Carpe Cakem!

At this point, I don’t think I want to put the effort in to process and comment extensively on Girard’s The Scapegoat. I actually had more trouble with it than his previous works and I think it is due to the rather stilted translation from the French this time around. Still, the book is an important contribution as he spends several chapters elaborating on certain aspects of mimetic theory that don’t get thorough attention in his other works.

I’ve posted a few of my favorite passages below, with a few notes. Most of these need more context to make sense.

—

Persecutors always believe in the excellence of their cause, but in reality they hate without a cause. The absence of cause in the accusation (ad causam) is never seen by the persecutors. It is this illusion that must first be addressed if we are to release all the unfortunate from their invisible prison, from the dark underground in which they are stagnating but which they regard as the most magnificent of palaces.

-Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, p.103

That really punches some holes in “just war theory” if you ask me.

—

On our astounding hesitancy to discuss or investigate the atrocities of Stalin, which were far worse than the Holocaust:

How can we be surprised that they have waited fifty years or more before making discreet inquiries into the greatest persecutions in human history. Mythology is the very best school in the training of silence. [That is, covering up what really happened.] We never hesitate between the Bible and mythology. We are classicists first, romantics second, and primitives when necessary, modernists with a fury, neoprimitives when we are disgusted with modernism, gnostics always, but biblical never.

The causality of magic is one with mythology, so the importantce of its denial cannot be exaggerated. The Gospels are certainly aware of this since the denial is repeated at every possible opportunity. they even put it in the mouth of Pilate, who says, after interrogating Jesus, “I find no case against this man.” (“Je ne vois pas de cause.”) Pilate has not yet been influenced by the crowd, and the judge in him, the incarnation of Roman law of legal rationality, acknowledges the facts in a brief but significant moment.

-p.105

For just a sec there, Pilate was not caught up in the contagion, the Satanic crowd of collective violence. He saw that Jesus was innocent. But then he was swept away. Today, we need to listen to the holy spirit and not be swept away in violence and shunning.

—

The magician of mythologies and religions has a very good audience in our structuralists.

-p.73

Girard here is saying that structural analysis of literature is vulnerable to deception by the devil. Yes, he really says stuff like that. I think Lewis might agree!

—

There is…a history of mythology. Mythology eliminates collective murder but does not reinvent it, because all evidence indicates it was not invented in the first place. Collective violence persists but is declared evil akin to cannibalism… violence is attributes to an older mythological generation and to a religious system now seen to be “barbarous” and “primitive.”

-p.74

In this passage and others, Girard has some very interesting commentary on how we tend to amplify the sins of our fathers and ancestors, while downplaying our own, even though they are exactly the same sins.

—

The essential factor in the Gospel use of parable is Jesus’ willingness to be imprisoned within the representation of persecution from the persecutors’ standpoint, and to do so for the sake of his listeners who cannot understand any other viewpoint, since they are prisoners of it themselves. Jesus uses the resources of the system in such a way as to warn people of what awaits them in the only language they understand.

-p.186

—

More here on the usual way society fails to stayed glued together:

“Every kingdom divided against itself is heading for ruin, and every city or house, divided against itself”. The repetition of “every” emphasizes the impression of symmetry among all the forms of community mentioned here. The text enumerates all the human societies, from the greatest to the smallest, the kingdom, the city, the house. For reasons that at first elude us, care is taken not to omit any category, and the repetition of every underlines that intention even more, although its importance is not apparent, immediately. This is not fortuitous or an accident of style that has no relation to the meaning. There is a second meaning that cannot escape us.

The text is, in fact, insisting that all kingdoms, all cities, and all houses are divided against themselves. In other words all human communities without exception are based on the one principle, both constructive and destructing, that is found in the second sentence; these are all examples of the kingdom of Satan.

Why should the spiritual sons, the disciples and imitators, become judges of their masters and models? The [Greek] word for judges is kirtai; it evokes the idea of crisis and division. Under the effect of mimetic escalation, the internal division of every “satanic” community is exacerbated; the difference between legitimate and illegitimate violence diminishes, expulsions become reciprocal; sons repeat and reinforce the violence of their fathers with even more deplorable results for everybody; finally they understand the evil of the paternal example and curse their own fathers. They pass negative judgment, as implied by the word kritai, on everything that precedes them just as we do today.

-p.188

The Gospel though can return “the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” (Malachi 4:6)

—

The truth offered to mankind unleashes the forces of Satan, the destructive mimeticism, by taking away its power of self-regulation. The fundamental ambiguity of Satan makes divine action superficially ambiguous. Jesus brings war into the divided world of Satan because, fundamentally, he brings peace. People do not or pretend not to understand this.

