The Mark of the Sacred by Jean-Pierre Dupuy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Therapy For the Doomed

Self-transcendence has been the key to human success. And it will probably be the cause of its destruction. This, I think is the central conclusion of Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s breathtakingly acute analysis. It is a conclusion without hope but nevertheless of some comfort. By relativising absolutely everything, from climate change to Trump, the Mark of the Sacred provides a kind of Zen perspective that allows anxiety to dissipate. It is a therapy for the doomed.

For Dupuy, self-transcendence is a uniquely human ability which shows up in innumerable hidden as well as obvious forms. Language, perhaps, is one of the most obvious. We use language, we create new language. Yet we live in a world controlled by language. Language transcends us as individuals even though it exists only to the extent that it is used by individuals. That we submit to language in a community is arguably our only competitive advantage in a world inhabited by stronger, faster, more instinctively aware beasts, not to mention the legions of microbes that would devour us if we couldn’t figure out how to fight them off collectively.

Self-transcendence is also demonstrated in political, commercial, and social organisation. Democratic politics is the creation and sustainment by a population of a polity, a set of constitutional laws, that then dominates that same population. In today’s world, we are perhaps even more dominated by an organisational form created in the Middle Ages that combines the transcendence of both the state and the church. This is the modern corporation, established and run by individuals who then are required by law to act in its interests rather than their own. Society as a whole is only marginally controlled by law and explicit restriction, but relies on continuous implicit respect for ‘something bigger,’ such as Order, or Freedom, or Regard for one’s neighbour.

Dupuy argues that the oldest and most universal form of self-transcendence is religion. Certainly no civilisation that we know of, ancient or modern, has been able to exist without the creation of a cause, identity, origin, or purpose external to itself. The essential externality has, of course, been God in some form or other. “By ‘God,’ I mean what all the divinities that human beings have made for themselves throughout history have in common—an exteriority that they have managed to project outside the sphere of human existence.”

For the ancient Israelites, the ultimate exterior transcendence was YHWH for whom and by whom they existed. For The 18th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, it was the divine Guarantor, who coordinated the activities of his ‘windowless’ Monads to ensure the best of all possible worlds. For we of a more secular, but no less religious, age, our self-transcendence is most often expressed as Reason, a somewhat ill-defined but very much glorified God.

As Dupuy notes, “reason, like all human institutions, has its source in religion.” Whether we view it as a substitute for religion or as an extension of traditional religion matters very little. Dupuy quotes Emile Durkheim approvingly (and frequently) as the first to understand that “the fundamental categories of thought, and therefore of science, have religious origins.” And not just thought but all the social structures created by thought: “… it can be said that nearly all great social institutions are derived from religion.” Marriage, justice, government, science, ethics, and basic social courtesies and virtues have their ultimate origin in the ultimately transcendent entity - God.

The traditional term for designating that which is explicitly transcendent is ‘sacred.’ We create the sacred but it is beyond us. Hegel called the process by which we do this ‘self-exteriorisation’; Marx termed it ‘alienation’; Adam Smith, the Invisible Hand. The French anthropologist, Louis Dumont, referred to the condition these processes established as ‘hierarchy,’ by which he meant the term in its original Greek meaning of ‘sacred order.’ This sacred order has an important characteristic. It “encompasses the contrary.” This can be stated rather precisely in terms that seems to include all of human social organisation:

“The coincidence of the whole and one of its proper subsets (which, for a mathematician, implies the idea of infinity) is what permits the whole to stand in opposition to the complementary subset. The whole, in other words, encompasses its contrary—the part that does not coincide with the whole.”

This statement may seem confusing to non-mathematicians but it is an extremely simple concept. A good example is the kind of corporate organisation common in many large German companies in which members of the workforce are elected to the ‘supervisory board’ which has corporate authority over management who in turn have authority over the board members from the workforce. Dupuy calls this a “tangled hierarchy.” My old teacher Russell Ackoff used the term “circular organisation” and advocated it extensively among American businesses.

