It would be a mistake in anthropological thinking to assume that the seed whose fruit is individual freedom was not always present, albeit in nascent form, from the very beginning of humankind.
Humanity is the species whose community is organized not along the lines of the pecking order of our animal cousins, but rather in terms of a centre of sacred/linguistic attention and a desiring human periphery. IN short, and all too briefly, humanity is organized through language and religion: the “top dog” must address the community as a whole, not just his immediate rival in the pecking order.
To reflect on how this state of affairs could ever have come into existence is hopefully to grasp that humanity is defined by the exchange of signs in a shared scene or event, a necessary reciprocity that is both the basis for the left’s intuitions about moral equality, (intuitions, the deeper understanding of which they always sacrifice to the Utopian impulse) and the freedom lover’s recognition that exchange requires social differences and someone taking the lead. Even the most ritual-bound society carries within it the possibility of eventually understanding that the ritual could not have ever come into existence without someone going first in unfolding the event from which the ritual stems. The Jewish discovery of the individual who covenants with the one God is not just the seed of a modernity at radical odds with traditional societies, but a real anthropological insight into the origin of all humanity, an insight superior to the un-selfconsciously sacrificial theories on origins that characterize the impulse to uniformity.
