In the essay collection For Rene Girard, Richard J. Golsan talks quite a bit about the holocaust and our inability to unify the world by thoroughly pinning the blame on someone. In the aftermath of the Balkan war in the 1990’s, this is even more the case. This follows Girard’s assertion that we are increasingly unable to bring peace to our own society through ritual sacrifice. Christianity has undermined the scapegoat mechanism. What we have in the modern-day war crimes tribunal is meant to be a proper and civilized ritual sacrifice. But it just doesn’t have the unifying power that a community lynching used to.
Accompanying this fixation on social decline and cultural decay is the belief that particular groups are responsible for this state of affairs, and that these groups continue to actively and insidiously pursue an agenda of destruction and annihilation.
What the purge trials attempted to accomplish (as do, to a certain extend, all political trials) was to isolate a limited number of culprits on whom the shipwreck of French culture, the collapse of the nation in 1940, and collaboration with the Nazis could be blamed. The reality was, of course, that it was not just a “few individuals” that were responsible.
None of this is to suggest that in the 1990s trials for crimes against humanity the accused were “innocent” or undeserving of their convictions. Quite the reverse. But to the extent that the trials became sacrificial rituals were the broader historical and social intent of expelling a criminal past and thereby unifying the nation, they not only partook of the primitive and cohesive ritual sacrifices that Girard describes.
According to Thomas Kuhn, normal science is research based upon past scientific achievements of a certain type, those that constitute what he calls “paradigms.”
That is to say, achievements that are “sufficiently unprecedented to attract and enduring group of adherents away from competing models of scientific activity.
Simultaneously…sufficiently open ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.”
-Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Paraphrased here by Jean-Pierre Dupuy)
Because we are among friends here, I can hazard a metaphor: Life is the Desire of God, and this Desire is mimetic because God created man (and woman) “in his image.” The Desire of God – Life – animates and runs through every living thing without distinction, and that is why the supreme heresy and sin consists in invoking God’s aid to destroy another’s life. In this universal and creative Desire of God, which lives everywhere and in everything, the original sin, the one that is at the origin of all the others, is an avatar, a side effect of mimeticism: the invention of false differences that generate conflicts and rivalries. the first and the most toxic of these fallacious differences being the one “ingested” by our first ancestors, the difference between Good and Evil, which since time immemorial has hurled men to their doom and which in our world rages with particular violence.
Desire, being mimetic, my desire and the other’s desire are strictly identical. What is diabolical and worldly is the assertion that “my” desire is Good, that it is inspired and blessed by God, and that the “other” desire is Evil, inspired by the Demon. Obviously what the “other” thinks is a mirror image of this assertion.
-Jean-Michel Oughourlian, My Life with Rene (From the For Rene Girard collection)
This an extension of the “there is no wrath in God” theory. I like it but still, at this point, cannot reconcile it very well with quite a few other things. This needs some serious work. Frankly, I think some of these Girard inspired theologians like James Allison have GOT to do a better job with this or most Christian thinkers and leaders will continue to not take them seriously. For starters you need to reconcile this with the various commands for capital punishment in the Old Testament. Now, I think there are some decent explanations for this, but you guys have got to articulate them. Same thing with the angel of death (in several places in the OT) and also the lake of fire. That God only ever desires life but frequently works outside of human beings to instrument death is not going to fly.
I really want Oughourlian’s idea here to work, but it doesn’t yet.
I’m glad some other folks are bringing this up as well:
Certain difficult and somewhat unsettled questions about the theory have, at times, been tricky to work through. For example, the question of atonement and the sacrifice of the Cross has been difficult to reconcile with traditional theology; certain questions of evolution have been challenging, as have the assumptions of mythical elements i the biblical text; and finally, the mysterious interaction between grace and free will in reorienting “fallen” mimesis has often been difficult to understand. Over time, I have come to see that the faith is the most important thing, and the speculative dimensions of the theory are, well, speculative.
