Rene Girard and the mimetic theory of desire

For those who haven't yet had the time to delve into the groundbreaking anthropological works of Rene Girard, this week Peter Robinson of NRO TV is presenting a five-part interview with Girard. Since desire is the foundation of human consciousness, this is well worth some thought:

UPDATE: see the complete interview here (HT: maccusgermanis):

Infidolls - and a note about Rene Girard

Find your fun in The Four Mass'keteers' sales pitch for the Angry Mob Playset:

Hey kids! It's time to work yourself - and, of course, others, silly! - into an angry mob!

Think you're not a joiner? Didn't get on the Big O Bandwagon in the fall? So what?

Haven't you wanted to lower your level of consciousness and become part of a whole greater than the sum of its parts, just like those cartoon-protesting, church-burning, victim-seeking hoards in picturesque, exotic places (like London and Minneapolis)? Well, now you can!

But wait! There's more! Buy an 'angry mob' set (pictured above) for your favorite nephews or nieces. It's never too early to start practicing!

But the reason I link to the main page of the The Four Mass'keteers is that I know at least one person here has expressed interest in reading some Rene Girard, and I notice that for the last few days, at least, the blog has been featuring excerpts from Girard's books. Here's one I like:

The modern tendency to minimize religion could well be, paradoxically, the last remnant among us of religion itself in its archaic form, which seeks to keep the sacred at a safe distance. The trivialization of religion reflects a supreme effort to conceal what is at work in all human institutions, the religious avoidance of violence between the members of the same community.

Cultural crisis: What is to be done?

A "Roamin' Catholic" and the Cultural Crisis | Interview with Gil Bailie, Cornerstone Forum | Ignatius Insight | February 25, 2009

Ignatius Insight: Who is René Girard and how has he influenced your thinking and work?(I changed the sentence from past to present tense, for Girard is still alive.)

Gil Bailie: The best short answer—and it's not that short—is to tell you a story, which I recently recounted in a soon to be published tribute to Girard.

I first encountered Girard's thought in his seminal book Violence and the Sacred. I bought the book without knowing what to expect, but in the first few pages I was convinced that I was in the presence of one of the world's most penetrating minds. (I have now known Girard for 25 years and I have had the privilege to take part in hundreds of seminars with him, and that first assessment has only been confirmed over the years.)

At the time of my first encounter with his thought, however, I knew nothing about him. My days of theological and exegetical dalliance were winding down, but during them I had attended a few of the conferences of the Westar Institute, out of which eventually evolved the infamous Jesus Seminar. The institute was having a conference in Sonoma, California, where I lived for many years. The founder of Westar, Robert Funk, knew of my interest in Girard, so he called me one day to say that a dozen or so of the biblical scholars who were coming to the conference had persuaded René Girard come up from Stanford University (where he held the Chair of French Culture and Civilization) to join them for a day to discuss the implications of his work for biblical studies. Bob said that he did not have a place to hold this meeting and asked if my office might be available. I was flabbergasted. To this day, I marvel at how providential that phone call was. At the time, I was completely out of the loop. I was not an academic. I did not move in such circles. I don't think I knew whether Girard lived in this country or in France, or even whether he was dead or alive. All I knew was that if someone had asked me for the name of the individual I would most like to meet and from whom I would like to learn, I would have instantly said René Girard. Literally out of the blue, he was coming to my office to spend the day in conversation with biblical scholars about his work.

There were two moments during the day of our meeting that I have often shared in order to give those who are new to Girard's work some sense of René Girard himself. The first incident came early in the day of the meeting with the biblical scholars. René began the day with an informal presentation that lasted, as I recall, about an hour. Though most of those in the room had some familiarity with his work, most were hearing René himself for the first time. His presentation was a typically marvelous combination of personal humility, intellectual audacity, and a healthy disregard for the ideological pieties afflicting the academy. After his remarks, the dialogue began, and the first question—as accurately as I can recall it—went something like the following: "Professor Girard, what you've been saying is quite extraordinary. It almost appears, however, that you are suggesting that the revelatory power of biblical literature is categorically superior to that of all other literature. You are, after all, a Stanford professor; you're not saying that are you?" René's one-word response was all the more striking for the momentary pause that preceded it: "Categorically," he replied. The impression one had was that Girard was the only person in this room full of biblical scholars willing to say such a thing.