Dupuy puts Dumont’s idea through an important ‘stress test’ and finds its weak point. He concludes that “the most stable social order is the one that contains the threat of its own collapse.” Think of democracy which permits maximal disagreement and diversity of political parties. Or, even more apt, a loosely regulated financial market (an old colleague of mine, Richard Pascale, wrote a book for business managers called Managing on the Edge which had the same theme). These institutions work best according to political and economic theory - until they, abruptly and without notice, don’t. At which point they tend to disintegrate completely into crisis: “The crisis that accompanies the collapse of a hierarchical order bears a name that has come down to us from Greek mythology: panic.” When the god Pan is seen in the forest, the locals hotfoot somewhere else, anywhere else. As word gets around, he instantly becomes the new exteriority for the entire population..

Panic undermines all hierarchical order; in fact it inverts it. When there is panic, all of the virtues of the system are inverted. What was good - freedom, self-determination, light-touch regulation, even fundamental concepts like private property and the sanctity of contracts - becomes evil. Commenting on the 2008 financial crisis, Dupuy makes the point clear: “… the virtue of a crisis of such unprecedented scope is that it makes clear, at least to those who have the eyes to see it, that good and evil are profoundly related; indeed they have become identical with each other as a result of the crisis. If there is a way out, it will be found only by allowing evil once again to transcend itself and take on the appearance of the good.”

So democracies do fall into dictatorship (e.g. Weimar Germany) and markets do become horribly chaotic (as in the dot.com bust or the even larger derivatives meltdown). But because we do not like these outcomes doesn’t imply that democracies or markets don’t work. They surely do - by creating the possibility a new hierarchical order, in which, perhaps, democratic freedoms are suspended and regulation becomes a dominant commercial force. Virtues become vices and vice versa. Therefore says Dupuy, “The challenge facing policymakers in a time of panic is to find an external fixed point that can be used to bring it under control.”

In other words the real strength in our institutions, if strength there be, is their ability to find new gods which re-establish orderly society. Finding/inventing/creating the new sacred as panic sweeps across our societies is necessary for survival. But this is where our history and our cultural heritage betray us. We are trapped by a monumental paradox of our religious life first identified by Max Weber:

“… the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be identified with the sacred, since it is responsible for the ongoing desacralization (or disenchantment) of the world that epitomizes modernity; second, that desacralization threatens to leave us defenseless against our own violence by unchaining technology, so that unlimitedness begins little by little to replace limitedness; third, the greatest paradox of all, that in order to preserve the power of self-limitation, without which no human society can sustain itself and survive, we are obliged to rely on our own freedom.”

When the respective religious authorities decided to fix their canons of sacred scripture and stop the process by which these writings had been continuously edited, amended, and re-interpreted, our fate was sealed. Religion became faith, complete confidence in some static expression of exteriority. Not only the gods, but also God became archaic, an impediment to human welfare and the welfare of the rest of the planet.

So, in Dupuy’s judgement we have lost our ability for self-transcendence. Our societies no longer act as “God-factories.” Religion has now substituted for the sacred and destroyed it by halting its evolution. The traditional gods have indeed died, even among those fundamentalists who spout an Ole Time Religion that never existed except in their imagination. Theirs is at best a sacralisation of Nostalgia and at worst of White Colonialism. The new gods proposed by the innumerable cults that spring up continuously (QAnon, any number of conspiracy theories, alien enthusiasts, enthusiastic adventists, etc.) appeal mainly to the emotionally needy, the shysters, and the resentful, not to the mass of those affected by the emerging panic on numerous fronts from immigration to the corruption of every major social institution.

We will continue to worship the gods we have established by default in our disenchanted societies - wealth, position, political power, the righteousness of capitalism - because they are, we believe, what Marx called the universal equivalent of every possible desire. They give us whatever else we might want. This is the Prosperity Gospel that proclaims a religion without a hint of the sacred. Even more disastrously, it has annihilated an awareness of the sacred.

It turns out that Hegel was probably correct. Reason has its own agenda of which we are largely unconscious. But whereas he was confident enough to call such an exteriority ‘cunning,’ thus implying a secret plan for human welfare, the better translation might be the Ruse of Reason, the cosmic practical joke that is the species Homo sapiens.

View all my reviews