The Elusive Altar

There are costs to sacrificing nothing. And why we're seeing so many alternate-universe stories lately.

Sacrifice is a word you don’t hear much anymore. There’s no sacrifice aperture on the recycling can. There’s no sacrifice exchange in New York, Hong Kong or Frankfurt.

Sacrifice is, by definition, meaningful. If you throw something valuable away out of rage or carelessness, it’s a waste. If you lose something, but get something in return, it’s a transaction. A sacrifice is a statement. It imposes seriousness on the practitioner.

Taking the reins

The point of a sacrifice is that it’s done willingly. Time will grind on. Possibilities will close. Everything will die. But at least if you deliberately kill, close those possibilities and spend the time, you can claim some ownership of these realities. You can be something other than their victim.

You are deliberately incurring the pain of regret. You are privileging something unseen with a greater reality than tangible objects.

Never forget

In America in 2024, sacrifice is mostly a rhetorical trope, used by politicians in lieu of financial compensation. The phrase is dedicated to soldiers, firefighters and teachers. It’s said solemnly but forgotten quickly. Consider the fast-fading reverence for supermarket cashiers, Amazon delivery drivers and other essential workers since the pandemic.

Daydream, conclusion

That phony overuse of the phrase may be part of why sacrifice just isn’t what most people are about.

Rather, having it all, is something people say they want. If they say it in jest, it’s only because they believe it’s out of reach. It can mean career and family, succeeding without exploiting, wealth and integrity, eating without getting fat, fame and dignity, and the like.

It’s a state of equilibrium, where desire sated to the extent of one’s imagination. It’s a state of no sacrifice. It is also, in many ways, the opposite of being alive.

Unprotected specs with multiple universes

To sacrifice nothing is to be glutted, sated, expanded to the volume of the universe.

And beyond. There’s a vogue for movies and television shows that explore the notion of multiple universes, where each decision breaks off another separate universe where that decision plays out, until the next decision, and so on.

These movies and shows explore the idea and then reel it all back in to the happily-after-all beginning state. As such, the multiverse plot winds up being about as predictable as the time-travel genre.

But people seem to want them, which is telling. A universe like a sprawling root-system of branching possibilities that all exist at the same time speaks to a few anxieties and desires.

• We are not special. We just as easily could have been very different. We very easily could have been almost anyone, with just a few different decisions.

• Our life experiences are commodities. They’re all the same shoe, just in different sizes and colors.

• Action is a sin. Anything you do can and will be held against you in the court of what might have been. Sit still.

• No FOMO. Some other version of us is enjoying those missed opportunities somewhere.

• No danger was ever escaped. But at least we’re superior to those failed versions of ourselves, the poor bastards.

• It’s all contingent. The wide disparity in outcomes among our millions of selves shows that none of it was never our fault, or to our credit. There’s no self-determination.

• It’s connected. A family tree of causation connects all possible outcomes, and precludes none of them. No person or event is idiosyncratic or un-repeatable.

The multiverse is a thought experiment in which absolutely everything is possible, except for a sacrifice.

Consider Cain

Sacrifice has always been tricky, though. One of the oldest stories is the sacrifice refused. Cain offers up his harvest and G-d says no thanks. His brother Abel has better results with a dead lamb.

The story was told by shepherds, so there’s no way the farmer wins in this one. But there’s also something about killing that underscores the no-refunds direction of time. And there’s something about a blood sacrifice that says you’re on the side of that no-refunds aspect of it.

Having his sacrifice poo-pooed drives Cain to murder. If anything, it’s a bigger killing. But no dice. It’s the wrong killing at the wrong time for the wrong reason, and Cain knows it immediately.

G-d punishes Cain, but won’t even dignify the guy with murder. His punishment is to go on living. From a narrative perspective, he’s sacrificed on the gray fires of irrelevance.

Inefficiency & terror

It’s the first of many biblical sacrifices that don’t seem to go by the book. Noah offers thanks by sacrificing a bunch of the very animals he just went to incredible lengths to save. We don’t find out which ones. We can only assume they’re extinct. But the sacrifice seems to have worked.

The next big one is when Abraham climbs the mountain to sacrifice Isaac. As far as Abraham is concerned, if anyone isn’t surplus in the story, it’s his son. Isaac is central to his life and the deal he struck with the Author of the universe. But Abraham does it anyway, or almost does.

Against national unity

These days, everyone is milling around. We look into history and into our own hearts and it’s unclear if these times are good or bad. And all we know for certain is that sooner or later, someone’s going to get it in the neck.

We watch the news for the guy of whom we can say better him than me. And then we work backwards to try and figure out why that horrible thing didn’t happen to us. If the reason makes a scintilla of sense, we congratulate ourselves. Then we go back to the news for a sign that it’s time to fight or flee for our lives. Until then, we reserve egress and gossip. 

The news says we’ve never been more divided. But come on. The only time a large group of people is ever unified is right before they murder another group of people. Let’s stop pretending unity is a thing we should want.

Beastmaster days

My first real exposure to human sacrifice was on cable. Nineteen-eighty four was a peculiar year for cable TV. It had money, but not much. And the televisual habits of the U.S. hadn’t caught up with the possibilities. We were still slow on the draw with the remote.

