arrived in their present condition by a combination of evolution and technocultural innovation).
Imagine that our species had developed in such a way that males were not on average 15 percent larger than females, but, like the Lamprologus callipterus species of fish, sixty times or so larger. Suppose that nonetheless we managed to develop into a technologically complex, liberal-democratic society that put a high premium on individual thriving, on freedom and equality. Suppose that within that society a school of thought and a political movement emerged that held that, even though men are sixty times larger than women, both sexes nonetheless have the same basic neural equipment to thrive, to the extent that their physical dimensions permit, in more or less the same way.
But suppose then another school of thought emerged, which said that this first one did not go far enough, and insisted that men are not actually sixty times larger than women, and that it is only a result of ideological indoctrination that we have believed this up until now. “But my mate can fit only a single tip of an antenna into our home,” some traditionalist woman might protest, “while I can swim around inside freely. He keeps accidentally eating me and having to spit me back out because I’m too small for him to detect, while when I’m with him he literally obstructs everything else from my field of vision. I think he’s gaining weight—at this point it takes me more than a day just to circumnavigate him. Surely I’m not imagining that.” And then of course she would be mobbed on Twitter for these heresies.
The thought experiment starts to founder when we note that such a species would never have “homes,” and almost certainly not monogamous mates either, while our species in turn would never have developed into a complex, liberal-democratic, egalitarian society, or at least have tried to do so, if males had been, or had remained, sixty times larger than females. Culture, with the innovative technological work-arounds that it has come up with to break the stranglehold of the sexual division of labor, and all the other ways it has been able to some degree to assure that biology, for men and women alike, is not destiny, has been the principal motor of our motion toward nondimorphism over the past few million years. Behind a veil of ignorance, you could surely know in advance that a species in which the males are sixty times larger than the females is not a species with automated payroll systems, cosmetic surgery, Twitter, or its own version of Judith Butler.
Again, it is likely that some dim awareness that this is the direction culture is pushing quite unsurprisingly leads some to suppose that culture must be pushed in turn, and we must eradicate whatever similarities remain to the L. callipterus. This is an understandable desire, but one also feels the need to warn against undue rashness. Biology may not be exclusive destiny, but it does dictate the terms under which the will is free to do its work. Will is not exclusive destiny either, and you are setting yourself up for ideological extremism, followed by disappointment, if you pretend that it is.
The reason for dwelling on these biological parameters of the world we share with orangutans and anglerfish is precisely that in social-media communication today, perhaps in part because of the way it disembodies our ideas, there are strong indications that many now reject the idea that biology imposes any limits at all upon the exercise of our will. There is a significant presence on social media of people agitating for a general moratorium on all references to “female reproductive anatomy,” maintaining that there is simply no such thing as “female biology”: their argument is that trans women do not have this anatomy and this biology, while some men, trans men, do have it. Men give birth too, this group tells us, and it is an entirely arbitrary piece of ideological baggage from our backward past that causes some to continue to believe that there is any special connection whatsoever, biological or conceptual, between femaleness and parturition. I contend that this is an extreme position to hold, a radicalization of reasonable demands for equality that has crossed over into the effervescence of unreason, where the ruling principle is to make increasingly implausible truth claims, and to denounce as enemies everyone who is unable to affirm them. A belief has overtaken this discursive community, moreover, according to which one must affirm all of its theoretical commitments concerning the nature of gender identity, if one wishes to avoid the accusation of exterminationism, of wishing for the elimination of trans people. This is the very definition of illiberalism: to believe that disagreeing with another person’s theoretical commitments, while affirming and defending their right to exist and to hold these commitments, is insufficient. For this community, radicalized online but increasingly present in real institutions, nothing short of full acceptance of their theoretical claims is acceptable.
By dividing the world into “cis” and “trans”—allowing all sorts of gradations within the latter based on self-reporting alone, while seeing the former as an essential property of the people it supposedly describes—this new way of thinking has traded one binarism for another. “Cis-” is a prefix we previously knew from geography: for example, Cisjordania, also known as the West Bank, was an area on “this side” of the Jordan River. But in recent years it has come to refer primarily to people who are on “this side” of the gender identity into which they were born, rather than having crossed over, as when one fords a river, into what appears to be another sovereign land. To call a person “cis” is to hold that that person just is what she or he is, unambiguously, settledly. But if we are hoping to establish a way of looking at human variety that favors continuity and fluidity, how does it help matters to simply shift the fundamental rift from that between “male” and “female” to that between “cis” and “trans”? There is an irresolvable tension between the insistence, on the one hand, upon the illegitimacy of binary thinking, and, on the other, the equally strong insistence that an individual’s identity as, say, a cis man, is plainly and simply a matter of straightforward fact.
