In this book Girard updates and revises some of his framework of mimetic rivalry. But as he makes clear at the outset, he still feels, “mimeticism is the very substance of all manner of human relations…. Passion, intense desire, is born the moment our vague longings are trained on a model that suggests to us what we should desire, typically in desiring the model itself. This model may be society as a whole, but often it is an individual whom we admire. Everything that humanity endows with prestige it transforms into a model…. Far from being the most personal emotion there is, our desire comes from others. Nothing could be more social.” This is how rivalry develops. Once I desire what a model who is close to me desires we both covet the same object. The model has become the obstacle. Furthermore, “desire becomes more intense on both sides. The model becomes the imitator of his imitator.” The spiral escalates as desire grows. “Human relations are the unending exercise in mutual imitation- the essence of which is perfectly captured by a not wholly transparent word, reciprocity.”
Culture was founded to restrict the escalation of rivalry into violence. It deescalates conflict and puts people in their proper hierarchy. “The prohibition always falls on a family’s nearest, most accessible possessions- which are therefore the ones likeliest to arouse conflict.” In the olden times this was often the womenfolk of the family. “In several languages the word meaning “gift” also means “poison.” In very, very remote times all gifts…. were poisoned: their original owners gave away only things that were a source of trouble and annoyance to them, and that they therefore sought to rid themselves of, in exchange for things that were just as useful but less bothersome, for the simple reason that they came from elsewhere…. The reciprocal exchange of gifts proved to be a workable system because gifts that were poisoned to begin with became harmless once they were transferred to a foreign community.” Still, in the process of gift giving we see the mimetic process involving similarities and differences at work. One has to try hard to get the balance just right. “Prudence requires no less strict equivalence in the giving of gifts than in the bartering of goods. Each party must imitate the other as closely as possible, while at the same time giving the impression of spontaneity.” The right gift must not show up the other party, nor give offense at being too paltry. It must be equivalent, yet unique. “One escapes the Charybdis of insufficient difference only in order to fall into the Scylla of excessive difference.”
Modernism destroyed many of the bounds set up by hierarchy. “Mimetic theory reveals the true reason for the cyclical conceptions one finds among the Hindus and the pre-Socratic philosophers.” Modernism, in contrast, sought to champion equality and reciprocity in their good forms, destroying both the bad and the good of social taboos. “Modernism’s wager is that good reciprocity will win out in the end.” The problem with mimetic violence is that when one is trapped in its spiral neither party is often aware of its onset. “No one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to violence committed in the first instance by someone else.” One must act above the fray if one is to end the cycle of violence. An eye for eye might be justice, but it will only inflame the mimeticism. “For if we treat them as they treat us, they will be able to disguise their own injustice by means of reprisals that are fully warranted by the violence we have committed. It is therefore necessary to deprive them of the negative collaboration they demand of us. Violent persons must always be disobeyed, not only because they encourage us to do harm, but because it is only through disobedience that a lethally contagious form of collective behavior can be short-circuited.”
Girard’s other major idea is that of the founding myth created by violence towards scapegoats. This is the very act that initially unites a peoples and creates a culture. “All other members of the society will unite against them by reproducing the founding act of violence, the act that serves as a model for all sacrifices, for all religious rites of purification. The preference that cultures grant to themselves, in other words, must be perpetuated at any cost. This preference is inseparably bound up with the identity, the autonomy, the very existence of these cultures.” This scapegoat is not an actual perpetrator. He does no wrong. He is arbitrary. He merely serves the purpose of the community. “Behind the ritual of the scapegoat, there is something more than mere superstition; there is also the tendency, universal among human beings, to take out their anger on a substitute, on an alternative victim…. Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.” This process works as long as the myth is not revealed. Only through utter unanimity in the community does the lie succeed in becoming a founding truth. “There is no human society that is not liable to break down as a result of its own violence. Every society seeks to thwart this tendency through a specific behavior of which it resolutely remains unaware…. the spontaneous, mimetic convergence of an entire community upon a single victim- the descendant of an original scapegoat- on whose head all hatreds are discharged so that they will not spread with catastrophic effect, destroying the community.”
Girard makes effort to look at myth through a biblical lens. Myth preceded, and in many ways was shattered by, the Abrahamic traditions. “In biblical texts, victims are innocent and collective violence is to blame. In myths, the victims are to blame and communities are always innocent…. Myths are rooted in crowd phenomena, which fool both the makers of myths and their audience.” The Bible is more moral than myths in the sense that it is reality. “It is more moral because it is the truth. Victims are scapegoats who have been selected solely through a process of violent mimeticism, which is why they are truly innocent. The role of unanimity ensures the victim will be a scapegoat. The “sins” of mythical heroes are too reminiscent of the ones associated with bloodthirsty crowds not the be the product of the same mentality.” The Bible was different because, for the first time, unanimity was broken. The lie was revealed. Disunion ensued. “The sudden intrusion of the truth destroyed a social harmony that depended on the lie of unanimous violence…. In mythic accounts, the opinion of the crowd is never subjected to criticism from a dissident minority. Conversely, many psalms describe the narrator as being hounded by a crowd, without any provocation on his part.” The Bible takes the perspective of the victim. It calls truth to the violence of the crowd, the founding lie. “The New Testament completes the process of desacralization by revealing what is revealed nowhere else- the mimetic genesis of scapegoats, and their founding and organizing role in human culture.” Jesus “sacrificed” himself, but was not “sacrificed” for he would not allow the community to turn him into the scapegoat. The lie was exposed through his death. “What Jesus proposed to men so that they might escape violence [was he] invited them to be done with mimetic rivalries. Each time a potential rival makes unreasonable demands of us, or what seem to be unreasonable demands, instead of treating him in the same manner one must yield on the issue in dispute; one must avoid escalating violence, which leads directly to scapegoating…. To protect itself against its own violence, mankind had ended up directing it against innocents. Christ did just the opposite. He offered no resistance. It was not in order to play the game of his enemies that he gave himself up to be sacrificed, but in order to put an end to sacrifice…. Christ died so that humanity might abandon the habit of violent sacrifice.” He tried to end the habit of sacrifice of another by assuming a sacrifice of himself. In doing so he not only put a lie to him being the scapegoat, but of all the scapegoats who had preceded him in the archaic past. “Christ is not simply another sacralized scapegoat. Christ became a scapegoat in order to desacralize those who came before him and to prevent those who come after him from being sacralized.” Jesus put an end to God’s responsibility for violence and put it squarely on the heads of man. Collective human violence was shown for what it was: not a sacrifice on behalf of the Gods, but collective murder of an innocent victim.