We let things run. We didn’t mind reruns. And the powers that were showed us the film The Beastmaster (1982) on HBO, TNT, USA, everywhere and almost constantly. I spent a cumulative month of my seventh year watching the thing.

The movie is bananas. It’s a half-bright producer’s idea of Joseph Campbell, punched up by a surly screenwriter from the softcore porn circuit. It opens up with Rip Torn, in a big rubber nose, cackling as he chucks children into a fire. The kids are losing their minds, screaming and crying in fear. It’s graphic. Those are the opening credits. It gets crazier.

It takes place in a witches-and-swords world where a guy can talk to animals. But it looks like the past. And even as a dumb kid, I knew they weren’t getting their ideas from nowhere.

Deed and oath

Whenever they dig up a mass grave of well-dressed children from a vanished civilization, anthropologists like to say that the sacrifices are transactions to keep the sun rising or the volcano calm. That’s fine. They’re in the explanation business. I don’t want to imagine the rot they’d say if they went through my stuff 600 years after the fact.

Part of that what makes sacrifice hard to understand is America. Our nation was made on transactions, according to the story. Peter Minuit bought Manhattan, the Louisiana purchase, Seward’s folly. Check the deed and buy your own lot! But what makes all that property law actually real to people is the stuff of horror movies.

Locating the altar

Sacrifice is the loud part that’s said quietly in daily life. It’s a religious concept altogether lost on the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd. But it creeps in when a company’s stock price perks up after mass layoffs, or in the near-mystical power of a few million bucks burned on a nonsensical Super Bowl ad, the reverential hush when a celebrity dies young or the rage of a spurned employee or slighted parent.

There’s a whole book or two of the Bible about getting sacrifices just right. If you miss a step, there’s a steep price, for everyone. The profound calamity of the destruction of the second temple was largely the loss of a proper place to perform sacrifices.

These days altar is elusive. Many of our religious instincts have been relocated to the arts, to government, to despising one another, or to our personal lives (See “The Secular Never Really Was,” this fall). So how do you find a sacred place for a pivotal act within an improvised faith during the hurly burly of our days?

Surplus

One reason why no one talks about sacrifice is our historical moment. We live in a civilization whose focus is shifting from human freedom, well-being and potential to a more efficient market.

People talk about becoming brands. People optimize and sand off their rough edges be smoother commodities. They place these commodities on platforms where they can be bet on and traded, hopefully enhancing their value in the process.

Anthropologists like to identify the primary benison of civilization is a surplus - an excess of food and shelter that translates into art, law and more anthropologists. But the seat of power has moved from the government to the corporation. And a well-run 21st-century company shouldn’t have any surplus. It has a strategy to deploy capital, or else return it to the shareholders. This is the logic reshaping everything.

It infects human beings. They hustle and grind. They work hard and play hard. They optimize even their free time. They work 89, 90-hour weeks and then brag about it. They like to flatter themselves that their sacrifice is wanted, and that it is acceptable. But to whom it is acceptable is the stuff of horror movies.

Outside the temple walls

Priesthoods are hard to audit. Priests are often accused of corruption.

The millers and smiths whisper that the priests aren’t sacrificing all the animals. They say the priests are gorging themselves on roasted doves, while some unseen thing goes neglected.

The herders and farmers see a fat priest while their kids are rail thin. It’s dispiriting, but they still who pay their tithes. All the while, the children of those families are also busy preparing themselves for the priesthood. Maybe the temple is the staple that fastens heaven and earth. Who knows? At least the priests eat well.

The receipts

The arts begin as a sacrifice. But when we check the box office receipts, it can sour the whole ritual. It doesn’t always spoil a piece of art when it enters the logic of exchange and dons a price tag.

The rules around this spoliation are hazy. But the sooner you check for the return on capital for a work of art, the more certain the sacrifice is to be drained of all power.

In digital media metrics of all sorts fly back at the maker as soon as they release a work. As a result, these sacrifices have less power than ever (see “Games (They’ll Wonder What Happened to Us)” later this summer). We all feel this loss.

The altar lately

The altar changes. It’s done little except change since before I was born. Sometimes the sacrifice works. But nobody knows why. And few things seem as disastrous as an attempt to repeat a success.

The pious are scrambling, fumbling with incantations and images, falling all over themselves, putting John Cage compositions on YouTube, or running a marathon every day for 30 days in a row. It’s even worse though, for those being sacrificed, who must now dream their nightmare for nobody at all.

The shrug on the sofa

A failed sacrifice has a particular feeling like a yawn that goes on so long that you forget you’re yawning. The movie was predictable. The music was familiar mortar troweled between voices in a restaurant. The milling throng wanders off to find some entertainment to tide them over until they’re allowed to sleep, however badly.

Without a shock, without terror and desire, the universe could be anything at all, maybe everything at all. Maybe it’s all of those things right now.

Against everything

The point of a sacrifice is to say only this is happening, only this matters. This may be painful, but all around us right now is the foundation of the universe of which I am a full and willing participant.

I willingly forsake my daydreams. I recuse myself from the illusion that I am innocent. I knowingly forego or destroy something of value to make this statement truer than any other.

Right now my neck hurts. My eyes are dry. I should be in bed. And still I do this. I choose these words and no others. I spell-check. It’s not much, but this essay is my sacrifice.