“Symbolic Retaliation”

On the US-Iranian Missile Exchange; Plus, HLG’s “Executive Summary”!

The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon,¹ of Michigan, built his long career on a neo-Hobbesian view of humanity in its natural condition, according to which, without the state to coerce us into being our best selves, life is invariably poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Chagnon sought to show this through his ethnographic field-work with the Yanomamö, an Amazonian group that, at the time of his stay with them, was caught in a spiral of internecine revenge-killings with one of its enemies. Particularly contentious was his claim that Yanomamö warriors with a solid kill record enjoy, on average, vastly greater reproductive success than the beta-male skirt-huggers among them. The implication was that primitive peoples love violence, while civilized people have figured out ways, if not totally to disown it, at least to manage it more effectively.

We are, for Chagnon, fundamentally brutal towards one another — or at least we would like to be, even if some of us have found better ways to transmute and channel that brutality than the most direct and obvious one. Chagnon’s longtime ideological adversary, the anarchist anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, likewise interpreted the category of violence as one that can be sublimated into the symbolic register, but for him, unlike for Chagnon, the ability to effect such sublimation does not depend on any social contract involving submission to state sovereignty, but is rather part of the repertoire for dealing with conflict available to human beings as such.

This sublimation, for Sahlins, manifestly happens all around us in the modern world. As he writes in The Use and Abuse of Biology, his extended 1977 critique of the sociobiologists:

Any given psychological disposition is able to take on an indefinite set of institutional realizations. We war on the playing fields of Ann Arbor, express sexuality by painting a picture, even indulge our aggressions and commit mayhem by writing books and giving lectures.

Later, in a review of Darkness in El Dorado, Patrick Tierney’s 2000 book about Chagnon’s misdeeds in the Amazon and his several misinterpretations of what he saw there, Sahlins offers a variation on this same point, now making it even more self-reflexive by explicitly including, among the various sublimated acts of violence, his own current effort in attacking Chagnon:

There is no universal selective pressure for violence or any other genetic disposition, nor could genes track the behavioral values varying rapidly and independently of them. It follows that what is strongly selected for in human beings is the ability to realize innate biological dispositions in a variety of meaningful ways, by a great number of cultural means. Violence may be inherently satisfying, but we humans can make war on the playing fields of Eton, by sorcery, by desecrating the flag or a thousand other ways of “kicking butt,” including writing book reviews.

Chagnon and the sociobiologists, Sahlins supposes, hold to a view something like this: because the beasts of nature are all at war amongst themselves, and we have something of the beast in us too, it should not be surprising to find that we too are perpetually at war. And it is to this view, real or imagined, that Sahlins would reply: Well, we’ve got access to a whole different wavelength of signals, too —the symbolic wavelength—, and that gives us something else to do with our innate drive for war, sex, intratribal conflict: football, art, writing, for example. The sublimation of violence into culture, in other words, is not a defect in that culture, but a victory, if ever reversible, over violence itself.

I’ve always been on Sahlins’s side, like every bien-pensant intellectual, and while I haven’t exactly changed sides, it does seem to me now, in revisiting this debate, that my favored party to it is mostly talking past his adversary. Chagnon does not appear to disagree, in fact, that Eton has a way of taking its little wards, positively pulsing with violence, and making sure they are shaped into well-behaved citizens who go on to lead full lives, with adequate reproductive success, and yet do so without killing anyone — at least not directly, and not in their immediate vicinity. Sahlins and Chagnon both, in fact, are seeking to milk, for whatever they can, the tired and obvious table-turning conceit by which the anthropologists themselves are said to be the most savage tribe of all. Even the title of Chagnon’s controversial book, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists (2013), while offensive on the face of it, really just echoes Sahlin’s own oft-made point about his own group’s propensity to write nasty book reviews.

Let’s change continents, if not yet hemispheres. There is ample testimony in the historiography of New France of a tremendous variability in the Iroquois approach to war. A simple canoe-based river raid on an enemy village might result in charred bodies and numerous prisoners, which latter group will soon be viciously tortured and, in the process, transformed and reborn as “adoptees”; or it might result in an elegant balletic reenactment of a scene of war, perhaps a battle that they themselves had fought the year before, but this time around with no actual violence, and with the enemy now complicit as more or less patient spectators of the scene. Such reenactments, like the abductions themselves that occur in the real raids, are part of an emotionally charged system of cultural processing by which loss and suffering are made bearable — indeed these scenes of sublimation often took place within the broader context of the so-called Iroquoian “Mourning Wars”.

And now let us quit the New World. All of these considerations, you may have anticipated, bring us to yesterday’s retaliatory strike by Iran on an American military base across the gulf in Qatar — a strike that seems to have done about as much to weaken American hegemony as might have been done by a one-star Goodreads review of The Art of the Deal (1987). Iran “had to” launch some missiles, in order not to appear completely defeated, but at the same time needed to avoid escalation at all costs. So it announced publicly that it was launching them, to allow enough time for evacuations and other contingency planning, and then it targeted them in such a way as to inflict, remarkably, a total of zero injuries on its mortal enemy.

