Thursday, February 8, 2018

“Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture” by Rene Girard with Pierpaolo Antonello and Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha

As in many of Girard’s other works, this book is constructed as a series of dialogues between Girard and his interlocutors. This book was published in 2008 and thus is an attempt to clarify and modify his mimetic mechanism, first developed in works like “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.”  It also deals with the familiar Girardian themes of doubles, sacrifice, scapegoating, ritual, victimhood, and the founding murder, portrayed through myth, literature, and religion. Girard explains his underlying methodology, “there is also a strong curiosity, and curiosity and understanding are obviously linked. There is a form of humility as well, in the sense that it is a methodological attitude, a postulate that you have to have in order to solve specific problems. I have the impression sometimes that a book I am reading could upset my entire existence.” Girard never claims to be a theologian. He views himself as a literary scholar and an anthropologist.

Girard’s analysis goes back to man’s origins and that is where he seeks to find the beginnings of culture. “Stoning (or crushing) and throwing someone from a rock are forms of sacrificial killings which are related to each other. They are forms of capital punishment where everybody participates and nobody is responsible. Nobody touches the victim. It is a form of collective and unanimous capital punishment, and it is a way of uniting the community when you have neither the central power nor judicial system that can prevent mimetic conflicts. There must be a device that makes collective killing possible at a distance, without any polluting contact with the victim. This is really the beginning of the state as an institution.” He explains the mimetic mechanism, “it describes the whole process, beginning with mimetic desire, which then becomes mimetic rivalry, eventually escalating to the stage of mimetic crisis and finally ending with the scapegoat resolution.” Girard goes on to detail how the scapegoat mechanism works, “in the frenzy of the mimetic violence of the mob, a focal point suddenly appears, in the shape of the ‘culprit’ who is thought to be the cause of the disorder and the one who brought the crisis into the community. He is single out and unanimously killed by the community. He isn’t any guiltier than any other, but the whole community strongly believes he is. The killing of scapegoat ends the crisis, since the transference against it is unanimous. That is the importance of the scapegoat mechanism: it channels the collective violence against one arbitrarily chosen member of the community, and this victim becomes the enemy of the entire community, which is reconciled as a result.” This founding murder is embedded in culture through ritual. “Ritual is a cultural form that prepares for the sacrificial resolution, but it serves mainly as a form of controlling violence, and the increasing sophistication of ritualistic forms and elements helps in distancing further and further a given culture from the original violence implicit in the ritualistic act…. As in all sacrificial rites, it is the ritualization of a spontaneous collective murder…. Repetition is as important as imitation for cultural transmission. ” 

However, Girard also recognizes that mimetic desire can be a positive for society. “Mimetic desire is what makes us human, what makes possible for us the breakdown from routinely animalistic appetites, and constructs our own, albeit inevitably unstable, identities…. There would be no human mind, no education, no transmission of culture without mimesis.” Humans might have come from humans, but there is also a distinction in quality, not just gradient between ethology and ethnology. “Symbolicity is essential. Scientists have the tendency to overlook the emergence of symbolicity as the force behind the discontinuity between animals and humans.”  

Girard sees truth embedded in ancient myths. “Myths are forms of organization of knowledge- and in fact the word veda means knowledge, science- and this knowledge is essentially related to desire and sacrifice…. Why are there myths and stories that seem so similar? Why do all these cultures carry similar features and tell of an original murder?…. I am in search of the innocent victim in any historical, mythical and fictional account…. One has to regard mythology and archaic religion as a riddle, and the solution of that riddle is quite real. Myth is primarily the accusation of the victim presented as guilty. Moreover, the myth is written from the point of view of the accusers.” Myth and ritual are intimately intertwined. “Whatever one demonstrates in myth, there is a direct counterpart of it in ritual, and vice versa…. Ritual is the deliberate reproduction of the mechanism; myth is the narrative…. Normally ritual is more directly revealing than myth, and this is because it confirms the interpretation of the latter as the resolution of the mimetic crisis…. Ritual confirms that the victim is really killed. Myth suggests that the victim is killed in order to reproduce the effects of the first murder.” Girard recounts three elements he finds in these myths, “(1) a crisis of undifferentiation (which corresponds to the orgiastic elements in rituals); (2) a victimary sign that singles out a villain; (3) an expulsion/killing of this villain (which is also represented as a hero because he/she eventually saves the community.” The link between myth and the founding murder (and its coverup) is what is most essential. “In myth, it is much more obvious that there is this logical inconsistency, and when one realizes that inconsistency is an invariant, it no longer looks like a mere logical inconsistency, but it turns into a clue which suggests the violent origin of the myth: a logical break, which is the same in so many myths, can’t be meaningless. This constant similarity, in spite of the diversity of myths, points to the presence of a common cause of logical distortion at the threshold of human culture. I believe that this cause is the original founding murder, and myths do their best- unconsciously at first, and then more consciously- to erase the traces of scapegoating…. Practically every story of origin or foundational myth states that society was founded upon a murder.” This origin of culture gradually evolved until its origins were obscured. “If the scapegoat mechanism is our common cultural ‘ancestor’, ritual sacrifice is an intermediate step in the evolution of cultural forms, while social institutions are mature forms derived from this process.”

Christianity was the break from archaic religion in that it proclaimed the victim as innocent. “Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous mob.” Christianity is actually anti-mythology. “Christianity is also paradoxical, because the more similar it seems to mythology, the more clearly it becomes a radical rereading of myths, the preparation of the deconstruction of all mythical presuppositions…. Myth is against the victim, whereas the Bible is for the victim…. In the Old Testament, the innocent victim appears for the first time. The victim is the only innocent person within a guilty community…. Revelation is the reproduction of the victimary mechanism by showing the truth, knowing that the victim is innocent and that everything is based on mimetism. The Gospel represents the crucifixion as a mimetic phenomenon. The true cause of Peter’s denial, of Pilate’s behaviour, of the bad thief’s attitude, is their imitation of the crowd, the collective mimetism, the violent contagion. Jesus is innocent. But everything lies upon mimetic unanimity…. Jesus saves all human beings because of his revelation of the scapegoat mechanism, which also deprives us more and more of sacrificial protection, therefore forcing us to abstain from violence if we want to survive. In order to reach the Kingdom, man has to renounce violence…. violence which is not divine but human.” According to Girard, it is Nietzsche who has it backwards. “Nietzsche is never more wrong than when he says that Christianity is the religion of the crowd, as opposed to Dionysus, which is seen as the religion of the aristocracy, of a minority. It is exactly the other way around: Dionysus is the crowd and Christianity is the small minority able to resist the crowd.” The revelation in Christianity is that the guilty are the many, while the victim alone is innocent. “This compassion for the victim is the deeper meaning of Christianity…. We do not have to accuse our neighbour; we can learn to forgive him instead.”

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