I learned two things at that moment which I was to learn again and again over the years in personal conversations with René. First, there is a huge difference between attention to nuance and equivocation, and the explication of nuances begins in earnest only when the principle to be nuanced has been unequivocally affirmed. Second, truth is transmitted through personal witness rather than rational discourse. There was never any doubt that Girard's "categorically" was intellectually well founded and that he was perfectly capable, if challenged, to give a rational account of it. But it was not the implicit presence of a rational defense that made his statement both startling and convincing. It was his personal conviction, made all the more impressive because of his indifference to how his expression of it might be construed by others.

The dialogue that followed gave Girard an opportunity to show the interpretive power of his anthropological theory. And then at the end of the day, another memorable moment came, when someone asked a practical question. Clearly, the panorama Girard had spread out before those assembled was astonishing, and against this backdrop, René's sobering assessment of the contemporary historical and cultural predicament stood out in bold relief. "Given all that you have said," someone asked Girard, "what is to be done?"

In response, René was gracious and patient and humble. His answer, as I recall, was something like this: "Well, it is of course an enormous problem, and it does not lend itself to being easily 'fixed.' We are each called to different tasks, so perhaps we should begin by striving for personal sanctity." I could hardly believe my ears. Biblical scholars, whose discipline had been for decades currying favor with the secular academy by renouncing a priori any distinctively religious preconceptions, were being advised on the practical value of personal sanctity.

There are a lot of things that can and should be said of Girard and his work, but this little anecdote tells the real reason for my attraction to René Girard and his extraordinary work.

I might add that if personal sanctity and acting as a personal witness to the truth is a challenge you can't tackle in a day, if you don't see how to make yourself into a figure of personal or historical importance to others, then you can always put your energies into promoting those who have experiences that can reveal truth to others.

Obama's crowd kind of want him to die...

When I talk about the victimary culture positively needing and wanting victims to make sense of the world, what follows is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Thankfully even some on the left are revolted by this: Brendan O'Neill, Please kill this ‘Obama assassination porn’ | spiked

From the moment he entered the primary race to become the Democratic candidate for president, Obama, his team, his security detail and his backers in the media and literary worlds have been positively obsessed by the possibility that he will be bumped off. Caniadian newspaper columnist and unapologetic neocon, Mark Steyn, refers to it as ‘Obama assassination porn’, part of a self-flattering, ersatz ‘determination to appropriate Camelot and [its] mythic narrative’ (4).

The palpable fear of assassination is certainly revealing. In the past, it was aristocrats – isolated princes, kings and dukes – who were consumed by assassinophobia, whereas democrats, from Abraham Lincoln to Bobby Kennedy, tended to make a public display of their lack of fear of the lone gunman (5). The Obama crew’s fear, even fantasy, that America harbours a killer who wants to take down their candidate reveals much about Obama’s aloofness, and about political crisis in the Democratic camp.
[...]
assassinophobia has been a continual undercurrent in the discussion about Obama, frequently revealing a broad-ranging fear of Americans rather than a specific fear for Obama’s life.

Supporters of Obama often talk about the wonderful things he will do ‘if he survives…’ The UK Sun hopes Obama ‘lives long enough to bring in the reforms that could rehabilitate America’ (6). Doris Lessing, the British Nobel Laureate, caused a stink in February when she declared that Obama would not survive in the White House: ‘He would probably not last long. They would kill him.’ (7) She didn’t specify who ‘they’ were, but she didn’t need to: ‘they’, in the words of one newspaper, are those ‘pockets of the US, and they are deep and large, that simply will not vote for a black man and where racism is ingrained’ (8). Earlier this year, the Daily Telegraph reported that some Democrats are ‘reluctant to vote for Mr Obama because a Southern racist might shoot him’ (9). Darkly ironically, their desire to save Obama from a bloody fate by not electing him is given sanction by the Obama camp itself. From day one, his circle has organised around the possibility of assassination. He was given Security Service protection in May 2007, ‘far earlier than previous presidential candidates’, and since then his security detail has been ‘stepped up amid fears he could be an assassination target’ (10).