-Tyler Graham, Rene Girard’s Hermeneutic (From the For Rene Girard collection)
In a genuine, healthy relationship between master and apprentice, there is a third element, the object of the imitation (the painting, in Don Quixote’s own example), with a reality of its own, independent from both master and apprentice. The latter imitates the former only in reference to that particular object, the reality of which sets limits to the imitation itself.
-Cesareo Bandera, My Encounter with Rene Girard (From the For Rene Girard collection)
I have always heard a ton in Christian circles about “discipleship” and mentoring.
That’s all good except you HAVE to be on the lookout for the big pitfall of discipleship: imitating the master himself and not the craft to be mastered. This is how teacher/student relationships can get flipped around and turn into rivalries. The closer (and more effective!) they are, the more this is a risk. This is why in many, perhaps even most church splits, the devisive faction is led by an assistant pastor who was originally mentored by the senior pastor. If they were to both keep their eye on the ball (the external objective) then they could work together in peace and mutual benefit. But if the apprentice imitates the master himself, he will always, if he follows the road long enough, end up in opposition to the master.
The psychology behind all this can be discussed at length, but it doesn’t need to be to grasp the principal. This dynamic is really easy to prove. It also naturally hides itself from the actual people involved.
Jesus is the only one we can safely imitate in the long run without creating this trouble. A mentor (in any subject!) is best when both the student and teacher always keep the higher cause in mind.
To worship another god than the true one is to worship another’s god, which is the same as worshipping the other, sharing and participating in the delusional transcendence that the others confide in or appear to embody.
-Andrew J. McKenna, Great Books (From the For Rene Girard collection)
That many scholars are harder to convince, I attribute to a professionally induced prejudice against commonsensical observation in favor of more sophisticated, abstract modes of representation, and this in spite of the demonstrable fact that the modern university owes less to the doctors of the Sorbonne than to the devastating mockery of their learned vernaculars by the likes of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Swift.
-Andrew J. McKenna, Great Books (From the For Rene Girard collection)
Ph.D. types without common sense? Say it isn’t so! This is something that Girard mentions often when discussing the resistance by academics in accepting his ideas. Often one of the biggest problems is that they seem too simple. If your day job is to work with really big words and long sentences you may develop an allergic reaction to simple words and ideas, however true or superior they may be.
Another writer in the For Rene Girard collection also brings this up.
In general, the major pedagogical challenge in teaching Girard is to dramatize the discover and fuel interest in further research. However, often mimetic interpretations are so “obvious” that their nature – or importance – is hard to see. Or, if the insights are not obvious, it is difficult to show why they are believable.
-Tyler Graham, Rene Girard’s Hermeneutic (From the For Rene Girard collection)
How can we escape from mimeticism, from rivalry, from the blind mechanisms of the scapegoat victim? Those who pretend that they fight for God kill and are killed for only a phantom of Caesar. I the time of the religious wars, Montaigne noted that one didn’t find a single combatant in a thousand who would sear to kill for his faith. Violence returns among us and among the divine as well. We live, even today, the return of these ghosts.
-Michael Serres, Receiving Rene Girard (From the For Rene Girard collection)
I didn’t know that folks as early as Montaigne pointed out that there was very little that was religious about the religious wars (the crusades). That this still gets used as a stick to beat up historical Christianity is ridiculous. It’s only sufficient as a stick to beat up mankind.
The Muslims are always fighting amongst themselves as well. The front is theological differences of course (Shiite, Sunni, etc.) but I think anyone on the ground will tell you it’s over the same old clan and territorial disputes, some of them very very old. Same things goes for the ethic cleansing violence in Africa. You think those machete wielding guys who attack the next village are that concerned about religious details?
The recently published collection For Rene Girard is a group of about 20 essays from friends and colleges writing about Girard’s influence on them and occasionally getting in to some of their own work. Girard is getting pretty old so I guess they figured they should get it published while he could still appreciate them himself. It was interesting to see the swath of people who have found Girard to be valuable. Most of them are Christians and a surprising number detail how Girard’s theory was actually pretty instrumental to their conversion to Christianity as well. James G. Williams, one of my favorite Girardian scholars, brings this up right off the bat.