-p.191

That make any sense? Of course not. The chapter as a whole does though, astoundingly so. I’ll say it again: Girard is impossible to work into an elevator pitch. Someone really needs to try to explain this again, and not in French.

—

A careful reading of the Gospels shows us that Jesus prefers the language of skandalon to that of the demonic while the opposite is true for the disciples and editors of the Gospels. We should therefore not be surprised to find a certain contrast between the fulgurating words attributed to Jesus, which are often not very coherent, and the narrative passages, particularly the accounts of the miracles, which are better organized from a literary perspective but lag somewhat behind the thought the emerges from the direct quotations.

-p.194

I’m sure it will upset some fundy folks who like to imagine the bible as a magic book written in an inspired trance and not penned by actual human beings, but I really like how Girard discusses the Gospel writers as “editors” of the accounts of Jesus. He likes to point out how their narrative differs in meaning sometime from Jesus’ actual quotations. He makes a pretty good case that the apostles didn’t fully understand what Jesus was talking about sometimes. The bible tells us this explicitly – that the disciples were often clueless when Jesus was still with them, but we sometimes assume that by the time they wrote it all down a few years later, they had it 100% figured out. But no – they were still realizing the full implications of the Kingdom of God. They continued to mature – as do we today. Jesus’ words still hold new treasure.

Christian art in Ethiopia has a curious feature not often seen anywhere else: the depiction of the Trinity as three identical old men. They are typically depicted like this with the heads of the four gospels in the corners.

Trinitarianism demands a God whose hands are dirty in history. Any
distant conception of God always presupposes a much more “mono”
entity.

The trinity is a tangled God who gets tangled up in flesh, blood, and
time but remains infinite.

How do you categorize that? He gets his own special category.

(Photo credit)

Some more rich material from Girard here:

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Westerners made an idol of science and believed in an autonomous scientific spirit of which they were both the inventors and the product. They replaced the ancient myths with those of progress, which might be called the myth of perpetual modern superiority, the myth of a humanity that, through its own instrumentality, gradually became liberated and divine.

The scientific spirit cannot come first. It presupposes the renunciation of a former preference for the magical causality of persecution so well defined by the ethnologists. instead of natural, distant, and inaccessible causes, humanity has always preferred causes that are significant from a social perspective and permit a corrective intervention – victims. In order to lead men to the patient exploration of natural causes, men must first be turned away from their victims. This can only be done by showing them that from now on persecutors “hate without cause” and without any appreciable result. In order to achieve this miracle, not only among certain exceptional individuals as in Greece, but for entire populations, there is need of the extraordinary combination of intellectual, moral, and religious factors found in the gospel text.

The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer which-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit, like the spirit of enterprise in an economy, is a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text. The modern Western world has forgotten the revelation in favor of its by-products, making them weapons and instruments of power; and now the process has turned against it. Believing itself a liberator, it discovers its role as persecutor. Children curse their fathers and become their judges. Contemporary scholars discover traces of magic in all the classical forms of rationalism and science. Instead of breaking through the circle of violence and the sacred as they imagine they were doing, our predecessors re-created weakened variations of myths and rituals.

-Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, p.204

What is the prerequisite to nearly all the modern social stability and scientific advances that we enjoy today? Scientists say that the enlightenment and the rise of rationalism is what opened the door. Economists like to point out that we had to advance our agriculture to a level where we could have artists and and other specialists who didn’t need to scrape their food together all day. David Bently Hart has pointed out in numerous ways that Christianity was in fact a prereq for both of these things to even get close to happening. In the same vein, Girard argues convincingly that first we had to stop busying ourselves trying to fix our troubles by casting innocent victims out of the society. The thing that finally put a stop to that was the deep philosophical awareness generated by the Gospel.

This passage here about stress is very plain and straightforward, but I have to admit, at one point it hit me like a ton of bricks.

We can start by considering some everyday problems of living, in order to discover the needs and intentions which give rise to them. Consider the problem of stress. Stress is pressure caused by the convergence of strong, conflicting claims upon the self. If, for example, a a person feels under the pressure of having to perform at peak efficiency in his work at all times, and also desires to be an attentive partner to his spouse and present parent to his children, he will almost certainly experience stress. How can he balance the strong, conflicting claims upon his time? Add to them his desire to have time for his own interests, and he will have a very hard time reconciling the demands. This is a type of stress that is familiar to many of us.

It is all the worse in a period like the present, when the law of capability is in force. This is the law that judges us wanting if we are not capable, if we cannot handle it all, if we are not competent to balance our diverse commitments without a slip. Who among us does not live under the dread sign of the law of capability?