Some Obama supporters have been rattled by the suspicion and heavy-handedness of his security detail. It is reported that ‘tensions have flared’ at some of the crowded pro-Obama rallies, where chanting and passionate crowds have ‘caused major headaches for his Secret Service bodyguards’ (11). At the Iowa caucus in January, Obama’s bodyguards drew their weapons when a man ran towards Obama shouting ‘Obama, Obama!’ The man only wanted to shake Obama’s hand. Later, an Obama aide said to the man: ‘Hey, you can’t do that man. Be careful.’ (12) It seems that while the Obama camp publicly heralded these mass displays of support as a ‘new kind of politics’, privately it viewed them as ‘security nightmares’ where every passionate supporter was a potential killer (13).

Some Obama-backers have seemed almost to fantasise that he will be killed. Writing in the Ottawa Sun, Earl McRae said: ‘Barack Obama is waving his arms. The crowd is cheering… I see Barack Obama, one minute smiling, the people crying his name. I see Barack Obama grab his chest and his eyes widen and his mouth opens, and the crowd screams as Barack Obama, black candidate for the presidency of the United States of America, falls to the ground, dead, an assassin’s bullet inside him.’ (14)

This is what Mark Steyn labels ‘Obama assassination porn’. Steyn points out that where it was the opponents of George W Bush who fantasised about his possible assassination – remember the Channel 4 made-for-TV-movie Death of a President? – it is Obama’s supporters who talk endlessly about his possibly being killed. ‘Obama assassination porn is written by his worshippers and testifies to one of the most palpable features of the senator’s campaign’, said Steyn: its desire to ‘appropriate Camelot’ (the figurative name for JFK’s administraton from 1961 to 1963) (15).

Steyn has a point: fears of an assassination attempt have left the realm of practical policing and become part of a political drama, part of a story about Obama being the heir to the slain Kennedys and Dr King who is risking everything to save America. In lieu of a clear-cut political programme or radically new vision, the ‘assassination story’ has unofficially, but stealthily, been co-opted as evidence of Obama’s dual vulnerability and bravery, and of the sacrifices he is willing to make to ‘rescue American values’ (16).

Yet the widespread assassinophobia also reveals Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s increasing dislocation from the masses. It captures the continual decline of the Democrats from a mass political party with sometimes passionate grassroots support into a kind of court outfit bereft of democratic vision and essentially fearful of the populace.
[...]
The return of assassinophobia in the American presidential campaign shines a light on the current state of the Democratic Party. It reveals their disdain for large sections of the American populace and the new class snobbery that infects liberal sections of the US; as one pro-Obama assassination fantasist says, some Americans just cannot accept that Obama is ‘a better American than they are’ and so they turn ‘zealously’ to trying to ‘protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Mom’s apple pie and the cross of Jesus in every home’ (23). It also reveals the inexorable transformation of the Democrats into a kind of feudal outfit, essentially cut off from the people and suspicious of their beliefs and motivations. The end result of this ‘assassination porn’ could well be that an assassination attempt becomes more likely. The Duke of Wellington lived in fear of assassination while posted in Paris in the 1810s, but he refused to change his behaviour because ‘I say the danger increases with the appearance of apprehension of it’ (24). In continually advertising their apprehension of death, and even volunteering the kind of ‘rednecks with rifles’ who might make it a reality, the Obama camp may unwittingly be issuing an invitation to some racist nutjob to make their fanatasies come true. Their fears might be one kind of ‘porn’ that really does give rise to violence in the real world.

O'Neill sees "assassinophobia" as the mark of feudal aristocracy. However, one might see in it something yet more primitive. In the Golden Bough, James G. Frazer recounted many stories of primitive, early agrarian-age, kingdoms in which the king enjoys only temporary reign before he must become the victim of a human sacrifice, and thus made, or confirmed, divine.

A general anthropological rule is that humans model themselves on their understanding of the gods, and not vice versa (Frazer was confused on this point). Men first invoke a God before they learn to discuss themselves. At the origin of culture, men signified the presence of a common God, via the things S/he had (apparently) made sacred, untouchable. The first men then went on to begin a process to understand their own humanity by reference to the sacred they had figured/been given, and, over millennia, by the transformation of the sacred understanding into the secular understanding of human nature.

