#MUSIL2020 DAYS 22-28 MUSIL, CALASSO, SCAPE GOATS & SACRIFICE

Roberto Calasso

I have been reading Roberto Calasso's The Ruin of Kash alongside my daily The Man without Qualities. Even though they are very different (where Calasso is gnomic and mystical, Musil is lucid and acerbic; where Calasso is profound and devastating, Musil is light and humorous), they are also very similar, both circling around similar questions: what are the driving demonic forces that create the dynamics of societies and history? What primal and ancient instincts lay below the seemingly civilized structures of the modern world? What does it mean for modern society that we have lost our conscious connection to the mythic, the ritualistic, the religious? How much of what we do and say is a hypocritical blind cover for these ever-present and recurring forces? And, maybe most similar and most important: how do we harness these forces to reanimate ourselves and our world to be more fiercely alive and awake as if in conscious vigilance against the soporific, depressing, moribund half-life of zombie capitalism and contemporary social reality? What does sacrifice, crime, violence, language, art have to do with this possible salvation? I knew that Calasso knew Musil and honored him; but yesterday I found a passage in The Man without Qualities that must have directly influenced Calasso's work (passage below).

I am not going to try to explicate Calasso, since I am never really sure I understand what he wants or advocates in The Ruin of Kash. I am in love with the book. And when I am reading, I think I understand; but then when I awake from it and try to explain, it eludes me like a dream (which may be part of the point of what it "means"); but when he talks about Sacrifice (a central theme of the book), I think I understand the following:

Civilization has always existed in contract with something that has often been called The Divine and which might also be understood as Nature. In order to be able to live more or less untroubled by the gods or the demonic forces of Nature, people have had to sacrifice things, people, surplus to the gods or to Nature, to ward away danger and to ward away the chaotic undifferentiated ALL from which civilization and individuation springs.

Without giving something up, without sacrificing something, often violently, there can be no civilization. We tear the crops from the ground and we kill animals to eat; we break ground to build cities; we wage wars over territory and resources; we battle opposing ideologies; we separate one thing from another to make definitions; we use words to come together in communication, but these words also divide the undifferentiated. We turn Nature to our own uses, but if we do not give Nature something back, she will take it herself.

He tells the story of the end of sacrifice as ritual conscious activity, the story called "the ruin of Kash," culled from Frobenius. A long cycle of sacrificial kingship, whereby all the kings of Kash were killed along with their chosen associates whenever the royal astrologers named the day, is interrupted by the powers of a storyteller, who puts the king and the astrologers under the spell of story (of language and poetry or soma) so that they miss their vigil recording the movements of the stars. The storyteller and the king's sister (who are both bound to die with the king) are in love and they scheme to end the cycle of sacrifices. And succeed. But only for a while. The storyteller becomes the new king, who dies a normal death...but with him the kingdom of Kash and its legendary and ancient wealth and power also die. "The Legend of Kash teaches us," write Calasso, in his usual cryptic style, "that sacrifice is the cause of ruin, but that the absence of sacrifice is also the cause of ruin".

The dynamic tension between civilization and the divine, between the differentiated and the undifferentiated, is a recurring and unavoidable cycle. But the modern world has forgotten the divine and forgotten nature and is unaware that the process of sacrifice continues without our knowledge or prayers or devotion. Nevertheless, sacrifices continue; as his long descriptions of the French Revolution and the Red Terror and Counter-Revolution demonstrate. Is he saying that these blood sacrifices are bad, because unconscious or are they good because they are sacrifices? He clearly is critical of the French Revolution and what he characterizes as the equalizing totalitarian vulgarity of its proponents; but is that because they mistakenly believed that their bloodshed was rational and not mystical? That they foolishly believed that their violent acts would fix the world, once and for all, removing the bad elements and installing perpetual utopia? Calasso is clear enough on one thing: Sacrifice as conscious ritual activity or as blind secular sacrifice are both inevitable and a necessary prerequisite for being alive. Maybe that is all we have to understand. Or, more importantly: this could be a warning against ascribing to any movement or ideology which professes it will once and for all remove all dark and dangerous things; and an incitement to appreciate that without darkness and violence (in one form or another---and the question of which form is important!) we have no light and no life. To do away with difference, tension, danger is to prepare for death and a return to undifferentiated sleep. To do this prior to death is to create a dystopian land of zombies.

But, as mentioned above, I found the following passage about sacrifice in my Musil reading yesterday, which may help us to understand both writers better:

"The world apparently needs its negative entities, images of the unwanted, which attract to themselves all the disgust and disharmony, all the slag of a smoldering fire, such as life tends to leave behind. Out of all that 'could be' there suddenly crystallizes, to the stunned amazement of everyone concerned, the 'it is', and whatever drops away during this disorderly process, whatever is unsuitable, superfluous, unsatisfying, seems to coagulate into the vibrant universal hatred agitating all living creatures that is apparently so characteristic of our present civilization, which compensates for all our lack of satisfaction with ourselves by allowing us to feel that easy satisfaction so readily inspired by everyone else.Trying to isolate specific  scapegoats for the displeasure is merely part of the oldest psychotechnical bag of tricks known to man. Just as the medicine man drew the carefully prepared fetish from his patient's body, the good Christian projects his own faults onto the good Jew, whom he accuses of seducing him into committing advertisements, high interest rates, newspapers, and all that sort of thing. In the course of time people have blamed their troubles on bad weather, witches, socialists, intellectuals, generals, and in the years before the Great War, Austrians saw a most welcome scapegoat of this sort in Prussian Germany. Unfortunately, the world has lost not only God but the Devil as well. As it projects its unwanted evil onto the scapegoat, so it projects its desired good onto ad hoc ideal figures, which it reveres for doing what it finds inconvenient to do for itself. We let others perform the hard tricks as we watch from our seats: that is sport. We let others talk themselves into the most one-sided exaggerations: that is idealism. We shake off evil and make those who are spattered with it our scapegoats. It is one way of creating an order in the world, but this technique of hagiolatry and fattening the scapegoats by projection is not without danger, because it fills the world with all the tensions of unresolved inner conflicts. People alternately kill each other or swear eternal brotherhood without quite knowing just how real any of it is, because they have projected part of themselves onto the outer world and everything seems to be happening partly out there in reality and partly behind the scenes, so that we have an illusory fencing match between love and hate. The ancient belief in demons, which made heavenly-hellish spirits responsible for all the good and bad that came one's way, worked much better, more accurately, more tidily, and we can only hope that, as we advance in psychotechnology, we shall make our way back to it" (560, emphasis mine).