Roberto Calasso - Ardor

Waking up each morning, rain or shine, and knowing there are no duties to follow. Making coffee, looking out the window. A feeling of blankness. Indifference. To reach this state, various millennia had passed. But nothing remained of it, apart from an opaque curtain, on all sides. No one celebrated this fact as an achievement. It was normality, reached at last. A characterless state, prior to desires. A mute foundation to existence. There would be no shortage of time for whims, plans, survival strategies. And this was the central point: time was not taken up, measured, assailed by obligatory gestures, without which there was a fear that all might fall apart. This might well have produced a feeling of exhilaration. But it was not to be. Indeed, the first sensation was of emptiness. And with it, a certain tedium. The metaphysical animal looked around, not knowing what to grasp hold of.

So secular society has not learned how to value its discoveries. It has felt no sense of relief. Instead, looking at itself, it has found itself insubstantial. Immediately it has felt the need for some cause to espouse, to give itself substance and regain solidity. And with causes once more there are obligations. A network of ready-established meanings has settled once more on the world. Why then have rituals been abandoned? Causes are always cruder than rituals. They are parvenus of meaning. Rituals, on the other hand, brought together the whole of the past, certain gestures repeated innumerable times, until they became part of human physiology, as a strange trust in their effectiveness grew. The fall of ritual also brought with it a heavy aesthetic decline. Free expression was always more awkward, more imprecise than the prescribed gesture. And forms tended to become uncertain and inert, now that they could develop unimpeded.

Secular society (and this would potentially include the whole planet) has therefore lost a great opportunity. It could have rediscovered a sense of wonder at the world, though this time from a safe distance that prevented it from being overwhelmed. But something else happened. A potent compound has been formed between technical procedures and ignorance of powers, which has left its mark on everyday life.

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How might we define a secular society ? Before resorting to complicated theories, we might say that such are societies that share the same airport boarding procedures. Therefore a network of societies that covers the planet. Essential in defining the secular society is the acceptance of a certain number of procedures. Those of airports are among the simplest, but in other cases the procedures can reach a dizzying complexity, especially where money is concerned. Once applied, the procedures may then be associated with very different forms of societies: tribal or authoritarian or cosmopolitan or libertarian or communist or theocratic or democratic or feudal. The range is vast, with unforeseeable opportunities for hybridization. But the basis doesn’t change — and is made up of procedures. This is the crucial innovation, compared with every previous form of society. As for the social forms themselves, they can also consider themselves mutually incompatible and fight each other with lethal expedients. Nevertheless they have much more in common than what we are prepared to admit. And that common basis could also have a greater heft than all the religious and ideological differences. From the point of view of procedures, secular society is the first universal society , marred by numerous civil wars, wars that seem to have been part of its physiology from the very beginning.

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Substitution, exchange, value: pivotal elements around which the world we call modern revolves. Their origin lies in sacrificial practices — and in the metaphysics of sacrifice. There is no sacrifice that does not involve exchange; there is no sacrifice that does not acknowledge substitution; there is no sacrifice that does not have a value at its core. But what happens when sacrifice is no longer allowed, as the modern world is proud to declare? Where has it ended up? As a superstition? How can we get to understand that the three categories (substitution, exchange, value), of which no one would dare suggest they are superstitions, were created and formed as part of one and the same superstition (sacrifice itself)?

The ban on practicing blood sacrifice in Western societies grew up and developed alongside the ban on capital punishment. But the latter is a legal issue that is accompanied by long, passionate debate and is crystallized into laws. Whereas the ban on blood sacrifice is almost never mentioned. It is implicit — and the issue is avoided, with a certain embarrassment. Yet, if a certain ethnic group in London or New York today, in obedience to its traditional practices, seeks openly to perform a blood sacrifice, the police immediately step in. Applying what laws? They would have to rely on regulations against cruelty to animals. And those regulations are found on the periphery of the law, as basic rules of public order. The question is not dealt with in major legal textbooks. Blood sacrifice is something to be cast aside, preferably without any accompanying words. Killing animals has to be the prerogative of those who work in slaughterhouses, in the same way that only the police are authorized to use violence. But any decision that regards the monopoly of violence is a fundamental aspect of society and treated with meticulous attention to detail (the police can use violence only in certain specific circumstances), whereas what happens in slaughterhouses slips out of control (apart from certain humanitarian measures toward animals — and the word itself immediately sends shudders down the spine) and is regulated only in terms of effectiveness and practicality. There is a remarkable omission when it comes to the killing of animals, today. And there is no more direct way of discovering how thought can become so subtle and can agonize over the question than by reading the Vedic texts. Texts from a remote civilization that celebrated innumerable — and often bloody — sacrifices.

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The dominant view in twentieth-century anthropology, heightened and taken to an extreme in the thought of René Girard, was that every society, in order to survive, needs sacrifice, either as an institution that produces a homeostatic effect, or as a mechanism that makes it possible to concentrate the violence produced within it on a victim, ostracized from society itself.

The thesis of the Brāhmaṇas was that the world is based on sacrifice, which is performed when the surplus of available energies is burned. Vedic society seeks to superimpose itself, point for point, moment for moment, upon this process — and offers the energy burned to powers that have a name. The different ways in which a society chooses to burn the surplus end up giving it its shape.

The two approaches have one area in common: that area where guilt is developed. In the case of society as viewed by Girard, the guilt is based on the fact that the victim is innocent — and his killers know it. In the case of the Brāhmaṇas, the guilt is based on the fact that every destruction of excess is a killing. And killing recalls the decisive step in the creation of society: the transformation of the human animal from prey into predator. Before becoming a hunter, man had been the animal who was hunted. And before settling as a farmer who lives off the land, man had been a hunter who lived on the flesh of the animals he killed. This is linked to another crucial step in the memory of the species: the transition to a diet of meat, in which a primate that was fundamentally vegetarian changed into a carnivore, assuming a character that is typical of his own enemies. It was a radical change that had a lasting effect on his psyche. There is therefore a lasting memory of how the sacrifice took form. And that secret history, infused with guilt, leaves its traces in the actions of the sacrifice. And so guilt constitutes the basis of sacrifice, in any version.