Thus, a primitive king must model himself on the gods. And to the extent his culture is not sufficiently secularized as to allow for a king who is seen as merely or largely human, the pressure to become godly, to justify to the rest of the human crowd this one lucky "man"'s centrality (his access to wealth, women, ritual power), will positively require a day when the king is sacrificed to the sacred image of his divinity. In the primitive world, according to Rene Girard, gods are nothing but the mythologically-disguised memory, or re-presentation, of sacrificial victims. What Girard does not make clear is that before you can have a sacrifice, men first have to have come up peacefully with the idea of a god to whom to sacrifice. The peace that comes with agreeing to share a god comes before the secular decline into resentment, the decline that seems, to primitive thinkers, to require a human sacrifice to stop. Human sacrifice is merely the primitive attempt to re-new a remembered, or original, peace, that lost "Camelot", that Garden of Eden.

If that's what we're seeing with Obama, it is another sign of the reversion of American political culture to something unworthy of a self-ruling Republic.

Falling on your own sword

I remember with interest a book I once read detailing a common theme in myths from around the world. These would be myths characteristic of an agrarian society with a dawning consciousness of how its myths work. These myths tell us about a society that, in times of trouble, hears the words of a wise man, or, alternatively, someone who is not usually heard from, telling the people to look for a special sign of something or someone - say, someone whose pants have a horizontal, not vertical, seam - someone who, it is implied, is somehow connected to the cause of the crisis. The person who speaks intuitively grasps that the community needs a victim, someone to point to and cast out, not that they know exactly what it is to scapegoat; what the person does not realize, until too late, is that in speaking out he or she becomes marked as a potential victim him or herself.

Such a myth is mark of a world still somewhat primitive, not yet fully in the light of the Judeo-Christian unveiling of myth's role of transfiguring sacrificial violence by making victims into myth's tragic heroes or gods, a world not yet troubled by myth's inability to explain itself, its own history and relationship to human violence and to the rituals that represent and obscure originary violent events.

I'm really not sure if I am being facetious in suggesting that such a mythic consciousness would be roughly the equivalent in religious consciousness of today's Archbishop of Canterbury:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has called for new laws to protect religious sensibilities that would punish “thoughtless and cruel” styles of speaking.

Dr Williams, who has seen his own Anglican Communion riven by fierce invective over homosexuality, said the current blasphemy law was “unworkable” and he had no objection to its repeal.

But whatever replaces it should “send a signal” about what was acceptable.

This should be done by “stigmatising and punishing extreme behaviours” that have the effect of silencing argument.

The Archbishop, delivering the James Callaghan Memorial Lecture in London this afternoon, said it should not just be a few forms of extreme behaviour that were deemed unacceptable, leaving everything else as fair game.

“The legal provision should keep before our eyes the general risks of debasing public controversy by thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting,” he said.
[...]
In 2006, Parliament passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which creates an offence of inciting or “stirring up” hatred against a person on the grounds of their religion. But the act was so watered down during its passage through Parliament that its critics fear it will be almost useless.

Dr Williams said: “It is clear that the old blasphemy law is unworkable and that its assumptions are not those of contemporary lawmakers and citizens overall. But as we think about the adequacy of what is coming to replace it, we should not, I believe, miss the opportunity of asking the larger questions about what is just and good for individuals and groups in our society who hold religious beliefs.”

Dr Williams was criticised by the National Secular Society who accused him of promoting “self-serving and dangerous" ideas.

Terry Sanderson, president, said that the Archbishop’s speech was a “blatant pitch for new legislation to replace the blasphemy laws that the Government are planning to scrap.”

Thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting? Self-serving indeed. I mean what could be more thoughtlessly sacrificial than pointing the finger at someone and labelling them with highly emotional and subjective labels like "thoughtless" and "unintentionally cruel", and then casting them out of society as the bad guy? Sure the lawyers would develop all kinds of standards and protocols for such charges; still, at the end of the day, what kind of law can judge "unintentional thoughts" without making the traditional English ideal of a univerally-applied law into a plaything of arbitrary judicial interpretation? How could a society with such a law not corrupt its judiciary and their aspirations to disinterestedness, given that a judge would have to rely on political correctness to know when someone was being criminally thoughtless and unintentionally cruel?