Of course, the question always arises: “What difference does it make?” That is, is it a theory or model that makes a difference to human relationships that can actually be applied in situations of conflict to reduce or eliminate mimetic rivalry, scapegoating, or violence, whether on a small or a large scale? Or is its usefulness limited to its explanatory power? Is it able to show us what we are doing while lacking the guiding power to enable us to be better as human beings? The problem, I believe is one of religion and conversion. The mimetic scapegoat theory helps us spiritually and morally only if it impels us into a process of conversion.
This is one of the most difficult aspects of Girard’s work, and I think we have to engage it openly and honestly. It owes much to its biblical and Augustinian heritage. It does not make sense and it does not work unless we see that a scapegoat mechanism is at the root of our attitudes, behavior, and language. This has been one of the most important insights for me. It has confirmed my Christian formation and has enabled me to understand it in a way that is powerful and compelling.
-James G. Williams, In the Light of Rene Girard (From the For Rene Girard collection)
In my effort to devour everything the library has related to Girard, I switched gears to psychology and picked up The Genesis of Desire by Frenchman Jean-Michel Oughourlian.
As I mentioned earlier, the book is equal parts awesome and ridiculous.
He begins by giving desire a broad definition: desire is psychological movement. Every movement requires energy, a driving force. The stuff going on inside our head (at least a lot of it anyway) is driven by desire.
At the heart of the book is a long and rather fascinating reading of the Genesis creation narrative.
I was going to say I don’t have time summarize it all here but the truth is I don’t want to put forth the effort! I’m tired and relaxing with a beer after the kids are in bed.
On the downside, his reading is too friendly to evolution to my liking (but that’s not really important) and his treatment of Satan is probably one of the weaker parts. Does Satan stir up mimetic rivalry in man? Absolutely. Does he start off by driving the man and woman apart? Definitely. Is there a model here for marriage and relationship problems? Yes and yes and to the degree that he follows these paths, he makes a lot of sense. I still reject the idea that Satan IS, ontologically, mimetic rivalry. Just as I reject the Satan that is from Milton and not the Bible, I also reject the Satan that is an imaginary devil that suddenly ceases to exist at all after a bit of philosophical hand-waving.
I like his conclusion about the topic that titles the book. You think desire is evil and comes from Satan? Nope. He is not the “unmoved mover” of our thoughts, good and evil. No, it’s God. God desires and we are made in his image. He gives us the breath of life. He gave our minds that first PUSH that makes us different from all the other creatures. I can make this sync with Sayer’s The Mind of the Maker and also Tolkien’s theology of sub-creation. Awesome.
He spends another chapter (there are only 5 chapters, all of them rather long) discussing the discovery of what some neuroscientists are calling “mirror neurons”. These apparently can be observed firing when we desire and even when we perceive another person desiring (the important part). This part might make a good hour on the Discovery channel if it had some good visuals, but just talking about it and summarizing the data is not particularly convincing. I don’t care about this part much though I’m assuming this stuff is mostly true.
His section on how marriage relationships both gather their romantic momentum AND derive their conflict from mimetic rivalry between the couple is really quite good. It describes in different language what Larry Crabb describes in his “I Love You –> I Need You –> I Hate You” explanation of close relationship problems. Some time I really want to synthesize these two explanations. I think they can both benefit from each other. It gives Crabb’s work a more solid footing to stand on. Oughourlian could use a bit less abstraction.
Along these lines he throws out a funny quote by Groucho Marx:
“Never trust couples who hold hands: if they won’t let go of each other, it’s because they’re afraid they might kill each other.”