The second half of the book takes the form of a discussion, where Girard discusses with a colleague the finer points of his mimetic theory. “Knowing the emissary victim requires a certain kind of conversion, namely, that one has to come to see oneself as a persecutor…. What we call conversion is, finally, the experience of the scapegoat becoming the subjective experience of the persecutor.” We finally see the other side of the coin. This is destabilizing for the community, however. “Since the victim is not guilty, he no longer has the power to absorb violence.” Girard discusses the role of submission to tradition in the Catholic Church. “Paul was more radical than Peter. He lectured Peter, and often strongly disapproved of him. But in the end Paul always gave into him because he knew that Christ had wanted Peter to speak for him. Paul went right to the heart of the matter in everything, and here he recognized the authority of tradition- a tradition that had only been in existence for a quarter-century! And it is because he was perfectly aware of what was at stake that he acted as he did. If he hadn’t, Christianity would never have survived; it would have fallen apart at once. To understand Christianity and orthodoxy one must think of Paul. Paul was indeed stronger than Peter, better educated, more cosmopolitan, but he always yielded to Peter’s primacy.”
Girard on Judaism and the history of Jewish people in the world, “the universality of Judaism comes from the fact that the Jews exemplify the experience of all peoples; that is, they resemble all the scapegoats of history.” On the domestication of animals, “why did people keep animals with them? Surely in order to make sacrificial victims of them. It is sacrifice that taught human beings to eat meat, to drink milk, and so on. And it is sacrifice that led to the domestication of those animals that could be domesticated.” The process began in prehistory, but it is first recorded in “the theory and practice of sacrifice in the Brahmanas. Everything is there: doubles, sacrifice as a form of lottery, the creative character of sacrifice, and so on. The explanation of sacrifice, in the strict sense, is inextricable from the reality of evolution. Sacrifices had to be repeated over hundreds of thousands of years in order to produce sacred kings, animal domestication, and many other human institutions. All these things came out of sacrifice just as the Hindus said.” On Tocqueville’s prescient analysis of American republicanism, “he was the first to perceive the difference between democracy and monarchy, which he rightly saw as being based on a unique kind of sacrificial animal, the king. Democracy, although it contains as many obstacles as there are individuals in society, leads people to believe that there are no more obstacles, because the king has been overthrown. No one before Tocqueville saw that, to the contrary, if the shadow of the cripple is no longer cast over the world, it is because the world is on its way to becoming a cemetery.” On modern consumerism, “people say, we all want the same thing; and the economy says, you shall have the same thing…. Mimetic desire is satisfied only for a time, which grows ever shorter. New toys must always be found, and that’s getting harder and harder to do.”
On the prevalence of twins in myth, “the troubling identity of mythic twins is a metaphor for the conflictual collapse of differences, a source of infinite disorder…. Mimetic crisis sharpens oppositions- not by reinforcing differences, as the dominant ideology of individualism claims, but by emptying them of their content, by undifferentiating them.” On the crippled victims of animal and man, “predators typically choose the weakest members of a troop of antelopes, for example, since wounded, injured, or otherwise disabled individuals are always easier to capture than healthy ones. Later they were to be found in human cultures, in the form of the archaic divinities- Greek, Hindu, and so on- to which collective murder gave birth. Human beings in search of scapegoats prey upon this same type of individual, which is why so many of the archaic and ancient gods are lame or crippled. The mimetic genesis of religion may be situated in the seemingly interminable transition between animal and man.” On managing violence in society, “it isn’t consciousness that keeps violence at bay in archaic religion, but prohibitions, which are aimed at eliminating opportunities for violence, and rites, which, in furnishing violence with an outlet that is itself violent, only to a smaller degree, transform the most lethal violence into a less lethal form.” On reason and the mob, “the informative function of reason has no effect on the crowd, which is governed instead by the scapegoat mechanism. Either this mechanism operates as it should and produces unanimity, in which case witnesses are false witnesses, or it fails to produce unanimity and ceases to operate.” Girard sums it all up, “but if you ask me what mimeticism is, I will tell you: it’s pride, anger; it’s envy, jealousy- these are the cardinal sins. It’s lust as well. Human sexuality is very important, because it’s a permanent impulse, not something episodic or intermittent. There are no tranquil interludes in human life. Rivalry is what sustains desire.”
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