The Virtuous Victim is a powerful totem because it plays on our desire for the full and final triumph of justice—a sentiment at odds with the logic of totemism. The totem raises spiritual expectations. I see it in my students, whose eschatological expectations of the dawning era of justice become vivid when they worship the Virtuous Victim. But the mechanisms of totemism are ordered toward managing spiritual tensions between the sacred and profane, not guiding us toward their final resolution. Thus the anguish, frustration, and bitterness that so often accompany multiculturalism. Members of the clan are anguished because they never seem to see any progress. But progress is not the aim of totemism.
In sociological terms, identity politics might work as a mechanism for distributing spoils in a postmodern competition for social status and economic resources—ritualized warfare among clans in a late-modern pluralistic democracy. But it cannot work as a mechanism for achieving a more just society, since that project entails a standard of justice that transcends the conflict of totem and anti-totem. Again, the dilemma: The proponents of identity politics draw purpose and resolve from their desire for a more just society, but their methods work in a very different fashion, leading to frustration and calls for still more finely sorted identity categories applied with still greater urgency and indignant fury.
It is with curiosity and trepidation that I await further developments in the evolution of this strange phenomenon. The stakes are raised by the fact that the multiculturalist clan’s beliefs are so widespread among our cultural elites. The Virtuous Victim is held up for veneration by many American institutions—educational, media, corporate. By my reckoning, we are likely to see still greater anger at the lack of progress, shriller calls for loyalty to the totem, and more aggressive efforts to purge the anti-totem, until the clan members collapse in spiritual and political exhaustion. May that time be soon.
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this is the point of change, either they colapse or we die.
the goalposts of this culture war seem to keep changing with time was my point. so perhaps what is being said is that totemism sees some good even in the profane whereas with multiculturalism in the end it sees the white patriarchy (or whatever) as inherently evil by virtue of its existence. the only resolution to the latter is a variant of the Final Solution— something similar to white people need to die.
Perhaps totemism sees the Other as an immutable force of nature which can never be expected to be completely tamed (such as for example lightning) (?)