In a commencement address, the columnist Ellen Goodman once described the Model Woman of today, somewhat along the following lines. She gets up at six-thirty in the morning and jogs five miles. At seven-thirty she cooks a totally nourishing breakfast for her husband and two beautiful children. By eight-thirty the children have left for school, her husband to his office, and she is on the way to her incredibly demanding job: she is advertising director for a major firm. All day long she attends meetings and makes important decisions. When she finally arrives home, it is quite late because she had to attend a board meeting for a community-service organization of which she is chairman. But she does not get home too late to fix her children a totally nourishing supper. She helps both of them with their homework and has meaningful good-nights with each. Yet she still has time to plug in the Cuisinart to prepare a gourmet, candlelit supper for herself and her husband. As the day comes to an end, the Model Woman has a totally fulfilling yet deeply honest sexual relationship with her admirably sensitive husband.

Under the law of capability the Model Woman, like any of us, is bound to sicken. We are all simply human. Stress, which takes innumerable forms in our lives and of which the law of capability is one, results from strong, conflicting claims upon the self. Ultimately, stress involves a religious problem. The problem underlying our need to reconcile conflicting demands is this: What establishes my identity? What IS my identity?

Many of us act as if the answer to this question were performance. If I can do enough of the right things, I will have established my worth. Identity is the sum of my achievements. Hence, if I can satisfy the boss, meet the needs of my spouse and children, and still do justice to my inner aspirations, then I will have proven my worth. Their are infinite ways to prove our worth along these lines. The basic equation is this: I am what I do. It is a religious position in life because it tries to answer in practical terms the question, Who am I and what is my niche in the universe? On this reading, my niche is a proportion to my deeds. In Christian theology, such a position is called justification by works. It assumes that my worth is measured by my performance. Conversely, it conceals, thinly, a dark and ghastly fear: If I do not perform, I will be judged unworthy. To myself I will cease to exist.

-Paul Zahl, Who Will Deliver Us?, p.9

My entire life, I’ve had the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith (versus justification by works, or “dead works”) driven home to me repeatedly. It is the heart of the gospel of Christ. And yet, how could I have acquired such a limited conception of it? You see, I’ve always seen “justification by works” as simply stuff we do to try to earn God’s favor, or stuff we try and do to “work our way to heaven” instead of giving up and relying on the work of Jesus. Most other religions are accused to living and dying by this method, in some fashion.

Here is the catch though, and the way that Zahl speaks of it makes it unusually clear: We use our dead works not just to justify ourselves before God, but also before others and especially ourselves. The pressure we put on ourselves to perform, our painful hesitancy to forgive ourselves when we fail – this is again the weight of the law pushing down on us, crushing us.

As Christians, we know that justifying ourselves to God is impossible and unnecessary. How quickly we miss the wider reaching implications though!

One rather incongruous situation comes to mind: In college, I took a Catechism class where we spent several weeks on the topic of “turning from dead works to serve the living God” (Hebrews 9:14). All the teaching and theology was sound. We read tons of scripture. But during this time, we were under an incredible amount of pressure to perform well and participate in church activities. If we didn’t show up for Saturday morning work crews, we got a phone calling asking where we were and wanting a pretty legitimate excuse, (for example, lying bleeding in the hospital). Getting in a fight with your roommate would get back around quickly to your small group leader and you were likely to get a talkin’ to. Despite being dressed up in spirituality, being buddy with the pastor or his kids was an effective and sought-after passage to climbing the social ladder. I don’t think any of this was at all unique to this particular church either. In fact, in many respects it was well above average.

What I’m getting at is that in this context, “justification by faith”, the heart of the gospel, was communicated and instilled in such a way that it was a doctrine only meaningful for eternal salvation. You don’t have to make Jesus happy to receive his love, but you still very much need to make everyone else happy, especially yourself if you want to get any love from them. In fact, putting a lot of pressure on yourself, (just like in the competitive business world or in the arts) was considered to be a good and even Godly thing to do. Yes, you rest in the Lord, but that’s only about going to heaven when you die. Right now, on earth, you had best pull yourself up by your boot-straps, “do hard things”, and kick some ass. The Holy Spirit will help you keep all the plates spinning.

No. I reject this now. It’s just more dead works. The gospel sets men free from that too. That’s why it’s a total scandal.

I’m waiting here in the pediatric surgery wing of this sprawling high-rise hospital. The waiting room sports some unusual toys, like a Little Tikes toddler car with an IV pole bolted on the back. The sweet syrup on every spoon induces amnesia so they won’t remember being wheeled away from their parents by masked men. No routine check-ups here – all the incoming adults are apprehensive.