In March 2018 a blog post on the website of the American Philosophical Association audaciously complained that attendees at a recent APA conference had failed in large numbers to wear stickers stating their “preferred pronouns,” even though these had been made available to them.26 It was noted that most of the people who declined were “cis” males, while in the same post it was also insisted that one cannot tell simply from looking at a person what their gender identity is. But this is a blatant contradiction. If you cannot know a person’s gender identity by looking at them, then how can you, from a visual scan of a conference room, tell the gender of the people who are being uncooperative with the effort to announce preferred pronouns? A contradiction this glaring seems nothing short of intentional: as in religious mystery cults (about which, see chapter 1), the willingness to embrace the contradiction can function as a shibboleth of insider status; and the willingness to question it marks one off, sharply, as an outsider and an enemy. It is this sort of radical goats-and-sheep bifurcation that the algorithms of social media—which have now made the leap and come to determine the tone and tenor of such fora as the blog of the American Philosophical Association—have stoked and amplified over the past years.
It is not the question of transgender identity that interests me in particular here. This is only a particularly vivid example of a general feature of the current environment, which disinvites us from thinking about what it is like to be another sort of human being. This is particularly regrettable in the case of transgender identity, since on at least one plausible interpretation, which reaches back to the original semantics of the prefix “trans-,” to be transgender is precisely to have a transcendent experience of gender, to be able to know the experience of a different kind of people from the ones you were initially expected to spend your life identifying with. It is just this sort of transcendent experience that some radical feminists deny, and one might find it a missed opportunity that contemporary progressive thought has failed to fully embrace the account of what is happening when one changes one’s social identity from “man” to “woman,” or vice versa, as a variety of transcendence.
When Walt Whitman engages in a course of introspection, he discovers not only that he is a woman, a saurian, a plant, but that he also contains within him the entire geological history of the earth. “I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss,” writes the poet.27 The illiberal, discussion-closing accusation of transphobia is often accompanied by a claim that anyone who views matters differently from the enforcers of the new orthodoxy is in no position to speak, because such dissenters have not mastered and cited “the relevant literature” of the “experts” in the scholarly study of transgender identity and experience. But one might with far more justice insist that they themselves are in no position to speak, as they do not seem for their part to have read Ovid, Saxo, or Whitman, say, well enough to have absorbed certain crucial lessons. Nor have they studied the oral folk traditions of the world that offer rich insight into the continuity human beings experience between the identity assigned to them at birth and the many other sorts of entity with which, in a narrow empirical sense, they are nonidentical.
For most of human history, in most cultures, in fact, it was perfectly meaningful and comprehensible to believe and to say things like “I partake of the essence of bear”28 or “I am a jaguar.”29 For many people in many places and times, claims of transspecies identity have given shape and meaning to social reality. There is an ample literature on such claims, produced both in the past two hundred years or so of Western anthropological scholarship, as well as in the past few millennia of world literary traditions. Yet no one in the new scholarly protection racket surrounding the discussion of what it is to be trans ever takes an interest in the possibility of this sort of identity, or appears even to be aware of it. It is hard nonetheless in the light of it to see casuistic distinctions between, say, claims of transracial identity on the one hand, of the sort that the “white” Rachel Dolezal attempted to pull off in claiming to be “black,” and claims of transgender identity on the other, as anything more than a particular culture’s efforts in a particular narrow time slice to work out problems that are much broader than that culture knows, and that are worked out very differently elsewhere.