A society that became so irrational as to cast out all that Christianity has taught us about the irrationality of scapegoating and depending on victimization for creating social order - a society whose present erosion is in part tied to its religious and political refusal to name and contest the primitive religious sensiblity that is growing in its midst (as anything other than "anti-Islamic" and "cruel") - is a society that could easily turn on the Archbishop and say that he is the one being thoughtless and unintentionally cruel, and cast him out.

Where do they find these people, these half-witted readers of Rene Girard (I have read that Dr. Rowan Williams is among their number) who never seem to appreciate what Girard is really telling us about our cruel addiction to casting out the bad guy, "Mr. cruelty"? The British Isles that gave us the greatest lessons in the rule of law and free speech, are now home to many high officials and sacrificers who need to go back to school and relearn those lessons.

As usual, the work of Eric Gans is to the point:

The claim that what Robert Sheaffer--an interesting "amateur" theoretician of resentment to whom I shall return in a future column--calls "envy control" is the founding principle of human society strikes me as more valid by every reasonable intellectual criterion than, for example, Richard Rorty's popular idea, borrowed from Judith Shklar, that the good society is one that avoids cruelty. The idea of avoiding cruelty is so sanctimoniously self-serving, in a word, so sacrificial--Cruelty as the black-hatted Bad Guy--that it makes me nostalgic for the Aztecs who supplied themselves with protein by slaughtering their neighbors; no mealy-mouthed hypocrites there! But this Nietzschean reaction, however natural, only plays into the hands of the "institutional middle class," with its "empathic" notions of compassion and cruelty-avoidance. As proof, Nietzsche himself has become a hero of this class, which is to say, of the Left, which he execrated. His revaluation of all values is now, with fitting irony, put to just the opposite use to that for which it was intended: the conscration of the victimary. This should be a warning to all thinkers who dare speak of resentment.

Human Sacrifice

Those interested in our specifically human origins, i.e. in the origin of human culture, as distinct from animal biology, should be interested in the work of Rene Girard and his student, Eric Gans.

One of the major points of contention between the two is Girard's claim that human culture begins with the emergence of human sacrifice or scapegoating as a way of solving "mimetic crisis" in proto-human animals who are too good at mimicing each other's desires that the biological pecking order breaks down. With the loss of social differences among these highly mimetic creatures, difference is re-established by arbitrarily choosing a scapegoat-victim. Once he is sacrificed to appease the built up tension, the scapegoat can carry the weight of everyone's blame for the crisis. The community, temporarily luxuriating in peace, imaginatively begins to turn the scapegoat victim into a divine figure whose sacrifice was responsible for saving the community from itself. For Girard, the transformation of victims into gods is the origin of myth and culture.

In contrast, Gans argues that while animal sacrifice (a new way of dividing up the fruits of the hunt that distinguishes human society from the animal pecking order) is indeed original to the human, the substitution of human for animal victims would not have emerged until the emergence of agricultural surpluses and the development of hierarchical, stratified societies ruled by a "big man" who controlled the distribution of the surplus by controlling the religious rituals where this surplus was distributed. The growing resentment occasioned by one man's domination of the ritual centre of society would have required new, more awesome, religious forms to mediate the tension. Human sacrifice, as a specifically religious act, would not have been a feature of the more primitive, equalitarian, tribes who worshiped the gods in animal form and who could not have afforded to lose members on a regular basis to sacrificial rituals.

Interestingly, a new study seems to split some of the difference between Girard and Gans: Ancient Graves Suggest Human Sacrifice

June 18, 2007 — Physically disabled people may have been ritually sacrificed by European hunter-gatherer tribes as early as 24,000 years ago, according to an investigation into burials from the Upper Paleolithic period.

Well known in large, stratified ancient societies, ritual human sacrifice has never been apparent in the archaeological data of Upper Paleolithic Europe (about 26,000 to 8,000 B.C.).

But, according to lead study author Vincenzo Formicola of the University of Pisa in Italy, several of these burials suggest that human sacrifices may have been an important ritual activity in this period.

"Our findings show that the Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers developed a complex system of beliefs, symbols and rituals that are unknown in small groups of modern foragers," Formicola told Discovery News.
[...]

