how they relate to each other in there; how they entered the faith over time; what particular Druze belief can be traced back to what source, and so on. But she will probably not say this: the Druze faith is a hybrid thing and so we must not try to sift out the Platonic from the Shiite components, whose traces have been lost in this blend; it is impossible to say where the one ends and the other begins; this is a common occurrence in the world of religion, so let us scrap the categories of Platonism and Shi’ism and the rest of it altogether. Saying something like that would not be considered an attempt to understand the Druze faith. It would be more like a surrender of the task.
In medicine, one studies the effects of substances on the human body: say, tobacco on the lungs. Where would such research have been led by the pronouncement that since tobacco and lungs are mixed in the bodies of smokers, the categories have become obsolete (if they ever were relevant) and hence the effects of one on the other cannot be meaningfully distinguished? Or consider how etymologists study languages. Does Spanish cancel out Arabic and Latin? Or the field of international relations: the European Union mixes Germany with Greece …
Hybridism as a guide to the world would certainly have some interesting political consequences. When Leon Trotsky scanned Tsarist Russia and distilled ‘the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’, he could perhaps have inferred that capitalism was now so deeply enmeshed in Tsarism that it had become pointless to track what parts of Russian social dynamics stemmed from it, let alone single it out for special treatment.11 Then surely anti-capitalist revolution would have been an idle venture. Or, someone might point out that the very physical makeup of the territories occupied in 1967 is patterned by the commingling of Zionist and Palestinian matter – the air in Gaza hums with the sounds of drones and muezzins; houses in al-Khalil have settlers living on top of local families; toxic waste from colonies mix with water in the valleys of the West Bank – and hence purifying this situation into boxes labelled ‘the Zionist project’ and ‘the Palestinian people’ has limited utility, for the contrast between them no longer makes sense.
Now, a hybridist might object that these analogies are unfair. Platonism and Shi’ism are, after all, the same sort of thing. Air adulterated by cigarette smoke and pure air are modalities of the exact same substance. Germany and Greece are but two nations, capitalism and Tsarism two social forms, Zionists and Palestinians two groups of people – their combinations should provoke no surprise. They do not call for a revision of our ontologies or methods; they do not imply that reality is mongrelised to an extent few have seen; the unification of such similar components does not cancel out their difference. But such an objection would only reveal the problem at the root of hybridism. Only by postulating nature and society as categories located a universe apart does their combination warrant their collapse. Only with an implicit conception of them as more substantially unlike each other than any other two things can one conclude that their admixture, in contradistinction to so many humdrum alloys, disproves their existence. The revelation betrays itself – oh, so nature and society were not self-contained galaxies after all! Then we cannot talk about them any longer!
In the background lurks, again, the legacy of an extreme form of dualism. Latour likes to refer to it as ‘the modern constitution’; a more common genealogy derives it from the philosophy of René Descartes. He held that the mind and the body are two ‘distinct substances’. The body is extended in space and constituted of parts that can be sliced off and removed like cogs from a machine, in starkest possible contrast to the thinking mind. If a heart is cut out from a body, that body loses a vital component and ceases to be – but where is the heart of the mind? Where are its arms, its legs, its constituent parts potentially separated from each other? They are nowhere, Descartes argued, for the mind is a thing one and whole, indivisible, indestructible; it does not possess a corporeal shape. The body is a physical substance, but the mind is an ethereal, spiritual sort of thing. This is why the mind can live on and prosper without the body; after death and decomposition, it survives because it is made of utterly different stuff. ‘Two substances are said to be really distinct’, Descartes lays down his central criterion, ‘when each of them can exist without the other’: and here such is the case, Descartes being ‘certain that I am really distinct from my body and that I can exist without it’.12 His philosophy is a substance dualism.
In the debate on nature and society, critics of Cartesianism are in the habit of mapping that philosophy onto the pair.13 Descartes himself did not speak in terms of these categories – his concern was the problem of body and mind – but many observers have found in Western worldviews the fingerprint of that philosopher, his dualist model simply extended to the analogous realms. And, indeed, the all-too-common conceptual segregation of nature and society can be seen as its logical continuation. If only by default, rather than some explicit alignment with Descartes, a characteristically Cartesian view of nature and society treats them as distinct substances fundamentally detached from each other. There might be occasional interstellar traffic between them, through some tiny pineal gland, but their essences are of opposite kinds and move in separate orbits.
Now, hybridism screams out its hostility to Cartesianism from every page it commands. It poses as the absolute negation of that obnoxious philosophy, since it refuses to countenance any distinction whatsoever between nature and society, to the point of denying their existence. That latter move, however – that rush to jettison the categories as soon as the extent of their entanglement comes into view – is, at a closer look, merely the flipside of substance dualism. Descartes himself spelled out its corollary: ‘to conceive of the union of two things is to conceive of them as one thing’.14 Anyone who believes that the body and the mind form a union would, he argued, be forced to recognise them as an undifferentiated oneness. By taking observations of their combination as so many reasons to expunge nature and society from the map of the world, hybridism updates this logic for our times. Moreover, it draws all of its rhetorical force from centuries of Cartesian thinking, to which the quantitative, historical component stands in exact proportion, the surprise at the proliferating combinations emanating from the legacy of extreme dualism: of this thinking, hybridism is not so much a rejection as a consequence. It is a negation of it only in the way the hangover is a negation of the binge. It is post-Cartesian in the sense that some scholars are post-Keynesian or post-Kantian: they carry the code of the original creed within themselves, if only in diluted form. Hybridism is to Cartesianism what e-cigarettes are to cigarettes.
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM IS A PROPERTY DUALISM
The mind, according to Descartes, is nowhere. It does not occupy any location in space. The substance of which it is made is not the kind that sits on a stool or lifts a weight or kicks a stone; it is defined precisely by not having extension, of being altogether otherworldly, cut off from mortal flesh. This philosophy gives rise to a well-known problem: that of causal interaction. If a stone is kicked down a path, it is because some foot has come into contact with it at a place. The foot has imparted motion to the stone, causing it to run over the ground; the two objects have interacted at the site of the collision, and that is how all causation occurs. For one thing to cause the behaviour of another, it must strike, brush, bump into, tickle or in some other way touch that thing at a shared location. But if the mind resides nowhere or only on its own numinous plane, where can it exert impact on the body? If the soul has no spatial position, how could it make contact with something physical? How do the two ever meet? It would be rather more occult than a concept hitting a billiard ball. Neither Descartes nor any other proponent of substance dualism has come up with a minimally satisfactory solution to this problem, and since one of the most conspicuous features of the relation between mind and body is that the two act upon one another, modern philosophy has written off that position as indefensible.15
But the cognate substance dualism is alive and well in conventional perceptions of society and nature. It is there whenever someone thinks or behaves as though society need not care about what happens in nature, however much the body of nature may bleed – as though it