In 2017, among countless other cases of internet mobbing, the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel was excoriated for daring to publish an article that explored some of the ways in which Dolezal’s experience of her identity is perhaps similar to that of a transgender person.30 As Lewis R. Gordon would brilliantly sum up her argument, Tuvel is not seeking to show that either transgenderism (as she calls it) or transracialism is more or less legitimate than the other. Rather, she is “stating that one commitment, without a uniquely differentiating premise available, entails commitment to the other.”31 The reason for the infuriated reaction to her argument, in Gordon’s view, is simple: in order to continue denying this entailment, one must be operating in bad faith. Tuvel, he observes, “did something indecent from a bad faith perspective. She called it out.”32 But of course no one would dare make an explicit charge of “indecency,” and so other crimes had to be trumped up. A key charge against Tuvel, as one could have predicted, was that she had failed to cite the relevant literature. But this was fatuous nonsense. None of the experts within the narrow community of scholars Tuvel was faulted for ignoring had themselves cited more than the tiniest fraction of potentially relevant literature for making sense of what is going on when a human being claims kinship, identity, or affiliation with a being held by others to be of a distinct nature.
If there is some sense in which we contain all of the diversity of nature within us, then surely also we contain all of the diverse possibilities of human gender or “race.” Or consider the example of beardedness. There are people, most of whom identify as men, for whom having a beard is a deep, central, ineliminable feature of their identity. For them to suddenly appear clean-shaven would be, for those who know them, nearly as revolutionary as if they were to change gender identity. The significance of the beard may be wrapped up with their religious commitments, or the beard may have grown over its many decades into a sort of visible excrescence, an explicatio or unfolding, of what we take to be the condition of that person’s inner life: the outward sign of learnedness, piety, world renunciation, or some other deep value I have not imagined. A beard is a powerful natural symbol, again, in Mary Douglas’s sense,33 and in some cases it is far more than simply a “fashion choice.” We might think the bearded/unbearded dichotomy is less important than the male/female or the cis/trans dichotomy, but this may simply be because we value different things, or we fail to notice certain other things.
I am clean-shaven, but it seems to me there is an obvious sense in which I have a beard “in me,” not just that I would be bearded soon enough if I stopped shaving—“for this goodly beard, should we not by generous anticipation give the man-child, even in his cradle, credit?” asks Melville’s confidence man34—but that the world of the bearded person is not inaccessible to me. I do not think that this is just because I have the right hormonal profile to grow a beard, either. Every human being has the experience of hair growth, and most have the experience of hair removal. Hirsuteness belongs to the human essence, or at least it is, like the ability to laugh, what the medieval logicians would have called a property quarto modo of humanity: something that belongs to each human, even if it is not part of our essence, as that distinction is deserved for reason alone. There is only a difference of degree from here, and perhaps not a very large one, to suppose that I have another gender “in me”: that the experience of the world through another gender identity is not foreign to me, even if it is not now, or perhaps has never been, part of my public presentation of myself, part of my “performance.” In order to be consistently inclusive, one should be prepared to recognize as trans those who feel themselves to be at odds with their assigned gender, but are too busy pursuing other things to bother to modify their appearance and behavior in order to perceptibly approximate what they feel their true gender to be. This would expand the notion to include very many of us, and all the better.
The prevailing identity-based commitments of a prominent sector of social-media communicants presupposes a strict and narrow empiricism, according to which each of us can speak only from within our actual daily reality; if you are not a member of a group, then what it is like to be a member of that group is strictly unthinkable. But one thing this misses is the way identities contain other identities, not by intersection so much as by emboîtement or enfolding, as my clean-shavenness contains beardedness. I know disability too, not because of any particular marked feature of my social identity, but because I am living out my life in a mortal corruptible body that is constantly threatening to unravel, and will assuredly do so one day in the not-too-distant future. Disability is the way of all flesh. I contain it within me. I would be prepared to say, with Whitman, that I contain a lot more besides, from the entire evolutionary history of life and even, beyond that, to the stuff of geology and cosmology. But we do not need to go nearly that far in order to accept Terence’s much more modest claim that we each contain—which is to say that we find familiar, or nonalien—everything that is human.
I do not know whether it is rational, or indeed the height of unreason, to make claims such as these. It is certainly inadvisable. It will be read, by those who are invested in the views I have described, as an imperious taking for myself of what is not mine, and it will be noted that the presumption of a right to do this is typical of people who match my public profile in terms of gender, race, class, and so on. But what I am attempting to do is to reach back in history, and to find genetic strands for this presumption in places where the narrow identitarians of today would not expect to find them. There is, to be sure, the danger of a sort of raving excess in the discovery that one, so to speak, contains multitudes, of which perhaps Whitman himself was guilty, and raving of this sort can hardly be rational. Yet if we restrict ourselves to the human sphere, Whitmanian multitudinousness does share with rationalism at least the connected aspiration to universality. This universalism is present in many ancient traditions, far preceding the Enlightenment. It is there in the cosmopolitan dimensions of the Gospels, in Christ’s insistence upon the universal applicability of his good news, and the senselessness of restricting any true religious faith to a single nation or ethnicity.