The stars and moons on the carpet repeat over and over in every direction. Thousands of stars, and hundreds of moons. It makes me wish there were stars with only one moon, hiding in a corner somewhere for a curious child to find as they wandered in their gown, covered with prints of Tigger and Eyore. Why did God give us only one moon? More would have made the night sky far more interesting. I think he must have kept it simple out of compassion for the mariners. The sea is treacherous enough as it is without overlapping and uneven tides.

Back in the waiting room, caretakers are lounging in fluffy chairs, but their minds are out among the ocean waves. Some play games on their phones. Others read a page in their novels, then read the same page over again. Cell phone calls come and go, touching base, calling the same number again, just because. The nurses try to strike a balance between encouraging and not too perky.

Soon she’ll wake back up. They tell me she will be herself an hour later and won’t remember a thing. Neither will I as her little life supplants and replaces mine, bit by bit. As Capon warned us, it’s them or us and inevitably, it’s going to be them.

Later, it is revealed that the surgery was not a success. Must we remain in the ship? I’ll take any harbor about now.

As for plenilune and argent, they are beautiful words before they are understood – I wish I could have the pleasure of meeting them for the first time again! — and how is one to know them till one does meet them? And surely the first meeting should be in a living context, and not in a dictionary, like dried flowers in a hortus siccus!

Children are not a class or kind, they are a heterogeneous collection of immature persons, varying, as persons do, in their reach, and in their ability to extend it when stimulated. As soon as you limit your vocabulary to what you suppose to be within their reach, you in fact simply cut off the gifted ones from the chance of extending it.

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #234, 22 November 1961 (via the Oxford Inklings blog)

I like his notion that meeting words “in the wild” is the best way. Oddly enough, I think it is close-minded adults who need to be addressed with a trimmed down vocabulary. Use a big word on them and they might dismiss you as a snob. Use too many in a row and their eyes will glaze over. It is assumed that children will do this for certain and perhaps sometimes they do, but the eager ones will keep listening and derive it’s meaning from context as soon as possible.

I’ve been to student art exhibits that were truly cringe-worthy. I’ve been to student composition recitals that could curl your hair. More than a few have noticed this over the years. How come so much terrible art, especially in our institutions of higher learning? Is it because the bar is so low for undergrads?

No, it is because the bar has been philosophized out of pedagogical existence. It still remains in a few class. An artist in “Drawing II” may be given an assignment to properly darken the angular shadows in a particular scene. He may complete it skillfully or in a shoddy fashion. A young musician in a style course may be allowed to come up with a melody on her own, but must write it “in the style of a piano solo by Debussy”. That’s a very good (and somewhat challenging) assignment. At the end of the day, it can be given an A, B, C, etc.

Aw, but the final show – the capstone, the student’s personal collection to show the last semester before graduation – who dare criticize it? Of course, it COULD be criticized, but will it be? We have taught our children that nothing is sacred because God is dead. We’ve taught them they deserve to be astronauts. We have taught our children that nothing is objectively beautiful – it all depends on how you look at it. We’ve thrown not just St. Thomas Aquinas in the garbage can, but even Aristotle right along with him. The old Greeks at least could say something like “That guy’s face isn’t symmetrical. It looks silly.”

Seriously though, what can a major professor say to a student who wants to present a ridiculous and slipshod sculpture? It’s not good enough? It’s ugly? No, he is not allowed to say anything like that. The secular relativism of the institution (even if this is not his own deeply person view, it rarely is) will not allow him to make any sort of value judgement upon his pupils work. The only aesthetic measuring rod he has left to enforce with is originality. An accusation of plagiarism is probably the only thing he can do to get a piece of art removed from an exhibition. The only other useful argument is possibly against laziness. A composition teacher may legitimately still say that a student has not “spent enough time” developing her symphony or whatnot. The final result can sound awful, but as long as there is a LOT of it, he has surprisingly little sway to direct the novice through the school of hard knocks. They may choose to journey there themselves, and more than a few do, but little can be done but to point them towards its door.

You can find a music critic, published of course, who will say whatever you want to hear. Do they simply all cancel each other out into meaninglessness? No. Some are wise, inspired, and correct. Others are foolish, twisted, and wrong. Secularism says it is impossible for aesthetics to be “twisted” or “wrong” – for it’s philosophy has nothing to twist and nothing to opposed except for unbridled personal liberty. Our teachers, especially in the humanities, are not empowered to teach what is beautiful. Fortunately, they can still model it themselves. Michelangelo and Bach are both bound to rub off.