And, on a somewhat different note, for a recent and reasonably accessible paper by Richard van Oort, a student of Eric Gans, that touches on the differences between Girard and Gans in their understanding of our mimetic nature, while focussing on the ingenious empirical science of Michael Tomasello who compares chimpanzee and infant human development to demonstrate how human cultural evolution is really something quite different from anything in the biological world, see here.

Faith and Anthropology

Gil Bailie has put up a quote from Romano Guardini that I, not a great believer in salvation through works, like much:

All around us we see activity, organization, operations of every possible type; but what directs them? An inwardness no longer really at home with itself which thinks, judges, acts from the surface, guided by mere intellect, utility, and the impulses of power, property and pleasure. An "interiority" too superficial to contact the truth lying at life's center, which no longer reaches the essential and everlasting, but remains somewhere just under the skin-level of the provisional and the fortuitous.

Before all else, then, man's depths must be reawakened. ... In a word, man must learn again to meditate and pray. ...

Therefore we must return to the essence of being and ask: What is the connection between a man's work and his life? ... What is obedience, and how is it related to freedom? What do health, sickness, death really signify? ... When may attraction claim the high name of love? What does the union of man and woman known as marriage mean (at present [1951!] something so seedy, so choked with weed, that few people seem to have any serious conception of it, although it is the bearer of all human existence)?

Now this is an argument for meditation on the purpose of our Being in history that comes to us from a Christian context, but it is not an argument whose truth is only negotiable by believing Christians; i.e. its truth, or lack, can be appreciated, limited, weighed, by anybody from within a secular anthropological and historical discussion of human nature. As I was telling Dag last night after our Covenant Zone meeting, I think our Western postmodernity will soon either collapse into ruins (because of its difficulties in motivating its members to reproduce themselves and their productive roles), or, more likely, it will turn away from its current nihilism, its materialism without much sense of purpose of what things and productive activity are for, towards a new kind of faith that combines a new kind of anthropology with more traditional religious positions, positions that will become somewhat re-positioned thanks to the new kind of anthropological and historical discussion that is emerging in the wake of (post) modernity's destruction of traditional cultures.

An example of this, again from a frankly Christian context, is provided by Mark Gordon's discussion of the Christian anthropology of Bailie and Rene Girard. Christianity, Gordon notes (and I would say this is true of Judeo-Christianity), is not simply one faith tradition among others, but a radically innovative attempt to interpret human nature and origins. And, as such, it is a claim on fundamental truth (truth about our specifically human origins and the purpose of human culture) that can and should be compared to others. This work of "anthropologizing" faith, and in turn of learning to put greater faith in our anthropology's original and ongoing purpose - a purpose that is both articulated (with more or less self-understanding) and evidenced by the history of societies' ways and means of representing their ethics - continues today. We find it not only in the high-minded discourse of the likes of Gil Bailie, but also in the more popular trenches of religious and political debate, as was made evident to me when I saw, a few days ago, the republication of an article "What Would Muhammad Say to Jesus?", by Mohamed Elmasry, head provocateur of the Canadian Islamic Congress, in whose newsletter the article originally appeared.

As soon as we are forced, by historical circumstances, to start comparing and contrasting two faith traditions put in close proximity, we either become close-minded dogmatists, or open-minded anthropologists, or some combination thereof. In his dogmatism, not only does Elmasry reveal a great ignorance of Christian theology and teaching, and of the anthropological truth behind trinitarian belief (the trinity is, among other things, a theory of human representation, a [Christian] means of symbolizing three basic ways people experience language or representation) but, I think, Elmasry also reveals a desire to engage Christianity in a larger debate about human nature that he thinks is the key to winning converts to Islam. In other words, I see him as a simple dogmatist with a small foot in the door of a larger anthropological wisdom.

To win this discussion, he will either have to hope there are a lot of lame brains out there who have already made up their minds that Christianity is a failed religion, and will show no interest in what it really teaches, or he will have to do a lot better in explaining how Islam can make a claim on fundamental truth regarding the co-emergence of (a name for) God and humanity at the origins of human culture, an explanation that can surpass that of Christian anthropologists like Gil Bailie and Rene Girard, or even that of a guy who comes up with a quick but pretty devastating inversion of Elmasry's article.