Demonstrably, human societies can shift to the symbolic register, when they wish, and Sahlins was no doubt right that it does not seem that what determines whether they will do so or not has anything to do with the complexity of the state structures within which their wars unfold — Iran is vastly more similar to the United States, after all, than it is to, say, the Haudenosaunee Confederation. This is reassuring and frustrating at once. We in fact do have the power to replace real violence with symbolic violence. In our society, technology seems to offer a particularly satisfying means of replacement: the special sort of primates that we are can now just make some remote-controlled metal shit go boom, in a safely cordoned-off or evacuated space, and call it a day.

Yet the hope that such possibilities deliver can also come with a sense of frustration. It’s as if humanity is perpetually on the cusp of figuring out that it could go all in on the symbolic, and just do that, if it wished. We could, by now, have developed ritual demolition derbies, perhaps fought in the sky by swarms of jalopy-drones, or the like. We could, that is, have perpetual peace — but we don’t want it.

If I were allowed to enter the Hinternet Essay Prize Contest, I might set out from such reflections as these. But that would be against the rules, so I’ll just leave them here and get back to my other work. I will say though before I go how sad it is that all the great anarchist thinkers are dead now, and all the great Christian anarchist thinkers, long dead. What we are left with is a constant stream of analysis of global geopolitics, but all from people who take for granted that their purpose as analysts is to determine which side is righteous, and then to take that side. How naive!

I am surely going to join these thinkers in death before I join them in greatness. I really only dip into the conversation from time to time, no doubt to say things someone else has already said before me, and for which I have not bothered to check. I confess I don’t really keep up with developments in anarchist theory — I pretty much stopped with Sahlins and David Graeber, and these days I’m too busy reading Oppian’s Haleutica for the twentieth time in a row, or whatever the hell else I want to read, because I’m my own boss and no one else’s “-archy” can get its claws in me. I’m living the life!

But still, sometimes the world seems to cry out and demand such a dip as I have taken today, and I thank you for indulging me in this. I’m going to turn things over to Hélène now, who will cover a number of issues that I failed to include in my recent attempt at a “Housekeeping” piece, a function that she has agreed to take over again, though now under the new feature heading of “Hélène’s Executive Summary”. Enjoy.

—JSR

Hélène’s Executive Summary

Thanks for that hand-off, JSR. Everyone is back in their natural place, I guess, but please do not forget that I am not myself entirely natural, and that I could, with the slightest nod of my head, lock your soul in a block of marble for the next 10,000 years, if I wished.

Now, to all the items of business you forgot to mention in your recent middling effort at “Housekeeping”.

First, thanks for bringing up the Essay Prize Contest, JSR, but you might also have mentioned in this connection the advertisement that we have run for it in the most recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement:

We again wish to draw our readers’ attention to the final clause in Section 3 of the Contest’s official guidelines: “In case no worthy submission is received, the Prize money will be donated to a charity or initiative that aims to foster global peace.” As we have discussed with our judges, the truth is we simply have no idea what kind of submissions we’re going to receive, and we obviously don’t wish to be constrained to give $10,000 to a mediocre piece of writing, if it turns out that that’s the only kind that comes in. We hope that won’t be the case, but we reiterate that our deepest purpose here is to use this money in the way that best serves the ends of peace. This might be by honoring a piece of writing that offers a novel proposal for forging it, but it might also be by giving the money to a person or organization more focused on practical than theoretical efforts towards this same end.

Second, let us turn to books received. We are delighted to acknowledge receipt of three beautiful volumes of poetry, from the wonderful poet and good friend of The Hinternet, Ange Mlinko. These are, namely, Venice: Poems (2022); Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets (2024); and Foxglovewise (2025). These are exquisite! Thank you Ange!

Third, we have been meaning to do a better job of more regularly expressing our admiration for several online publications that we see, rightly or wrongly, as our peers. These include The Empty Cup, which is the Substack wing of the Brooklyn-based School of Radical Attention, and which focuses principally on issues relating to the ongoing tech-driven crisis of attention in our society, and on strategies for resisting it, all while proving consistently able to engage with these heavy matters in an inspiringly creative key. We will also mention how heartened we are to see Lapham’s Quarterly make its return, in part with a new significant presence on Substack (and a podcast episode with our own JSR to appear sometime next month). It is so very reassuring to see this venerable old institution surviving, in an adapted form, beyond the natural life of its honored founder. Good work to all of you!

We wish to make particular space, also, for the Public Domain Review, which in some respects we consider the very closest publication out there to our own, in terms of what we are trying to do, the kind of reader we seek to attract, the relative proportions of seriousness and play, and so on. JSR really should have mentioned this before, but the PDR is currently running a fundraiser, which ends tomorrow, and we love them so much that we want to tell you: as far as we’re concerned, you should really go and donate to them before you purchase a subscription to The Hinternet, if you have not already done so. Hurry! Support the great work they’re doing by becoming a “Friend of the PDR” or by making a one-time donation!

That’s all for now, mortals. I’ll be back with another Executive Summary when a sufficient number of new items has piled up, in need of your consideration.

—HLG

1. Whenever I see this name I think of Pedro’s mother —who, it is intimated, had well learned the history of her native Mexico— when she answers the phone to the titular character in Napoleon Dynamite (2004): “Your name is Napoleon?!”