Correlative to this sort of universalism is the idea that one is misunderstanding what is at stake, philosophically, spiritually, or existentially, in the question “Who am I?” if the only answers one is able to come up with are of the sort “I am a Jew,” “I am a Roman,” “I am a white working-class American,” “I am a trans woman.” It is only ignorant, or arrogant, or puffed-up people (to use the language of St. Paul) who mistake the variables of their social identities for features of their souls.
This is what Emily Dickinson understands when she insists that she is nobody, and that to proclaim who you are, in any usual sense, is only the croaking of a baselessly prideful frog (see chapter 8). The universalism that says, “I know what it is like to be you, for we, humans, are not so different in the end,” continues the rationalist project as well, to the extent that it is reason, or the inherence of a rational immortal soul, that has most often served as the bedrock nature in which sundry variations can occur: bearded, female, thin, paraplegic, and so forth. The presumption that we do have within us the power to know the other has often been used to deny real distinctions, and to deprive people with whom commonality is being claimed of something that they value. And yet, unless the authors of the Gospels, and Terence, and Alexander Pope, and Emily Dickinson simply did not know what they were talking about, we must suppose that the presumption has a significant amount of truth to it. Since it is impossible to eradicate truth, we are well advised not to seek to deny the presumption, but rather to remain cautious to avoid its misapplication.
An Age of Extremes
At present, the preoccupation with identity that has taken over social media and much of academia, as well as the ever-growing gray area between these two spheres of public life, is demanding of us, in ever more strident terms, that we remain within the ever-shrinking boundaries of our narrow public identities, and that we acknowledge no community, no shared life, with those with whom we are not deemed to intersect sufficiently closely. This is the collapse of civil society into sundry units resembling nothing so much as the steppe-combing clans; or, in the more commonly invoked comparison, the internet is currently moving through its “Wild West” phase.
We are familiar with those intellectuals of the twentieth century who were willfully blind to the crimes of totalitarianism. Many denied the existence of the gulag in their own era, and were so committed to the righteousness of the 1789 storming of the Bastille that they have difficulty facing up to the excesses of the Reign of Terror between 1791 and 1794. Sartre even went so far as to claim that the only real failure is that Robespierre did not get a chance to spill even more blood—that if he had, the goals of the Revolution would have been fulfilled and enshrined for the ages.35
It is true that the no-platformers, who seek to block the speaking engagements of people with whom they disagree politically, and social-media mobbers of various stripes, are not state agents, and they are operating in a world in which those with “real power,” the regimes in control of states, pose vastly more threat to transgender people than student activists can pose to Germaine Greer. But Robespierre also did not operate on behalf of the state, until he did, and if we oppose authoritarianism only after it has taken the reins of state power, surely we are failing to understand how it succeeds in doing this in the first place. One might well have been dismayed by the Moscow purges of 1938 without being opposed to workers’ control of the means of production. Just so, to be concerned as we watch people being mobbed, ostracized, losing their jobs and livelihoods, for a poorly worded tweet about, say, the innateness of gender inequality, does not mean that we must support, or even give an inch to, gender inequality.
These conclusions seem almost too commonplace and moderate to warrant explicit statement. Yet, as Margaret Atwood has recently commented, surveying many of the recent developments considered here, “in times of extremes, extremists win, … and the moderates in the middle are annihilated.”36 The polarization and radicalization that have been exacerbated in the past few years by Trumpism and by social media have created a landscape in which bland and commonplace statements have difficulty gaining any foothold in public discourse, even if they are perfectly true. It may be more important than ever to make them, then, and to keep repeating them, if not in tweets, where we know in advance that they will go unloved at best and brutally punished at worst, then perhaps in books—where their fate is unknown as we write them, and to write them at all feels something less like the clamoring and jockeying of public debate, and more like an act of faith.