Going back to the Genesis narrative for a second, I was struck by this passage on the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I am often delighted when I find an old traditional theology that I’ve held on to from childhood replaced by something that makes WAY more sense. What is amazing is that you will often find it backed up by the church father’s too. Check this out:
What IS the “knowledge of good and evil”? It is not a form of objective knowledge or knowledge of how to do something: Adam knows his way around his world perfectly; the garden is his domain, and it is he who, in verses 19 and 20, gives names to all the animals that God parades before him. Nor is that knowledge a form of moral discernment or a capacity for judgment: Adam already has that, otherwise God’s counsel or warning would convey no meaning to him.
You got that? It’s not moral discernment. “Oh my gosh! This over here is good and that over there is evil. Holy crud! I never knew!” Adam already understands that. God gave him the command earlier to not eat the fruit. Eve knows this too and knows to resist the temptation even, at first. So what is the knowledge of good and evil?
According to the tradition of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, the “knowledge of good and evil” has to do with a claim to moral autonomy: to eat of the fruit of this tree is to appropriate the knowing of good and evil to oneself, to set oneself up as the judge of what is good and what is evil. It is therefore an attempt to overturn the divine order.
That is one interesting way to read it. Even more interesting from my point of view is that suggested in the commentary of Josy Eisenberg:
“This tree is the place where Good and Evil are confused together. To speak of fusion is to speak also of confusion…this is the new situation with which Adam is confronted: there exists a tree – a world – where Good and Evil are in a mixed state.”
And further on, Eisenberg adds:
The mixture of God and Evil in all things is itself, according to Jewish mysticism, the dominant characteristic of the human story.”
Developing this idea, I propose to show that if the forbidden tree gives rise to desire, it is mimetic desire that makes good and evil spring from ths prohibition and, with the, all the relative, subjective, and generative differences of rivalry.
-p.49
Later he goes on to explain how all relationships are mimetic. We imitate each other. The one exception being our relationship with God, who does not change. We imitate Christ, but Christ remains unstained by rivalry. In him alone can we find peace.
At the beginning and end of the book he uses some specific stories or case studies involving his own clients. I wish he had done this more. As Mary Dupree (one of my best professors) always said, “Be specific. Use examples!”.
I must say, I found his stories of torrid romances and affairs really rather out of control. My initial thought was that, marriage, if nothing else, puts a damper on the kind of crazy emotional trouble some of his subjects have put themselves through. Strengthening just the institution of marriage alone, even if it does not deal with the underlying problems of mimetic rivalry, will still go a LONG way toward softening the damage people do to their friends, family, and especially children. But we live in a world where our lovers may come and go relatively easily and rapidly. Are we the happier for it? Quite the contrary.
On a side note, another example of stuff in the book that I didn’t find helpful was his regular discussion of hypnosis. I guess I don’t know very much about it, but I find it impossible to take seriously.
All in all, good stuff lurking in here and it definitely props up some of the Girard-based ideas I’ve been working out lately.
1. My laptop broke and was in the shop getting the motherboard replaced. Apparently 2007 Mac Books have a defect in the video card.
2. The kids have been as crazy busy as ever. Crazier and busier as evererer.
3. I read the collection of essays, For Rene Girard. Lots of interesting stuff in there, but not much that makes for good blog posts. I will be posting a few notes from this soon though.
4. I read Jean-Michel Oughourlian’s The Genesis of Desire. It was about equal parts awesome and ridiculous. It definitely gives me some paths to explore for combining the work of Girard and Larry Crabb though.
5. I read Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative. (See how much reading I get done when I don’t have my computer!) I finally understand where Peter Leithart is coming from now with some of his analysis. Much of it is in the same vein as this. I was previously pretty unfamiliar with this form of Bible scholarship.
6. I’m beginning to realize that my note-taking method isn’t working anymore. All the thoughts and ideas I want to get down on paper are increasingly becoming to long to describe in a paragraph. Most of the supporting material I’ve been digging up on Girard requires too much context to communicate. I think I need to move to some sort of running commentary/outline method of notetaking instead of just marking and jotting down interesting quotes.
7. And finally, I purchased a video game for the first time in many years. Yes, what a terrible and irresponsible thing to do, right?