Here is a fantastic quote by philosopher Slavoj Zizek:

Postcolonial critics like to dismiss Christianity as the “whiteness” of religions: the presupposed zero level of normality, of the “true” religion, with regard to which all other religions are distortions or variations. However, when today’s New Age ideologists insist on the distinction between religion and spirituality (they perceive themselves as spiritual, not part of any organized religion), they (often not so) silently impose a “pure” procedure of Zen-like spiritual meditation as the “whiteness” of religion. The idea is that all religions presuppose, rely on, exploit, manipulate, etc., the same core of mystical experience, and that it is only “pure” forms of meditation like Zen Buddhism that exemplify this core directly, bypassing institutional and dogmatic mediations. Spiritual meditation, in its abstraction from institutionalized religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.

What he is describing here is what nearly the whole western world assumes, from the ground, to be what “spirituality” and religion is all about. There is this generic base-line core mystical experience that is legitimate and clearly valuable to the lives and experiences of people all over the earth, throughout history. Then, all the religions tack on extra stuff, extra junk to this meditative white pillar. They tack on morals, institutions, worship forms, myths, superstitions, power structures, etc. Hindu’s add in some incense, chants, and some neat statues. Christians tack on a bunch of commandments and structures for getting together and singing and praying. Islam does the same, but with a different flavor. Primitive tribal religions, like that of the Native Americans, are praised for being more minimalistic and less cluttered. Really stripped-down systems like Zen are considered acceptable since all the supplemental – obviously NOT spiritual elements – have been tossed aside. All religions are the same because when you take away the lies and nonsense, you get the same blank generic spirituality underneath.

Why? What is driving this view? Why has it become so normal in the past century? High criticism? The triumph of rationalism? Zizek says no. The answer is capitalism. This model works the best for a West full of little autonomous individuals who define themselves by adding on products to their persona: what they wear, what music they listen to, what car they drive, what color their hair is, what microbrewery they frequent, who they marry and marry again later. They still believe in God, to some degree, but their chosen (of course they get to choose it) fashion of religious devotion is going to be mix-and-match, just like their iTunes playlist. You can listen to old Run DMC or new hip hop, metal or Yo Yo Ma, it’s all cool, but at everyone is still using an iPod and a pair of headphones. That’s the baseline. This popular conception of religion fits in naturally with our daily consumption. It is king and gets to tell everything else how work.

Here, Girard describes our deep desire to put a finger on on the author of evil. We keep fighting because we demand “an original cause which could be rectified”.

At least half of the combatants always believe that justice has been done since they have been avenged, while the other half try to reestablish that same justice by striking those who are provisionally satisfied with a blow that will finally achieve their vengeance. The circumstances are so confused that they will only be brought to an end by both sides recognizing the evil reciprocity. It is asking too much to expect them to understand that the relationships within the group not only feed their misfortune but generate it… Everyone is more or less equally responsible but no one will admit it. Even if men were truly aware of their evil reciprocity they would still want to identify the author, a real and punishable source; they might allow that his role was less significant, but they would still want an original cause which could be rectified, as Evans-Pritchard writes, a pertinent cause on the plane of social relationships.

-Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, p.86

In our modern world, where we are aware, at least to some degree of our own folly and the innocence of victims, the only one we have left to blame or hate is God. Nihilism (existence has no meaning) is ultimately just another philosophical flavour of hating God. Both of these lead us to pick our weapons back up.

The alternative is trust.

Ethnologists have known these facts (of horrific violence in past societies) for centuries, ever since the first deciphering on the representations of persecution in the Western world. But they have not drawn the same conclusions. They spend most of their time minimizing, if not actually justifying, among the Aztecs what they rightly condemn in their own universe. Once again we see the different means of measurement characteristic of anthropology when dealing with both historical and ethnological societies…Scholars show an extraordinary reluctance to examine so-called ethnological societies as ruthlessly as they do their own.

-Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, p.62

What Girard is describing here is a strange double-standard in modern social science (which includes modern politics). On the one hand, we are so incredibly sensitive to victim’s rights that a person yelling a racial slur in America today can be fired and even arrested and charged with hate crimes. On the other hand, the ridiculous ritualistic murder of tens-of-thousands during the Aztec reign is glossed over as simply an interesting cultural artifact. The forced conversions and ethnic cleansings by Muslims in the middle ages is intentionally kept in the mists of history and no one dare bring it out into the open to demystify the recorded rhetoric of the oppressors. Still today, secularists can’t decide whether atrocities such as honor killings and female circumcision need to be loudly denounced or given a free pass in the name of multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance. We are incredibly inconsistent. We need better philosophy, better theology.